PART IIIINSTIGATION
InstigationCHAPTER XVI.
Thetrain in which Carl was riding rolled slowly through the outskirts of a southern city and he looked out at the rows of negro cottages and hovels that plaintively cringed underneath the wide foliage of willow and magnolia trees. Most of the cottages were unpainted and grey with the impersonally chaste kiss of time, while the hovels were mere flimsy boxes covered with black tar paper. Sunflowers and morning glories stood amid the weeds and twined about the slanting fences like gaudy virgins dismayed at their sight of a lewdly disordered room and appealing to the sunlight for protection. Negro women in faded sunbonnets and wrappers could sometimes be seen shuffling down the thickly dusty roads and negro children, in weird incoherences of tattered clothes, tumbled around the humble doorsteps. The children were little black madmen unconsciously dodging a huge fist that was concealed beneath the scene. The dust of a late August morning had dropped upon all things, sifting its listless sadness into every crevice and crack, and even the fierce sun could not dispel this invasion.
Every shade of this scene was an accurately friendly answer to Carl’s mood and he squandered the brooding light of his eyes upon all of the visual details outside of the train window. The mask of careless bitterness upon his face said its hello to the cowering and sinister apathy of the houses and people, and viciously he longed to leap out of the window and join the unashamed animal rites which these hovels and human beings were parading. Here an alien race was standing amid clouds of evil-smelling squalor and staring at its broken longings and dreams—staring with a wild hopelessness. This race had lost its own civilization and was clumsily imitating that of the white man, not because of any innate desire, but because it had been forced to blend into its surroundings or perish, and Carl felt that all of his life had also been an animated lie of flesh and speech, devised to aid him in escaping from the contemptuous eyes that vastly hemmed him in. And now, with the feelings of a man who had neatly murdered himself, he was planning to turn the knives of his thoughts and emotions upon other people, not for revenge, but because the marred ghost of himself harshly desired to convince itself that it was still alive. If this ghost had yielded to the subterfuges of kindness and gentleness it would have become too much aware of its own thin remoteness from life, and cruelty alone could induce it to believe that it was still welded to the actualities of existence.
As Carl sat at the window he could often hear the grotesquely quavering, boldly mellow laughter of negro men trudging to their work, but these sounds did not express humor to him. They held the strong effort of men to flee from tormenting longings and the numbly vicious rebuke of poverty, and the sounds which these men released merely symbolized the long strides of their fancied escape. Laughter can be merely the explosive sound with which human beings seek to demolish each other—the indirect weapon of self-hatred. Carl laughed with a strained loudness, throwing a magnified echo to the negroes on the dusty roads outside, and a drowsily plump, middle-aged woman in an opposite seat opened her mouth widely and huddled into a corner, fearing that she might be attacked by a maniac. He gave her a glance and feasted upon her fear, for her shrinking attitude was falsely and deliciously persuading the ghost of himself that it still held a potency over other people.
Sometimes a song crazily drifted to Carl’s ears from one of the negro cottages—a song that was weighted with loosely undulating sadness—and he listened with a stern greediness. Music is a huge, treacherous sound made by thoughts and emotions to console them for their feeling of minute mortality, and after it has given them its dream of permanent size it disappears, slaying the illusion with silence. Now it brought a delusion of substantiality to the ghost within the mould of Carl’s flesh and he listened in a trance of gratitude. Lost in the obliterations of his grief, he felt infinitely nearer to these abject, musical negroes outside than to the artificially silent, stiffly satisfied white people with whom he was riding. Grief, which is an insane tyrant among emotions, has an effortless way of crossing all boundaries and walls, but it does not reveal any hidden oneness between human beings. Grief places men and women in a vacuum of renunciation, or shows them that they have little connection with the people around them and that they have been enduring an alien camp. Ruled by this latter discovery, Carl looked with an undisguised hatred at the formal, complacent white people in the railway coach and felt that he was deeply related to the negroes outside.
Almost three months had passed since the invisible knife had swung into the middle of his being, and since he had staggered across the agitated sincerity of night to the peaceful compassion of the young school teacher. Now and then he remembered their silent walk down the sturdy brightness of the country road—a silence which had been a soft wreath ironically thrown upon the weakness of words—and the troubled way in which she had helped him brush his clothes and wash his face, and the stumbling simplicity of the words with which she had tried to comfort him. Although he had been a stranger to her, she had thrown aside that distrust which is born of sensual pride and a cheaply purchased worldly wisdom, influenced by the helpless directness of his demeanor and by the supple humility which a grief of her own had once left within her. The force of her fearlessness had fallen upon him like the sweeping touch of another world, and in his daze he had actually believed that she had been sent by the woman whom he had lost as an alert messenger striving to teach him how to hold his ghostlike shoulders up beneath a future burden. If she had held a human aspect to him he would have hated and reviled her, for then she would have been merely an atom in the vast, turbid reality that had slowly lured him to an imbecilic torture. He accepted the curves of her body as an unearthly visitation and possessed them as one who passes through a fragile ritual. But after his departure from her, as he once more walked down the shaggy, solid country road, she had tiptoed away from him with a spectral quickness, and the clamor of a world had once more attacked him, like the scattered falsehoods of an idiot. The rustle of trees had become an insignificant whisper of defeat; the songs of birds had changed to the shrill vacuities with which a monster entertained himself; the colored groups of flowers had become the pitiful remains of a violated carnival; the earth beneath his feet had altered to the stolid aloofness of a giant moron; and the sunlight had seemed to be a theatrical accident.
