A peculiar species of happiness lurked beneath the weeping. Grief, hating itself, found a revengeful pleasure in attempting to tear and exhaust itself into death. Sometimes the turmoil subsided to a light and sibilant fight for breath. The animal noise departed then and a small soul, much lighter than a phantom sin, plucked unavailingly at the mysterious spear that had suddenly coerced its breast.... The dark words of twilight finally entered the room, making an opera of the marred lyricism that escaped from the hidden face on the bed. Then night pardoned the deficiencies of the room and corrected them with moonlight, creating a tragic and chaste boudoir. Carl Felman felt emptied of all sound, and a mad craving for motion stabbed his limbs. He wanted to rush endlessly into space, barely supported by the breathless consolation of running after something that could never be caught. This would also be of great value to his heart, which was a stiffly smirking acrobat who has broken his legs but still strives to continue the act.
He leaped from the bed and seized his cap. His mother, who had been entering his room at intervals and vainly questioning him, stopped him at the outer doorway.
“Carl, where are you going?” she cried, in a sharply fearful voice.
With a hugely mechanical effort he managed to twist low sounds from his useless lips.
“Just—for a—walk—back—soon.”
Without heeding her protests and questions, he fled down to the street. Human beings had disappeared, but he could see faces indented on the fronts of houses. One had a look of mangled suffering; another was studiously wicked, like a learned burglar; and a third bore the pathetic leer of a venturesome housemaid. He picked up these details, glanced at them a moment, and then threw them aside as though they were scandals from another planet. He passed into a region of three-story rooming-houses—flat wretches holding an air of patient cowardice. People surreptitiously filtered from the houses and walked down the street with Carl—chorus girls with plump, sneaky faces, underworld hoodlums with an air of wanly etched bravado, ponderously rollicking servant girls, clerks with the faces of genial mice, and meekly dazed old men stumping to their dish-washing jobs. To Carl they were also hurrying after something that had vanished and cajoling their mingled emptiness and pain with swift motion. Now and then he waved an arm to them in greeting, while an unearthly smile dug into his face. His gesture, when observed, was taken for an intended blow and he left attitudes of fear and pugnacity behind him.
He crossed a bridge above a narrowly turbid river. The oily lights and toiling tug-boats were to him an inexplicable affront. Their stillness and slow motion insulted his passion for speed and with the spite of a child he looked down at his feet for a stone to throw at them. Finding a pavement block, he cast it into the river and rushed along, feeling for a second an exquisite relief. He passed into a crowded theater and business section. The strained melee of lights and noises became an intensely sympathetic audience, urging on his race, and the faces and forms of human beings met in an applauding confusion. With the cunning of a blind animal, he darted through their ranks and avoided collisions. Finally he reached another apartment-house region—large brick boxes without a vestige of expression. “The faces are gone!” he cried, with a gasping incredulity, as though inanimate things had alone become real to him. Moonlight, unable to fathom their petty baldness, clung to them with an attitude of limpid disgust. Thickly contented families, mild and tightly garnished, issued from the doorways, trundling to some moving-picture show or ice-cream palace. An aspect of well-washed and hollow serenity protested against Carl’s direct flight. Wrapped by this time in a warmly merciful daze, he did not detect the drably swaying counterfeit of happiness that would have awakened within him a maniacal response.
He sped down street after street like an inhuman hunter, and came to rows of wooden houses separated by large fields and blackguarded by the smoke of nearby factories and mills. An attitude of mildewed supplication—a beggar rising from ferns and mud—lifted itself over the scene. Rushing along, he plunged into the open country, where wild flowers, ditches, and fields of corn pungently conversed with moonlight in a language too simple and formless for human ears to catch. But Carl’s ears had become inhuman, and he started a loud talk with the growing objects around him, revelling in their sympathy and advice. By this time his long, half-running walk had weakened him and he began to lurch over the soft earth of the road like a crushed and fantastic drunkard.
The ingenuous brilliance of a cloudless morning stood hugely over the green fields and yellowish brown roads and an air of alert innocence went exploring between the flowers and ditches. Harriet Radler walked slowly down the country road on her way to the schoolhouse where she ruled a little band of demons, drudges, minor poets, and clowns. She lingered along the roadside, sometimes stooping to tear a tiger lily from the shallow ditch. Slender and short, a pliant virginity twined itself around her body. Her young face, pink and barely whipped, had been marked by a tentative sorrow and was hungering for the actual battle. Her black and white clothes lazily flirted with imps of morning air and were encouraged by her eyes.