“I become rather tired of these anarchists who are forever trying and plotting to blow up the city-hall,” said Edith. “They’re neither artists nor dull, useful citizens and they serve no purpose that I can see. If they imagine that they can change the present system of things by shrieking and murdering people they ought to be sent to a school for the feeble-minded.”
“I’m not so sure that I’d want to see things radically changed,” said Jarvin. “Of course I know that there’s a great deal of graft and injustice everywhere but I’m not sure that I’d care to live in a Utopia—wickedness and cruelty are far more interesting.”
“The trouble with these anarchists and socialists is that they miss all the beauty in life,” said Martha. “If you show them a painting or a poem they think that you’re trying to waste their time, unless it contains a social message.”
“I think that it’s cruel and useless to try to take another man’s life,” said Helen, earnestly. “I hate this fellow, Pearlman!”
Kone listened to this stagnant symposium of viewpoints, with a patient sneer.
“In Russia we are more accustomed to murder,” he said. “We have not attained the—what shall I say?—the genial and practical compromises of your American democracy. In our country, alas, oppression takes off its mask and swings a red sword! If you will realize that death does not hold for us the mysterious terror that it holds for you it may help you to understand Pearlman. He came to this country—a young Russian—sentimental, idealistic, crowded with naive longings for martyrdom. He wanted to die for the people—that grand, massive, mysterious, and yet near and real people! When he tried to kill a millionaire, who was stubbornly refusing to arbitrate with his striking men, Pearlman was choked with a poem of liberation that could not be denied. Then the icy reality of his next twenty years—condemned by both society and the strikers whom he had tried to help, surrounded by the rigid leer of iron bars; and squeezed into a niche of futility.... This crucified Russian does not need your sarcasm, my friends.”
The conversation staggered and scampered for another hour, with everyone save Carl animatedly endeavoring to conceal the fact that he was in no way interested in anyone’s opinions except his own, and at last the party packed away its comedies, irritations, and convictions, and arose from the chairs. There were farewells, with just the right compound of gaiety and caution, and the gathering separated.
Carl and Alfred Kone went to the latter’s room in a dormitory at the university and sat until an early hour of the morning, arguing with an intensity that made their tobacco smoke seem a cloud of gunpowder. Kone was that tense incongruity—an ironical sentimentalist. Within him, emotion cajoled thought to a softer brutality and thought intruded its staccato, exploring note upon the limpid abandon of emotion. A deliberate friendship rose between these men, like a translucent wall through which men can see each other without touching, for each one knew that the other held a baffling insincerity of imagination and was afraid that he might be deftly ridiculed if he failed to measure his words. Kone admired the nimble restlessness of Carl, a quality which he was compelled mechanically to imitate, while Carl liked the explosive way in which Kone evaded himself. Kone was now almost thirty years old but his machine-like capering made him seem much younger and he bounded through life like a sophisticated street-urchin, swindling himself with fiercely endurable makeshifts in place of dead dreams. His tragedy rested in the fact that he was not a creator and the knowledge of this was to him a secret poison from which he had to escape with many a gale of make-believe laughter.
CHAPTER XIV.
One afternoon, four months after the Apperson party, Carl, Kone, and Jenesco, a Roumanian painter, sat in the latter’s little blending of studio and bedroom and looked at a landscape which he had just finished. Jenesco’s eyes lazily flirted with triumph and his small, ruddy face displayed the expression of a child throwing a few last, unnecessary grains upon a sand-hill.