The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

OCTOBER, 1915

Published Monthly

15 cents a copy

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO

$1.50 a year

Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

The Little Review

Vol. II

OCTOBER, 1915

No. 7

Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson

Songs and Sketches

Ben Hecht

I.

Night

Who hath not sung to thee, Night? So silent; so deep. But this night thou hast given thyself to me. Thy black wings brush silently against my soul.

Thou hast come to me, for I feel thee resting like a soft sorrow on my heart.

Thou who art alive with the shadowed wounds of ages hast heard me crying out to embrace thee, my soul beseeching thee to fold me against thy black bosom. And in answer thou hast let the mysticism of thy wonder-gloom sink into me until my soul hath opened to receive its kiss.

Tonight no one but I shall sing to thee. For thou art my mistress. Thy blackness and mine have wedded. And now thy dark kiss stingeth like a pain in me.

Into thy long arms I give myself. Night, Night, thou art so filled with longing. I hear the soft lament of thy deep heart murmuring to me.

Thy dim fingers trail across my face in a blind caress.

I feel thy yielding body that is spirit more than my spirit behind the somber veils thou wearest. I possess thee and our sorrows swell into an ecstacy.

Night, thou art the beautiful shadow thrown upon the earth by my sorrow.

I have carried thee a buried miracle in my soul of souls until this hour—when thou hast taken wings and flown out of me to confront me.

Night, my Night, let me enter now into thy darkness until all life beats in vain outside the obscurity of my soul. I would vanish from myself.

Night, my somber mistress, upon thy face my tears shine as stars and make thee more beautiful.

Night, thou art infinity revealed. I will stir thy ancient fires on thy cold lips until thou willst thunder to me with thy hidden voices out of thy vast silence.

Night, I open my heart to hear but I hear only my heart crying out. Speak.

Beautiful one, I sing to thee for bringing me the madness of silence. I sing to thee, for thou art mine; for thou art fierce and pregnant with still wounds.

Night. Behold! I know thee. I have seen the black flames of thy spirit that burn in the depths of thee. I have heard the murmuring music of thy tears.

Thou art glorious. Come. Come, thou and I shall make of our sorrow rejoicing. Come, place thy long, cool fingers in mine and lead me beyond.

Night! Night! Thy face is paling. Thou art stricken. Thou art treading silently away without me.

Night—thou hast taken from me the pain of thy kisses. There hath come into thy deep eyes a weariness. Thou art dying. Thou art dying from my arms. The red glow of death burneth in thy face and is transforming thee.

Night, where shall I find thee again? Where shall I seek thee?

The dreadful day that is thy white shadow hath come. And a part of me hath died.

Sleep Song

I lay in a field of black flowers, and there were purple veins and green that floated like thin worms about me.

There were soft thick shapes swaying liquidly, moving unseen, and I lay under them gripped by soft thick mists.

Deep under them I lay hidden and they pulled me deeper into the field rolling softly around me.

A sorrow that had pursued me in my soul left me as I vanished, left me and floated above the flowers.

And I saw a white face drifting away like a pale bubble over the top of my black garden.

A white face like a dim sorrow, like a mute pain, drifting far away; the white face of a dead love searching in vain for me, in vain.

The day was a white monster, naked and bellowing; grinning after me with its buildings that were jagged rows of dirty teeth. There was no place to hide from my sorrow.

It lay in the sky that winked at me like a vast and blue and relentless eye. And it lay in the sun that burned like a golden grotesque. It lay in every laugh and in every beauty and in every little bird that lost itself over the water.

I felt the black flowers grow blacker and higher and I moved deeper into the blackness.

And then a sorrow that had pursued me in my soul left me as I vanished.

It floated away over the tops of the black flowers and I saw her white face moving from me like a pale bubble.

I saw the white face of a dead love moving beyond the soft shapes that swayed unseen; drifting away like a mute pain and searching in vain for me, in vain.

I ran, but there was no place to run; for the monster day ran after, glaring like a white torment, shouting and scampering after, and there was no place to hide.

Now the day was a white grave opened to me. Now it was a wide wave breaking over me.

And now it was a great bird, white-breasted and grey-pinioned, flying after me and after, bearing my sorrow in its blue beak; racing after me until its heart burst in the west and it sank, bleeding gorgeously across the sky.

And still I ran; but now the night came, running after, and there was no place to hide from my sorrow.

I fled in the streets before the darkness. But the stars found me and the trees loomed after me and the houselights followed me and the darkness wept around me—and they were my sorrow.

