CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIII.

Kone had already arrived at the apartment and was waiting on the front porch. His heavy body, of medium height, held the arrogant bulge of muscles beneath his light grey suit and his pale brown face cradled a wraith of bitter alertness—a sneer attempting to break through the concealing flesh. He had a short flattened nose, thick lips, and the eyes of a forced and sprightly demon, and the dark abundance of his eyebrows receded into a low forehead, which in turn ended in a mass of black hair brushed backward. He had come to America some six years before this late Autumn evening; had first worked as a porter in a department store; had mastered English with a miraculous speed; and was now studying at a neighboring university and earning a living by teaching Russian to classes of children. In place of that violently disguised boredom commonly known as a heart he seemed to have an over-perfect dynamo that made him a mechanical wild-man—there was a sharp, strained persistency in all of his movements and the fact that he never deigned to falter in his words and gestures gave him an aspect of well-maintained artificiality. He threw his vivid grin to Carl.

“Hah, poet who seems to sleep but is always awake—greetings,” he called out, in the crisply dramatic way in which he usually spoke. “‘Demons lurk in your dimples’—you should have written that line about yourself.”

“Portraits are merely pretexts—secret portraits of oneself tortuously extracted from the blankness of other people,” said Carl.

“You would like to believe that. The involved egoism of youth!”

“It might be proving your case to answer you,” said Carl, laughing.

Kone was one of the few men who could make him laugh, since he had the odd habit of laughing only in praise and scarcely ever in derision—a custom born in the loneliness of his former years. Kone greeted Martha, who came in later, with words in which an adroitly raised respect and daring sensuality were carefully mixed, but, although her surface was flattered by his obeisance, his attentions failed to penetrate her radiant self-immersion. That would have been a feat worthy of century-old preservation. She listened, like a convinced and mysterious referee, while Kone and Carl indulged in the precise uselessness of argument—a discussion on whether Dostoevsky was an insane mystic, drunk with the details of reality, or an emotional search-light stopping at the edge of the world. The talk led to a question of the exact value of originality.

“So, you are looking for originality,” said Kone with a metallic mockery in his voice. “A man may stand on his head without in any way disturbing the universe. Has it not occurred to you that life is only a series of reiterations beneath the transparent gowns of egoism?”

“I prefer the gowns when they are a little less transparent. I might also have to know why a man was standing on his head before I could make any conjecture concerning the agitation of the universe”—an amused respect was in Carl’s voice. He liked the stilted lunges of Kone.

Helen appeared in the doorway.

“Put your daggers aside for a while and come to dinner,” she said, with the most benign of tolerances.

After the meal Arthur Jarvin, the critic, arrived with a woman named Edith Colson. Jarvin was almost tall—one of many “almosts” composing his entirety—and the plump old rose oval of his face showed its immense self-satisfaction beneath a fluffy mat of dark brown hair. He wore spectacles and his features bore the petulant satisfaction of one who has eaten too much for breakfast and has not quite decided whether to regret that fact or not. Since he held a contempt for the mad limitations of time he always fondly lengthened the utterance of his many “howevers” and “notwithstandings.” His friend, Edith Colson, was a tall, slender woman who freed a satirical vivacity with each of her words, thus making one regret the fact that she had nothing to say. One felt that to herself she was intrenched upon modest but well-guarded hill-tops of emotion; that, being thinly perverse, she had purchased her castles in Norway and scorned the more treacherous animations of a warmer climate. Her icy effervescences—whirls of powdered snows—sometimes subsided to a softer note which told you that the dab of warmth left within her was reserved for a select two or three beings, and that her conversation was an elaborate form of repentance. Outwardly she offered the effect of a carefully ornamented self-protection. The greenish brown length of her face accepted the problems of a long straight nose, loosely thin lips, and large black eyes, and was topped by a disciplined wealth of brownish black hair.

They sat in a circle on the porch and the conversation skipped with too much ease between recent books, plays, and local celebrities among writers and artists. Jarvin, full of the books that had come to him for reviewing purposes, compared and dissected them with the air of a professor who boredly but genially lectures to his special class. “This book was passable: of course it couldn’t come up to so-and-so’s book. This other one—well, not quite as good as his last novel. A little too much of one style, you know. That new Frenchman? Yes, they’re raising quite a fuss over him. Grim, cruel stuff, but well done. Those books lose a lot in the translations, though. That new poet? Mm, he’s lyrical enough but he just misses inspiration. The new crop will have to go a long way before they can approach Shelley or Wordsworth. Have you seen the new Shaw play at the Olympic? After all, Shaw is one of the few men who can make you laugh without being vulgar or obvious,” etc.

Carl sat in silence and rearranged, in his head, the difficult line of a new poem, and to his immersion the conversation had become a slightly irritating and well-memorized murmur. Endlessly he muttered to himself: “your face is stencilled with a pensiveness ... pensiveness ... but I need another adjective.”

Kone ruffled the dulcet informations of the others now and then with a polite but ironical jest that was never too obviously at their expense; Martha preserved her eagerly listening silence; and Helen sat like a dazed woman at a verbal banquet, scarcely daring to touch the glittering food in front of her. Finally Jarvin found Carl’s direction with a question that jerked him back to the gathering although the exact words eluded him.

“What were you saying? I haven’t been listening,” said Carl.

“That’s an insulting confession”—Edith Colson’s voice snapped like a succession of breaking wires. “Aren’t you interested in books?”

