Blackguard

by Maxwell Bodenheim

drawing by Wallace Smith

CHICAGO
COVICI-M^cGEE · PUBLISHERS ·
1923

Copyright 1923
Covici-McGee
Chicago

First Printing, March, 1923

CONTENTS

PART I
THE STRUGGLE

The Struggle

CHAPTER I.

Carl Felman stepped from a train at the Union Station of a midwestern American city. His young face, partly obscured by a blonde stubble of beard, was a passive concealment, and his thin lips and long nose did not hold that stalwart sleekness which one associates with earth. If some joker had taken a Gothic effigy of Christ, trimmed its beard, dressed it in grey and dirty clothes, and forced upon it an unwilling animation, he would have produced an exact duplicate of Carl’s aspect and gestures.

In the emotional confusion of the railroad-station, with its reluctant farewells and gushing greetings, Carl walked alone and abstracted, and he treated the scene as though it were a feverishly unreal mixture of drama and travesty. He strode with the careful haste of one who seeks to escape from an irritating dream but knows at the same time that his efforts are futile. He was without baggage, and his face held the strain that comes from battling with open spaces and strange faces—the hunted question of the hobo. His face showed two masks, one transparent and passive and the other tense and protesting. He had ridden for thirty-six hours in the chair of a day-coach, without food or sleep, and he was walking to the home of his parents because he lacked the necessary car-fare, but these circumstances were only partly responsible for his air of spectral weariness. He knew the stunned exhaustion of a man whose mind and heart had broken their questions against unfriendly walls, and at intervals he became immersed in vain efforts to understand the meaning of his wounds.

During the twenty-one years of his life he had resembled an amateur actor, forced to play the part of a troubled scullion in a first act that bewildered and enraged him. At high-school he had been known as “the poet-laureate of room sixteen,” a title invented by snickering pupils, and his timidly mystic lyrics about sandpipers, violets, and the embracing glee of the sun, had gained an unrestrained admiration from his English teachers. Teachers of English in American high-schools are not apt to insist upon originality and mental alertness in expression, since their own lives are usually automatic acceptances of a minor role, and Carl became convinced that writing poetry was only a question of selecting some applauded poet of the past and imitating his verse. “You must say the inspiring things that they have said, but see that your words are a little different from theirs,” he said to himself, and his words—“a little different”—became slightly incongruous upon the thoughts and emotions of Tennyson and Longfellow, the latter two having been selected because they seemed easier to flatter than other poets such as Browning and Swinburne. Another Carl Felman watched this proceeding from an inner dungeon but lacked the courage to interrupt it, for to a boy the opinions of his teachers, delivered with an air of weary authority, seem as inexorable as the laws of the Talmud or the blazing sincerity of sunlight. Carl was nearing seventeen at this time—a lonely, vaguely rebellious, anaemic, dumbly sullen boy, who tried in his feeble way to caress the life-chains which he did not dare to break. His parents, middle-aged Jews with starved imaginations and an anger at the respectable poverty of their lives, looked upon his poetic desires with mingled feelings of elation and uneasiness.

The phenomenon of an adolescent poet in the family is always liked and distrusted by simple people—liked because it pleasantly teases the monotone of their existence, and distrusted because they fear, without quite knowing why, that it will develop into a being at variance with the fundamental designs of their lives. Carl’s parents clucked their tongues in puzzled admiration when he read them one of his poems, and then, with a note of loquacious fear in their voices, told him that he must look upon writing as a “side-line”—a pretty, lightly smirking distraction that could snuggle into the hollows of a business-man’s life. Carl, who liked the importance of carrying secret plots within him, did not answer this suggestion, or gave it a sulky monosyllable, and his reticence frightened his parents. The simple person is reassured by garrulity, even when it attacks but can derive nothing from silence save the feeling of an unseen dagger. The Felmans wanted their son to attain the money that had seduced and eluded their longings, but deeper than that, they yearned for him to place a colored wreath over the brows of their tired imaginations—one that could convince them that their lives had not been mere sterile and oppressed bickerings. The father, a traveling-salesman for a whiskey-firm, wanted Carl to be prosperous and yet daring over his cups while the mother felt that he might become a celestial notary-public, placing his seal upon the unnoticed documents of her virtues.

Carl experienced the uncertain dreads of a dwarf futilely attempting to squirm from a ring of perspiring golden giants known to the world, and not even sure of whether he ought to escape, but knowing only that a vicious and unformed ache within him found little taste for the flat-footed routines of clerk or salesman. Upon another planet this initial writhing is doubtless offered the consolation of better compromises, but the treadmill uproars of this earth merely increased Carl’s feelings of shrinking anger.

“Oh, well, I’ll work in a store or sell something, and make money. Life won’t let you do anything else,” he said to himself. “But inside of me, m-m, there I’ll do as I please. I’ll make a country where poets and other begging men live in little huts on the obscure hills and rear their families of thoughts and emotions, with a haughty peacefulness.”

He shunned the people around him as much as possible, studying his lessons in a precisely weary manner and squatting on the grass of a public park near his home where he wrote his dimly placid lyrics to the sun and moon. He had no companions at school, for the children around him were quick to jibe at any remark of his that contained a searching wraith of thought, and he did not join in the school’s minor activities because of his angry pride at the giggling accusations of queerness which he received from the other boys and girls. They regarded him for moments as an enticing target, reviling his exact grammar and mild manners, but for the most part they paid little heed to this grotesque atom lost in the swirl of their games and plans. In a smaller school the strident inquisitiveness of average children thrown upon each other might have overwhelmed him, but in the immense city high-school he managed effortlessly to isolate himself, and the children, once having dubbed him poet-laureate—sarcastically mimicking the phraseology of their elders—proceeded to forget about him.

When at length he was graduated, he begged his parents to send him to college, desperately fighting for another long period in which he could brush aside dry information and rhyme “earth” with “birth,” since he preferred the frolic of misty promises to a world of prearranged shouts and sweating dreads. But his parents felt that their period of uneasy indulgence had inevitably ended, and words trooped from them in righteously redundant regiments.

“You’re a big boy now, yes, a big boy, and you know that we’ve sacrificed everything to give you a good education,” said Mrs. Felman. “Not that we regret it, no indeed, we only hope that it helps you to get along in life, but this college stuff, now, is a lot of foolishness. That’s only for people with rich parents, or them that can afford to go a long time without working; and not only that, but it fills your head, you know, with a lot of nonsense. It’s time now that you go out and make money to help your parents. You know that we’re just barely able to get along on what your father makes. Not that we’re begging you for your help, you understand, but you should be only too proud to give comfort to your parents. Uncle Emil can use a smart boy like you in his clothing business and he told us only the other night that he’d give you a good job the minute you come down. You’ve got to give up those writing notions of yours! They don’t bring you in anything, and a man must go out into the world and make his own living. Writing is no business for a strong, sensible boy!”

Carl listened with a feeling of impotent anger. Yes, they were probably right in their commands and he would be a scoundrel if he refused to obey them and rescue them from their poverty; but—well, he preferred to be a scoundrel. “Beyond a doubt I’m a lazy, ungrateful wretch, and all that I care for is to put words together—that seems to relieve me somehow—but say, how about sticking to what I am?” he asked himself. “I know perfectly well that I’ll never change, and if I make a liar out of the rest of my life that won’t make me any the less guilty. Besides, it’s funny, but I don’t know whether I want to change. There’s something satisfactory about being a scoundrel—it lets you do the things that you want to do; while being good, as far as I can see, is just pretending that you like to do the things that you don’t want to do. Well, I’m not going to stand for that! I’ve got to choose between hurting my parents and hurting myself and they are going to be the victims. This will be mighty selfish, I know, but I guess I’m a naturally selfish person. Anyway, I don’t feel much love for them and I don’t see that it will help them if I try to hide my feelings. They would find out sooner or later what an inhuman person I am and they might as well find out now.”

Carl answered the verbose commands and advice of his parents with a mechanical “yes” now and then—a small shield to protect the inner unfolding of his thoughts—and walked into his bedroom, where he rested his dull broodings upon a pillow. The lives of some men represent a scale of gradually increasing compromises with, or victories against, the forces surrounding them, while other men crowd their decision into one early moment and walk swiftly down an unchanging road. The boy with Carl died upon the bed in his room and the fumbling, stiffly vindictive beginning of a man rose and walked into the street, with an evil smile petrifying the softness of his face. In this emotional birth he became to himself a huge black criminal staggering beneath the weight of unreleased plots, and he derived an angry joy from this condition, reveling in the first guilty importance that had invaded his meekly repressed life.

With the inquisitive grin of one who is quite convinced that he is an embryonic monster, he arose at five o’clock on the next morning, stole into the bedroom of his sleeping parents, pilfered fifteen dollars from the trousers of his father, and took the train to a distant city, where he enlisted in the United States Army. He had first intended to do this at the nearest recruiting station, but with the triumphant shrewdness of a budding knave he decided that if he joined the army in another city he could more easily escape being arrested for his theft. He had robbed his parents with an actually quivering delight, feeling that it was the first gesture of his attack upon an unresponsive world. In joining the army he had not been lured by the recruiting poster’s gaudy lies concerning “adventure, travel, and recreation,” but his reasons were more practical and involved. He longed for the stimulus of a physical motion that would not be concerned with the capture of pennies and he believed that he could be more alone with himself in a new whirlpool than in the drably protected alcove from which he had fled. He felt also that if he were going to prey upon the world he must make haste to learn the tricks and signals of a rogue and pay for this knowledge with physical pain and weariness.

The details of his army life need not interfere with this quickly sculptured hint of his birth. He emerged from the lustreless workshop of the army with the patient bitterness of one whose dreams have become the blundering slaves of a colorless reality. For some time he wandered about the country, in a stumbling dance with various kinds of manual labor—cotton picking, wood chopping, factory work. At intervals he engaged in little thefts, such as the money from a drunken man’s pockets, the purses of rooming-house landladies, and articles from the counters of shops, and used them for a week or two of leisure in which he wrote of nightingales inebriated with the fragrance of lilac bushes, or dawn robbing the hills of their favorite shawl.

His role of desultory sneak-thief failed to cause within him the slightest shame or self-reproach and he felt that his longings were using trivial weapons in a furtive manner merely to protect a secretly delicate bravery within him.

“I don’t care whether the world is filled with poets or not,” he sometimes said to himself. “If it were, I might want to be a carpenter or a clerk then and make that my form of rebellion. I don’t know. But the world wants to be filled with carpenters and clerks, and it’s not as fair as I am. The unfairness makes me angry and I strike against it.... You must guard your only reason for living. All that I want to do is to keep on writing, and since no one cares to pay me for this kind of work I’ll have to arrange for the payment myself. When I do hard work during the day I’m too tired to write at night, and the only way in which I can get leisure time for writing is to steal. If this is evil, it’s been forced upon me. Of course, I’d much rather steal out in the open; but that would instantly bring me to jail. No, this complicated game known as a world is unaware of my existence and I must be equally absent-minded in my own attitude.”