But there on the distant verge, where the night sinks exhausted into the blood-red arms of the white monster leaping over the world again, I fell; deep I fell.

Far into a hidden land where I lay hidden; hidden in a field of black flowers that were threaded with purple veins and green floating like thin worms about me.

Autumn Song

My heart scatters tears over the dark day. The dull silvered poplar leaves float in the air like dead butterflies.

It is the autumn come again, speaking with its soft-tongued winds to the trees and to me.

It is cold. I have lost my warmth. I have lost thee. And the autumn has come again to tell me of it.

Listen to the sad-tongued winds. See the storm faltering in the street. It is cold.

It is the autumn come again, the autumn in whose wild sad treasures we once laughed; once when your hot hands reached out to me like a bright cry mocking the somber lisping of the twilight season.

Where are the songs I sang, the songs that leaped out of flame? Do they echo still in your listening ears? Do they fall like warm tears in your heart?

See the winds droop wearily into the trembling tree arms. See the street grows pale. A dying panoply drifts across the grey-girthed sky.

Ho, Life, I have still a song for you. Though you come whispering to me from the golden tombs of youth, from the scarlet graves of love, I will make of the lament you bring me—music. I will make of the dull tears you bring me—lyrics. I will clothe the grey ghosts of sorrow in rich trappings.

For it is only she who hath died. It is only she whom I loved with all my soul. Though my heart scatter tears over the dark day they are the tears of plenty. For her death hath enriched me.

For the autumn is come again speaking with its soft-tongued winds to the trees and to me things I have never heard before; things that her white breasts never told me; things that her burning lips never said to me; wild, sad things that the flame from whence my songs once leaped never held for me.

The dull silvered poplar leaves float in the air like dead butterflies, and they are beautiful.

Death Song

Last night you came and sat by my bed in a little dark room and boasted to me like a child.

“I have come to destroy the sun,” you said; “I will take the great, yellow sun in my fingers and blow on it once and it will go out like a match.”

And I wondered, because the sun is so large and hot, how such a little one as you could blow it out like a match.

But you said: “I will blow once into the night and the stars will sputter like little flames in a great wind and scatter away in ashes. And the moon will spin around and around like a bright coin until it breaks into little black bits.”

And I wondered because the night was so far, how such a little breath as yours could reach into its soul.

But you said: “I will go out and touch the trees and the green leaves will shrivel and the brown trunks will vanish. I will breathe just once on the houses, the great big houses of iron and wood and stone, and they will sway like long pieces of black cloth in the wind and they will melt into a dark mist.”

And I wondered and wondered.

But you said: “In an instant I will walk up and down all the roads you have known; I will wander in all the fields you have wandered and pass through all the highways you have been. And each place that I move in will cease to be. Under my feet the earth will become a powder and vanish.”

Then you said, for I had ceased to wonder and was listening sadly: “I will go to your beloved whose hair is like the silk on the corn and whose eyes are like the deeps of the sea and I will smile on her and she will become as nothing. She will become as a speck of dust and she will never be again.”

And I wondered again how such a little one as you could make my beloved into a speck of dust when she was so beautiful.

But you said: “I will touch all the faces you have seen with the point of my finger and they will change into little dark clouds and I will blow them away with the stars and the moon and the yellow sun.”

And I thought of all the faces you boasted to destroy and wondered—because there were so many.

But you said: “Do you remember the little bird you saw hopping on the stones in the park one day: I will go find the little bird and lay my hand on her and she will never hop on the stones again.”

I remembered the little bird.

And you said: “Do you remember the wide, green water that rolled itself into a great colored ball and bounced up and down under the sun? Listen—I will go and blow on the water and it will disappear into a single drop. And I will bring this drop back to you to wear in your eyes when they close.”

And I wondered and wondered.

But you said: “Listen:—there is an old woman who smiles when she thinks of you. I will walk up behind her and touch her gently on the shoulder and she will vanish.”

And I murmured, “Do not touch the old woman.”

But you said: “Listen:—I will lay my hand over all the wild notes and sweet notes you have heard and they will be hushed. I will kill the songs that lie unborn in the earth and the sea and the cherry trees and in the white throats of birds and women and in the hearts of men.”

And I wondered how such a little one as you could hush so great a chorus.

But you came closer to me and said: “I have come to destroy the world for you, to pluck out every little blade of grass and every flower, to brush away the stars and kick over the hills and tear up all the fields.”

It was dark in the little room where we were and I sighed.

And you came closer to me and said: “I will gather up in a great, black bag everyone and everything and every God you have known and I will drop them into a great, black hole. And listen:—and then you will be alone.”

