CHAPTER XVII.
He turned from the window and strove to place an expression of close-lipped serenity on his face, for the train had almost reached the station. He had not seen his uncle for years and he played with dim memories of the man’s appearance. When he walked down the station platform he found that his uncle, Doctor Max Edleman, was waiting just outside of the iron gates. Doctor Edleman was a man of sixty years, sturdily rotund, with a tall body that was beginning to be disgraced by its expanding paunch. His head was unusually large and ruled by small blue eyes and the sharply turned breadth of a nose. His great, thick lips were tightly withdrawn to an outline of benign patience and his florid face ridiculed the trace of wrinkles that had flicked it. His greyish blonde hair was still fairly abundant, and all of him suggested a man who was uniquely intact because he had scarcely ever allowed life to clutch him familiarly. Since he was an Alsatian Jew, he kissed Carl carefully on both cheeks, and this annoyed Carl, not from the usual masculine reasons, but because he felt that this was a jocose insult from a fantasy that despised him, but he submitted with a flitting grimace.
He took Carl to an automobile and after they had been driven away he smothered him with questions.
“Your dear mother tells me that you have been acting queerly of late,” he said, in the heavily-measured way of speaking he had. “You have been refusing to speak to anyone and staying away from home—bringing worry to your dear mother. It seems to me that you have given enough care and trouble to your parents, and that it’s about time that you acted like a normal man. I understand that you have been dissipating and going with dissolute people. You are twenty-five now and there is no longer any excuse for this wildness. What have you to say for yourself?”
“Don’t ask me to explain things that you couldn’t understand,” said Carl, returning to act in the falsely unpleasant play. “I have had a great grief and I’m trying in my own way to make it a friend of mine. If I tell you that your questions bring back wounds, I am sure that you will not desire to hurt me.”
He gave his uncle words that would appease and disarm him, while at the same time evading his queries, and this game gave him a smooth semblance of life.
“So-o, so-o, I have no desire to penetrate your secrets,” said Dr. Edleman, in a kindly voice that feebly strove to comprehend. “I am simply advising you to pull yourself together. Show some consideration for the people around you.”
He continued to offer the benevolent adulterations of his advice, and as Carl listened he suddenly thought of a high-school teacher who had once rebuked him for bringing to class a theme entitled “Women Who Walk the Streets,” and with a vaporously swinging amusement in his heart he almost felt human again. This fantasy could hold a blustering smirk now and then—its only extenuation. But the nearness vanished as his uncle’s voice became a swindling monotone, angering him with its formal pretense of life. Carefully, and with a ghostlike insincerity that bribed his voice with lightness, he gave words that could hold this man at arm’s length. The strain of adapting his words to the intelligence of the man beside him brought him a closer relation to the bickering phantasmagoria of men and their motives without in any way summoning his own thoughts and emotions. Dr. Edleman felt that his nephew was skillfully attempting to defend a selfish past and bringing into the service of this motive a graceful keenness of mind, but beyond this point Carl’s words were unable to affect him.
“I have always admired your brilliancy,” he said, “and I only wish that you would use it in the right way. A young man must pay some attention to the desires and opinions of older people. It will be a glad day for me when I see that you are using your talents to bring happiness to other people. A glad day.”
Carl gave a sigh to the grave dullness that marched forth in his uncle’s voice and meditated upon the curious differences in sound with which people petted their limitations and discretions. These differences were known as words, and when they pleased a great number of people they were hailed as symbols of genius or power, but Carl could see no distinction between any of them. Like a horde of tired servants, they pranced to the prides and hatreds of men and then returned to their common grave, and only their exact arrangement gave them a flitting assumption of life. “What is the difference between this old man and myself? Several keys to false doors of thought and emotion, misplaced or lost in his youth and found in mine.” Through reiterating these plausibilities he tried to give bulk and texture to the fantasy of existence.
The automobile stopped before the Edleman home, which was a large two-story structure—a partial reproduction of the Colonial period modified to conform to the more exuberant inclinations of an Alsatian Jew. Four broad, high wooden pillars, painted white, rose over a wide veranda and ended in a slanting roof of black slate, and the walls were of red brick courted by an abundance of vines. A large garden, with tons of fruit trees and brilliant episodes of flowers, surrounded the house and was enclosed by a level hedge of shrubs and a low iron fence. An impression of dreamlessly cluttered luxury, verging in spots upon bland somnolence, proclaimed the empty heart of the place, but it was almost a distinct flattery to Carl, who had grown tired of aggressive angles and plain surfaces. Here, at least, the mirage held a sleek flirtation with bunches of color and burdened curves.