His youthful gesture of contorted cynicism, qualified a bit by the remaining ghosts of a naively wounded idealism, made him resolve to become a crafty underdog—a man who had become obsessed with the task of finding his voice and was using every possible subterfuge and device to protect this obsession, leering at the forces that were attempting to intrude upon his religious concentration. Right and wrong to him were unfair scarecrows that slipped from the huge indifference of his surroundings and demanded an attention which they were unwilling to give in return. Perhaps he was a minor knave, seeking to rationalize his instincts for crime, and perhaps he merely held a naked determination like that of a certain immoral slayer and plunderer known as Nature. The question is a frayed one and derives little benefit from the tensions of exhausted arguments. Carl was constantly harassed by a feeling of inarticulate insignificance, and the poems which he twisted from his heart, on park benches and in the long weeds of ditches beside railroad tracks, were like bunches of forget-me-nots plucked by a dirty, bewildered child and thrown as offerings against the stone breast of an unheeding giant. He still believed that poetry was a cloak of blurred embroidery that should be cast over the shoulders of sentiments such as love, faith, charity, mercy, chivalry, courage and honor, and he felt both consoled and amused at the thought that he was using a rogue to guard within himself the better man that life had not allowed him to become. His love for the sentiments which he tipped with rhymes was partly caused, however, by the fear that without them he might become too utterly inhuman for earthly survival.

For a year he wrestled with different manual labors, and stole when their perspiring monotones weakened and angered his desire to write lyrics that were half trite and half thinly wistful, but he finally decided to return to the midwestern city and brave the reactions of his parents, whose wrathful letters had sometimes visited his journeys. He determined to rest awhile amid the moderate comforts of his former home and felt that he could disarm the anger of his parents with a masterful, jesting attitude that would muzzle them. And so, penniless and in dirty clothes, he was now walking through the heavily tawdry business district of a midwestern city.

CHAPTER II.

On the streets martyred by crowds, electric lights pencilled the night with their trivial appeals, and an ineffectual approach to daylight spread its desperately dotted jest over the scene. Since Carl almost never voiced his actual thoughts and emotions to people, he grasped, as usual, the luxury of speaking to himself.

“Electric light is only the molten fear of men,” he said, as he strode through the unreal haste of the crowds. “Men are afraid to look at the night and they have given it eyes as stiffly frightened as their own. Underneath the comforting glare of this second blindness they protect themselves. In a dim light men and women could not easily escape from each other, for the darkness would tend to press them together, but in this violent stare of light they are divided by a self-assured indifference. Watch them as they stride along with an air of gigantic, amusing importance. The crowd is really a single symbol of many isolations joined to a huge one. It sees only those people who are unpleasantly conscious of the electric glare, and who hurry through it with gestures of alert dislike, or with a slow and morbid desire for pain.”

This fancy made him feel conspicuously disrobed, and the glances of passing people became to him flitting symbols of derision directed at his beard and dirty clothes. As he looked up at the tall, unlit office buildings, grey and narrowly vertical, they reminded him of coffins standing on end and patiently waiting for a civilization to crumble, so that they might inter it and fall to the ground with their task completed. He reached the apartment-house section in which his parents lived—rows of three and four-story buildings almost exactly like each other, and standing like factory boxes awaiting shipment, but never called for. In front of each building was a little, square lawn hemmed in between the sidewalk and the curbstone—tiny squares of dusty green lost in a solved and colorless problem in material geometry. Carl greeted them with a gesture of ironical brotherhood as he hurried along the walk, while people, observing his downcast gaze and saluting hands, sometimes paused to doubt his sanity.

The glib suavity of a midsummer night sprinkled its sounds down the street and the doorsteps and walks were heavy with men, women and children, parading the uncomfortable drabness of their clothes and unwinding their idle talk. In pairs and squads, youths and girls strolled past Carl, laughing and playing to that exact degree of animal abandon tolerated by the street lights of a civilization, and sometimes crossing the forbidden boundary line, with little bursts of guilty spontaneity. Amid the openness of the street they were forced to become jauntily evasive of the old sensual madness brought by a summer evening, and they sought the refuges of crudely taunting words, snickering withdrawals, and tentative invitations. They were sauntering toward the kittenish excitements of ice-cream sundaes, moving pictures, and kisses traded upon the shaded benches in a nearby public park. Thought had subsided in their heads to a kindly mist that clung to the rhythm of their emotions, though in the main, their minds were merely emotions that vainly strove to become discreet. Most people are incapable of actual thought, and thinking to them is merely emotion that calmly plots for more concrete rewards and visions.

Carl looked upon the people on the sidewalks with the attitude of an unscrupulous stranger, and in his fancy he measured them for material gains and attacks, without a trace of warm emotion in his regard. To him they were merely alien figures busily engaged in deifying the five senses, and they mattered no more than shadowy animals blind to his aims and presence. He had long since frozen his emotions in self-defense and nothing could unloosen them save the timidly mystical lyrics which he wrenched from the baffled surfaces of his heart. During the four years of his life as a soldier and hobo he had often looked upon some of the darker and more rawly naked shades of sexual desire in the people around him, but after a first period of mechanical curiosity he had drawn aloof from what he considered a blind, shrieking, fantastic parade. “This wearisome game of advancing and retreating flesh, always trying to lend importance to an essential monotone, can go to hell,” he had muttered to himself. “I’ll yield to my sexual desires at rare intervals, but I’ll do it in the brief and matter-of-fact manner in which a man spits into a convenient cuspidor.” Women to him were simply moulds of dull intrigue, irritating him with their pretenses of animation and with the oneness of their appeal.

As he walked between the incongruities of hard street surfaces and soft noises, everything around him seemed to be vainly trying to conceal a hollow monotone. Middle-aged and old people sat around the doorsteps of the box-like apartment-houses, and the circumscribed and hair’s-breadth shades of intelligence and defeat on their faces were transparent over one color and shape. Each of these people strove to convince himself that his relaxation on this summer evening was a glittering honor conferred by hours of virtuous toil, though at times discontent suddenly raised their voices high in the air. It was as though they lifted musical instruments, gave them one helpless blow, and retired to apathy, scarcely aware of what they had done. Carl looked at them with a weary indifference that almost verged upon hatred, and hurried down the cement walk.

As he neared the apartment-house where his parents lived it suddenly occurred to him that the entrance might be decorated by people who would recognize him and comment upon his appearance and his abrupt return. The thought of their amused and veiled contempt, or their assumption of superior compassion, made him cringe a little and he turned to a side-street that led to an alley which extended behind the block in which his parents lived. He passed through the dismal rear yard of beaten earth and ascended the wooden stairway. A negro janitor, who had been working in this place for several years, gazed at him, at first with suspicion and then with a slowly pitying grin of recognition.

“’Lo, Mistah Felman. What brings you-all back here?”

Carl affected an irritated aloofness.

“I came back to enjoy a little shame,” he said.

“What dat last word you said?”

“Shame, shame,” repeated Carl, frowning at the man.

“Guess you-all’s crazy,” said the negro, throwing up his hands and stumping away.

This was one of Carl’s favorite tricks. Whenever he desired to avoid a forced exchange of commonplaces, or the threat of a humiliation, he would speak in a cryptic fashion that aroused bewilderment or annoyance in the person before him and helped him to end the conversation. He found that the rear door of the apartment was locked and knew that his parents were visiting an adjacent moving-picture theater or sitting outside on the tiny lawn. Happily, he eyed the open window and remembered how often in the past his mother had scolded his father for that enormous crime. Ah, the windows in their minds were well nailed and shaded. He felt relieved at the knowledge that he could probably sit for an hour or two and rest before they returned. He climbed through the window with the jocose satisfaction of a criminal whose mock-hanging has been postponed, and sat on a weak-jointed rocking-chair in the small dining-room.

Not a fraction of change had come to the cluttered dullness of the room. He saw the same rickety table of round oak, where an inferior circle was displaying with mild pride an embroidered square of white linen; the modest and orderly showing of cut-glass and silverware—tinsel of an old defeat—; the plaster-of-paris bust of an Indian, violently colored and bearing an artificial scowl; the mantlepiece that held a little squatting Chinaman made of colored lead and the bric-a-brac effigy of a doll-like courtier in washed out pinks and blues. On the wall opposite him a brass clock, moulded into crude cherubs intertwined with stiff blossoms, busily spoke of itself, forgetful of the time that it was supposed to measure, and little prints of uncertain landscapes hung in golden frames upon the wall-paper that was stamped with heavy purple grapes against a tan background. Carl shuddered as though he were in the midst of a weak and disorganized nightmare, in which reality was indulging in a hackneyed burlesque at its own expense, and he crashed his fist upon the oak table.

“Damn it, I’ll get out of this some day,” he shouted, craving the sharp relief of sound, and then he grinned at the clumsy futility of his explosion.

“If you ever do manage to escape from this conspiracy of barren peace and flat lies it won’t be with angry noise,” he said to himself. “A vicious calmness will help you more.”

He extracted a soiled roll of pencilled, smudged papers from an inside pocket of his coat and stroked them as though they were a gathering of living presences. The paper became smooth skin to him and he questioned it with his fingers. This reaction was not a sensual one but sprang from his longing for a reality that had so far eluded his consciousness. His poems, peeping with eyes of fanciful promises above the veils that redeemed their faces, were more concrete to him than actual flesh and breath.

CHAPTER III.

He sat in the rocking-chair, tired and vaguely oppressed, clutching the paper in the manner of one who clings to a tangible encouragement in the midst of fantastic lies and fists. His parents came into the room at last and turned on an electric light without at first noticing him in the semi-gloom. Turning, his mother saw him in the chair. Her hands flew to her breast, in two tight slants, as she impulsively pictured the presence of a bearded burglar, and then she recognized him and insulted her emotions with a cross between a gasp and a squawk.

“It’s Carl! Carl! For God’s sake, when did you come in?”

“About an hour ago, through the window that father always leaves open,” said Carl, waiting with a poised and resigned smile for the inevitable cannonade.

His father came in from the kitchen, where he had gone for a drink of water. Seeing Carl, he slowly challenged him with sleepily prominent eyes.

“S-o-o, s-o! You’re back here again,” he said. “I always said that you would come back. I knew you would get tired of bumming around. I knew it. Well, you loafer, what do you want from us now? Some more money out of my pants-pockets, maybe? You’re a son that I should be proud of; oh, yes!”

“Yes, and a fine condition he comes back in,” said Mrs. Felman, who was beginning to be angry at herself because she was not quite as wrathful at Carl as she felt that she should have been. A louder voice might supply this missing intensity. “A fine condition! Look, will you, at his shoes, and his clothes, and the beard on his face. A nice specimen to be trotting back to his parents after four years! When he needs us he comes back, oh, sure, but we wasn’t good enough for him when he ran away and stole our money. We should tell him to go right back where he came from. Right back!”

She sat down with an air of stifled indignation that strained in its effort to capture an actual condition, and with many gasping words she tried to piece together the image of an inexplicable reptile. She was a woman whose emotions, garrulously bitter because of the material strait-jackets in which they had writhed for years, were ever determined to exalt their bondage, if only to win relief from pain. Carl had always been an evil enigma to her, one that was at times half guessed—the accusing finger of her youth, sometimes barely discerned through the mist of lost desires. To escape these momentary exposures she had often swung the blindness of an anger that was directed as much at herself as at Carl. The father, however, had obliterated his past self with a more jovial carelessness and had stolen the consoling fumes of many taverns, so that he felt little need for the shrouds of loud noise.

“Well, at least you showed good sense in coming through the back way,” he said, looking at his son with a mixture of wonder and humorous contempt. “You would have made a fine sight for the neighbors on the front steps! We would never have heard the last of it. Noo, noo, what did you come back for? If it’s just to play your old tricks again, you can walk right out of here, I tell you. I’ll stand for no more nonsense from you. Turn over a new leaf and you’re welcome here, but no more of your writing, and fancy talk, and high notions!”

“Look at him,” said Mrs. Felman. “Sits there like a piece of wood! Have you nothing to say for yourself? Why, you haven’t told us how-do-you-do. Inhuman! I don’t see how I ever gave birth to such a creature as you.”