II.

The Synagogue

This street in the ghetto looks at night

Like a prison corridor,

And the houses facing it are dark cells.

And then you come to a block where the rickety, thin tenements

Rise like gnawed, patient pencils tracing crazy star lines

In the sky.

And then you come to the Synagogue of Judas the Servant,

A little church of the Jews

Crouching on its knees

And enveloped in the rags of cheap saloons and hovels.

It thrusts its iron star into the night

Like a strange voice whispering in a dark place.

And its stained walls impregnated with an ancient faith

Murmur stoically to the stars of burning prayers and hopeless sobs

And other things they have never heard.

And if you stand before it for a time

Strange wild things will cry out of the shadows,

And you will see the torn, bleeding image of a race

Whom Christ crucified.

In the Sun

O what a day!

The buildings are bursting into bloom—

Huge, dazzling flowers sweeping against the heaven;

Dizzy ferns waving like dreadful fans under the flying clouds.

The shining windows flutter down like a shower of golden petals.

O what a day!

The buildings are crashing into bloom;

Gleaming stalks of purple sprawling with a graceful frenzy into space.

Smoke monsters dance lazily over their heads.

The sky swims like a blue butterfly in and out among them.

The streets race away.

A golden wind sweeps with a roar through the world that has become a fierce gorgeous garden, and it nods breathlessly.

Out of its blazing depths color leaps and the growling music of a torn God singing in pain.

O what a day.

Beauty bursting into madness.

On the Beach

The lake comes gliding in and in,

And gliding out it goes,

Running up and back on the ribbon of the beach

That plays with its silver toes.

And the lake reaches down to the hem of its gown

With its cool curved wind of a hand,

And throws out its petticoat lacy and white

With a swish-swish over the sand.

Its blue dress fluttering, tinted with the sun,

Hangs from its girdle white-spaced,

And a far ship riding with its nose in hiding

Stands black like a buckle at its waist.

It begins to rain and the lake birds fly

With a whir and an angry screech,

As the thin grey fingers reach down from the sky

And tap, tap faintly on the beach.

Digging little holes for an elfin folk,

Pointing up the water like a grate;

And the sky moves closer like a gust of smoke

And behind it crouch and wait

Great half shapes and grey cloud apes,

And a grey, old water crew,

And the lake birds fly with their wings awry,

Searching in their faces for the blue.

Now the long rain chants in the grasses on the hill,

And the lake runs in with a frightened sound,

And sullen and wet the sand sinks low,

Like a heavy brown cloud on the ground.

On the hill top green the trees bend away

And brood as they lower and bend,

And grey things walk beyond the grey

Where the sands and the waters end.

The rain has stopped and the earth like a bride

Has hung white petals in her hair,

And the sky draws back till the white clouds ride

Like soft white gardens in the air.

And a butterfly flutters like an endless note

Over the lake’s thin brink,

And the sand takes off its heavy brown coat

And the cloud apes vanish and sink.

The gay water dawns and the grasshopper pipes

And the lake glides in anew,

Dressed in greens and in awning stripes,

And little birds leap toward the blue.

The Dionysian Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser is the greatest novelist in America. It is not a distinction. He has written poor novels. His latest novel, The “Genius” published by John Lane Company is loose in parts. It limps. It loses its breath. It grows thin. But it is a novel of sweep and magnitude, of sledge hammer blows and fine chiseling. In the caramel chorus of America’s chirping fictionists Dreiser raises the smooth, virile voice of an artist. And there is no voice like his in America.

I prefer to write of what Dreiser has done in The “Genius” than to tell in detail of what it is about. Calmly, aloofly with a consummate dispassion Dreiser has thrust his magic pen home into the heart of American Puritanism. God forgive him. God forgive the publishers. God forgive everybody who reads the book and forgive me who write about it. For American Puritanism is a sacred thing, as sacred as the gilt on the cathedral altar places, as hallowed as the bathroom in a bawdy house. And Dreiser has peeled off the gilt and ruthlessly thrust open the door. May he be cursed with the wrath of an avenging public conscience. May he be made to wither under the distinction of being a maniacal sensualist, a libidinous ruffian, a lascivious distiller of corrupting langours. Amen.