His aunt Bertha, a short, stout woman in a gown of brown taffeta and white lace, welcomed him in a babbling and languid fashion and showed him to his room. She was a softly shallow woman whose major interests were card parties and the lingering intricacies of gossip. The flabby roundness of her face was in the last grip of middle age and her mind was as scanty and precisely glistening as the greyish-brown hair that slanted back from her low forehead. After the dinner, she hurried off to the mildly mercenary rites of a bridge whist party and Carl was left to wander idly around the garden. He sat on the grass beneath a persimmon tree and played with lazy, cruel thoughts in which he slapped a man’s face or tortured a woman’s cheek, still moved by his old mania to profane the empty dream which life had become to him, forcing it into a vigorous duplicate of reality.
The bright afternoon, with its myriads of shrilly clear and hissing sounds, was like a troubled falsetto rapture and he weakly fought to bring it nearer to his senses. As he sat beneath the tree he resolved to give his mind some labor with which it could transform the vision to a more solid picture, and he thought of the people who would soon be embarrassing him with their mouths and eyes. They were Jews of a kind that had rapidly spread over the south. The older people among them had migrated to the south some forty years previously and had gradually won large or comfortable fortunes by means of their thriftiness and trading abilities. They were now contented grand-and great-grand-parents, surrounded by two generations of their offspring, and all of them were strangely indifferent to the austere mysticism for which the Jewish race is so verbosely noted. Dreamless, voluble, self-assured, they angled with their religion in a half-hearted way and blackmailed, with money, the occasional flutters of mental curiosity. They had picked up several mannerisms of the south—softly drawling voices and unhurried movements—and the only things that distinguished them as Jews were the curved gusto of their faces and the fact that they mingled only with each other—a last, lukewarm trace of loyalty left by the surge of centuries of past incidents.
Carl went into the house and returned, with paper and pencil, to his station beneath the persimmon tree. He strove to write a poem to the woman whom he had lost. It was a torture that, like a starved monster, devoured the softer spaces within his heart. It was as though he were endeavoring to compress the ruins of an entire world, making them narrower and narrower, more and more alive, until at last they formed the body of a woman. The effort brought him an actual physical pain; drops of sweat were born on his forehead, and his spirit reeled like a mesmerized, beaten drunkard. “All of life is a lie unless I make her appear on this paper,” he cried aloud to the persimmon-tree leaves, for the lack of better gods. He detested his own futility and sought to avenge himself upon it. When the poem was finished he fell into a troubled, plundered sleep in which his consciousness busily made reports that were unheeded. He could still see the trees and flowers, but they were like the edge of the universe miraculously brought near to his eyes. Finally, with an effort like a straight line thrusting aside several worlds, he roused himself and read the poem. It failed to satisfy him; it was a tangle of treacherous promises and pleading fragments—the line of one of her arms, with an ashen delicateness; the nervously boyish rebuke of her eyes; the tenuous defiance of her heart; the curled merriments of her hair—fragments fastened to a slip of white paper and lacking the great surge of breath that could have whirled them into a speaking whole. He had written other poems to her and they had produced the same result; but still, huddled under the tree, he continued to write, much like a dying man who has no choice save to gasp for breath, only in his case it was a ghost that struggled to avoid a second death. The ghost was seeking to escape a final extinction. He wrote until the lengthened shadow of the tree told him that he must return to the house; but it took him at least ten minutes before he could censure his face and control his breath. At last, with the thinly passive mask once more adjusted and held by the slenderest of threads, he walked from the garden.
At supper he met his cousin, Dr. Joseph Rosenstein, who was living at the Edleman home and who treated him with a suspecting affability. The presence of a poet is always a vague challenge to those people who feel that he is somehow at variance with the complacent finalities of their lives, but who cannot draw the difference into a clearer antagonism. For this reason they try to cover their distrust with a nervous and questioning amiability. After jovially advising Carl to write a sonnet to a doctor, protesting to a great admiration for the prettiness of poetry, and asking Carl whether he didn’t think that practical people were also of some use in the world, Rosenstein deserted the farce and began to discuss the technical details of an operation with Dr. Edleman. Bertha Edleman uttered some placid remarks concerning the possibility of Carl’s writing short stories that would bring him a great deal of money; inquired after his parents in a detailed but listless way; and then, with more vigor, commenced to speak of engagements, marriages and divorces within her immediate circle. Dr. Edleman, by turns waggish and blunt, presided over the groups of corrupted words. Since Carl was anxious not to provoke these people, he stooped to the task of uttering pleasantly obvious remarks in a timid and deliberate fashion, and since they secretly felt that his work gave him a rank lower than theirs, they liked the subdued and abashed manner in which he spoke.