Carl had been sitting like a stone figure, dressed by the playful passerby known as Life and yet absolutely void of life. His mute indifference had seduced all suggestions of flesh from him and even his blonde beard and hair seemed pasted upon an effigy. Finally the clever semblance of emotion returned to his body and sent an experimental tremble to see whether the flesh was prepared to receive another animated disguise. His hands twitched as though they were striving to overcome their paralysis in an effort to obey some powerful signal. As he listened to the jerky tirades of his parents—sterility seeking to regain a fertility by the use of a staccato voice—part of him wanted to cringe and win the convulsive shield of tears, while another part longed to bound from the insipid, brittle room and glide aimlessly into the night. The cringing mountebank, unfairly aided by physical fatigue, won this inner skirmish, and Carl decided to silence the anger of his parents by speaking to them in a way that would make them bewildered, since bewilderment is but a shade removed from frightened respect. It was the only pitiful little stunt that could offer him a small respite from the poverties of noise that were assailing him—the favorite purchase of Indian medicine-men, Druid priests, circus barkers and other childlike charlatans.

“You see, the situation has been complicated,” he answered slowly, with the voice of a loftily enervated teacher. “Complicated. I have tried to save a possible poet from death—always a noble but redundant proceeding—but it seems that his skin must burn. I’ve come back now to make his coffin and stud it with gold. Gold would seem to be a favorite metal of yours, my dear parents. Surely you will be satisfied now. And it is also possible that you may help me with the funeral arrangements, since this burial, unlike plebeian ones, may extend over several years. And what else do you want me to say? I have so many acrobatic words and they would love to perform for you, but I am tired to-night. True, I am a rascal. Can you forget that embarrassing challenge for one evening?”

He broke his stonelike repose into one forward motion as he leaned toward his parents, turning upon them the prominently somnolent eyes that had been the sole gift from his father’s face, and smiling like an exhausted but lightly poised angel. His parents were stunned, for their indignant assurance had suddenly recoiled from an unexpected, blank wall. They could not quite understand his words and yet they felt that he was mocking them. The gracious glibness of his voice dwarfed them with the mystery of its meanings. This monster was not ashamed of himself—what could it signify? But, after all, it was rather difficult to be angry at a man when you were not quite sure whether his words were flattering or sneers. Carl rose abruptly from the chair. Now he controlled the situation for a time. He kissed his mother’s forehead lightly and smiled at his father.

“I’m tired and hungry,” he said. “A little food and sleep will fix me up, though, and to-morrow I’ll look for work of some kind.”

“Crazy, crazy, just like he always was,” said his father, turning away with a partly appeased and patient manner. After all, one must give the proper blend of pity and tolerance to one who is truly insane.

The face of his mother held a virtuous impatience that made her large nose go up and down like a see-saw, and on the see-saw a dash of reluctant tenderness rode.

“I’ll get you something from the ice-box,” she said. “You’re still so young—twenty-two you’ll be next week—and we may yet live to be proud of you. If you’ll only get rid of your funny writing notions and your stealing ideas. My God, what a combination!”

Afterwards, as Carl ate, they sat at the kitchen table with him. Mrs. Felman was tall and strong, with a body on which plumpness and angles met in a transfigured prizefight of lines. The long narrowness of her face was captured by a steep nose slightly hooked at the top and her thin lips were not unlike the relics of a triumphant sneer. Even when they tried to be satisfied they never quite lost their expression of tight gloating. Above her high cheek-bones her eyes were bitter tensions of light, and a remnant of greyish-brown hair receded from the moderate and indented rise of her forehead. Her skin, once pink, was now roughly florid, like a petal on which many boots have been scraped and cleaned. Mr. Felman was her violent refutation. Short and hampered by plumpness, the large roundness of his face held the smirking emphasis of a greyish-red moustache, huge and clipped at the ends. His thick lips blossomed uncompromisingly over his fair double chin, and his low forehead, madly scratched by a plowman, stood between the abrupt curve of his small nose and a ruff of dark red hair pestered by grey. An expression of carelessly earthly humor, banqueting on shallowness, fitted snugly upon his face and only his eyes, bulging with sleep, brought a metaphysical contradiction. He watched his son with a lazy, half-curious pity.

“Noo, what have you been doing all this time?” he asked.

“I left the army a year ago. You know, I wrote to you then and found out that you still lived here. That was very kind of me, I’m sure. Since then I’ve knocked about in different towns. Sleep and work, work and sleep—the twin brothers of man’s inadequacy.”

“Ye-es, still using long words, the twin brothers of something or other,” said Mrs. Felman, with a light disapproval. “Learn to talk and act like other people and you’ll be better off. I used to think a little different when I was young, but believe me, you can’t get along by just dreaming and talking to yourself. The trouble with you is that you got a lot of fancy words and no get-up.”

“Philosophical discourse number sixty-two,” answered Carl, in the drowsily chanting voice of a train announcer. “Or have I lost count of them? Your life hasn’t made you very happy, mother, and perhaps that’s why your arguments are lacking in the swagger of conviction. Or perhaps you think that it’s best to be unhappy, and in that case I agree with you.”

“Well, I wouldn’t lower myself by trying to argue with you,” said Mrs. Felman. “I’m perfectly right in everything I say, but I simply don’t know how to fiddle with words like you do.”

“Have you still got those poetry ideas in your head?” asked Mr. Felman. “Poetry is no business for a strong, grownup man. It’s a lot of foolishness good for women and children!”

“If you could write things that make money now,” said Mrs. Felman. “Why, only the other day Mrs. Benjamin was telling me she has a cousin who writes love stories for the Daily Gazette. Nice stories that make you laugh and cry. And this girl gets twenty dollars apiece for them, too.”

“Now, now, don’t be trying to encourage him again,” said Mr. Felman. “Ain’t we had enough trouble over this writing of his? Let him go out and get a regular job, like other men!”

Carl laughed, and his laugh was like an emotion interviewed by carbolic acid, and his parents eyed him with an offended surprise.

“Still squabbling over the bones,” he said, with a sarcastic apathy. “If you were more delicate you might realize that it is inappropriate to argue at a funeral. I’m only a tongue-tied fool, but I seem very elusively inarticulate to you because you’re even more tongue-tied. And now, as usual, you haven’t understood a word of what I’ve said.”

“Well, you don’t have to laugh at your parents,” said Mrs. Felman, with an air of pin-pricked dignity. “You never did show any respect for us, in spite of all that we’ve done for you. Never.”

“Say, Carrie, you’ll have to get a suit for him. Something cheap, you know, at Pearlman’s,” said the father. “He’ll never get a job in those rags of his.”

“Money, money,” said Mrs. Felman in a mechanically mournful voice. “All I do is spend money. It’s terrible.”

The sound of an opening door invaded the flat tom-tom of their talk.

“It’s Al Levy,” said Mrs. Felman, with fear in her voice. “It would be a shame now if he saw Carl in this condition. Hurry, hurry, Carl, to the bathroom before he comes in here. Your father’s razor is on the shelf and I’ll get you a clean shirt from the ones you left behind. Maybe they still fit you, as I was always careful to buy them a size too large.”

Carl felt like an ignoble marionette who was being hastily mended behind the curtain for fear that he might cast ridicule upon the sleekly vacant play, and his emotions were evenly divided between amusement and contempt. Driving his heart and mind into a fitting blankness, he closed the bathroom door. Levy had a room in the Felman apartment and they treated him with an unctuous respect that almost verged upon an Oriental self-abasement. He was a man of twenty-six who worked for a wealthy uncle, received a large salary, and polished and scrubbed the limited essentials of a semi-professional man-about-town, with minor chorus girls and gamblers helping him to flatter microscopically the fatigue donated by his daily labors.

“Be very friendly to Al, please,” said Mrs. Felman, as they all sat around the dining-room table. “He’s a very smart man—works in the mail-order business, selling cheap jewelry to country people, and makes a pile of money. His seven dollars a week come in mighty handy to us, I can tell you.”

“Dammit, all business is going good except whiskey,” said Mr. Felman, as though he were inviting an elusive conspiracy to share the firmness of his tones. “These prohibition fanatics are ruining everything. The saloon-keepers are all afraid they’re gonna be closed up, and they won’t buy. I haven’t sold a barrel in two days. I don’t know what the world’s coming to with all these here prohibitions. People are entirely too busy telling each other what to do, and nobody minds his own business any more.... Well, anyway, Carl, there’s still sample bottles for you to swipe from my overcoat pockets.”

He said the last words with a bearish joviality, and had the expression of a bear who has paddled to within a mile of irony and is sniffing at the singular realm.

“Sol, don’t remind me of his old wildness,” said Mrs. Felman, with a peevish dread. “I still remember the time when he staggered along the sidewalk in front of all the neighbors. Is there anything bad that he hasn’t done, I want to know?”

One evening, just before running away from home, Carl had taken some tiny bottles of whiskey from his father’s overcoat, without curiosity, but longing for the feeling of sly self-assurance that had balanced his blood from former sneaking sips. He had repaired with the bottles to a neighboring public park and emptied them in swiftly nervous gulps, enjoying the vastly kinglike sneer at the world which had brushed aside his melancholy uncertainties.

“I am a poet!” he had cried out to the murmuring patience of the trees around him, “and fools will some day gape along my road, and the open circles of their mouths will be like the rims of beggars’ cups. My voice will rise above the dreamless clink of their coins and they will stop and look at me, as though I were a pilgrim-problem. An angry amazement will lend its little catastrophe to their faces. Yes, I will drop beauty to them, in clearly abundant handfuls, and they will sit quarreling over its value and tossing me an occasional penny. But I will never stop to join their discourses. My feet will be lighter than breezes and more direct. I am a poet, and the world is stagnation that I must ever torment!”

He had lurched back to the Felman apartment, “dropping beauty” with an incisive exuberance to the astonished neighbors seated around the doorstep, and commanding them to examine his gifts. As he sat at the dining-room table now, he remembered this episode, and similar ones, with a gust of half-rebellious shame.

“This has been my only triumph so far—a whiskey bottle raised beneath the stars, on a summer evening, and reigning over an idle riot of words,” he said to himself with an exhausted self-hatred. “Am I going to be contented with this thwarted joke? And yet——”

Levy stepped into the room and provided a slightly unwelcome ending to this secret sentence. Short and slender, his blue serge suit clinging to him like an emblem of shrewd victory, he made an excellent period to the labors of thought. Upon his small, light tan face a twirled-up black moustache curved to a diminutive swagger and his bending nose seemed to be vainly attempting to caress the moustache—an unnecessary affirmation. His black eyes incessantly drove little bargains beneath the shine of his black hair.

“H’llo, folks,” he chirruped, smiling with an automatic ease at the Felmans. Then he noticed Carl and looked at him with polite surprise.

The father and mother regarded each other with a despondent indecision, dreading the thought of introducing their drolly disreputable son to this shining symbol of an outside world and hating the undeserved appearance of inferiority which had been thrown upon them. This queer son had cast his shadow upon their assured and humbly conservative position in life—in a world of decently balanced regularities. Their ability at loquacious pretense took up the burden with a weary precision.

“This is my son Carl,” said Mr. Felman, with a prodigiously uneasy grin tickling the roundness of his face. “Carl, this is Al Levy. You’ve heard us talking of him, Al. He’s just come back from the army—surprised his old parents, you know.”

“Glad to meet you, I’m sure,” said Levy, with an expert affability beneath which he exercised his disdain for Carl’s patched-up appearance and his inkling of the actual situation.

He complimented a chair at the table briskly; or, in other words, he sat down, employing a great condescension of limbs. He and Felman began an uncouth debate concerning the respective selling merits of whiskey and cheap jewelry, while Carl listened, bored and a little sick at the stomach. Words to these men were crudely unveiled mistresses, selling their favors for whatever hasty coin might be thrown on the table. Levy turned to Carl.