When he had reached the city, with its orderly ranks of houses and factories and its dully precise pavements, the scene had been to him a cunning mirage made by dying people to suppress their realization of the advancing destruction. The people on the streets had held the complicated glee and perplexity of an insane slave trying to extract an imaginary importance from his bondage. He had longed to jump at their throats and silence the feverish lie that was reviling the truthful stare of his eyes and only his physical exhaustion had prevented him from doing this. Grief is a spontaneous welcome sent to the insanity that lurks within all human beings, and its invitation greets a responsive strength or a frightened weakness of imagination, according to the man or woman who receives it.
And so he had plodded back to his home, carrying within him a numb confusion that was sometimes disrupted by vicious impulses, and forcing the ghost of himself into a motion which it could not understand. He had tried to answer the angry and uneasy questions of his parents with plausible lies at his own expense. Yes, he had met someone who had given him bad news and in a fit of temper he had rushed from the railroad station and deserted his valises. What was in the telegram? Oh, just a message from a friend. Where had he been for the past two days? Why, he had gone on a spree and had slept off his drunkenness at the house of a friend. Shouldn’t he be locked in an insane asylum? Yes, but life had already granted him that favor. With a glib tongue he tried to serenade the barren comedy of improbabilities to which he had returned, but he scarcely heard the words that he was uttering, and as he wrung them from the empty ghost that was within him he longed to strike his parents in the face and feed greedily upon their rage and astonishment, in an effort to convince himself that he was still substantially powerful, still able to assert his reality by injuring the people around him. With an act of this kind he could destroy the indifferent fantasy of life and change it to a tangible and active opponent. The man standing before him—his father—was merely an irritating puppet whose lack of understanding moved jerkily, governed by the hands of an ignorant dream.
With a cry of hatred, Carl struck his father in the face and watched him reel back against the wall of the dining-room with a feeling of warm triumph. He struck him again and revelled in the blood that decorated the man’s lips. His mother shrieked with fear; his father returned the blows; and the two men fought around the room, overturning chairs and vases. Several neighbors, brought by the cries of his mother, rushed in and overpowered him. Together with his father, they held him down while someone summoned a patrol wagon, and he was taken to a cell in a police station. As he sat in the flatly smelling semi-gloom of the cell he caressed, with an overpowering fondness, the blood that had stiffened upon parts of his face, for it mutely testified that he had conquered the remote lie around him and altered it to a satisfying enemy. He had persuaded himself that he was still alive, and the blows which he had given his father had been the first proof of this illusory emancipation. Throughout the night, as he shifted upon the iron shelf that was his bed, he muttered to himself at regular intervals, “I am alive, I am still alive,” as though he were trying to preserve a triumphant dream that would soon disappear, and the grief within him rocked to and fro upon the words, using them as a cradle.
But when the morning dodged shamefacedly into his cell, bringing with it a faint retinue of city sounds, the annoying fantasy returned with full vigor, and the ghost within him stealthily assumed possession of his flesh. Once more he was a thinly wounded spectator, filled with an impotent hatred at the melee about him and longing for the lusty release of physical motion. Two small boys, lying upon their stomachs, peered through the grating of his cell window, which stood on a level with the sidewalk outside, and jibed at him. He cursed them incessantly, with an anger that was not directed at them, but at the meaningless tensions of their voices, and with the tumult of his own voice he vainly strove to shake the wraith within him to firmer outlines.
As he stood before the magistrate a few hours later, an incredulous sneer was on his face, as though the man at the desk above him were a pompous, talkative scarecrow, and with a stubborn silence he confronted the questions that were thrown at him. In a low, hesitating voice his father declared that he feared that his son had become insane, and the judge ordered an examination by one of the city physicians. Carl was returned to his cell, after his parents had pelted him with half-angry and half-bewildered sentences in an ante-room of the court, and as he sat again in his cell, surveying the rigid jeer of the iron bars, his hatred began to listen to the advice of cunning—a cunning pilfered from the wilted depths of his despair. He began to see that physical blows and silence were crude and ineffective weapons in his attack upon the insulting commotion of life and that, if he desired to injure human beings so that both he and they might become real for a moment, he must use more indirect and ingenious methods.
