CHAPTER XV.
The winter bickered with spring; days gave their imaginary separation of time; Olga and Carl stooped to the task of conjuring myriads of fancifully plausible tongues from their dream of perished identities lost in one search. Then Olga left with a theater company that was about to tour the middle west, having managed to secure the small part of a garrulous chambermaid, and Carl glided into a riot of writing, waiting for the telegram that would send him to join her in a far western city where her company would stage its last performances. In the meantime, he resolved to visit a wealthy uncle who lived in the south and wanted to see this “queer nephew of mine, who scribbles poetry and doesn’t care about making money.”
As he sat one morning in an elevated railroad coach, with valises at his side, commencing the journey to the city in which his uncle lived, his mood was glittering and aimless. He danced with outlines of Olga’s words; hummed briskly saccharine tunes; and trifled with the contours of people seated near him. Across the aisle a fatly rosy man was reading a newspaper and Carl’s gaze idly struck the front page and absorbed the headlines. In a corner of the page he came to the words: “Actress Dies in M——.”
His intuition, springing from that complaint vaguely known as metaphysical, changed his skin to a subtle frost and laid its squeezing pressure upon his eyes. The quick and heavy beat of his heart became frantically audible to his ears, like a gauntly terrifying horseman riding over him, and his mind changed to a loud confusion. He jumped across the aisle, tore the paper from the gaping man, and read that the woman whom he loved had instantly died after an accident. Assailed by an oblique rain of black claws, he tottered from the car, leaving his valises in the aisle. The black claws vanished; his heart and mind became extinct; and nothing remained save a body turned to ice and guided by instinct. Slowly, and with a brittle indecision in each step, he walked through the bickering brightness of one street after another, hearing and seeing nothing. He reached the bold flatness of the stone apartment building; read the delayed telegram held out by his mother, with the barest shiver of returning life, and dropped upon his bed.
Sunlight stood within the small room, like an emaciated patriarch entering through grey shades. Sunlight ignored the glossy chastities of furniture and dull yellow walls, and looked intently at the bed standing in one corner of the room. A long human collapse in black clothes stuck to the white bedspread. A blotch of blonde hair rested stilly in the weak light and hinted of a face. The body shook now and then as though an inquisitively alien hand were investigating its lifelessness. Then sobs pushed their way from the hidden face—an irregular orgy of distorted lyricism. It was as though a martyr were licking up the blood on his wounds and spitting it out in long gurgles of lunatic delight. The sobs were separated by rattling pauses that reminded one of a still living skeleton endlessly wrestling with death. The skeleton and the martyr sometimes felicitated each other upon their endurance, and short silences, like uneasy lies, glided from the hidden face. Then the bleeding turmoil once more streamed upon the air of the room, almost extinguishing the dim sunlight.
A peculiar species of happiness lurked beneath the weeping. Grief, hating itself, found a revengeful pleasure in attempting to tear and exhaust itself into death. Sometimes the turmoil subsided to a light and sibilant fight for breath. The animal noise departed then and a small soul, much lighter than a phantom sin, plucked unavailingly at the mysterious spear that had suddenly coerced its breast.... The dark words of twilight finally entered the room, making an opera of the marred lyricism that escaped from the hidden face on the bed. Then night pardoned the deficiencies of the room and corrected them with moonlight, creating a tragic and chaste boudoir. Carl Felman felt emptied of all sound, and a mad craving for motion stabbed his limbs. He wanted to rush endlessly into space, barely supported by the breathless consolation of running after something that could never be caught. This would also be of great value to his heart, which was a stiffly smirking acrobat who has broken his legs but still strives to continue the act.
He leaped from the bed and seized his cap. His mother, who had been entering his room at intervals and vainly questioning him, stopped him at the outer doorway.
“Carl, where are you going?” she cried, in a sharply fearful voice.
With a hugely mechanical effort he managed to twist low sounds from his useless lips.
“Just—for a—walk—back—soon.”