Against the gray-dirt background, the shallow-hued smears of his many contemporaries, Dreiser’s book stands forth like a red cry of truth. It is not the book of a man enraged with the narrowness of a country, sputtering against the insipidity of its composite ideals. Dreiser never descends to the punitive hectoring of a Robert Herrick. Nor does he join the plaintive assaults upon the pusillanimous conventions which characterize the “advanced” fiction of the country. He does not make his men and women vehicles for the antiquated day dream of brotherhood bosh. He does not prostitute his work in dramatizing the current quibbles, marketing asinine public convulsions in the literary capsules so commonly compounded by our quack “creators.” All these things he does not do and if the reading public of today will not reward him, the God of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Huysmanns, Shakespeare and Ambrose Bierce will.

What Dreiser does do is tell a straightforward story, tell it with all the painstaking genius of the old Flemish painters. And he uses for his background not the isolated strata of any single calling, but a country—your world and mine and our neighbor’s. Life is greater than any of its truths, sings Theodore Dreiser. There are many kinds of good, many kinds of standards and many kinds of virtue. There is the virtue of farmer Blue, the solid, masculine, clear and open virtue rooted in the laws of the land and the rigmarole of society; thriving on the long, brown roads, the ploughed fields and the homely beauties of existence. And there is the virtue of Eugene Witla, the aesthetic, vibrating pursuit of beauty rooted in the soul of the artist, thriving on the illusive lust of women, the intangible urge of inspiration; spitting in the face of laws unnatural to it and the fallacies that would be its fetters. Yes, says Dreiser, (I do not quote him), life is a wide field bearing on its bosom beautiful flowers that do not resemble each other and that require widely different care and nourishment. To think that such commonplaces should be distinctive notes in the art of a country! But they are. If you have read these things into novels before you have not read them into American novels. I do not recall a single hero in American fiction, who is not a Puritan, who does not suffer when he sins, whom the indulgence of his desire for women does not inspire to repentance and “reform” and success as the blue literary laws of America demand. For further particulars on this general subject see Mr. Mencken’s fulmination in last month’s Smart Set.

On this broad canvas of thought it is that Dreiser works. In his new novel he begins in a little town in Illinois. Out of the midst of a mediocre family living in the concentric provincialism of the middle west he launches his young hero Witla—a lad suffering from dreams and stomach trouble and a vague distinguishing unrest. His types are masterpieces. His style, shorn of pretentious reticence or rhetorical pomp, is the painstaking and poetical diction he revealed in Jennie Gerhardt. But he is not infallible. There are sentences, paragraphs which jar. Although his strokes in delineating character and situation are swift and certain, his language often seems lame, his words watery, his phrases trite. But these are as the flaws of a panoramic pen crowded at moments to a point of impatience and not the faults of a weak writer. The effect is untouched. His people breathe out of the pages. They are personalities. From beginning to end Dreiser reveals a psychology of character amazing in its range and detachment. Witla as a boy lives in Alexandria, Illinois. Dreiser traces the development of his soul and sex and struggle out of the blanketing bourgois of his birthplace. The young ’Gene answers the call of beauty, without knowing what it is that calls him. He comes to Chicago. He is a laundry wagon driver, a collector for an installment furniture house, a student of the old Art Institute, a worker in the art department of a newspaper. Dreiser traces him out of the half way stratas of Chicago to New York, to success, and then through a labyrinth of incidents all interesting and big. He follows him through one development after another until Witla, the painter, realizes himself. I cannot begin to tell what the book is about. It is partially a depiction of the struggle between an artist husband and a “good woman” who is his wife, partly the struggle between the flesh and the spirit of the same husband and the tale of their final adjustment. It is an Odyssey of a type of man in whom the future of the arts rest as they always have rested. In the 736 pages there are persons of every type. You will meet everyone you have known and many you have dreamed of knowing. Every shade of womanhood flashes between the covers. It is as a novel should be—complete. It tingles with the quick spasmodic life of the city, of the country, the factory, the field, the drawing room. And above all, it breathes the atmosphere of America’s art life, the lively, struggling workers of the studio.

Witla, however, remains Dreiser’s calm, masterful argument against the one-sided perversions of the Puritan. Witla is a genius. What are you going to do with him, you proselyting blue stocking? Such a detached study in perfidious polygamy is enough to damn the very printers who set the type for the book. Here is a man of strong ideals, great productive talent, an indispensable contributor to life, who naively considers setting up an establishment for his pretty model just after he has proposed matrimony to the woman he loves at the time with all the finest desires of his nature; a miserable fellow who ruins and ravishes without compunction every shapely creature who crosses his path. He is without even unconscious morality, innate morality. Woman is beauty when she is anything and to possess beauty is the motive force in his life. His eye possesses the beauty of the city’s filth and dirt, the beauty of landscape, his mind possesses the beauty of books and talk and other minds, and his body the beauty of passion wherever he encounters it. Logical, natural, primitive and entirely artistic. But immoral? God, yes. No one woman can satisfy a man unless he deliberately stunts himself, is the Dreiserian Gospel. A man needs blonde women, brunette women, short ones and tall ones, radical ladies and conservative creatures—that is, a man like Witla does. And is Witla a supreme type, a distinctive Sanine sort of fellow? Not a bit of it. Whether Dreiser thought he is, I don’t know. He doesn’t say. But he isn’t. He is man and not artist in his “sins.”

