CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER VIII.

During the next two weeks Carl sat in his drably dark room, slowly copying his poems with a stiff, perfect handwriting and mailing them to magazines and newspapers, but rejection-slips, fresh from the printer, began to reach him with each return mail. Many of his uncertain, mystical poems were equal to the quality of verse maintained by certain American publications, but editors scarcely ever trouble themselves to read verse that is copied in pen and ink and bears the spirals of deceptively boyish handwriting. Under the blow of each returned poem Carl receded inch by inch to his old cell of faltering insignificance. He went back to the tame routines of physical labor, finding work as a plumber’s assistant, and still consoled himself by creeping, like a soiled and weeping child, to Lucy’s blind and half-motherly worship.

One evening, after he had stepped into the brightly dismal sitting-room of Lucy’s home, he noticed an uneasy politeness in the greeting of her parents—the usual well-smeared cordiality was absent. At first he felt that he might have made a mistake, but one glance at the nervous distress upon Lucy’s transparent little face indicated that some change had taken place in her family’s regard for him. Lucy was never successful in her efforts at evasion, and each one of the pitifully comical masks that she wore merely snugly revealed the outline of the emotion which they were attempting to conceal. With a strained gaiety she suggested a walk and after they had reached the street he questioned her.

“Well, what’s the trouble, Luce? The graceful, January note in your parent’s voices was not quite expected. Tell me what it’s all about.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, nothing, Carl dear.”

“I’m quite sure that it’s nothing in reality, since your parents are almost incapable of thought, but at any rate, you might explain the empty gesture to me.”

“Carl, you’re talking so funny again. I adore you when you say things that I can’t understand. But, oh Carl, I’ve forgotten, I mustn’t say that to you any more. I mustn’t. You don’t know what’s happened.”

“No, I don’t. What is it?”

“Why, my father says that he’s convinced by now that your intentions to me aren’t serious an’ he says that he doesn’t want me to go with you any more. He says that you’re only triflin’ with my affections else you’d have asked me to marry you long ago, an’ my mother says I shouldn’t go with you ’cause you don’t seem to have any ambition to rise in the world an’ ’cause you haven’t enough money to support a wife.... Gee, if you knew the jawin’ they’ve been givin’ me for the last two nights!”

“Yes, but why has all this come so suddenly?” asked Carl.

“I don’t want to tell you, Carl.”

“You might as well, Luce. I can see part of it on your face now, because you always talk best when you’re silent. Tell me.”

“Well, you know my second cousin Fred has always been runnin’ after me, only I’ve always been cool to him because I don’t love him, of course, but a couple of nights ago he came to my father an’ said that he wanted to marry me an’ that I wouldn’t have him. An’ ever since then they’ve all been on top of me! He’s got a store on the north side, a gents’ furnishing store, an’ he makes piles of money, an’ all my family are just crazy for me to marry him. They say I’m just wastin’ my time with you an’ they’ve forbidden me to see you after tonight.”

Carl felt the incongruous embrace of amusement and compassion as he listened to her simple, broken, troubled words. This thinly yearning, stifled girl who had folded him in the arms of her puzzled adoration, was life really on the verge of wounding the diminutive misty mendicant that was her heart? He felt helpless, and a little guilty because he was not as troubled as he should have been.

“Do you want to give me up?” he asked.

“Carl, you know I don’t! You know it. But, Carl, you wouldn’t ever marry me, would you?”

“No, I’m not the kind of a person that you ought to marry, Luce.”

She was silent for a time and he watched her with a pitying question. Had he been unfair to this poignantly cringing child? Yes, but unfairness was inevitable when people from those different planets contained within an earth yield to a surface emotional attraction.

“Carl, I’ve always known that we’d hafta part sometime,” she said, “only I tried to make believe that I didn’t know it. But I did. We’re too different from each other, Carl, an’ you know so much more than I do an’ you’re so much better than I am. I wanted to hold on to you ’cause I wanted to make you happy, but all the time I knew that we wasn’t meant for each other. O I knew it so well!”

“I’m not in any way better than you are,” said Carl. “It’s just that we each want different things from the world. You want to settle down in a home, and polish your kettles, and sing to your children, and blithely wait for your tired husband every night, while I want to write foolish words on slips of paper and escape from the world around me.”

“But, Carl, it’ll be so hard for me to leave you,” she said, in the mournful, dazed voice of one who turns away from a stone wall of whose existence he is not quite certain.

A tumult of frail inquiries found the corners of her face and lips. Her breasts heaving beneath the blue muslin waist suggested the movements of loosely despairing hands. She sat with Carl on the grass of a park and wept in a barely audible manner as though she were intent upon giving firmer outlines to a blurred and elusive grief. Carl felt a softly potent disgust with himself and life. Human beings—what did they ever bring each other except pain cunningly disguised or reaching for a phantom ecstasy? Now he would be alone again; the slender thread binding him to animated life would snap; while this child, who held a cloud where a brain should have resided, would hide her glimpse of a grotesquely forbidden heaven and plod back to the soothing subterfuges of her world. Flitting lies seducing a black void into an attitude of false friendship. A stumbling urge, mistaking its own drops of perspiring ardor for permanent, actual jewels.

As they stood upon the porch of her home she looked at the darkened windows and then clutched the lapels of his coat.

“They’re all in bed now,” she whispered. “Carl, I’ve got to have you once more before you go. I’ve got to. Maybe I’m a bad girl, maybe, I don’t know, but I want to hold you again.”

“This will be the least thing that I can give you,” said Carl inaudibly as they sat upon the hammock. With great care he tried to form within himself the intensity of a despairing father, drawing the swift incense of motion into a farewell to his child, in the hope that she might be idiotic enough to preserve it afterwards as a tangible comfort.

He closed his eyes as he kissed her, a little afraid to look into her face.

Back to IndexNext