CHAPTER XII.
Carl returned to the minor, suavely gesturing groups of hypocrites in the city in which he lived, and in going back to this “art and literary world” he had the feeling of one who had deserted a strong valley of desire to enter a stilted room filled with imitation orchids, valiantly empty words, and malice dressed in clumsy, velvet costumes. This reaction was still dominating him as he sat, one afternoon, in the office of a magazine called “Art and Life,” perched upon a window-sill and looking down at the black and dwarfed confusion of a street.
This office was a gathering place for several young writers, each of whom fondled his pet rebellion against conservative standards, and they clustered around the anxiously seraphic face of Martha Apperson, the young editor, and seriously fought for the treason of her smiles. She was a tall, sturdily slender woman with a blithely symmetrical swerve to her body, and the natural pinkness of her face parted into the curves of a lightly distressed and virginal doll. Her blue-gray eyes were looking at life with a startled incredulity—the gaze of one who has been tempted to regard a sometimes merry, but more often vaguely sorrowful picture-puzzle. Life to her was a rapidly taunting mixture of glints, hints, undertones, surface blooms, fleeting tints, portentous shadows with little shape to them, broken images, and misty heights, and she was forever trying to lure them all into a cohesive whole by striding from one philosophy and creed to another, adding another stride every three or four months. At such times she would appear at her office and enthusiastically assure her audience that she had finally accomplished the almost obscene miracle of penetrating the depths of human existence. She had started her magazine as a strident protest against “the people who live conventionally, steeped in a vicious comfort that binds their imaginations and ruins their legs and arms,” and its pages made an awkwardly weird combination of sophomoric revolts, longings for “beauty and splendor”—those easily bought thrones for the importance of youth—and enraged yelps against traditions and conventions, with here and there a more satirically detached note from Carl and two other men. Carl knew that he wanted her body because it was the only mystery that she seemed to possess and because he wondered whether it might not be able to make her thoughts less obvious. Her mind was a stumbling jest to him and her jerkily volatile pretences of emotion failed to cleave him.
He began to turn his eyes impatiently toward the office door. Martha had left him in charge, promising to return in an hour, but he knew that her hours were frequently afternoons as she cavorted around the city, throwing out miniature whirlwinds of appeals for money and attention. In a corner of the office stood a huge photograph of her latest god—a middle-aged, hawk-faced lecturer from England—that fertile land from whence all lecturers flow—a man who had recently startled the city by speaking on Oscar Wilde, dressed in a black robe and standing in a chamber dimly disgraced by candles, incense, and muslin poppies. The theatrically savage features of this man rested beneath a framed letter from a prominent writer—one of those abortions in which the great man tells a small magazine that he earnestly hopes that it will amount to something and believes that it can accomplish a great purpose if it pursues the ideals which have illuminated his work. Carl’s eyes sought this framed joke for the hundredth time, since his mood needed such artificial humor to make it less aware of itself, and at this moment Martha came with the rapid gait of one who is returning to vast and uncompleted tasks, although her day’s labors were at an end. This was not a pose but merely a bouncing overabundance of energy. With her was Helen Wilber, a young disciple who scarcely ever left her side. Helen had fled from a wealthy family in another city and traded her debutante’s excuse for the more fanciful robe of an ecstatic pilgrim starting to ascend from the base of veiled mountains of expression. She darted about on errands and interviews and felt the humble fervors of a novice—a tall, heavy girl with a long, soberly undeveloped face and abruptly turned features that were garlanded with freckles. She had made a fine art of her determination to persuade herself that she was masculine, giving it the intense paraphernalia of stolen words and gestures, but beneath her dubiously mannish attire and desperately swinging limbs the desires of an average woman were feebly questioning the validity of her days. She greeted Carl with her usual ringing assumption of boyishness.
“Hello, old top! Been waiting long?”
“Not as long as I expected to wait, considering Martha’s superb indifference to the impudence of time. Well, Martha, how have you been insulting actualities—with your usual crescendoes of insanity?”
Martha reached for the device of quickly sliding the tip of her tongue over her upper lip, a movement that always gave its opiate to her embarrassment or dismay, and then smiled with a softly tragic aloofness.
