CHAPTER IX.
One Sunday morning, Carl sat at home, lightly wandering through a newspaper. On the previous night he had met Petersen and had yielded to an invitation to accompany “two swell brunettes who don’t object to a gay time,” and the recollection of his violent, drunken contortions came to him like a weirdly teasing dream of no particular significance but leaving the temptation of nausea behind it. He had released a desecrating ghost of himself from the sneering recesses of his self-despair. Yes, you could burn away the sensual rubbish, with derisive gestures, but your emptiness and weariness always returned for their slow revenge. He sought to put his thoughts to sleep with the hasty versions of loves, catastrophes, and law-suits that winked maliciously at him from the newspaper.
In the middle of one page he came upon a rectangle of gossip concerning a poetry magazine of whose existence he had never known, and darting from his insensitive trance he lingered greedily over the news. Through the efforts of an elderly poetess several society people had agreed to endow a small magazine that would be entirely devoted to verse, and the newspaper item was heralding the fact that one of these people had contributed a sonnet to a recent issue of the magazine. “Mr. Robert Endicott, the well-known clubman and member of fashionable sets, appears with a delicate contribution in this month’s issue of The Poetry Review, our aristocratic little magazine of the muse. This will be a surprise to those who know Mr. Endicott only in his role of business-man and society leader.” Carl strove to be properly impressed by the surprise, decorating it with the Order of the Nasty Chuckle.
He felt that it might be consoling to receive a rejection slip from an upper-world magazine of this kind—a dab of caviar on the empty plate—and so he sent them three poems. The paper oblong came, but its blank side held the following note: “Dear Mr. Felman: Your work interests me. Won’t you drop into the office some time? Clara Messenger.”
What men call triumph is a fanciful exaltation that may fall alike upon atoms and temples—a grandiose child of hope, whose mother is egoism and whose father is pain. Men, whose life is but a sensitive or oblivious second—a fleeting stampede within mist—seek the absurd consolation of believing that their work will become immortal, and this phantom lie has induced many a soldier to writhe upon some trivial battlefield and many a minor poet to fight with threats of the gutter. Carl Felman, obscure, gasping struggler, communing with the marks left by endless whips, felt foolishly thrilled at this first glimpse of personal attention from a magazine and became like a swain to whom a glove has been thrown from an enticingly high balcony. He stood peering up with a timid excitement.
On the following afternoon he managed to leave the plumbing shop, with a plea of illness, and raced to the office of the magazine. A feathery swirl of quickly purchased emotions—fragments of a youth that had been shattered—revolved within his heart. As he closed the door of the large office he saw two women seated at different desks and poised over the rustle of papers. One was elderly and sedate, and her sober clothes were reprimanding a substantial body. Beneath a survival of greyish-brown hair, plainly gathered, the narrow oval of her face looked at life with a politely questioning air. It was the mellowly distorted expression of one who has arrived at final convictions regarding the major parts of life, and is patiently and inflexibly regarding the lesser perceptions surrounding her. Her slightly wrinkled face was dominated by a long, thin nose and thin, tightly expectant lips, and it seemed that her tired emotions had gone to sleep and were staring out from a dream of suave wakefulness. The other woman was hovering near the last climax of her youth, and her slender body rose unobtrusively to the pale repressions of her face. Small and round, her face carried a well-trimmed self-satisfaction—the reward of one whose dreams have lived inwardly, with only an occasional sip of forbidden cordials. Her loosely parted lips guarded a receding chin and her barely curved nose ascended to large brown eyes and a high forehead.
Carl walked to her desk and stood for a moment like a child in a cumbersome robe who is waiting for some inevitable rebuke. The harshly weary assurance which he was able to display to other people vanished in this imagined shrine of an unattained art. The young woman looked up with courteous blankness.
“My name is Carl Felman. You wrote me a note last week,” said Carl, delicately groping for the inconsequential words.
“Oh, yes, I remember”—her face attained a careful smile, tempered by a modest curiosity. “I’m so glad that you came down.”
She turned to the other woman.