CHAPTER XIV.
One afternoon, four months after the Apperson party, Carl, Kone, and Jenesco, a Roumanian painter, sat in the latter’s little blending of studio and bedroom and looked at a landscape which he had just finished. Jenesco’s eyes lazily flirted with triumph and his small, ruddy face displayed the expression of a child throwing a few last, unnecessary grains upon a sand-hill.
“Boys, what do you think of it?” he asked in a tone of confident fatherhood.
Kone and Carl scanned the painting. It was a mother-goose transfiguration, too quick in its acceptance of violent colors and bearing a blandly forced simplicity. Red, indigo, and orange trees were lining both sides of a road, and the trees were painted in such a manner that they seemed to be kneeling at the roadside. In the distance white mountains, resembling the suggestion of upturned cups, refused the blue wine of sky, and in front of them were fields that looked like wrinkled, green tablecloths spread out to dry. In the sky one large pink cloud forlornly squandered its innocence.
“Pleasant—pleasant,” said Kone. “Not realistic, and not fantastic. It deceives both of its mistresses.”
“You don’t see what I’m trying to get at,” answered Jenesco. “I’m trying to make reality turn an amiable somersault, as Carl would say. I want to avoid the two extremes of painting the usual photograph on the one hand and making something that no one can understand on the other.”
Carl listened to the seething argument that followed, with the feelings of one who hears an exquisitely worthless routine of sound. He was always amazed at the fact that people could argue about art—a word pilfered from that last desperate undulation with which an ego decorates the slavery of mud. Arguments on art to him were like the antics of a sign-painter defending the precious label which he has painted upon certain of the more indiscreet and impossible longings within him—a piece of inflexible nonsense. He felt that works of art so-called could be described and admired with a novel and independently creative bow of words, but never defended and explained. Books on art were to him a futile and microscopical attempt to inject logic into a decorative curiosity. As he listened to the wrestling sounds of the present argument, words within him began to flatter his indifference.
“While Kone is talking, Jenesco sits, trying to frame his reply and paying little heed to Kone’s words,” he said to himself. “If Jenesco hears a point that he has not previously considered he will make a hasty attempt to shift his answer—a quick sword-thrust at the new opponent—and then proceed to forget about the matter. Serious arguments might be of value if they were not windy and elaborate. If men could decide to condense their views into neat typewritten sheets, carried in a coat pocket and distributed among people, they could save a great deal of cheated energy.”
“The poet has been sitting here like an amused statue,” said Kone, after the argument had collapsed to the usual stand still. “Come, we are waiting for you to flay us.”
“Splendid. Another tense battle. Haven’t you had enough?” said Carl. “I would suggest that we hold a debate on whether that spider on the wall will crawl into the sunlight near the window, or whether it will remain in the shade. In this way we can speculate upon how much the laws of chance may alter the spider’s conception of the universe.”
“Get away with that satirical pose!” cried Jenesco.
Carl smiled without answering, while the others derided his self-immersion. Jenesco knew no other weapon save an emotional club. He was a machinist who had taken up painting two years before this late winter afternoon and he still kept a little shop where he occasionally sold and repaired machines. This combination of rough mechanic and art-desiring man had given its surface lure to Carl’s imagination and he had commenced to spend most of his time at Jenesco’s home. Short, and with the body of a subdued, light-weight prize-fighter, Jenesco was a small hurricane of physical elations. He had the face of a corrupted cherub that had sold its innocence to mental inanities, and his mind was a conceited confusion of naive ideas. He had been attracted to painting because it brought his hands into motion, thus encouraging the habit which they could not forget after their working hours, and because it taught color and flexibility to the hard greys, browns, and blacks of his daily toil. He belonged to that band of men who spend a lifetime in stubbornly walking down a road of artistic effort which does not lead them to any distinct surrender. Their imaginations are not weak enough to kneel before the drab regularities of life and not strong enough to escape from the instinctive push of dead men’s realities.
From that afternoon on, Carl began to see more of Jenesco and less of Kone. Kone was not a creator but merely transposed, with a hungry fire, the sentences of other men, and after you solved the snapping tricks with which he did this, his ironies became thin and lamely transparent. Carl preferred the wolfish wit with which Jenesco, an ogling Proletarian, tore silk and satin from the shrinking flesh of obvious hypocrisies in life. It was at least a lurching circus of words—a pulsating buffoonery. He scarcely ever saw Martha now, since their self-immersions tended to create a sterile restraint between them, with words and hands playing the part of irrelevant intruders. Each of them secretly despised life and its people, while giving a pretended attention, but they used different methods. Martha fluttered her emotional veils, with a breathless coercion, while Carl dodged beneath a carnival of grotesquely mated words.
To amuse the secret loneliness which often became a boring acid he formed, with Jenesco, that hollow melee known as a debating club; called it “The Questioners”—prodded by a ghost of humor—and exhibited his words in the formal vaudeville-show. The performances occurred at the studio of a man named Fyodor Murovitch, a young Polish sculptor with a softly melodramatic abundance of dark brown hair and the face of a strangely waspish saint—a saint who was tempting himself with malices in order to conquer them. One evening Carl sat in this place, drained by the empty ritual of responding to noisy and firmly convinced people and ogling his nerves with the rhythm of pipe smoke. He looked up and saw a woman—Olga Ramely—standing beside him. His eyes experimented with the eyes of this stranger and suddenly contracted. Her eyes seemed to be two drops of quivering sweat left behind by an emotional crucifixion. They were sensitive with essences. Greyish-green, larger than a dwindled sky, lost in a perilous dream of wakefulness, holding the phantom glow of incredible tortures, friendly to mental recklessness, they were like a ludicrously clever imitation of his own eyes and he trembled in the presence of an inexplicable deception. His imagination was becoming a detached devil much in need of correction. Olga Ramely spoke to him.
