CHAPTER XI.
Filled with these gloomy realities he walked down a roughly bright street where the underworld tiptoed furtively between the ranks of semi-respectable working-people—a street of gaping, sleekly sinister saloons, cabarets, small, thickly tawdry shops, and cheap, coffin-like hotels and apartment houses. The hour was early—nine p.m.—and he walked slowly, engaged in his favorite pastime of watching the shrouded haste of crowds. As he passed a moving-picture theater, dotted with greasy electric lights and plastered with inanely gaudy posters, he felt a light hand on his shoulder. He turned and saw Lucy standing before him. The sight gave him a friendly shock, for on this evening he was tired of clever hypocrisies and longed for anything that would be crude and unassuming.
“Lucy, have you fallen down from some sky?” he asked.
“No, I just came out of the theater here an’ saw you walkin’ by. Gee, but I’m glad I did! It’s been a year now since we’ve seen each other, hasn’t it? An’ I never, never thought I’d meet you again.”
“Well, what has happened to you, Luce?” he asked as they walked down the street together.
“I’m married to Fred now. I didn’t see anything else to do after you left, and all of my folks just pushed me into it. ’Nen besides I was tired of workin’ in that darn store. Tired.”
“Are you less tired now? Happy?”
“Mm, Fred’s an awful nice man in his way an’ I s’pose I oughta be happy. He really loves me, Fred does, an’ he don’t seem to lose his temper the way some men do. ’Course, he’s a little stingy with money but then I s’pose he’s tryin’ to look out for the future.”
“Do you love him now, Luce?”
Her head drooped a little and she was silent for a time.
“I guess it’s terrible of me not to love him, after all he’s done for me, but I just don’t. I always keep rememberin’ all of your funny ways an’ all the time we was together an’ I feel ashamed of it too ’cause it’s kinda like not bein’ true to Fred, but I can’t help it. There’s been times when I’ve managed to forget about you but they don’t last long enough.”
He tried to make himself feel like a helpless knave as he listened to this simple child of earth who longed for the palely inexplicable god before whom she had once grovelled in rhythmic speechlessness. He had taken all of her eager silences, pardoned by the damp understanding of flesh, and bestowed upon her in return nothing save the blurred vision of thoughts and emotions which it would have been useless for her to understand, and the tantalizing fantasy of his embraces. If he had stayed with her he would have mutilated, kicked, and evaded every longing and purpose of his life while she would have revelled in happiness. Walking down this street were thousands of people, trying to embalm a softly sensual hour with the fluids and devices of bravely stupid lies, and inventing words—“honor,” “respectability”—to conceal the grotesquely snickering effect of their lives. Life was, indeed, an insipid mountebank!
“Luce, I ought to feel like a selfish dog, for if I did, then at least I could give you a belated shoulder to cry upon,” he said. “We’re different persons, that doesn’t need to be said, but still I’m sorry at times that we parted. I need your stupidity.”
“Do you still care for me, Carl?”
“There are times when I want you again. You brought me a delicate dumbness which I could change into any kind of speech, with my fingers and words. Your simplicity doesn’t swagger, or point admiringly to itself, and I like that. Just now I am surrounded by people who are not different from you except that they have memorized three or four thousand words more, and use them with a moderate degree of cunning. Your silences are much better.”
“I’m not always silent ’cause I don’t understand what you say. Sometimes I do understand, but I keep quiet ’cause I don’t know how to tell you about it.”
They turned down a side-street and he looked questioningly at her.
“Aren’t you afraid that Fred may see us together?” he asked.
“I forgot to tell you. He left this afternoon for Pittsburg, to see his mother, an’ he’ll be gone for two weeks. I’m all alone now.”
That conversing silence, in which a suggestion is so strongly felt that it need not be heard, was released from both of them and remained until they reached the apartment building in which she lived, and stood in the dark hallway.
“I don’t want to leave you now”—her whisper was frightened but stubbornly tender. “I don’t want to. For all I know I may never see you again and if I don’t I’ve got to have somethin’ that I can hold on to. Somethin’ that’s not as foolish as just talkin’ words.... I’m a dreadful girl, I s’pose. I must be very wicked. I must be.... But I don’t care. Please don’t go away.”
They stood in the hallway like two dizzy, burdened children feeling the advancing shadow of an irresistible action and yet waiting for the exact moment when all deliberate words would vanish. Until their minds were quite free of words their limbs could not move. Suddenly they both mounted the stairway, hand in hand, as though a kindly demon had decided to make playthings of their legs.
When Carl left the apartment building early on the following morning and hurried to the suburban cigar-store where he now worked half of the day as a clerk, his old self-disgust was absent and a cleanly wild lightness took his limbs, as if he had slept upon the plain sturdiness of a hillside and was pacing away with the borrowed vigor.
“The only time that I dislike earth is when it is dressed in urgent mud, adulterated perfumes, strained lies, and repentant fears,” he told himself as he walked through the bustling shallowness of each city street.
Before leaving Lucy he had promised to return on the following night, and when she had wept and begged him “not to think that she was a terribly bad girl,” he had laughed softly and dropped his lips upon her tears.
“You have been yourself, Luce, and since the world is always conspiring against such an arbitrary occurrence, you can give yourself a bewildered congratulation,” he told her, gayly.
Without understanding his words she had felt the presence of defiant sounds which had cheered her. During the next two weeks, as he remained with her each night, he reflected upon the possible melodrama that lurked just outside of his visits.
“If her husband suddenly returns and finds me with her he’ll want to kill me,” he said to himself once, as though he welcomed the idea. “He’ll feel that only my death could heal his injured vanity—vermilion medicine!—but, of course, instead of admitting that to himself he’ll find an accommodating phrase to hide the actual motive, such as ‘avenging his honor,’ ‘killing a treacherous hound,’ ‘defending the family,’ etc. The newspapers are full of such charming episodes, well fortified by words, for without words to obliterate his motives man would perish in a day. Melodrama is the only real sincerity that life holds—the one surprising directness in a world of false and prearranged contortions. Perhaps I could ravish my fears and welcome it. I don’t know, and no one can until it actually arrives.”
But the two weeks died without the blundering interruption of drama, and Lucy and Carl parted on the last morning with a chuckling stoicism—tears and the syllables of laughter are always similar—the madcap protest of a last kiss—lips and tongues intent upon a future compensation—and a final flitting of hands. They had slapped in the face a violent shadow known as life and now it would take a fancifully piercing revenge. They had attained a quality known as bravery—a quality that is only fear rising to a moment and effectively sneering at itself.