“How did you like the army?” he asked, with a lightly superior kindliness.

Carl nervously wondered what he should answer and bickered with his desire to return a curt indifference to this vaguely garnished mannikin. He decided to annoy the limited mind of the man in front of him and take a comforting wraith of revenge from this result—his customary device for such situations, always used to evade a language which he did not care to simulate. The physical nearness of people made him snarl, for then his imagination found it more difficult to trifle with their outlines, and he would strive to drive them away with insult.

“The army is a colorless workshop, where men can forget their past and avoid gambling with their future,” he said, in an aloofly professorial voice. “All of the hurried and obedient movements of a day in the army, like a little drove of dazed foxes, prevent a man from fully realizing his own insignificance, and at night there is always a nearby city in which the sorrowful illusion can be captured again. Oh, yes, the army is an excellent prison for men to whom life holds a fixed horizon—men whose hearts and minds have reduced curiosity to an ashen foothold.”

Levy’s brows bent to an unfamiliar process and perplexity slowly loosened his lips, but a feeling of irritated pride made him determined not to show his confusion to one whom he looked upon as a demented and windy subordinate. He knew that this “fancy fool” was attempting to parade a superior knowledge of English, thus creating a counterfeit of wisdom.

“Oh, I don’t think that the army is as bad as all that,” he said, in a glibly hurried voice, trying to assume an attitude of careless disagreement. “I was a sergeant-major once in the National Guard, down in Tennessee, and we had a pretty good time of it, I’ll tell you. It gave us all a splendid muscle and fine appetite, and it taught us to obey the commands of our superior officers without hesitating. You know, in life you’ve got to follow the orders of someone who knows more than you do, or you’ll never get anywhere. Besides, we had a lot of intelligent men in our outfit. Why, my company commander was one of the best lawyers in Nashville.”

“My planet is somewhat distant from yours. I was barely able to hear you,” said Carl, amusedly. “Still, that doesn’t mean that either of us is better or worse than the other. Your eyes are contented with what they see and mine are not. But it would not be very important to tell you of things that you have never missed.”

Levy became involved in his cigarette smoking while he futilely asked his mind for an adequate and unconcerned retort. Mrs. Felman sensed his annoyance and felt hugely angry at her son for “not getting in right” with this splendid young business-man and for speaking in a manner that was mysteriously and trivially vexing.

“Ach, Carl always talks just like a hero in a story,” she said, in an agitated effort at humorous masquerade and hoping to smooth over the errors made by her freakish son. “Don’t pay no attention to him. I can never understand him myself.”

Levy, once more completely the successful man to his own vision, forgot the bite of the beetle, and turned to the elder Felman.

“How about a little game of rummy?”

“Carrie, get the cards,” Felman answered, in quick tones of bright relief. “Carl will play—he always was a rummy shark and he never changes in anything. Such a stubborn boy! I bet you that forty years from now he’ll be just as foolish as he ever was.”

“Your optimism concerning the length of my life intrigues me,” said Carl.

Ten-cent pieces were placed on the table and the cards were shuffled. To the other two men the card game would have lacked interest without the money to be battled for, not because of the tiny gain involved, but because their desires for relaxation were lacking in spontaneity and needed the pettily deliberate strokes of a familiar whip to encourage their birth. Whenever, on rare occasions, they romped upon some lawn, tossing a ball to a child, or read the lurid clumsinesses of some magazine, they showed a sheepish hesitation and hazily felt that they were wasting time that belonged to the shrewd importance of barter and exchange. The presence of a coin upon a table, however, held a glint of the missing coquette. They swore elaborately and interminably at lost hands—“that queen would have given it to me”—flung down the paper oblongs with a tense elation when they were winning, and enjoyed the presence of a milder but still keen market-place. The gambling instinct is never anything more than the desire to seduce an artificial uncertainty from a life that has grown mildewed and prearranged—the monotone must be circumvented with little, straining devices. It pleased Carl to imitate the motions of the other two men, outwitting them at their own small game while still remaining a repulsed bystander, and sneaking a morsel of enjoyment from their genuine dismay at some defeat. After several games had been played the father yawned mightily, creating a noise that sounded like a Mississippi River steamboat whistle heard at a distance, poignant and full-throated. Perhaps with this yawn his soul signaled a complaint against the disgrace which this day had cast upon it—a nightly remonstrance unheard by his mind and heart. Levy, subdued and impressed by Carl’s card-playing abilities, pelted him with commonplaces which he tried to make as genial as possible, and Carl, too sleepy to be belligerent or aloof, gave him softly vague responses. Mrs. Felman, for the first time, looked out with heavy peace from behind the crinkling newspaper where she had been placidly nibbling at the perfumed logics of a latest divorce scandal. Her son had finally redeemed the evening by exhibiting a small but ordinary proficiency which drew him a little nearer to the dully efficient level of mankind, and her reflections upon his material future became a shade less hopeless.

CHAPTER IV.

At an early hour on the following morning she hurried Carl to the business section of the city so that the neighboring women, who slept late after getting breakfast for their men, would not see him from their windows, and at a department store she purchased a cheap suit of clothes for him. He dressed behind a small screen in the store, feeling like a small, eccentric lamb who was being glossed for the market. She left him at an elevated railroad station, extracting a dollar from her pocketbook with an air of intensely solemn and reflective importance.

“Don’t waste it now; I know your tricks,” she said. “Be sure and get the afternoon paper and look through the want ads. Take anything at the start—don’t be high-toned.”

Carl gave her the necessary monosyllables of assent and walked down the street, his mind busy with many insinuations.

“Perhaps I’d better stop stealing for a while,” he said to himself. “If I keep it up without an intermission it’s going to land me in jail again and I’m not anxious for that circumscribed travesty to happen. That term of three months in Texas gave me a great deal of time in which to write, but the little animals in that place intruded with a bite that was both wistful and inadequate. It’s a little difficult to write about beauty and scratch your skin simultaneously—the proud stare of the former does not like to sit in the prison of a small irritation. It is an intricately adjusted equilibrium and the lunge of a finger nail can desecrate this subtly balanced aloofness. There is little difference between the bars of mind and actual iron rods, but when you are still partly inarticulate, physical motion can become a necessary recompense. No, for the time being I had better strain my hands in prayer against the tiny implements with which men felicitate their stupidity. Back and forth—but what else can I do?”

It was his habit to think only in metaphors and similes, and in this way he evaded the realities that would otherwise have crushed him. He walked down the street, practicing an emotion of stolid submission, and this surface humility played pranks with his blonde-topped head and made his thin lips loosely unrelated to the rest of his face. As he strode through the business district of the city, with its sun-steeped frenzies of men and vehicles, the scene pressed upon him and yet was remote at the same time. It was as though he were studying a feverishly capering unreality and vainly striving to persuade himself that he formed a significant part of it.

The unrelenting roar of automobiles, wagons and cars became the laughable and inarticulate attempt of a dream to convince him that it held a power over his mind and body. Men and women darted past him with a rapidity that made them appear to be the mere figments of a magic trick. Here he caught the thick tension of lips, and there the abstracted flash of eyes, but they were gone before he could believe that they had interfered with his vision. He paused beside a dark green news-stand squeezed under the iron slant of an elevated-railroad stairway and strove to pin the scene to his mind and fix his relation to the people who were jesting with his eyes. Young and old, dressed in complications of timidly colored cloth, each seemed to be running an exquisitely senseless race in the effort to gain a nonsensical foot on the other person. The masked rush of their bodies deprived them of a divided sexual appearance and lure—men and women, touching elbows without emotion, were swept into one lustreless sex which darted in pursuit of a treacherously invisible reward. The entire structure around them—buildings, signs, and iron slabs—stood like a house of cards carefully supported by an essence that rose from the rushing people, and Carl felt that if these men and women were to become silent and motionless, in unison, the house of cards would instantly lose its meaning and tumble down.

“What are they gliding and stumbling toward?” he asked himself—the old, poignantly futile first question of youth. “Each man, with an ingenious treason, is trying to forget his inability at self-expression and soiling the void with an increasing burden that will prevent him from complaining too much. At some time in their lives all of these people felt, dimly or strongly, for a moment or for years, the ludicrous ache of a desire to stand out clearly against their scene, but the loaded momentum of past lives—the choked influence of past futilities—pushed them along with a force which they could not withstand. It is really a stream of adroitly dead men and women that is fleeing down this street—surreptitiously dead people living in the bodies of a present reality and perpetuating the defeated essence of their past lives.”

As he stood and watched the crowd he found it necessary to ask himself the words: “What gave its slyly amused signal for this plaintive race through the centuries?”

He also found it necessary to answer: “A languid idiot, much in need of consolation, refuses to abandon his dream.”

Here and there, apart from the main lunge of the crowd, were men and women, standing still, as though motion had betrayed them, or loitering in a carelessly placid fashion. Vacancy and indecision tampered with most of their faces.

“How many minor poets have stood upon these street corners, making arrangements for a gradual and unnoticed death?” he asked himself, with the sentimental self-importance of youth.

But the stage hands clamored that he was neglecting the play—a habit falsely known as laziness—and that, with appropriate cunning, they had erected this city scene so that he and hordes of others should find it difficult to forget their tamely borrowed lines. With an uncomplaining wrench he returned to his surface role of a youth sent out in weakly gruesome clothes to look for some task that would begin to answer the flatly strident requests of an average life. The humble stupor fell back upon his shoulders and he walked to a bench in a public square, seated himself, and read the “want-ad” section of a newspaper. He spied, with a prostrate frown, the barren jest of: “Wanted—Young man for clerical work; must be neat, industrious, wide-awake, sober, well educated, reliable, good at details, ambitious, honest, painstaking; salary twelve dollars a week.” He muttered certain useless words to himself. “The illusion of a reluctant penny for fresh vigor. If the applicant is morbidly patient and reasonably deft at following orders he may after many years attain the virtue of writing the same trivially unfair appeal to other men. And even that exquisite victory is uncertain.”

He saw that as usual his only choice rested between an office-boy’s task, dignified by the title of junior clerk to make it more enticing, and unskilled manual labor.

“Now, how will you become tired—mentally or physically?” he asked himself with great formality.

Abruptly, and in that conscious and secret plot which men insist upon calling subconscious, he peered at the picture of a black man and a white man throwing a wilted rose back and forth to each other and catching it without a trace of emotion. The little, ridiculous rose lost a petal after each catch, but in spite of its smallness the number of petals seemed to be inexhaustible. At a distance the black and white man exactly resembled each other, but on approaching closer it could be seen that the black man held the face of an incredibly stolid ruffian, while the white man’s face was engraved with the patience of a cowed child. Not being acquainted with psychoanalysis—that blind exaggeration of sexual routines—Carl did not believe, after he returned to the touch of the park bench, that this picture had slyly veiled the direction of his physical desires. He knew that a fantastic whim had slipped from his mind and induced him to probe his choice between two equally drab kinds of labor, striving to make this choice endurable for a moment.

He selected three advertisements, all of them asking for manual laborers, walked from the park, and boarded a street car. The first place that he visited was a box factory—a slate-colored crate of a building, bearing that flatly unexpectant tone that expresses the year-long mating of smoke and dirt. As he ascended the gloomy stairway an endless drone and clatter battled with his ears. It seemed a senseless blasphemy directed at nothing in particular—the complaint of a dull-witted, harnessed giant who was being driven on without knowing why. Carl entered a huge room disheveled with sawdust and shavings and cluttered with black belts and wheels. Men with swarthy, motionless faces and feverish arms leaned over the wheels and saws. As he stood near the doorway, feeling dwarfed and uncertain, a man came toward him. Sturdy and short, the man looked like a magnified and absent-minded gnome, too busy to realize that civilization had played an obscene trick on him by stealing his fairy disguise and substituting the colorless inanities of overalls and a black shirt. The large and heavily twisted features on his face were partially hidden by a brown stubble of beard, and like all men who work forever in factories, he had an ageless air in which youth, middle age and old age were pounded into one dull evasion.