Without heeding her protests and questions, he fled down to the street. Human beings had disappeared, but he could see faces indented on the fronts of houses. One had a look of mangled suffering; another was studiously wicked, like a learned burglar; and a third bore the pathetic leer of a venturesome housemaid. He picked up these details, glanced at them a moment, and then threw them aside as though they were scandals from another planet. He passed into a region of three-story rooming-houses—flat wretches holding an air of patient cowardice. People surreptitiously filtered from the houses and walked down the street with Carl—chorus girls with plump, sneaky faces, underworld hoodlums with an air of wanly etched bravado, ponderously rollicking servant girls, clerks with the faces of genial mice, and meekly dazed old men stumping to their dish-washing jobs. To Carl they were also hurrying after something that had vanished and cajoling their mingled emptiness and pain with swift motion. Now and then he waved an arm to them in greeting, while an unearthly smile dug into his face. His gesture, when observed, was taken for an intended blow and he left attitudes of fear and pugnacity behind him.
He crossed a bridge above a narrowly turbid river. The oily lights and toiling tug-boats were to him an inexplicable affront. Their stillness and slow motion insulted his passion for speed and with the spite of a child he looked down at his feet for a stone to throw at them. Finding a pavement block, he cast it into the river and rushed along, feeling for a second an exquisite relief. He passed into a crowded theater and business section. The strained melee of lights and noises became an intensely sympathetic audience, urging on his race, and the faces and forms of human beings met in an applauding confusion. With the cunning of a blind animal, he darted through their ranks and avoided collisions. Finally he reached another apartment-house region—large brick boxes without a vestige of expression. “The faces are gone!” he cried, with a gasping incredulity, as though inanimate things had alone become real to him. Moonlight, unable to fathom their petty baldness, clung to them with an attitude of limpid disgust. Thickly contented families, mild and tightly garnished, issued from the doorways, trundling to some moving-picture show or ice-cream palace. An aspect of well-washed and hollow serenity protested against Carl’s direct flight. Wrapped by this time in a warmly merciful daze, he did not detect the drably swaying counterfeit of happiness that would have awakened within him a maniacal response.
He sped down street after street like an inhuman hunter, and came to rows of wooden houses separated by large fields and blackguarded by the smoke of nearby factories and mills. An attitude of mildewed supplication—a beggar rising from ferns and mud—lifted itself over the scene. Rushing along, he plunged into the open country, where wild flowers, ditches, and fields of corn pungently conversed with moonlight in a language too simple and formless for human ears to catch. But Carl’s ears had become inhuman, and he started a loud talk with the growing objects around him, revelling in their sympathy and advice. By this time his long, half-running walk had weakened him and he began to lurch over the soft earth of the road like a crushed and fantastic drunkard.
The ingenuous brilliance of a cloudless morning stood hugely over the green fields and yellowish brown roads and an air of alert innocence went exploring between the flowers and ditches. Harriet Radler walked slowly down the country road on her way to the schoolhouse where she ruled a little band of demons, drudges, minor poets, and clowns. She lingered along the roadside, sometimes stooping to tear a tiger lily from the shallow ditch. Slender and short, a pliant virginity twined itself around her body. Her young face, pink and barely whipped, had been marked by a tentative sorrow and was hungering for the actual battle. Her black and white clothes lazily flirted with imps of morning air and were encouraged by her eyes.
Looking down at the ditch, she saw the half-concealed form of a man lying in the water, with his head and arms resting upon the bank. A tragedy of dry mud stamped its grey mosaic over his face. His blonde hair drooped with dirt like a trampled sunflower. The Pierrot-like hesitation of his features peeped beneath the dirt—a still and frightened ritual. With the horror of one who believes that she is beholding a dead man, Harriet knelt beside the figure and shook its head, her face turned away and her eyes tightly closed. Then she heard a mingled rustle and splash and saw that the man was rising to his feet. He stood with bent knees over the mud of the ditch, his black clothes garlanded with slime, his face twitching into life beneath its stiff mask of earth. With a squeal of fright she scrambled to her feet and ran down the road. The man in the ditch, Carl Felman, felt that something was still evading him and once more experienced the hunter’s frenzy that had tumbled him over the night. Gripped by a superhuman agility, he transcended his stiff joints and pursued her down the road. He caught her, his hands dropping upon her shoulders and whirling her around. She faced him with uplifted arms, a turbulence of fright and curiosity swiftly toying with her eyes and mouth. He lowered his hands and stood limply before her.
“Do you know what grief is?” he asked, in an almost indistinct voice.
She stared and did not answer.
“Do you know what grief is?” he asked, in a softly clear voice.
A look of loose wonder came to her face.
“Do you know what grief is?” he asked, in an almost loud voice.
A darkly smiling contemplation revised the lines of her face.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Without another word they both walked down the country road together.