His youthful gesture of contorted cynicism, qualified a bit by the remaining ghosts of a naively wounded idealism, made him resolve to become a crafty underdog—a man who had become obsessed with the task of finding his voice and was using every possible subterfuge and device to protect this obsession, leering at the forces that were attempting to intrude upon his religious concentration. Right and wrong to him were unfair scarecrows that slipped from the huge indifference of his surroundings and demanded an attention which they were unwilling to give in return. Perhaps he was a minor knave, seeking to rationalize his instincts for crime, and perhaps he merely held a naked determination like that of a certain immoral slayer and plunderer known as Nature. The question is a frayed one and derives little benefit from the tensions of exhausted arguments. Carl was constantly harassed by a feeling of inarticulate insignificance, and the poems which he twisted from his heart, on park benches and in the long weeds of ditches beside railroad tracks, were like bunches of forget-me-nots plucked by a dirty, bewildered child and thrown as offerings against the stone breast of an unheeding giant. He still believed that poetry was a cloak of blurred embroidery that should be cast over the shoulders of sentiments such as love, faith, charity, mercy, chivalry, courage and honor, and he felt both consoled and amused at the thought that he was using a rogue to guard within himself the better man that life had not allowed him to become. His love for the sentiments which he tipped with rhymes was partly caused, however, by the fear that without them he might become too utterly inhuman for earthly survival.
For a year he wrestled with different manual labors, and stole when their perspiring monotones weakened and angered his desire to write lyrics that were half trite and half thinly wistful, but he finally decided to return to the midwestern city and brave the reactions of his parents, whose wrathful letters had sometimes visited his journeys. He determined to rest awhile amid the moderate comforts of his former home and felt that he could disarm the anger of his parents with a masterful, jesting attitude that would muzzle them. And so, penniless and in dirty clothes, he was now walking through the heavily tawdry business district of a midwestern city.
CHAPTER II.
On the streets martyred by crowds, electric lights pencilled the night with their trivial appeals, and an ineffectual approach to daylight spread its desperately dotted jest over the scene. Since Carl almost never voiced his actual thoughts and emotions to people, he grasped, as usual, the luxury of speaking to himself.
“Electric light is only the molten fear of men,” he said, as he strode through the unreal haste of the crowds. “Men are afraid to look at the night and they have given it eyes as stiffly frightened as their own. Underneath the comforting glare of this second blindness they protect themselves. In a dim light men and women could not easily escape from each other, for the darkness would tend to press them together, but in this violent stare of light they are divided by a self-assured indifference. Watch them as they stride along with an air of gigantic, amusing importance. The crowd is really a single symbol of many isolations joined to a huge one. It sees only those people who are unpleasantly conscious of the electric glare, and who hurry through it with gestures of alert dislike, or with a slow and morbid desire for pain.”
This fancy made him feel conspicuously disrobed, and the glances of passing people became to him flitting symbols of derision directed at his beard and dirty clothes. As he looked up at the tall, unlit office buildings, grey and narrowly vertical, they reminded him of coffins standing on end and patiently waiting for a civilization to crumble, so that they might inter it and fall to the ground with their task completed. He reached the apartment-house section in which his parents lived—rows of three and four-story buildings almost exactly like each other, and standing like factory boxes awaiting shipment, but never called for. In front of each building was a little, square lawn hemmed in between the sidewalk and the curbstone—tiny squares of dusty green lost in a solved and colorless problem in material geometry. Carl greeted them with a gesture of ironical brotherhood as he hurried along the walk, while people, observing his downcast gaze and saluting hands, sometimes paused to doubt his sanity.
The glib suavity of a midsummer night sprinkled its sounds down the street and the doorsteps and walks were heavy with men, women and children, parading the uncomfortable drabness of their clothes and unwinding their idle talk. In pairs and squads, youths and girls strolled past Carl, laughing and playing to that exact degree of animal abandon tolerated by the street lights of a civilization, and sometimes crossing the forbidden boundary line, with little bursts of guilty spontaneity. Amid the openness of the street they were forced to become jauntily evasive of the old sensual madness brought by a summer evening, and they sought the refuges of crudely taunting words, snickering withdrawals, and tentative invitations. They were sauntering toward the kittenish excitements of ice-cream sundaes, moving pictures, and kisses traded upon the shaded benches in a nearby public park. Thought had subsided in their heads to a kindly mist that clung to the rhythm of their emotions, though in the main, their minds were merely emotions that vainly strove to become discreet. Most people are incapable of actual thought, and thinking to them is merely emotion that calmly plots for more concrete rewards and visions.
Carl looked upon the people on the sidewalks with the attitude of an unscrupulous stranger, and in his fancy he measured them for material gains and attacks, without a trace of warm emotion in his regard. To him they were merely alien figures busily engaged in deifying the five senses, and they mattered no more than shadowy animals blind to his aims and presence. He had long since frozen his emotions in self-defense and nothing could unloosen them save the timidly mystical lyrics which he wrenched from the baffled surfaces of his heart. During the four years of his life as a soldier and hobo he had often looked upon some of the darker and more rawly naked shades of sexual desire in the people around him, but after a first period of mechanical curiosity he had drawn aloof from what he considered a blind, shrieking, fantastic parade. “This wearisome game of advancing and retreating flesh, always trying to lend importance to an essential monotone, can go to hell,” he had muttered to himself. “I’ll yield to my sexual desires at rare intervals, but I’ll do it in the brief and matter-of-fact manner in which a man spits into a convenient cuspidor.” Women to him were simply moulds of dull intrigue, irritating him with their pretenses of animation and with the oneness of their appeal.
As he walked between the incongruities of hard street surfaces and soft noises, everything around him seemed to be vainly trying to conceal a hollow monotone. Middle-aged and old people sat around the doorsteps of the box-like apartment-houses, and the circumscribed and hair’s-breadth shades of intelligence and defeat on their faces were transparent over one color and shape. Each of these people strove to convince himself that his relaxation on this summer evening was a glittering honor conferred by hours of virtuous toil, though at times discontent suddenly raised their voices high in the air. It was as though they lifted musical instruments, gave them one helpless blow, and retired to apathy, scarcely aware of what they had done. Carl looked at them with a weary indifference that almost verged upon hatred, and hurried down the cement walk.
As he neared the apartment-house where his parents lived it suddenly occurred to him that the entrance might be decorated by people who would recognize him and comment upon his appearance and his abrupt return. The thought of their amused and veiled contempt, or their assumption of superior compassion, made him cringe a little and he turned to a side-street that led to an alley which extended behind the block in which his parents lived. He passed through the dismal rear yard of beaten earth and ascended the wooden stairway. A negro janitor, who had been working in this place for several years, gazed at him, at first with suspicion and then with a slowly pitying grin of recognition.