Blackguard

by Maxwell Bodenheim
drawing by Wallace Smith
CHICAGO COVICI-M c GEE · PUBLISHERS · 1923
Copyright 1923 Covici-McGee Chicago
First Printing, March, 1923
Carl Felman stepped from a train at the Union Station of a midwestern American city. His young face, partly obscured by a blonde stubble of beard, was a passive concealment, and his thin lips and long nose did not hold that stalwart sleekness which one associates with earth. If some joker had taken a Gothic effigy of Christ, trimmed its beard, dressed it in grey and dirty clothes, and forced upon it an unwilling animation, he would have produced an exact duplicate of Carl’s aspect and gestures.
In the emotional confusion of the railroad-station, with its reluctant farewells and gushing greetings, Carl walked alone and abstracted, and he treated the scene as though it were a feverishly unreal mixture of drama and travesty. He strode with the careful haste of one who seeks to escape from an irritating dream but knows at the same time that his efforts are futile. He was without baggage, and his face held the strain that comes from battling with open spaces and strange faces—the hunted question of the hobo. His face showed two masks, one transparent and passive and the other tense and protesting. He had ridden for thirty-six hours in the chair of a day-coach, without food or sleep, and he was walking to the home of his parents because he lacked the necessary car-fare, but these circumstances were only partly responsible for his air of spectral weariness. He knew the stunned exhaustion of a man whose mind and heart had broken their questions against unfriendly walls, and at intervals he became immersed in vain efforts to understand the meaning of his wounds.
During the twenty-one years of his life he had resembled an amateur actor, forced to play the part of a troubled scullion in a first act that bewildered and enraged him. At high-school he had been known as “the poet-laureate of room sixteen,” a title invented by snickering pupils, and his timidly mystic lyrics about sandpipers, violets, and the embracing glee of the sun, had gained an unrestrained admiration from his English teachers. Teachers of English in American high-schools are not apt to insist upon originality and mental alertness in expression, since their own lives are usually automatic acceptances of a minor role, and Carl became convinced that writing poetry was only a question of selecting some applauded poet of the past and imitating his verse. “You must say the inspiring things that they have said, but see that your words are a little different from theirs,” he said to himself, and his words—“a little different”—became slightly incongruous upon the thoughts and emotions of Tennyson and Longfellow, the latter two having been selected because they seemed easier to flatter than other poets such as Browning and Swinburne. Another Carl Felman watched this proceeding from an inner dungeon but lacked the courage to interrupt it, for to a boy the opinions of his teachers, delivered with an air of weary authority, seem as inexorable as the laws of the Talmud or the blazing sincerity of sunlight. Carl was nearing seventeen at this time—a lonely, vaguely rebellious, anaemic, dumbly sullen boy, who tried in his feeble way to caress the life-chains which he did not dare to break. His parents, middle-aged Jews with starved imaginations and an anger at the respectable poverty of their lives, looked upon his poetic desires with mingled feelings of elation and uneasiness.