Gargoyles

by Ben Hecht

"The humble ones ... the humble ones...." it sang, "they are God. The ones life walks upon. The working ones, the cheated ones—here is their song. The oppressed ones, listen to their hearts beating."

It was a passion out of which a great propagandist might have been born. But Lindstrum's mind was too simple to utilize it, even to understand it. He was aware only of a torment that seemed to twist at his heart and bring words like soothing whispers into his thought. A craftsman obsession moulded it slightly. But always the inarticulate excitements that had started him writing remained fugitive among his written words saying neither "I hate," nor "I love," but affirming with a monotonous crescendo, "I am. I am!"

Doris caught by the fanatic lyricism of his songs yielded her intellect to them for a time. The shoemaker Wotans and hobo Christs startled her into an acquiesence. But she was determined. She knew that her praise of his poetry was like an admiration of his infidelity. Yes, he loved people as he might have loved her, blindly with his heart, with his arms around their bodies and his grey eyes looking hungrily through them.

The debates grew less casual. There were abrupt climaxes during which he stared at her with anger. Then it was no longer a debate of ideas but of wills. Here she knew herself powerless and yielded at once, making use of her apology to caress his face or seize his hand.

Alone again she would study the things she had said as she studied from day to day the social, political and spiritual history of her own and other times. Her mind grew to master the phrases which outlined the illusions of the crowd, which revealed the lusts and errors of the crowd. Her thought inspired by the single desire to destroy for her lover the beauty of her rival, rallied continually from its defeats before his anger. Her cynicism became a mystic thing—her adoration of her lover turning into a hatred of life, a contempt of people.

At night she sat in the window of her room overlooking the thinly crowded street. The obsession held her now, occupying her energies entirely. In its excitement, in the mental twistings, she found rest from the desires that burned.

Alone ... she was alone. She would play langorously with this sense of loneliness. She would repeat quietly, "He'll never come to me again. Never hold me in his arms. How beautiful he is. His lips are not like any man's lips could be. But he doesn't love me any more. He loves this in the street below. Men and women in the street."

And here her thinking would begin, a sequel to the preface of sorrow. Below her moved the face of her rival—the crowd. She must study the thing out carefully so as to be clear in her words when she talked to him. So as to make her words a poison in him that would destroy the passion for her rival.

The night lifted itself far away. Little lights ran a line of yellow at the foot of buildings. Men and women. What were men and women? The blur of faces in the street, moving along every night, what was that? Something to idealize and give one's soul to? No.

Individuals racing toward their secret destinations and tumbling with a sigh into an inexhaustible supply of graves—that was a phenomenon to be studied separately. Out of that one could locate plots, dramas, humor, tragedy. But here below the window was another story—was a great character that had no name but that her lover worshipped. The crowd ... this thing in the street he sang of as the crowd was a single creature. Its face was one, its voice one. It had one soul—the soul of man. A dark thing, alive with inscrutable desires.