“I’ve been watching you all evening. The light from the candles over your head fell upon your yellow hair and put shadows on your face. The shadows gave your face a soft excuse and you looked half like a sprite and half like a martyr. There was an indelicately impish weariness on your face. Your hair was like light, and in one glistening attempt it tried to reach the weariness, but couldn’t. I told myself that you were not the man that people say you are.”
He made his peace with her eyes, moved by a profound embarrassment, and discovered the rest of her face, with an abject and yet faintly skeptical desire. The surface flattery of her words had been almost without meaning to him, but her voice had given him a problem—deep with an alto scheme, like a trailing memory of pain, and quivering rebelliously under the disciplines of thought. He examined her face for an affirmation of the voice. Short, dark brown curls encumbered her head, like a wig of lost thoughts undulating in an effort to capture reality, and her skin was the smoothly troubled fusion of white and brown. Her nose was of moderate length and curved slightly outward, in a subdued question of flesh; her lips were small and thin—pliant devices of doubt—and a tight survival of plumpness upon her face told of a lucidly cherubic effect that had existed before life dropped its hands heavily upon her. Her body, verging on tallness, was immersed in a last skirmish with youth.
“What have you heard them say about me?” he asked, craving the evasion of words that would conceal a unique tumult within him.
“I’ve heard people say that you were a thief, and a rascal, and a disagreeable idiot, and a poseur, and a liar, and an overwhelming egoist.”
“What did you think of this dime-novel version of iniquity?”
“I have been, at times, partial to crude monsters, but your work was a curious contradiction. Why do they hate you?”
“Hatred is, of course, fear—fear wildly attempting to justify its presence. With most people this fear skulks within a harmless parade of adjectives, while others are compelled to fall back upon their hands. And so people commit actual murders while others slay their opponents in conversation. The former is apt to be a little more convincing than the latter, though.”
Carl spoke slowly, still correcting the turbulence of his mind with a plausible display of words, and almost unconscious of what he was saying.
“You’ve left out a hatred for hypocrisy,” said Olga, with the same abstracted indifference to words and the same instinctive cunning at piecing them together. “Some of the people who have been flaying you alive walked up to you to-night with outstretched hands and congratulations. And I felt the emotion of one too tired to have more than a twinge of disgust.”
“It requires no effort to be stoical to this joke,” said Carl. “The masks are too exquisitely futile to become interesting unless, indeed, they attain a moment of dextrous humor.”
Jenesco and Murovitch, who had been disputing in a corner of the studio, walked over and offered a belated introduction.
“Sorry to interrupt love scene, but maybe you do not know names of each other,” said Murovitch in his deliberate, shattered English. “Names tell people how much like nothing they are. But maybe both of you want to be somebody, in which case it is wise to pity you.”
“You have a crudely spontaneous imagination—it spies love scenes and vacuums with a truly lumbering swiftness,” said Carl, annoyed at the interruption.
Murovitch laughed—he had made a religion of giving and receiving heavy blows and it made an excellent screen for his inner timidities.
“I like your frankness. It reminds me of a heavy negro. It’s black and excited,” said Olga.
“Felman’s complexion is a little dirty itself,” said Murovitch, defiling his saint-like face with a prearranged grin.
As Carl and Olga walked to the studio where she was living with a woman friend, she told him some of the immediate facts of her life, as though clearing away an opaquely intruding rubbish.
“I’m working now as a waitress in a little cafeteria on Winthrop street. Eight in the morning to three in the afternoon. Two afternoons a week off. These burns on my hands come from the hot coffee. On the two afternoons I write poetry. My body, you see, passes into a less visible conduct, and thoughts rattle more effectively than china cups. Then, on the next morning, I am forced to recollect that life is in a continual conspiracy to prevent this transformation of manners. The plates are once more held up. Beans and roast beef refuse to betray the secret.”
They had reached the studio and were seated opposite to each other.
“And I work every morning in a tobacco shop,” said Carl. “Since life works with ravishing incongruities, everything there should be burned except the cigars. Meditating on this, I am able to wait more peacefully on the customers. Cringing sounds slip from my lips. ‘Yes, MacLane will win the next fight and the weather is terrible.’ Strange, twisted little payments of sound. Life clinks them in his empty purse.”
“Be romantic—make it the brave bow to an indelicate dream,” said Olga.
“A background of colored compensations? They, too, are endurable if you don’t turn your head too often.”
The adventure of stealing from a cautious world to an alcove of unguarded expression changed their physical desires into brightly unheeded guests lurking just outside of their longing to talk to each other. When their hands touched at last, they laughed at the minute surprise tendered by their flesh. They became two secret isolations examining a velvet hallucination of fusion. Their bodies touched while investigating this enticing dream.