The incongruous love-song of the conversation continued as they departed for the Apperson apartment. Carl became morbidly jovial as though striving to goad himself into a mood, but underneath his words he was sad as he side-stepped Helen’s heavy lunges. “I have never actually had youth—that glistening mixture of blunders, sighs, cruel laughters, and a pleasant sadness that does not cut too deeply,” he said to himself as he listened to the obviously proud youth of the two women.
CHAPTER XIII.
Kone had already arrived at the apartment and was waiting on the front porch. His heavy body, of medium height, held the arrogant bulge of muscles beneath his light grey suit and his pale brown face cradled a wraith of bitter alertness—a sneer attempting to break through the concealing flesh. He had a short flattened nose, thick lips, and the eyes of a forced and sprightly demon, and the dark abundance of his eyebrows receded into a low forehead, which in turn ended in a mass of black hair brushed backward. He had come to America some six years before this late Autumn evening; had first worked as a porter in a department store; had mastered English with a miraculous speed; and was now studying at a neighboring university and earning a living by teaching Russian to classes of children. In place of that violently disguised boredom commonly known as a heart he seemed to have an over-perfect dynamo that made him a mechanical wild-man—there was a sharp, strained persistency in all of his movements and the fact that he never deigned to falter in his words and gestures gave him an aspect of well-maintained artificiality. He threw his vivid grin to Carl.
“Hah, poet who seems to sleep but is always awake—greetings,” he called out, in the crisply dramatic way in which he usually spoke. “‘Demons lurk in your dimples’—you should have written that line about yourself.”
“Portraits are merely pretexts—secret portraits of oneself tortuously extracted from the blankness of other people,” said Carl.
“You would like to believe that. The involved egoism of youth!”
“It might be proving your case to answer you,” said Carl, laughing.
Kone was one of the few men who could make him laugh, since he had the odd habit of laughing only in praise and scarcely ever in derision—a custom born in the loneliness of his former years. Kone greeted Martha, who came in later, with words in which an adroitly raised respect and daring sensuality were carefully mixed, but, although her surface was flattered by his obeisance, his attentions failed to penetrate her radiant self-immersion. That would have been a feat worthy of century-old preservation. She listened, like a convinced and mysterious referee, while Kone and Carl indulged in the precise uselessness of argument—a discussion on whether Dostoevsky was an insane mystic, drunk with the details of reality, or an emotional search-light stopping at the edge of the world. The talk led to a question of the exact value of originality.
“So, you are looking for originality,” said Kone with a metallic mockery in his voice. “A man may stand on his head without in any way disturbing the universe. Has it not occurred to you that life is only a series of reiterations beneath the transparent gowns of egoism?”
“I prefer the gowns when they are a little less transparent. I might also have to know why a man was standing on his head before I could make any conjecture concerning the agitation of the universe”—an amused respect was in Carl’s voice. He liked the stilted lunges of Kone.