“I am a poet!” he had cried out to the murmuring patience of the trees around him, “and fools will some day gape along my road, and the open circles of their mouths will be like the rims of beggars’ cups. My voice will rise above the dreamless clink of their coins and they will stop and look at me, as though I were a pilgrim-problem. An angry amazement will lend its little catastrophe to their faces. Yes, I will drop beauty to them, in clearly abundant handfuls, and they will sit quarreling over its value and tossing me an occasional penny. But I will never stop to join their discourses. My feet will be lighter than breezes and more direct. I am a poet, and the world is stagnation that I must ever torment!”
He had lurched back to the Felman apartment, “dropping beauty” with an incisive exuberance to the astonished neighbors seated around the doorstep, and commanding them to examine his gifts. As he sat at the dining-room table now, he remembered this episode, and similar ones, with a gust of half-rebellious shame.
“This has been my only triumph so far—a whiskey bottle raised beneath the stars, on a summer evening, and reigning over an idle riot of words,” he said to himself with an exhausted self-hatred. “Am I going to be contented with this thwarted joke? And yet——”
Levy stepped into the room and provided a slightly unwelcome ending to this secret sentence. Short and slender, his blue serge suit clinging to him like an emblem of shrewd victory, he made an excellent period to the labors of thought. Upon his small, light tan face a twirled-up black moustache curved to a diminutive swagger and his bending nose seemed to be vainly attempting to caress the moustache—an unnecessary affirmation. His black eyes incessantly drove little bargains beneath the shine of his black hair.
“H’llo, folks,” he chirruped, smiling with an automatic ease at the Felmans. Then he noticed Carl and looked at him with polite surprise.
The father and mother regarded each other with a despondent indecision, dreading the thought of introducing their drolly disreputable son to this shining symbol of an outside world and hating the undeserved appearance of inferiority which had been thrown upon them. This queer son had cast his shadow upon their assured and humbly conservative position in life—in a world of decently balanced regularities. Their ability at loquacious pretense took up the burden with a weary precision.
“This is my son Carl,” said Mr. Felman, with a prodigiously uneasy grin tickling the roundness of his face. “Carl, this is Al Levy. You’ve heard us talking of him, Al. He’s just come back from the army—surprised his old parents, you know.”
“Glad to meet you, I’m sure,” said Levy, with an expert affability beneath which he exercised his disdain for Carl’s patched-up appearance and his inkling of the actual situation.
He complimented a chair at the table briskly; or, in other words, he sat down, employing a great condescension of limbs. He and Felman began an uncouth debate concerning the respective selling merits of whiskey and cheap jewelry, while Carl listened, bored and a little sick at the stomach. Words to these men were crudely unveiled mistresses, selling their favors for whatever hasty coin might be thrown on the table. Levy turned to Carl.
“How did you like the army?” he asked, with a lightly superior kindliness.