“Oh, people weary me so!” she said. “They’re so impossible most of the time and so sublimely unaware of that fact! I’ve just come from seeing an elderly woman who said that she might be interested in helping us. She was fat and expensively gowned and she wanted to know whether we wouldn’t print a story about the historical old families of this city and how they had founded a great, commercial and romantic fabric. I told her that we were concerned with the restless and flaming present, with the artists and thinkers of our own time, and not with respectable tradespeople of the past. Of course I put it as nicely as I could but she flew into a temper and said I was insulting the people who had built up a great and mighty city.... O people are so impossible!”
Carl envied the excited flow of her words and wished that he could also feverishly felicitate his emptiness at that particular moment.
“I felt like telling her that men who’ve made money and put up ugly buildings aren’t necessarily important enough to talk about,” said Helen, with a hollow seriousness, “but of course I didn’t for fear of hurting Mart’s chances.”
“I get so tired of wasting words on people who lead monotonous lives and can’t see the variety and beauty within life,” said Martha. “When you talk to them they treat you as though you were a little, misbehaving girl who would soon be spanked and put to bed. ‘O you’ll soon get over all of this artistic nonsense,’ they say.”
“Ah, they can’t see that a defiance like yours, Mart, is a fire that only grows stronger when someone tries to put it out,” said Helen with a spontaneously rhetorical worship.
Carl grinned at the dramatic sincerity with which these two women lunged at colossal targets.
“What’s all of this endless stuff about beauty?” he asked. “Beauty, beauty, I’m tired of the label. No specific description but just a nice, sonorous word. You might exalt your loves and punish your aversions with a little more clarity.”
“O you can’t diagram it as though it were a problem in mathematics!” cried Martha. “It’s too big and mysterious for that. You simply know it when you see it. It quickens your breath and drops like music upon your soul. It’s the thing that makes you know that you have a soul—the radiant weariness that springs from everything that is strong, and lonely, and delicate, and elusive, and tortured.”
“The adjectives are stirring and the fact that they happen to be meaningless is of little importance,” said Carl. “I like the way in which you make love to your emotions.”
Martha gave a grimace of exasperation.
“You’re the most insincere man I know,” she said. “Some day I’ll fall in love with a man who can be sincerely brilliant and beautiful and who doesn’t put his words together carefully, as though they were unimportant toys.”
“Such a fate may be exactly what you deserve,” said Carl, still grinning.
“Here we’ve been tramping around all day, seeing stupid people, and you waste Mart’s time with your old arguments about beauty and words,” said Helen with a jocose disgust. “I’m getting famished. Let’s go home.”
“I forgot to tell you, Carl—I’m having a party at the apartment this evening,” said Martha. “That strange, interesting Russian you met yesterday is coming—Alfred Kone. And Jarvin who runs the literary page on the Dispatch. You’ll come with us now, won’t you?”
“Yes, I’m interested in Kone. He carries a certain revolving electricity around with him. His words and gestures are abruptly flashing like showers of sparks. I’m almost tempted to find out where the sparks come from.”
“He’s a natural pagan,” said Martha with an admiring sigh. “Don’t you love that European air about him! It’s something that you wouldn’t like if you could put your finger on it—something elusive and graceful, and sophisticated.”
“Is it possible that you mean that Kone is intricately redundant?” said Carl, carelessly.
“Carl, you always talk in such a careful, unearthly way,” said Helen, with a combat of irritation and wonder in her voice.
“With most people talk is a weak, thin wine,” said Carl. “They drink endless cups of it and at last they become mildly intoxicated. I prefer to achieve drunkenness with less effort.”
The incongruous love-song of the conversation continued as they departed for the Apperson apartment. Carl became morbidly jovial as though striving to goad himself into a mood, but underneath his words he was sad as he side-stepped Helen’s heavy lunges. “I have never actually had youth—that glistening mixture of blunders, sighs, cruel laughters, and a pleasant sadness that does not cut too deeply,” he said to himself as he listened to the obviously proud youth of the two women.