When the city physician, a tall, briskly-balanced man with no imagination, questioned him in his cell, he became a blandly appealing and submissive actor.
“Yes, doctor, I had a nervous breakdown from overstudy, you know, and for a time I’m afraid that I lost my reason. They tell me that I struck my father and this has horrified me, as I haven’t the slightest recollection of what I did. But I’ve gathered myself together now and I can promise you that I’ll never lose control of myself again—never! And I’m awfully sorry for what I did. I can assure you of the sincerity of my repentance.”
The physician was putty in Carl’s adroit hands—this composed young man with an intelligent, contrite speech must, of course, be quite sane. Carl, as he spoke to this man, slowly formed an evil grin beneath the cool mask of his face, and he relished the task of showering upon this man earnest platitudes, smooth imitations of that limited sleep known as “common sense,” and words of self-reproach, because this trickery brought back to him his old sense of power over his surroundings and offered a subtle outlet for his hatred of life. The physician ended by shaking his hand with a genial respect and when evening came he was given his freedom.
He returned to his home, repeating the soft treachery of his words while his fists still longed to lunge out at the faces in front of him, but the shrewdness of a ghost determined to regain a semblance of life by cleverly deceiving and punishing the people around it came to his rescue and controlled his body. His parents had felt wrathful at the presence of something which they could only dimly see and which he made no effort to clarify, but life had taught them to make a god of submission, and a heavy tenderness mingled with an alert fear crept into their posture toward him. He trudged back to the loquacious, coarse emptiness of his clerkship at the tobacco shop and shunned the world that he had previously inhabited, for he feared that if he met anyone whom he knew he would feel again the irresistible inclination to interrogate their throats, and he knew that these impulses would only lead to his own destruction. When he accidentally met some acquaintance on the street, he would hurry on like a nervous criminal, ignoring the other’s greetings.
He prowled about the city, still in search of a violent dream that could offer its delusion of reckless strength to the mutilated spirit whose complaints drove him on. He ran to the soiled raptures of prostitutes and sensually oppressed, adventurous girls who could be picked up on the streets, and gave them a twisted symphony of blows, curses, whispered insinuations, lies, while he revelled in the illusion of cruelty that was lending a false reality to the thin futilities of his mind and flesh. With a mixture of brutality and delicately simulated caresses, he overawed these women and they felt themselves in the presence of a charming, abstracted fiend, whose kaleidoscopic insincerity only made them long to change it to a gesture of actual love. He sought the company of thieves and hoodlums, and at first they distrusted him because his restrained manners and gently removed look were not proper credentials, but when they saw how eager he was for the impact of fists, and how he could take a blow and rise with a grin of stunned delight, they accepted him as an eccentric brother. They did not know that these actions were not born of courage, but were caused by a gigantic longing for physical pain—pain that could shock his numb spirit into a feeling of sharply hideous communion with an actual world.
But finally this life began to weary him because it could not reach the flimsy loneliness that stood within him. He carried within him at all times an audience of ghostly thoughts and emotions, and they were at last becoming bored with the stolen melodrama. He determined to practice an economy in movements and words, and he walked alone at night and on streets where the possibility of meeting someone who knew him would be distant. He watched the syncopated gliding of people with the irritation of a stranger. The men and women who drifted or bobbed along were cardboard mannikins to him and he vainly tried to give life to their flatness and lack of color. Sometimes he would pause and touch his arm and face, wondering at the odd inadequateness of their presence. Olga had become a living but invisible being who was constantly groping for him, with eyes unused to the outlines of earth, and sometimes finding his shoulder in a fleeting and accidental way. When this happened, he would turn around abruptly and berate his inability to extract her form from the concealing air. At such times he would often speak to her. “Olga ... Olga ... what is this unsought blindness that has come to both of us?” he would cry into the night air of a street. “A cruel chicanery ... a blurred and simple pause ... a little fantasy within a huge one? Am I a coward rolling in the mud that stretches before a vast gate? Life seems a fantastic conspiracy, panting and rattling in its efforts to hide the emptiness beneath it.... Olga ... take me to your burnished hermitage ... I am tired.”
He would walk on, trying to imagine what her answer had been, and winning an elusive and deliberately wrought consolation that stayed for an hour and then gradually departed. His life had settled into the recurrence of these reactions, when a second invitation arrived from his wealthy uncle in the southern city, and he had accepted merely because he wanted a new arena for his struggle with a discredited reality—fresher targets and a change in the illusion’s surface.
And now he was seated in the train that slowly rolled through the outskirts of a southern city and giving his eyes to the squalid negro section that unfurled before him....