“Well, not in the broad and detailed way in which they seem to interest the rest of you,” said Carl, with the sleepily candid smile which usually made another person long to investigate the resiliency of his throat. “Once every five months I read one that should be spoken of with great vehemence and then gradually forgotten, but that’s a rare occurrence.”

“O come, that’s an easy, superior attitude,” said Jarvin. “Come down to the valley and join us, Mr. Poet!”

“All right, I’m down. I’ve passed your hills of judicial comment and reached the moonlight on the street pavement outside. It suggests a contest. Suppose we all make up a line describing the moonlight on the street—the moonlight that falls like a quiet silver derision on all philosophies—and we’ll see which of us is best acquainted with the penitent promise of words. I’ll begin. ‘The moonlight repressed the grey street, like a phantom virtue.’ Only original lines—nothing from books.”

“Here I am in the midst of a talk on Bergson, and this young poet asks me to make up some pretty lines about the moon,” said Jarvin, in a voice of poised scorn. “I read enough about the moon in the flood of mushy poetry that pours into my office.”

“You might try to describe it yourself,” said Carl. “In that way you could provide an excellent antidote for your disgust. It is, I assure you, an important task to rescue the moon from the rape of trite words.”

“No, I’ll leave that to minor poets,” said Jarvin.

Carl gave him the malicious grin of one who is enjoying a sham battle.

“If the moon doesn’t satisfy you, Mr. Jarvin, let’s try that whispering prison of trees just outside of this window, or the people who place their unsearching feet upon streets every day. Anything except voluble shop-talk about the latest mediocrities with now and then a philosopher or scientist thrown in for purposes of repentance and caution.”

“Well, our young iconoclast even scorns philosophy,” said Jarvin. “Perhaps it speaks with too much thought and authority to suit your fancy. It’s much easier to let your emotions juggle words.”

“Philosophy is a bottle-faced dwarf drowning with imposing howls in an ocean that does not see him,” said Carl, with a languid lack of interest. “But philosophy should be read, if only with a careful indifference.”

Jarvin threw another rock, with haste, and Carl gave him another epigram. Kone, always a restive audience, interposed.

“The anarchist, Pearlman, has just come to town,” he said. “Perhaps all of you know that he served twenty years in prison for attempting to kill a millionaire. A cruel penance!”

“I become rather tired of these anarchists who are forever trying and plotting to blow up the city-hall,” said Edith. “They’re neither artists nor dull, useful citizens and they serve no purpose that I can see. If they imagine that they can change the present system of things by shrieking and murdering people they ought to be sent to a school for the feeble-minded.”

“I’m not so sure that I’d want to see things radically changed,” said Jarvin. “Of course I know that there’s a great deal of graft and injustice everywhere but I’m not sure that I’d care to live in a Utopia—wickedness and cruelty are far more interesting.”

“The trouble with these anarchists and socialists is that they miss all the beauty in life,” said Martha. “If you show them a painting or a poem they think that you’re trying to waste their time, unless it contains a social message.”

“I think that it’s cruel and useless to try to take another man’s life,” said Helen, earnestly. “I hate this fellow, Pearlman!”

Kone listened to this stagnant symposium of viewpoints, with a patient sneer.

“In Russia we are more accustomed to murder,” he said. “We have not attained the—what shall I say?—the genial and practical compromises of your American democracy. In our country, alas, oppression takes off its mask and swings a red sword! If you will realize that death does not hold for us the mysterious terror that it holds for you it may help you to understand Pearlman. He came to this country—a young Russian—sentimental, idealistic, crowded with naive longings for martyrdom. He wanted to die for the people—that grand, massive, mysterious, and yet near and real people! When he tried to kill a millionaire, who was stubbornly refusing to arbitrate with his striking men, Pearlman was choked with a poem of liberation that could not be denied. Then the icy reality of his next twenty years—condemned by both society and the strikers whom he had tried to help, surrounded by the rigid leer of iron bars; and squeezed into a niche of futility.... This crucified Russian does not need your sarcasm, my friends.”

The conversation staggered and scampered for another hour, with everyone save Carl animatedly endeavoring to conceal the fact that he was in no way interested in anyone’s opinions except his own, and at last the party packed away its comedies, irritations, and convictions, and arose from the chairs. There were farewells, with just the right compound of gaiety and caution, and the gathering separated.

Carl and Alfred Kone went to the latter’s room in a dormitory at the university and sat until an early hour of the morning, arguing with an intensity that made their tobacco smoke seem a cloud of gunpowder. Kone was that tense incongruity—an ironical sentimentalist. Within him, emotion cajoled thought to a softer brutality and thought intruded its staccato, exploring note upon the limpid abandon of emotion. A deliberate friendship rose between these men, like a translucent wall through which men can see each other without touching, for each one knew that the other held a baffling insincerity of imagination and was afraid that he might be deftly ridiculed if he failed to measure his words. Kone admired the nimble restlessness of Carl, a quality which he was compelled mechanically to imitate, while Carl liked the explosive way in which Kone evaded himself. Kone was now almost thirty years old but his machine-like capering made him seem much younger and he bounded through life like a sophisticated street-urchin, swindling himself with fiercely endurable makeshifts in place of dead dreams. His tragedy rested in the fact that he was not a creator and the knowledge of this was to him a secret poison from which he had to escape with many a gale of make-believe laughter.

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