There is naturally more color to his escapades, to his “pursuit of beauty,” for he is the “genius” with an eye to shades and a soul for nuances not possessed by his more hum drum brothers. To him matrimony is naturally a pit, a degradation, a series of cages, for he is the eternal masculine. But how many men are there who have always been faithful to their wives? What? I do not know of a single one. In his high lighted type of Witla, Dreiser tells of this rudely, brutally and beautifully—with the indifference of a Juggernaut and the cunning of a magician.

Really, you of the firm-fireside-faith, what is there to be done? Here is the Dionysian dastard who dares proclaim that life is a decent, orderly routine and that life is also a wild, warm passionate thing; that it is also a flame in which there is only one color, the red, golden color of youth.

And the answer is—howl. A howl will go up, I swear it. It will start from the critics.

I can almost read their forthcoming reviews as I close my eyes.

“A sensually depraved and degenerate type.”

“Striking at the bed rock of public solidarity, of home happiness, of everything decent and worth while.”

And America’s reading public—“Horrible, filthy.”

Howl, you who have stultified your artists and buried them under the gingerbread morality of your own monotonous lives. Dreiser is the one novelist being published in America today who doesn’t listen to you, who describes you at your various bests, who wrings the pathos and joys out of your little worlds; who paints in with the brush of a universal art what you and I are doing in Alexandria and Chicago and New York and all the milk-station stops between.

I am not a disciple of the Dreiserian Gospel. I would like to argue with him the certain superiorities of monogamy for the artist. But he has limned a hero who is not a sugar-coated moralizer. He has ignored superbly the mob-begotten mandates of literary excellence. Whatever his faults of composition or construction, and there are not so many as his friends endeavor to make out there are, he has magnificently booted the reading public, the morally subsidized critics and the very publishers in the coarsest regions of their bodies—their souls.

And for these things I hail him as the greatest novelist in the country. I acclaim him as the only real, uncontaminated genius of these States and pray to God that my friend Sherwood Anderson will hurry up and get published so that there will be two of them.

The Scavenger.

Leather Lane

Three restless gas-jets

In Leather Lane;

A thousand faces,

Wandering in the night,

Too dull for pain.

God saw;

God quenched the light.

But God had not choked

The clamor of gaunt curses

That stalk in Leather Lane,

Uncloaked,

Blatant with strength of dour years.

God heard;

God stopped His ears.

Ho!

God had forgot His nose,

And in the stench that rose

From Leather Lane,

God died.

—Mitchell Dawson.

Etchings

Alexander S. Kaun

I. Gratitude

On the play-grounds. The pretty girl and I withdrew from the noisy festival to the desolate fountain. It was too hot to think, so I merely talked.

An old, ragged, grey-bearded, gibbous Jew, with a basket over his arm, was slowly approaching us.

The meaningless eyes of the pretty girl clouded.

“Peddlers are not allowed on the grounds. He must have sneaked in.”

The Jew stood at our side. He said nothing, but his timid eyes appealed.

It was too hot to think, but for a moment I thought that a waft of eternity breathed upon me from out the sad, timid eyes, and from out the folds of the soiled old coat, and from out the clotty grey beard of the descendant of Isaiah and the Maccabees.

“I shall buy some peaches, yes?”

The pretty girl twitched her little nose.

“But they are dusty.”

“Oh, no. See, they are covered.”

The sad, timid eyes smiled at me. I looked into the depth of those eyes-of-ages. A half frivolous notion passed through my mind: I raised the fruit, and pronounced the ancient Hebrew blessing:

“Barukh atah, Adonay, elohenu melekh haolam, bore pri haetz.” (Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, creator of the fruit of the tree.)

The sad eyes became faintly radiant and moist. A suggestion of a smile appeared around the hairy mouth. The lips mumbled something inaudible. A lean brown hand rubbed the glossy side of the coat, and tremblingly extended to me. I grasped it, embarrassed.

“Lange Johren magt Ihr hoben, lange Johren auf Euch!” (Long years may you have, long years unto you!)

