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 stoleOver your antique face—The warning of a soulRising with tireless grace.Rising above your cartOf apples, figs, and plums,And with its swelling artDeriding the city’s drums.
A purplish pallor stoleOver your antique face—The warning of a soulRising with tireless grace.Rising above your cartOf apples, figs, and plums,And with its swelling artDeriding the city’s drums.
A purplish pallor stoleOver your antique face—The warning of a soulRising with tireless grace.Rising above your cartOf apples, figs, and plums,And with its swelling artDeriding the city’s drums.
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.