Читать книгу Blackguard - Maxwell Bodenheim - Страница 6

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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.