I turned to the pretty girl. With her handkerchief she was diligently rubbing off a drop of juice from her white blouse.

It was too hot to think, so I resumed our playful talk.

II. Nocturne

It was night, and soft and blue and starry. A uniformed nurse emerged from the dark alley of the park, and heavily dropped on the bench where I sat. For some time she leaned backward, her eyes closed, her breast heaving, her mouth half open. Then she looked widely, straightened herself, sighed deeply, and casually glanced at me and at my box of paints.

“Are you an artist?”

“Yes. Obviously, you are a nurse?”

She nodded, and burst forth into a rapid talk, as if she had long been waiting for an opportunity to unburden herself.

“Just got off duty. See those lighted windows across the road? That is our hospital. Ah, I shan’t stand it much longer. Moans and groans, suffering, tears, madness—God! You know, it starts at twilight. As soon as the sun sets all the miseries get loose. Even the quiet patients become delirious and raise bedlam. And so till midnight. It will drive me insane. Give me a cigarette, will you? There is nobody around at this time.”

Her “shop talk” bored me. Silently I gave her a cigarette and a light, and watched her inhaling the smoke eagerly and intently. Her grey striped dress with the tight white apron outlined a light, slender body, a supple breast, and full strong arms. Her face was in the shadow, but my professional eyes noticed its lovely oval contours. The little white cap seemed toyishly small on the vast mass of disobedient hair. She flung away the cigarette, and turned to me:

“Thanks, stranger. Why don’t you say something? Ah, what a night! See the blue mist away there beneath the trees, and see that big oak—it’s like a tower. Gee, I am getting romantic. Ah, what a night!”

I was amused with her half bookish, half street-talk. Somehow she did not irritate me, as the rest of the people did, with her trivial remarks on things which I believed to belong exclusively to the realm of colors and music.

“Look!” She grasped my hand. “See the star falling? There, it dropped into the lagoon. Ah, I smell hyacinths, do you? Hey, if you are not going to say something, I’ll smash you!”

She snatched off my hat, threw it high up in the air, and, laughing loudly, ran away, dropping her cap on the grass. I picked it up, and pursued her. She was a swift runner, and we raced a long while across the wide lawn before I caught her. In the dim bluish light she stood at my side, a savage figure with stormy cascades of hair over her face and shoulders, with flashing eyes, open mouth, dilating nostrils. In my professional delight (I never lose my self-consciousness) I seized her by the waist and lifted her up above me. She waved her good arms and shrieked in joy, tossing her Medusa-head, arching her tense chest, quivering in ecstacy.

“Hey, there. Cut that out!”

A husky policeman on a motorcycle approached us. He dismounted, looked at us (I was still holding her in the air), and burst into a hoarse guffaw.

“Well, I’ll be.... Beat it now. It’s improper.”

I handed her the mussed white cap. She twisted it with her fingers, and her lips muttered somnolently:

“And at six thirty in the morning I must be on duty....”

III. Will to Power

At a crossing line on a Saturday night about 2 A. M. Tired men, women, children, families, couples, waiting for a street car. Some lean towards the wall, some sit on the sidewalk, on the garbage-box, on the curb. Dull silence. The June night rolls on indifferently.

Suddenly the calm is disturbed by violent screams and oaths. A woman is hurled out by invisible hands from the corner-hotel. She crosses the street towards the waiting crowd, staggers, waves her big handbag, and swears hideously.

No response. The ennui on the faces remains unstirred. The coarse solo of the prostitute, who ejaculates fantastically ugly verbs, nouns, adjectives, bespatters the velvet night.

A baggy figure in a battered derby rises from the sidewalk, and hesitatingly accosts the woman.

“You stop this noise....” Then threateningly: “Want to take a ride?”

Her foul flux interrupted, the woman thrusts her red face into the man’s, and hisses half coquettishly, half contemptuously:

“A ride? With you, sweetheart? Sure!”

He grabs her by the shoulder. His face grows pale.

“Come on, now. Move on, I tell you!”

The woman shrieks and struggles.

“Let go! Look what he is doing to me! Who are you? You are not a detective.... Let go!”

The crowd does not stir. Some one yawns desperately. A little boy whimpers, and clings to his dozing mother.

The man drags his shrieking victim. He pulls out a chain of keys, and swings it triumphantly. The woman screams and hits her assailant on the face with her heavy handbag. New figures appear from the adjoining streets. A voice is heard:

“Maybe he is not a detective.... Hey, where’s your star?”