“What d’ya want?” he asked, the words jumbled to a bark.

“I’m looking for work. Saw your ad in the paper.”

He examined the region between Carl’s toes and cap, measuring the unimportance of flesh.

“We want good strong men to load boxes and carry lumber,” he said. “You don’t look like a man for the job, bo. You’re dressed like a travelin’ salesman an’ we want men who ain’t afraid to get dirt on their clothes. Get me?”

“Don’t mind this suit of mine,” said Carl. “I have a much dirtier one at home and I’ll be only too glad to wear it here. You see, I always feel more peaceful in dirty clothes, but someone played a joke on me and made me wear this suit.”

“Well, you ought to come ready for work, if you’re lookin’ for it”—the man peered again at Carl.

“Nope. Nope. You ain’t got the build for heavy work. We’re after big, husky men. Sorry, Jack, but there’s nothin’ doin’.”

“Say, be reasonable,” said Carl. “I’ve done hard work off and on for the last four years and I’m much stronger than I look. Come on, give me a chance.”

The man shook his head as his eyes received Carl’s slender arms and narrow shoulders, and he did not know that this weak aspect concealed an inhuman amount of endurance. After another useless expostulation Carl walked out, grinning forlornly as he strode down the street. Cheated out of the phantom opiate of a beautiful box-piling job because of a deceptive physical appearance and a twenty-dollar suit, reduced to nineteen through the expert pleading of his mother! He looked down with delicate aversion at the grey, neatly-pressed cloth which concealed his material humility with lines of dreamless confidence, and felt a sudden impulse to tear it off and go nakedly cavorting down the street, taking the cries of onlookers as a suitable reward, but that sleek caution born from rough faces and rougher hands chided him back to sanity. After calling at another factory and receiving the same refusal, he decided to wait until the morrow, when he could don his old, dirty clothes and avert suspicion.

The city turmoil was slackening, like a huge, human top beginning to spin weakly. The warm hardness of a summer evening between city streets tried a little laughter in an unpracticed voice, and revolving streams of men and women hid the pavements—a satiated army returning from an unsettled conflict. The scene was a mixed metaphor trying to straighten itself out. Feeling forlornly alert and useless in the midst of all this important exhaustion, Carl made his way home.

A group of neighbors sat with a clean and well-brushed peace around the doorstep. In the heat of the summer evening they seemed mere figures of slightly animated flesh, with their thoughts and emotions reduced to placidly contented wraiths. Three middle-aged Jewish women sat in rocking chairs and knitted with an effortless incision, unaware of the spiritual prominence that is usually discovered in their race. Their bulky bodies censured the lightness of evening air and their deeply-marked brown faces were those of self-assured, thoughtless queens issuing orders to a tiny domain, with palmetto fans for scepters and rhinestone combs for crowns. Incessantly they chatted about the personal details of their daily lives, splitting these details into even smaller atoms and fondling the minute particles with a lazy relish. Children romped at their feet or brought some tiny request to their laps—children that seemed to be dreams of cherubic hilarity, released from the busy sleep of the middle-aged women and reproving it. Behind them, sitting on the stone steps, a middle-aged Jewish man glued his depressed weariness to a newspaper. The orderly sleekness of his clothes had met with the familiarity of a summer day and the rim of his once stiff collar, drenched with perspiration, made a pathetic curve around his fat, brown neck. His eyes were like flat discs of metal placed on each side of an enormous, confident nose. Noses express the spirit of people far better than lips and eyes, for they cannot be moved and changed to suit the fears and desires of a person, but stand with an outline of uncompromising revealment. Their still silence is often the only sincerity upon a human face, and the nose of this man showed a strident green that was contradicted a bit by the drooping little indentations just above the nostrils, indicating that the man had his moments of self-doubt, but refused to yield to them.

It seemed incredible to Carl that these people were housing hearts and minds, for he could see them only as so many sterile lumps of flesh that were using every desperate trick to minimize the crawling shadow of their unimportant graves. Two of the women knew him and greeted him with an insincere and inquisitive cordiality.

“Wh-y-y, Mister Felman, when did you get back?” said Mrs. Rosenthal, the fattest of the group.

“I returned yesterday,” answered Carl, injecting a great solemnity into his voice.

“Yesterday? Well, well. And did you have a nice time in the army? I’ve been told that it’s really marvelous for a man—makes him so strong and healthy. And then all the traveling about, you know, must be so interesting.”

“Oh, ye-e-es, it’s a wonderful place,” said Carl, gravely mimicking her drawling voice. “Bands, and uniforms, and parades. It’s really quite fascinating.”

“Well, I’m so glad you liked it,” said Mrs. Benjamin, another woman in the group, who felt that it was time to advance a well-placed sentence. “I want you to meet my husband. Mo, this is Mister Felman, who’s just come back from the army.”

“Glad t’ meet yuh,” said the man on the doorstep, blurring the words in a swiftly mechanical fashion, but looking very closely at Carl.

Carl returned the salutation in the same fashion, taking a shade of amusement from his parrot-like impulse. These hollow creatures—what else could one do save to imitate their mannerisms and ideas, for self-protection, and rob and defraud them at every opportunity, thus giving them a mild apology for existence? After another round of wary commonplaces he managed to break away. His mother met him at the door and he said “Hello” and was about to pass her when her sharp voice halted him.

“You haven’t got an ounce of affection in you! A nice way to greet your mother! Hello, and he walks right by like I was some boy he met on the street.”

For a moment Carl stood without answering. This woman who had given birth to him—an incomprehensible chuckle of an incident—was almost non-existent to his emotions—a mere shadow that held an incongruously raucous voice and guarded one of the gates of his surface prison. As he stood in the hallway, doubting the reality of her shrill voice, he asked himself: “Am I an inhuman monster, unfit to touch this woman’s dress, or am I a poet standing with candid erectness in an alien situation?”

Suddenly the question became unimportant to him and he felt that he had merely offered his inevitable self the choice between an imaginary halo and an equally fantastic strait-jacket. If his mother actually longed for an affection which he did not hold, it would be inexpensive to toss her the counterfeit coins of gestures and words. When she finished her staccato diatribe, he bowed deeply to her, with the palm of one hand lightly interrogating the buttons of his coat, raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it at great length.

“Na-a, go away with your silliness,” she said. “I know you don’t mean it.”

Her narrow face loosened for a moment and a shimmer of compensation found her eyes. This queer son of hers might be faintly realizing, after all, the unselfish intensity of her efforts to give him a position of honor and respectability in the world. Perhaps he was only wild and young, and would finally press his shoulders against the admired harness of material success. It could not be possible that one who had struggled from her flesh would remain a remote idiot and ignore the warm shrewdness within her that life had somehow swindled.

The elder Felman was reading his paper in the dining-room. He greeted Carl with a somnolent imitation of interest, but the heat, aided by a day spent in pungent saloons, had cheated him of most of his mental consciousness. He had become so thoroughly accustomed to drink that an artificial buoyancy scarcely ever invaded the dull ending of his days.

“We-e-ell, where did you go to-day?” he asked, feeling some slight craving for sound and trying to rouse his material anticipations.

He abandoned his seductive newspaper, with its melodrama that was pleasant because it murdered at a distance, and questioned Carl with his sleepy eyes.

“Went to a couple of factories, but the foremen were disgusted with the cut of my clothes,” said Carl. “They felt that the wearing of a new and unwrinkled suit revealed an intelligence which should not be possessed by an applicant for manual labor. I tried to convince them that the semblance was false in my case, but they refused to be persuaded.”

“Always trying to joke. That won’t get you anything. The main thing is—did you get work, or didn’t you?”

“No, I did not. I applied for manual labor, but I forgot to put on overalls.”

Mrs. Felman stood in the doorway and lifted a skillet in simple wrath.

“Factories he goes to!” she cried, in a voice that was not unlike the previous rattling of the skillet. “I bought him a new suit and shoes this morning so he could look for common, dirty work! It’s terrible. Here we sent him to high-school for four years and his only ambition is to work as a common laborer.”

The father smiled dubiously at her explosion.

“Now, Carrie, don’t let all the neighbors know your business,” he said. “Your holler is enough to drive anyone crazy. There’s no harm in honest work, Carrie, and besides he’ll soon get tired of sweating in factories and look for something decent. Don’t worry.”

“I guess anything will be better than that silly scribbling that’s ruined his life so far,” said Mrs. Felman, her anger dwindling to a guttural sulkiness. Carl, who had been sitting with a suffering grin on his face, gave them soothing words and once more held them at arm’s length.

CHAPTER V.

In the dirty clothes that he had worn upon his arrival, qualified by a clean shirt, he went forth on the next morning and found work as a lineman’s helper for a telephone company. He was required to climb up the wooden poles; hand tools to the lineman; unwind huge spools of wire; make simple repairs under the lineman’s guidance. As he labored from pole to pole, down a suburban street, taking the impersonal whip of the sun and winning the pricks of insects on his sweat-dappled face, he felt dully grateful toward the physical orders that were crudely obliterating the confused demands of his heart and mind. As he toiled on, this dull feeling gradually rose to a self-lacerating joy. He revelled in the cheap vexations brought by his tasks—the unpleasant scraping of shins against iron rungs and the sting of dust in his eyes—and his self-hatred stood apart, delightedly watching the slavish antics of the physical mannikin.

Then, when this emotion paused to catch its breath it was replaced by a calmer one, and his insignificance receded a bit, beneath the substantial lure of arms and legs that were moving toward a fixed purpose. “I am doing something definite now and that is at least a shade better than the indefinite uselessness of my thoughts,” he mumbled to himself as he lurched from pole to pole. The slowly mounting ache of his muscles became a bitter hint of approaching peace and he looked forward to the moment when he would quit his labors and enjoy the returning independence of his body, as though it were a god’s condescension. He worked quickly and breathlessly, as one who hurries to a distant lover’s arms. Filled with a doggedly naive hatred for his own deficiencies, he welcomed this chance to insult them with disagreeable and infinitely humble postures, and he gladly punished himself underneath the violence of the sun. It was, indeed, a spiritual sadism deigning to make use of the flesh.

“Hey, Jack, take it a little easier,” the lineman called down to him once. “Don’t kill yourself at this job. It’s too damned hot to work hard.”

Carl gave him a beaten grin and moved his arms even faster while the lineman bewilderedly meditated upon this imbecility. The lineman was a burly young Swede with a broadly upturned nose and thickly wide lips. His face suggested poorly carved wood. The blankness of his mind held few skirmishes with thought on this rasping afternoon and his mental images were confined to tools, stray glasses of beer, yielding pillows, and feminine contours—the flitting promises that held him to his day of toil. He possessed no human significance to Carl—he was a drably accidental automaton who shouted down the blessed orders that gave Carl little time for definite thoughts and emotions: an unconscious helper in the flogging of mind and soul.

As they walked down the street after the day’s work Carl looked closely at him for the first time. Sweat and dirt were violating the youthful outlines of his face, and his small blue eyes were contracted and deeply sunk as though still directing the movements of his arms. The blunt strength of his body sagged beneath the colorlessness of clothes and his head was wearily bent forward—the grey frenzies of a civilization had exacted their daily tribute and it is possible that he was not aware of the glory and impressiveness which certain poets find in his cringing role. For a time Carl looked at him with an exhausted friendliness and felt tied to him by the intimate bonds of confessing sweat and conquered toil, and this illusion did not vanish until he spoke.

