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.