The man’s pale face twitches convulsively. The woman feels encouraged, strikes him short, rapid blows, and shouts wildly:

“He is not a detective! Look what he is doing to me!”

A big fist plunges into the man’s face. He gasps, and falls. When he rises, a shower of fists meets him. Many of the erstwhile indifferent figures are now up, eager to lay a hand on the imposter. Like a toy, he falls and rises, looking astonished, in a trance.

The long-awaited car suddenly plunges into the imbroglio. Men, women, children, push and justle at the narrow entrance.

The man stands alone, hatless, wiping a bleeding face with his sleeve, muttering faintly:

“I am a detective.... I am.”

The night rolls on indifferently.

The soul of music is something more than the soul of humanity expressing itself in melody, and the life of music something more than an audible dramatization of human life.—Arthur Symons.

The Truth

Burt Harris

The truth, my friend? There is no truth. It is impossible for the human mind to attain the truth. You can tell the truth with reservations, with omissions. Perhaps you can speak the truth that is only part truth. Yes, that is often done by virtuous people and by clever people. But to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to place your soul naked before either God or man,—that, my friend, is impossible. I have listened to women lie. Sometimes it is only necessary to watch. And it is the same with a man.

What? A man will tell the truth before God? You are quite wrong. A man will lie to himself and he will lie to his God. I know. I listened to a man lie to God. I will tell you the story.

The man’s name was Henry Spencer. You perhaps remember it. He was a murderer. One of his victims was a tango teacher named Mrs. Allison Rexroat. When the body of Mrs. Rexroat was found behind a clump of bushes in a lonely spot the police somehow blundered upon a clew. In four days they traced the murder of the woman to Henry Spencer. They wove a net of evidence about him. Oh they are clever, sometimes, my friend. On the fifth day Henry Spencer sat in the police captain’s office and they sweated him. After five hours he confessed. Ordinarily this means nothing. I have seen criminals confess to crimes of which they were innocent. Sweating is an unintelligent process, but then criminals are unintelligent persons and for a stupid mind the whole affair becomes quite an ordeal. The police captain says, “You did.” The criminal replies, “I didn’t.” It is very simple, my friend, but very wearing; particularly when there are five policemen to say “You did,” and none but yourself to say “I didn’t.” But it happened this time that the policemen blundered upon a real confession. After five hours Henry Spencer jumped to his feet and shouted, “Yes, I did. I killed her.” He was led away. Two days later he repeated his confession and elaborated on it. He sketched the murder, described the events leading up to it.

The policemen, highly elated, rushed out and verified all he had said. They found the hammer he told them he had used where he said he had thrown it. They found the effects of the murdered woman where he said he had hidden them. Henry Spencer went to trial. A number of attorneys defending him pleaded insanity. Spencer upset their efforts by rising in the court room and informing the jury he was quite sane and that he had committed a number of murders in his life. Given permission by the court he informed them that his life had been an extremely illegal one. He named five women he had killed. The police, highly elated, rushed out and verified his statements. In concluding, the defendant again sought to impress them with the fact that he was quite sane and willing to pay the penalty for his crimes. In fact several times he cried out from his seat, “Hurry up and hang me.”

You will argue, my friend, that there was an instance where in the very depravity of his nature a man attained the naked truth. You are quite wrong. Henry Spencer killed the women he said he killed, but he failed of the truth. For three months he had sat in his cell figuring the thing out. He came to the conclusion that by telling truthfully of his crimes and pleading truthfully of his sanity he would create the impression that he was indeed a maniac. You see, it is quite simple. Lies are always simple. It is only the truth which is impossible to understand. Henry Spencer’s logic proved accurate. He convinced the jury that he was a maniac. But he had placed too much faith on the technical interpretation of the law. The jury sentenced him to hang, anyway. So did the judge.

The date was set and Henry Spencer waited in the jail of a little town in Illinois. It is the duty of a large number of people in the world to save souls from Hell. Do not think I speak sarcastically, my friend. There is nothing wrong in this, except, of course, its utter futility. For two months the Rev. Mr. Williams, his wife, and his son visited Henry Spencer daily in his cell. They taught him religion. The doomed man was an illiterate. He had been brought up in the streets. He spoke English vulgarly and he understood nothing. His mind was unformed and his ideas of any particular life to be were as vague as his ideas of the life that was.

So he became religious. This is quite a story in itself, his acquiring “faith.” They played hymns in his cell on an old melodeon. Each night the Williams family knelt with him and prayed. He found in the Scriptures and their promise something that stilled the cold terror of death. His nerves became quiet. In fact he became buoyant. You will say it is impossible for a man to acquire genuine faith under such circumstances. You are quite wrong, my friend. I will prove it to you soon.

