PART IITHE KNIFE
The KnifeCHAPTER X.
WithClara Messenger as his guide, Carl began to discover that another world nestled between the dull apartment houses, raucous markets, and underworld saloons which had confined his body—a world of smoother parlors and studios, in which stood “poets,” painters, sculptors, novelists, critics, Little Theater actors, art patrons, students of the arts, all leading their little squads of camp followers or plodding methodically in the ranks. This world was swaggering and overheated, and within it hosts of minor people were raising their faltering or blissfully insincere prayers to a god with a thousand faces, whom they called Artistic Expression—a god of astigmatic egoism dressed in cautious shades of emotion and thought, and obsessed with a fear of irony and originality.
Carl felt like an emancipated hermit suddenly thrown as a sacrifice to an uproar of contending philosophies and artistic creeds. His mind, accustomed to solitary decisions, became bewildered amidst the bloodless, tin-sword battle around him and he wondered how he could possibly make his own voice heard in the egoistic din. Each man assured him that the other man was a fool or a charlatan, and he listened to their conflicting assumptions of wisdom with a naive dismay.
“What has lured these people into their attitudes of isolated and weary superiority?” he asked himself, “and if the attitudes are genuine, why do these people make a garrulous religion of attacking each other? If they actually believed that their convictions were mountain ranges, with some snow of immortality soft beneath their feet, they would dwell with a more pensive calmness upon these substantial protests, instead of assiduously pelting each other with flecks of mud in the valleys.”
With the melancholy idealism of his youth Carl had made an emotional sketch in which artists and writers were a band of profoundly misunderstood martyrs, clinging to each other as they accepted the indifference and ridicule of a practical world, and he was amazed to find that almost all of them were far too easy to understand, and thronged with shudders of words at the idea of clinging to one another. Like an array of famished and animated housewives, they traded gaiety and friendly argument while in each other’s presence, while in secret they carved each other with gossiping exaggerations, three-penny sneers, and every hair’s-breadth edge of derision. Even among their different “schools” and cliques he found little fusion—the members of each group were plotting to unseat their leader because they had commenced to fear that he was merely using them as a step-ladder.
This trivial drama, with malice performing menial duties in the service of the old, egoistic dream of immortal expression and emotional tallness, was a new reality to Carl and he surveyed it with an alert contempt.
“Why all of this clownish, papier-mache melodrama, with words playing the part of overworked murderers?” he asked himself. “Is it possible that faint voices whisper within these people that they are not as important and all-seeing as they would like to be? Most ludicrous tragedy! The noise, alas, must ever continue, since their doubts and fears require a constant pounding. Poor, astounding people! ... The critic, stroking his suave patter above a tea-table: ‘Oh, yes, Mr. X. is a very sound man, very sound.’ ‘Mr. C. is indeed a great poet, for there’s a certain simplicity and sincerity in everything he does.’ ‘Mr. E. is amazingly clever and erudite—a most important man.’ ‘Mr. B.? I’m afraid that he’s only a minor Baudelaire, you know, the old morbid straining after originality’—this critic is merely allowing his thoughts and emotions to perform their private functions upon the publicity of a fanciful pedestal, to retch, relieve themselves of fluids and rubbishes, and scratch their smarts. It is, in truth, a weird, prolonged indecency.”
He meditated upon his own relation to this explanation of the belligerent waste of energy around him.
“I am a better egoist than the people around me,” he said. “I will not be forced to display my private organs as often as they. Only an absolute egoist can afford to be calm and more obscurely naked. If I indulge, at rare intervals, a secret grin will gain its reward.”
His thoughts had mounted these conclusions as he sat one night in Clara’s studio, with his legs tucked in above a scarlet cushion. She looked at him with a petulant question on her face.
“Carl, why are you forever arousing the enmity of people?” she asked.
“Because I detest most of them; because I like straight lines and angles in conduct while they prefer curves and circles; and for a variety of reasons.”
“But, Carl, you don’t need to be so deliberate about antagonizing people.”
“I’m not. I’m simply myself most of the time—a difficult task, but it can be achieved.”
“Well, everybody is sneering at your latest stunt. Why, oh why, did you have to parade down Scott street smoking that long Chinese pipe of yours, with a red ribbon tied to the stem? Carl, sometimes I almost believe that you love to pose!”
“I ain’t guilty, I swear it. When that group of my poems came out in the big eastern magazine I simply felt that the event demanded an unashamed celebration. It was like the christening of a healthy child and I wanted something stronger than whiskey or wine. An odd longing that comes to me sometimes. I decided to commit the inexplicable crime of becoming immersed in a new toy of motion. I fitted a rubber mouthpiece over the tip of the pipe and used it half of the time as a cane. I’ve been told that a crowd followed me but I didn’t turn my head to investigate.”
“Well, everyone has heard about it and they’re all calling you a cheap little poseur. And, really, I don’t know that they’re wrong. I never felt so angry in my life. You love to attract the attention of other people and you’ll make every kind of excuse rather than admit this fact!”
He showed an outburst of surface anger.
“You can act more impulsively in a camp of lumber-jacks than before a crowd of so-called artists and writers,” he said. “The lumber-jacks might regard you with a simple amazement, or an unrestrained laughter, but at least they’d grant you the sincerity of insanity! Since I must choose between stupid people I prefer the more roughly natural ones.”
“I’m tired of hearing you call everybody a hypocrite,” said Clara. “It’s just a nice way that you have of defending your own actions!”
He arose and reached for his cap.
“I’ll leave you to this weariness,” he said angrily. “It may be possible that, as I walk down the street, no one will believe that I’m striding along in a highly deliberate manner. The thought is pleasant.”
“Carl, don’t be foolish,” she said, half-repentantly, but without answering he walked out of the studio.
This had not been his first quarrel with Clara, and the frequency of their collisions, always followed by a skirmish of nervous laughter, made him believe that they were both stupidly postponing a sure separation. Clara was, in her entire essence, a deft Puritan industriously beating the back of a frightened Pagan. At certain intervals the Pagan arose and knocked the Puritan unconscious but the latter always gradually revived and resumed its dulcet mastership, and Clara liked or disliked Carl whenever her inner situation shifted in these ways. Carl had grown weary of being alternately punched and caressed by her moods. He had long since realized that his relations with her were merely the playthings of a fluctuating emotional response and that neither he nor she had the slightest respect for each other’s habits and minds, and on this evening, as he walked down the street after leaving her studio he knew that the uncertain pretence of drama had ended.
He had slowly discovered that almost all of the people around him, with their different versions of culture and art—those two realities hidden by mincing courtezans of egoism—were distrustful of bluntness and gay impulse in conduct and had made a word known as “unconventional,” in order to defend the ordinary fright that governed their actions. A venerable contradiction among these minor people but one that had held new outlines for him. He had also learned that most of these people were so accustomed to masquerades that they could not believe in the reality of a carelessly naked attitude and usually mistook it for a dazzling and ingenious pose.