“Me for beer and somethin’ to eat,” he said, with heavy anticipation. “A day shust like this’ll take the guts outa any man. Come along, Jack, I’ll stand treat for the suds.... An’ say, lemme give ya a tip—don’t overwork yourself out on this job. It don’t pay. You won’t get a cent more at the end of the week. Do whatcha gotta do but take it kinda easy. Kinda easy. The boss is too busy most of the time to notice who’s doin’ the most work an’ unless you loaf on the job you can get by without killin’ yourself.”

The complacent roughness of his voice, divided by the shallow wisdoms of the underdog, destroyed the feeling of tired communion which Carl had been sheltering, and his exhaustion began to creep apart from the man, like a tottering aristocrat. He was once more a proudly baffled creator, shuffling along after a day of useless movements, and his hatred for human beings awoke from its short sleep and brandished a sneer on his loose and dirt-streaked face.

He walked into a corner saloon with Petersen and gulped down a glass of beer. Its cool interior kiss aroused a bit of vigor within him and he looked around at the men who were amiably fighting to place their elbows on the imitation mahogany bar. Their faces were relaxed and soiled, heavily betraying the aftermath of a day of toil, and an expression of brief elation teased their faces as they swallowed the beer and whiskey and licked their lips. After each drink they stood with blustering indecision, like generals striving to forget a menial dream and regain their command of an army, or quietly tried to erase the blunders and supplications of a day, seeking nothing save the solace of lazy conversation and weakly clownish arguments. The strained, corrupt clamor of voices debating over women, prize-fighters, and money swayed back and forth and was timidly disputed by the whir of electric-fans and the clink of glasses. A wave of sleepy carelessness stormed Carl as he watched these men. Inevitably thrown in with them, as a sacrifice to a dubious reality, he felt inclined to copy their actions and inanely insult his actual self, since at this moment all words and gestures seemed equally futile to him.

“What essential difference is there between a poet, boasting of his reputation, and a workman bragging about the women who have allowed him to molest their bodies?” he asked himself, forcing the question out of the drained limpness of his mind. “The poet has taught better manners to his vanity, with many an inquisitive artifice, while the other man is more natural and clumsy.”

Petersen’s voice interrupted the soliloquy.

“Come on, have another.”

“Make it whiskey this time,” said Carl to the bartender. “I’ll pay for this one, Petersen.”

“Keep your money, keep it,” answered Petersen, warmed by his beers to an insistent generosity. “I got plenty of it. But say, I’ll be a little shorter in kale tuhnight when Katie gets through with me. There’s no way of spendin’ money that that dame don’t know, but I guess all women are like that. They make you fly some to get ’em. Gonna meet her at eight tonight.”

“Who’s Katie?” asked Carl, drowsily amused after his whiskey.

“She’s a little brunette I’m goin’ with. I’m blonde myself so I like ’em dark an’ well-built. Fine-lookin’ girl she is. Some curve! She ain’t a fast dame by no means but I give her money so’s she can look decent. You know the wages they pay at them damn department-stores! I don’t wanna be ashamed of her when I take her out so I get her the best of everythin’—silk stockings, nice hat, swell shoes.”

“Don’t she feel kinda small about a man paying for her clothes?” asked Carl, slipping into Petersen’s language.

“Well, she said no at first but I told her that she didn’t have to give me nothin’ except what she wanted to,” said Petersen. “I’m a straight guy with women, I am.”

“Do you love her?” asked Carl, wondering how Petersen would take the question.

He looked at Carl with a heavy disapproval.

“Say, cut out the kiddin’,” he answered. “D’ya lo-o-ove her”—he mimicked the words with astonished derision—“none of that soft stuff for me. She’s a good-lookin’, wise girl, and if I don’t see anyone I like better I’ll prob’ly marry her, but she ain’t got no ropes tied to me. You bet not! There’s plenty of fish in the pond, Jack.”

“Yes, if you’ve got the right kind of bait,” answered Carl, deliberately falling into the other man’s verbal stride, “but be sure that someone else isn’t fishing for you at the same time. Hooked from above, while not watching, you know.”

“You’re a regular kidder, ain’t ya,” said Petersen, who dimly felt that Carl was masking the sly wisdom of sexual pursuits and respected him for it. “But say, Katie’s got a nice friend—Lucy’s her name. She’s a little thin, not much curve to her, but some men like ’em that way. An’ she’s kinda quiet too, don’t talk much, but I don’t care for them when they’re always laughin’ and cuttin’ up. Then they’re usually tryin’ to get on your good side an’ work you for somethin.’ Would ya like to meet this dame? I don’t know just how far she’ll go but she might come across if you work her right.”

“Sure, lead me to her,” said Carl, inaudibly laughing to himself.

“Alright, I’ll make it for eight tuhmorrow night. The four of us’ll go somewhere.... Well, one more an’ we’ll beat it, Jack.”

Glancing swiftly ahead, Carl saw that this engagement would demand a certain sum of money and he wondered how he could obtain it since he would not be paid for his present work until the end of the week. While he stood, grasping this little perplexity, he noticed that a man at his left had placed a ten-dollar bill on the bar, in payment for a drink, and that the man was immersed in a violent argument with a friend, with his back turned to the bar. The bartender was at the other end of the counter, and after a glance at Petersen, who stood dully peering into his empty glass, Carl whisked the bill into one of his coat pockets. Then he quickly prodded Petersen’s shoulder.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said, and the two walked out of the saloon, Carl taking care to stroll in a reluctant fashion and steeling himself for the angry shout that might come.

As Carl walked down the street he felt a twinge of regret at having stolen the money of a stumbling, minor puppet. He told himself that this petty gesture had been forced upon him by an innately vicious contortion known as life, but his emotions cringed as they arranged an appropriate explanation.

“This man whom I have robbed will curse the treacherous unfairness of life and his eyes, dilated with bitterness, will see more clearly his relation to the things around him. In this way I have really befriended him. The railroad-detective, who once struck me on the head with the butt of a pistol, when I was offering no resistance, was trying to obtain revenge—revenge upon the people who had made him their snarling slave—and he blindly reached out for the object nearest to him, which happened to be my head. But there was no desire for vengeance in my own gesture. I steal from men in order to prevent life from stealing an occasional refuge for my thoughts and emotions. A purely practical device.”

He left Petersen at the next street-corner and boarded a crowded street-car, reflecting on his engagement to meet the “quiet an’ thin Lucy” as he stood wearily clinging to the leather strap. Petersen’s attitude toward women was a familiar joke. Dressed in its little array of fixed and confident variations it had pursued Carl in the past without repulsing or flattering him. To him it was an elaborately pitiful delusion of dominance made by hosts of men, who felt the craving to inject a dramatic variety and assurance into the frightened monotones of their lives. In an aching effort to dignify their barren days these men adopted the roles of hunters and masters among women. They entered, with infinite coarseness and precision, a glamorous realm of lies, jealousies, cruelties, and haloes, and in this wildly fantastic land they managed to forget the flatly submissive attitudes of another world. Carl was telling himself that he had been waiting for a woman who could bring him something more than the crudely veiled undulation of flesh but he fashioned the starving little romance with great deliberateness.

“Women have excited my flesh and it has often yielded to them, but that is simply a necessary triviality,” he said to himself. “I, too, must seek to evade the monotonies and restrictions of my life, lest I become mad, but at least I am quite conscious of the joke. The cheap little drug-store does not witness any hoodwinked swaggers on my part! So on to quiet Lucy, with her stiff stupidities and elastic curves.”

Once more he had to pass the garrulous sentries at the gate—the neighbors around the doorstep. They eyed the dirt upon his clothes and face with an amazed contempt—Carrie Felman’s son a common laborer!—and lost in their scrutiny they gave him monosyllabic greetings.

“Well, judging from the dirt all over you you’ve found a job,” said his mother in tones of blunt resignation.

“Yes, I’m working as a lineman’s helper for the telephone company,” he answered in an expressionless voice.

After he had washed his parents pelted him with amiable questions—the details of his work, wages, and companions—a dash of solicitude swinging with their desire to entertain the dull aftermath of a hot summer day. He answered their questions patiently and they were glad that their son seemed ready to plunge his “wildness” into the soothing currents of an average life. Their affection for him was only able to dominate their hearts when he failed to challenge the peaceful assumptions and bargains of their lives, for otherwise it verged into hatred because it was confronted by a stabbing mystery which it could not understand.

After the evening meal he sat in an easy chair upholstered with violent green plush and usually occupied at such times by his father, but donated to him in honor of his first evening of submission. He sprawled in the chair, trifling with the headlines of a newspaper and throwing them aside. A warm and not unpleasant stupor began to descend upon his thoughts and emotions and they fluttered spasmodically, like circles of drugged butterflies. He closed his eyes. His legs and arms held a heaviness which he enjoyed because he was not forced to raise it.

“Will this be my end—a swinging of arms and legs during the daytime and then different shades of sleep or sensual bravado at night?” he asked himself drowsily—a well-remembered sentence that needed little consciousness.

Suddenly, an emotional revolt within him tore against his physical lethargy, like lightnings from some unguessed depth of his soul, and he was astonished to find himself sitting upright in the chair. He saluted the victory joyously.

“By God, I won’t give in as easily as this,” he whispered to the purple grapes on the tan wall-paper, addressing them because their ugliness was at least helplessly inert. “You’re concrete symbols, if nothing else, and you don’t stumble amidst unconquered clouds. I’ll go to the park and try to write a poem.”

Agreeably amazed at the returning vestige of strength in his legs he walked to the public-park and sat down upon a bench. Ignoring the people who were strolling or romping around him he bent over his paper-pad and tugged at the smooth insolence of rhyme and meter, but the fight was an uneven one since his mind and emotions were still brittle and dazed from their day of hurried subjection. After crumbling sheets of paper for two hours he wrote:

TO A SAND-PIPER

One blast—a mildly frightened little host

Of liquid sprites, each holding one high note,

Aroused from some repentance in the throat

Of this grey-yellow bird who skims the coast—

And silence. Far off I can somehow feel

The drooping-winged sprites back to covert steal.

The poem did not satisfy him, and in a measure he felt like a sleepwalker who was imitating gestures that had lost their meaning to him, but he dared not substitute his actual thoughts and emotions in place of the tenuous or stilted fancies which he believed were all that poetry was allowed to achieve. All that he wanted to say, and all that he did say in conversation with himself, muttered unhappily within him as he sat on the bench and strained to capture the pretty suggestions of a mystical rapture, but he was slave to the belief that poetry was a thinly aristocratic experience in which thoughts and emotions, serene, noble, and ludicrously artificial, disdained the lunges of thought and the turmoils of an actual world—pale, washed-out princes contending among themselves for trinket-devices known as rhymes and meters.

He rose from the bench, impoverished by the effort that he had made to counteract a day of toil, and trudged homeward.

CHAPTER VI.

After stumbling through another day of heaving muscles and bruised shins, with his self-hatred gloating over the slavery of his body, he met Petersen and the two girls at a down-town street-corner, grinning at the thought of what this experience might hold, for he liked the idea of pretending to be a sensual beggar while a sneer within him played the part of a bystander.