On the day preceding his execution Henry Spencer exhibited the only bit of nervousness during his watch for death. He objected to the big clock that hung in the corridor outside his cell. He didn’t like the way it ticked. You know why. So they removed the clock. How kind people are to those whom they are about to destroy. They quite resemble the Gods in the matter.

I am coming now to the point of the story, so be patient, my friend. It was a sunny morning in early July. Inside a stockade they had erected a scaffold. During the night Henry Spencer sang hymns. The sheriff sat on the doorstep of his home adjoining the jail listening and looking at the moon and greasing a hempen rope with cold cream which he borrowed from his daughter. He was a religious man and the hymns made him sad.

At ten o’clock the death march started from Spencer’s cell. Now there were thirty-eight steps leading to the top of the scaffold which rose high above the stockade top. I know this because a young man named Smith and I walked up the steps the midnight before and counted them. After counting them I made a wager with the young man that Spencer would never reach the top unsupported. So I was exceedingly interested when the death march entered the stockade. A number of persons were privileged to march in the line, and the first to appear was Spencer. He was dressed as if he were hurrying to a tennis game—white trousers, white shoes, a soft white collar, and a white shirt. On the pocket of his shirt he had pinned a red carnation. He walked with a light, springy step. Behind him trailed the Rev. Mr. Williams and the others.

Henry Spencer wore a good-natured smile on his face. When he reached the bottom step of the scaffold I held my breath. I watched him skip nimbly up the stairs, never missing a step, never tripping or hesitating. Under more virtuous circumstances the thing would have passed for heroism. At any rate I lost the wager.

Spencer stood on the scaffold, the noose hanging over his shoulder. The smile had not left his face. Several hundred necks were craned towards him. I would have felt chilled to see so many necks at such a time had I been he. The sheriff and his assistant began dressing him in a white robe that covered him from the neck down.

He commenced talking at once.

“My friends,” he said, extending his arm. They strapped it to his side as he did so but he continued unflustered. “I am glad of the opportunity this gives me of telling you that for the first time in my life I am happy. I have found a mother and a God and a friend while I have been in jail waiting for death. Although it is going to cost me my life I am glad I am here to tell you this. I have repented for my sins. I have made my peace with my God and my fellow men. And I am happy, my friends, happy. I have found a mother who has shown me the way to peace and salvation. I am grateful to Him for the gladness he has put in my heart. Oh, my friends—”

He raised his head to the sky. Standing against the sun in his white robe, his face transfigured with a wonderful smile, he looked like some Crusader giving himself into the arms of the Virgin. Above him stretched the green leafy branch of a tree that rustled faintly in the breeze. A little bird sat on a twig and chirped. And still above stretched the pure blue sky with its white fleece clouds. Henry Spencer looked at it all—life, the little bird, the sky, the green leaves—and smiled; smiled as I have never seen a man smile before.

They strapped his ankles and then the sheriff adjusted the rope around his neck with great care. His political future was dependent on his task. Spencer resumed talking.

He recited two long psalms with never a wrong word, and I who had listened to him five months ago sat astounded. His voice, his accent, everything about him had changed. A theologian could have rendered the psalms no more accurately. Then he looked at the sky again. I felt that before his eyes the clouds rolled away and God revealed himself, a gigantic figure seated on a golden throne. I felt that he saw the cherubs and the angels he had read of in the scriptures, perceived the jewelled streets and the harpists and Christ waiting with outstretched arms and forgiveness.

“Yes, my friends,” he went on, “I am not afraid, for I have given myself to Christ, pure in spirit, strong in faith.” He quoted from the Bible. “See, I smile at it all, for believe me, O Lord, I am happy.” The sheriff had lifted the white hood to the man’s head and was beginning to adjust it. The smile never left his face, the light that blazed from his eyes never dimmed. “I am going to heaven,” he said as they settled the hood on his head, “and I want to say only one more thing before I go. My friends, as I stand here, I tell you I am innocent of the murder of Mrs. Allison Rexroat.”

And they hanged him.

The truth? The human ego is too weak for truth. What do you say, my friend?

We carry faithfully what we are given, on hard shoulders, over rough mountains! And when perspiring, we are told: “Yea, life is hard to bear!” But man himself only is hard to bear! The reason is that he carrieth too many strange things on his shoulders. Like the camel he kneeleth down and alloweth the heavy load to be put on his back.—Nietzsche.