Читать книгу Blackguard - Maxwell Bodenheim - Страница 5

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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.