Petersen’s sweetheart, Katie Anderson, was a short, plump girl who tried, with the incessant swiftness of her tongue, to apologize for the excessive slowness of her thoughts. The coarse roundness of her face was determinedly obscured by rouge and powder, and her large brown eyes were continually shifting, as though they feared that stillness might betray some secret which they held. Her face knew a species of sly and mild cunning not unlike that of a rabbit frequently beaten by life but clinging to its mask of courage while hopping through the forest of sensual experience. Her friend, Lucy Melkin, was more subdued and helplessly candid. Her small slender body stooped a little as though some unseen hand were pressing too familiarly upon one of her shoulders—a hand of exhausted fear—and the pale oval of her face had the twist of a loosely pleading infant beneath its idiotic red and white. Her blue eyes seemed to be endlessly waiting for something to strike them and wondering why the blow failed to arrive on time.

Petersen suggested that they should visit an adjacent vaudeville theater and when Carl and the others agreed they walked through the crowded streets.

“Baby, but I’ve had some day,” said Katie. “Them shoppers sure get on your nerves, I’m telling you. But you’re not gonna let me work all the time, are you, Charlie dear?”

“There’s no harm in workin’,” said Petersen, not wanting to be quite placed in the position of disdaining an essential fact within his life. “No harm. I gotta take a lot of sass myself from the foreman but it’s all in the day’s game. You don’t get nothin’ easy in this world, ’less you’re a crook, and if y’are you’ll soon wind up in a place where ya don’t wanta be. But still, a good-lookin’ girl like you, Katie, shouldn’t hafta stand on her feet all day. Don’t be afraid, I’ll make it easier for ya pretty soon.”

“Now Charle-e, the way you flatter is somethin’ terrible,” said Katie, with a simper of nude delight. “I suppose Mister Felman would like to get some nice girl too, wouldn’t you, Mister Felman? Or maybe you’ve got two or three already. You men can never be trusted.”

“No, I haven’t been lucky,” said Carl, secretly exploding with a laughter that was partly directed at himself.

He had been afraid that these girls would prove to be of the shallowly sophisticated, carefully sulky type and he felt relieved at their coarsely direct naivetes. An axe, with baby-blue ribbon tied around it, was more entertaining than a pocket-knife steeped in cheap perfume.

“No, I haven’t been lucky,” he went on, “but, you know, we’re always waiting for the right one.”

“Why, that’s just what Lucy always says,” said Katie, rolling her eyes as she looked at the other girl in a ponderously insinuating manner. “She’s always been rowmantic, like you, Mister Felman. Why if I was to tell you of all the fellas she’s turned down you wouldn’t believe me.”

“No, perhaps I wouldn’t,” answered Carl, keeping his face sober with a massive effort.

“Now, Katie, you keep quiet,” said Lucy, and Carl was surprised at the actual anger that hardened her voice. “I’m perfectly able to talk about my own business without your helpin’ an’ it’s not nice to be sayin’ such things to a gen’lman who’s just met me. I’m sure he’s not interested in my past an’ even if he is I’m the one to tell him an’ not you. You make me tired!”

“Well, of all things,” cried Katie. “I was only tryin’ to be nice an’ here you go and get real angry about it. I’ve never had a girl frien’ who was as touchy as you are. I didn’t really tell Mister Felman anything about you ’cept that you was rowmantic, an’ that’s nothin’ to be ashamed about.”

“See here, stop all this quarrelin’,” said Petersen, to whom the speech of women was always an ignorance that assailed the patience of masculine wisdom. “You women can talk for ten hours about nothin’! I didn’t bring my friend down to have him lissen to your squabblin’. Cut it out, I tell ya.”

This storm in an earthen jar was amusing to Carl. He marvelled at the ability of these people to whip words into redundantly nondescript droves in which thought gasped weakly as it strove to follow the uproar of simple emotions. Continually, he felt the reactions of a visitor from another planet, witnessing an incredible vaudeville-show. All human beings to him were hollow and secretly despairing falsehoods separated only by the cleverness or crudeness of their verbal disguises, and he heard them with an emotion that was evenly divided between amazement and a chuckle.

“I’m sure that Miss Anderson meant no harm,” said Carl, with a whim to become the glib peacemaker. “She was just feeling gay and frisky, and I took her words in the right spirit. Miss Melkin was a little angry because she thought that I didn’t understand Miss Anderson’s intentions, but she needn’t be afraid. I never misinterpret. It was just a little misunderstanding on both sides so let’s forget about it.”

“Mister Felman, you’re such a perfect gen’lman,” said Katie, blithely.

Carl looked at Lucy and saw that a wistfully surprised expression was liking his words and trying to explain them to her mind. It was the look of a baby flirting with an incongruous sophistication and striving to create a fusion between ingenuousness and a certain sensual wisdom learned in the alleys of life.

“Ah, these starved dwarfs, how little it takes to please them,” Carl sighed to himself.

After the wiry, tawdry spectacle of the vaudeville show, with its weary acrobats and falsetto singers, the four visited a grimly gaudy Chinese restaurant, where the Orient becomes an awkward prostitute for Occidental dollars, and while Petersen and Katie gossiped about their friends Carl and Lucy traded hesitant sentences and threw little sensual appeals from the steady gaze of their eyes. Lucy, with her look of a stunned infant, made him feel vaguely troubled—the ghost of a fatherly impulse. After the meal the group separated, since the girls lived in different parts of the city, and as Carl and Lucy rode in the trolley car they tried to make their anticipations more at ease, with the veils of conversation.

“Why do you live?” asked Carl, abruptly, to see whether one or two words in her answer might be different from what he expected.

“What a funny question!” cried Lucy. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I wanta be happy. I never am mosta the time, but then I’m always hopin’ that things’ll change. Why’d you ask me that funny question?”

The fumbling bewilderment of her words irritated and saddened Carl, simultaneously, and in an effort to slay the reaction he simulated a compassion.

“Happiness doesn’t always speak the truth,” he said, struggling to mould his words so that they could reach her understanding. “It’s sometimes a beautiful lie. You understand? A beautiful, soft, desperate lie. And we say the lie because we want to change ourselves and somebody else to something that can make us forget our smallness. You see, we are not very large, either in our bodies or in our thoughts, and we try to make ourselves several feet taller, tall enough to put our heads on a level with the trees, tall enough to imagine that the wind respects us. Beautiful, desperate lies. Do you understand?”

“I don’t quite understand you,” said Lucy. “You speak so different from all the men I know, so different, and yet I like the way you speak. Do you mean it’s not good for anyone to be happy?”

“If your happiness doesn’t put you to sleep it’s good for you. When people try to be happy for more than a little while it makes them sleepy. And, you see, it’s much better to be very much alive, or very dead.”

“Honest, I’d like to get what you’re sayin’,” said Lucy, perplexed and softly candid. “Maybe you mean that we oughta keep movin’ all the time, hearin’ and seein’ different things, an’ maybe you’re right about that. I get tired of goin’ down to work every mornin’ and coming back to the same room every night. I’d like to travel around, an’ see different people an’ places, an’ find out what everything’s like. But I guess I never will.”

“It’s much easier than you imagine,” said Carl. “Just pack up your grip some morning and ride away to another city and see what happens there. After you’ve done it you’ll wonder what held you back.”

“Oh I just couldn’t do that. I’d make my mother so unhappy if I did, an’ besides, I’d be afraid of goin’ somewhere all alone. I might not find any work in the place where I went, an’ then I’d be up against it. I’d like to travel around with plenty of money, an’ nothin’ to worry me, an’——”

Her words trailed off into a revealing silence, and Carl smiled sadly at the little, pitifully obvious hint within her faltering. Perhaps it might be best to marry this simple, mildly wistful, ignorant girl and surrender himself to monotonous toil and sensual warmth, forgetting the schemes that were torturing his heart and mind. The reaction captured him for a time and then died. No, he was gripped by a snarling, nimble blackguard who was determined to lead him to destruction or victory. And in the meantime, here was sensual forgetfulness—an interlude with a girl to whom happiness was merely physical desire captivated by filmy and soothing disguises.

They reached her home, a grey cottage in the suburbs, with a little yard of dusty grass and a modest porch. It bore an aspect of abject simplicity, and that meditative leer possessed by the fronts of all cottages. They sat in a hammock on the porch, and Carl suddenly kissed her with the theatrical intensity of one who is trying to shake off a deliberate role. The gasping expostulations of her voice were contradicted by the limpness of her body, and sighing at this prearranged incongruity, Carl kissed her again, still feeling like a skillful charlatan and still hoping to lure himself into a tumultuous spontaneity. This time she was silent but gripped his shoulders with both hands, while little shades of fright and desire gambled for her face. Suddenly, a meek candor came to her eyes and the seriousness of a child lost in an overwhelming forest moulded her lips.

“Will you be good to me if I let you?” she whispered.

The pathetic, cringing frankness of her words made a stabbing lunge at his deliberateness and a feeling of troubled tenderness mastered his heart. He wept inaudibly, as though he himself had become a begging child, and the illusion of rare experience, cheated and twisted out of his life, returned to betray him. His head struck her shoulder like the death of regret.

CHAPTER VII.

From that night on his life fell into a regular stride—days of wrenching labor and nights of rebellious weariness, broken by intervals in which he crept, like a swindled, dirty child, to the arms of Lucy, washed into a dreamless rest by the simple flow of her desire for him and her sightless worship. To her he was an enigmatic, statuesque prince delighting her with queer words which she could finger as though they were new toys and bringing her an eager compression of grief and joy which she had never known before. She realized, dimly, that he was fundamentally alien to her, and she often said to herself: “Some day he’ll meet a child who c’n understand all of his funny words and then he’ll forget about me,” but this fear only increased the stubbornness of her grasp. And so his life wavered between toil, and sensual peace, and little mildly stunted poems until one morning in late autumn when, at the main office of the telephone company, he was discharged with the information that his job had been merely a temporary one.

“Thanks, old boy,” he said loudly in the face of the astonished cashier. “If you knew what a relief this is to me you’d take a drink with me to celebrate the occasion.”

“Now what in the devil’s the matter with you?”—the man voiced his peevish perplexity as he fished for Carl’s pay envelope.

“I was getting accustomed to the chains, but now that you’ve benignly removed them I’ll make another effort to escape,” he answered, in the grip of a gay and aimless relief.

The clerk tapped his forehead, with a scowl, and contemptuously tossed over the envelope. Carl carelessly stuffed the sixteen dollars into a pocket and walked out upon the crowded down-town streets. The streets were touched with the middle of forenoon, that hour when the business section of an American city is most leisurely and nondescript in its make-up. The wagons and trucks were not yet bombarding time with the full climax of their inane roar and the flatly hideous elevated railroad trains were firing at longer intervals. Noise had not yet become the confused and staggering slave of an ill-tempered avarice. The nomads and idlers of the city’s populace were flitting in and out among housewives on an early shopping-tour and those sleekly bloated men who stroll belatedly to their offices. A sleepy young vaudeville actress, painted and satiated, hurried to some booking-agency; a middle-aged pickpocket emphasized his grey and white checked suit with sturdy limbs and examined passersby, with the face of a shaved fox; an undertaker, tall and old, paced along with that air of worried dignity which his calling affects; a fairly young housewife pounded the sedate roundness of her body over the pavement and held the hand of a small, oppressed boy; a stock-raiser from the west slid his bulky ruddiness along the street, while beneath his broad-brimmed hat his face held an expression of awe-stricken delight; a college-girl, slender and carefully hidden by silk, strove with every mincing twist of her body to remind you that she was pretty; a youth, trimly effeminate and attended by an inexpensive perfume, trotted along, eyeing the scene with an affected air of disapproval.

The streets were cluttered with a ludicrous, artificial union of people—people who were close together and yet essentially unaware of each other’s presence, and the invisible, purposeless walls of civilization crossed each other everywhere. If he swerved two inches to the right the chained trance of this lonely farm-hand might strike the shoulder of this dully wounded chambermaid from the Rialto Hotel, and with this happening their lives might become an inch less burdened and struggling. Their sidelong glances cross for a moment, like tensely held spears, but they pass each other from cautious habit, striding to more prearranged and empty contacts. Civilization has raised wall-making to a fine art, striving to hide its dreamlessness beneath an aspect of complex reticence, and keeping its human atoms feeble and solitary, since pressed together they might break it into ruins. During the rush-hours of a city you can see those streams of people who are busily making and repairing the walls, but during the lulls in the fever upon city streets you may observe the stragglers, wanderers, and grown-up children who are not quite connected with this task and who humbly or viciously hurdle the barriers that separate them.

These thoughts and emotions formed themselves in Carl’s mood as he strolled through the clattering, mercenary sounds of a midwestern city. The joy of not being compelled to cope with undesired physical movements brought its lightness to his legs, and he hurriedly fished for secrets from the thousands of faces gliding past him. This shrouded girl with a scowling face—was she meditating upon the possibility of suicide, or wondering why her sweetheart had failed to purchase a more expensive box of candy? Each face curved its flesh over a triviality or an important affair and swiftly taunted his imagination, challenging it to remove the masks that confronted it.

“Life holds a measure of anticipation and mystery because people for the most part pass each other in silence. If they stopped to talk to each other they would become transparent and wearisome.”

As Carl walked along hope began to sing its juvenile ballade within his contorted heart. He planned to send his poems to the magazines and he felt strengthened by the unexpected lull of this late autumn morning. He hurried to his favorite bench in the public square, one that he always occupied if it happened to be vacant when he passed. He had a shyly whimsical fancy—a last remnant of youth asserting itself within him—that his touch upon this bench stayed there while he was absent and gave a sense of invisible, prodding communion to other pilgrim-acrobats who occupied this seat at times—an abashed bit of sentimentality evading itself with an image. Filled with the alert meeting of hope and bitterness he wrote with a degree of fluid ease that had never visited him before, and for the first time his lyrics grazed a phrase or two that rumored recalcitrantly of a proud story known as beauty. In one attempted poem he asserted that an old, blind, Greek huckster on the side street of an American city had suddenly towered above the barrenly angular buildings, in a massive reincarnation of Homer, and he wrote in part:

A purplish pallor stole

Over your antique face—

The warning of a soul

Rising with tireless grace.

Rising above your cart

Of apples, figs, and plums,

And with its swelling art

Deriding the city’s drums.

With a quivering immersion he bent over his paper, lost to the keen realities of a city day. Sidling vagrants and transients from small towns glanced at him with morose disfavor and sometimes stopped to stare at this shabby young man whose head was never raised from his writing. His abstraction was an insult to their sense of idle release. He wrote for hours and only paused when hunger of a different kind began irresistibly to whisper within him, for he had not eaten since morning. It was six o’clock when he hastened from the park. He joined the homeward bound masses, feeling satiated and apart, and dreading the evening contact with his sagging, verbose parents. They were sitting and standing in two of the few postures that life still absentmindedly allowed them—bending over newspaper and frying-pan.

“Well, I’ve lost my job,” he said to his father.

His father dropped the newspaper and his mother shuffled in from the kitchen.

“Lost your job—what do you mean?” said his mother with slow incredulity, as though she had just escaped being crushed by a falling wall.

“They told me this morning that it had only been a temporary one and they paid me off. I thanked the clerk for his news but he didn’t seem to take it in the right spirit.”

“Ach, I knew it would happen, I knew it,” said Mrs. Felman. “Here’s what you get from your ma-anooal labor! What kind of work is that for an educated boy like you? With your brains, now, you could go out on the road and sell goods. You should have more get-up about you. Mrs. Feinsthal was telling me at my whist-club today that her son Harry is making piles of money with Liebman and Company. Sells notions and knick-knacks. You could easy do the same if you had any sense in your head.”

“Carrie’s right, this slavery is no work for a smart man,” said Mr. Felman. “Any fool, you know, can work with his hands, but it takes real intelligence to make a man buy something. I want you to be able to laugh at people, and feel independent, and not be a poor schlemiel all your life.”

“Well, you’ve been a travelling salesman for twenty years,” said Carl, with a weary smile, “and before that you tried a general merchandise store, but it doesn’t seem to have brought you much money or happiness. You recommend a treacherous wine. The thing that you’ve fought for has always scarred and eluded you. What’s the reason?”

Mr. Felman lowered his head while the round fatness of his face revealed a huddled confusion of emotions in which shame and annoyance predominated. He sat, tormenting his greyish red moustache, as though it were a fraudulent badge, and gazing with still eyes at a newspaper which he was not reading.

“Perhaps I’ve inherited nothing from you save your curious inability at making money,” said Carl, trying to feel a ghost of compassion for this petrified, minor soldier lost in the uproar of a battle but still worshipping his glittering general. “You’ve spent all of your life in chasing a frigid will-o’-the-wisp, made out of the lining of your heart, and you want me to stumble after the same mutilated futility. You’re not unintelligent, as far as business ability goes, and yet, you’ve always been doomed to a kind of respectable poverty. Something else within you must have constantly fought with another delusion to produce such a result. You can’t simply blame it on luck—that’s an overworked excuse. Perhaps you failed to win your god because you’ve never been able to teach efficiency and strength to the spirit of cruelty within you. You have not been remorselessly shrewd, my father, and now you are paying the penalty.”

“Well, because I’ve been a fool that’s no sign that you should be one, too,” answered Mr. Felman in a voice of reluctant and secretly tortured self-reproach. “Yes, I’ve been too kind-hearted for my own good, dammit, but I want that you should be different. It’s been too easy for people to swindle me. Yes, I want you to show them something that your poor old father couldn’t. Yes. And as for your talk about chasing money, tell me, how can a man live decent without plenty of money? How can he?”

“We would have our nice store this very minute if your father had listened to me,” said Mrs. Felman, mournfully. “He never would let me handle the reins. I know how to be firm with people, believe me, but your father would always give credit to every Tom-Dick-and-Harry that walked into the store. And whenever he did have money he always gambled it away. Gambling has been the ruination of his life! All of your wildness, Carl, has come from your father’s side and not from mine!”

Mr. Felman looked at his son with an embarrassed admission of secret sins, while for a moment he became a faun lamenting his awkwardness, and his uneasy smile quivered as it tried to say: “Alas, I am not so much better than you are, my crazy, foolish son.” Carl grinned in return and for the first time in his life was on the verge of feeling a slight communion with his shamefaced father. As the mother went on with her endless story of the father’s crimes and incapacities the rubbing of her words produced a glimmer of ill-temper.

“Noo, don’t you ever stop?” he cried. “Always nagging about the past! I might be a rich man now if you hadn’t driven me crazy with your endless complaints and hollering. Never a moment of peace from the day I married you.”

“I’ll have to give both of you something else to complain about,” said Carl. “I’m going to stop working for a while and write poetry, and send it away to magazines.”

“Ach, I thought those writing notions were out of your head,” cried Mrs. Felman. “Who will buy your good-for-nothing stuff? I can’t understand a word of it myself! Writing again! Will my miseries never end?”

Mr. Felman glared at his son and the old hostility fell opaquely between them.

“Between you and your mother I’ll be in the grave soon!” he shouted. “I’m done with you!”

He arose and stalked out of the apartment, muttering and producing a loud period of sound as he closed the door.

Al Levy strolled into the dining-room, triumphantly tinkering with one of the points of his small black moustache; lightly whistling a tune from some latest musical comedy; and bearing upon his face the look of bored patience which he assumed when in the presence of an inferior being. After he and Carl had exchanged constrained “helloes” he sat at the table and nervously interested himself in his cigar, as though silently signaling for future words.

“See here, Carl, I don’t want to butt in, and of course, it’s none of my business, but I couldn’t help hearing some of the argument that you’ve just had with your parents and I want to give you a little advice, purely for your own good. You’re on the wrong track, old boy. You’re living in a world that wasn’t made to order for you and you can’t change it. If you don’t bow to the world the old steam-roller will get you, and what satisfaction is that going to bring you? This poetry of yours is all very well as a side-line, something to fill in the time when you’re not working, and of course it’s very pretty stuff. I like to read poetry myself sometimes. But really you shouldn’t take it more seriously than that. I’m telling you all this because you’ve really got a fairly good head on you and I hate to see you go wrong.”

The sleekly loquacious man in front of him, offering his shop-worn little adulterations of worldly wisdom, aroused Carl to a lightly vicious mood.

“You’ve wandered away from your natural field, Levy,” he said. “Talk about the cheap jewelry that you sell, or the physical merits of a woman, or the next candidate for mayor, or the latest prize-fight, but don’t speak about something that’s simply an irritating mystery to you. You know as much about poetry as I do about credits and discounts, but you’re a swaggering, muddy fool who imagines that the wisdom of the world has kissed his head. I’m not interested in you or your words—you’re simply five crude senses dressed in a blue serge suit and trying to scoop in as much drooling pleasure as they can before they decay. Go out to your poolroom or down-town theater and leave me in peace!”

Levy gasped blankly for a moment and then frowned with an enormous hatred.

“Why, you stupid fool, this is the thanks I get for giving you a little sensible advice!” he cried. “You think that you’re better than everyone else with all the rot you write about roses and love, but let me tell you something, a common bricklayer is more important than you are, any day in the year! A man like that is helping the progress of the world while you’re nothing but a puffed-up little idler! And even you have got to do manual labor because you’re not fit for anything else. You’re just a bag of easy words. If it wasn’t for your parents I’d punch you in the face and teach you a lesson!”

Mrs. Felman, who had been knitting on the rear porch, rushed into the room.

“Boys, boys, stop it!” she cried, in anguish. “Are you out of your minds—fighting in the house! Don’t pay any attention to what Carl says, Al. You know he’s crazy and not responsible.”

“Well, after all, you’re right, I shouldn’t pay any attention to him,” said Levy with a sulky loftiness. “I only spoke to him for your sake, you know, but I’ll leave him alone after this.”

Carl grimaced with the aid of his eyebrows and suppressed the easy words with which he could have clubbed the man in front of him. After Levy departed Carl fled to the street to escape his mother’s enraged words concerning the possible loss of a valuable roomer.

CHAPTER VIII.

During the next two weeks Carl sat in his drably dark room, slowly copying his poems with a stiff, perfect handwriting and mailing them to magazines and newspapers, but rejection-slips, fresh from the printer, began to reach him with each return mail. Many of his uncertain, mystical poems were equal to the quality of verse maintained by certain American publications, but editors scarcely ever trouble themselves to read verse that is copied in pen and ink and bears the spirals of deceptively boyish handwriting. Under the blow of each returned poem Carl receded inch by inch to his old cell of faltering insignificance. He went back to the tame routines of physical labor, finding work as a plumber’s assistant, and still consoled himself by creeping, like a soiled and weeping child, to Lucy’s blind and half-motherly worship.

One evening, after he had stepped into the brightly dismal sitting-room of Lucy’s home, he noticed an uneasy politeness in the greeting of her parents—the usual well-smeared cordiality was absent. At first he felt that he might have made a mistake, but one glance at the nervous distress upon Lucy’s transparent little face indicated that some change had taken place in her family’s regard for him. Lucy was never successful in her efforts at evasion, and each one of the pitifully comical masks that she wore merely snugly revealed the outline of the emotion which they were attempting to conceal. With a strained gaiety she suggested a walk and after they had reached the street he questioned her.

“Well, what’s the trouble, Luce? The graceful, January note in your parent’s voices was not quite expected. Tell me what it’s all about.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, nothing, Carl dear.”

“I’m quite sure that it’s nothing in reality, since your parents are almost incapable of thought, but at any rate, you might explain the empty gesture to me.”