Blackguard

by Maxwell Bodenheim

Instigation

CHAPTER XVI.

The train in which Carl was riding rolled slowly through the outskirts of a southern city and he looked out at the rows of negro cottages and hovels that plaintively cringed underneath the wide foliage of willow and magnolia trees. Most of the cottages were unpainted and grey with the impersonally chaste kiss of time, while the hovels were mere flimsy boxes covered with black tar paper. Sunflowers and morning glories stood amid the weeds and twined about the slanting fences like gaudy virgins dismayed at their sight of a lewdly disordered room and appealing to the sunlight for protection. Negro women in faded sunbonnets and wrappers could sometimes be seen shuffling down the thickly dusty roads and negro children, in weird incoherences of tattered clothes, tumbled around the humble doorsteps. The children were little black madmen unconsciously dodging a huge fist that was concealed beneath the scene. The dust of a late August morning had dropped upon all things, sifting its listless sadness into every crevice and crack, and even the fierce sun could not dispel this invasion.

Every shade of this scene was an accurately friendly answer to Carl’s mood and he squandered the brooding light of his eyes upon all of the visual details outside of the train window. The mask of careless bitterness upon his face said its hello to the cowering and sinister apathy of the houses and people, and viciously he longed to leap out of the window and join the unashamed animal rites which these hovels and human beings were parading. Here an alien race was standing amid clouds of evil-smelling squalor and staring at its broken longings and dreams—staring with a wild hopelessness. This race had lost its own civilization and was clumsily imitating that of the white man, not because of any innate desire, but because it had been forced to blend into its surroundings or perish, and Carl felt that all of his life had also been an animated lie of flesh and speech, devised to aid him in escaping from the contemptuous eyes that vastly hemmed him in. And now, with the feelings of a man who had neatly murdered himself, he was planning to turn the knives of his thoughts and emotions upon other people, not for revenge, but because the marred ghost of himself harshly desired to convince itself that it was still alive. If this ghost had yielded to the subterfuges of kindness and gentleness it would have become too much aware of its own thin remoteness from life, and cruelty alone could induce it to believe that it was still welded to the actualities of existence.

As Carl sat at the window he could often hear the grotesquely quavering, boldly mellow laughter of negro men trudging to their work, but these sounds did not express humor to him. They held the strong effort of men to flee from tormenting longings and the numbly vicious rebuke of poverty, and the sounds which these men released merely symbolized the long strides of their fancied escape. Laughter can be merely the explosive sound with which human beings seek to demolish each other—the indirect weapon of self-hatred. Carl laughed with a strained loudness, throwing a magnified echo to the negroes on the dusty roads outside, and a drowsily plump, middle-aged woman in an opposite seat opened her mouth widely and huddled into a corner, fearing that she might be attacked by a maniac. He gave her a glance and feasted upon her fear, for her shrinking attitude was falsely and deliciously persuading the ghost of himself that it still held a potency over other people.

Sometimes a song crazily drifted to Carl’s ears from one of the negro cottages—a song that was weighted with loosely undulating sadness—and he listened with a stern greediness. Music is a huge, treacherous sound made by thoughts and emotions to console them for their feeling of minute mortality, and after it has given them its dream of permanent size it disappears, slaying the illusion with silence. Now it brought a delusion of substantiality to the ghost within the mould of Carl’s flesh and he listened in a trance of gratitude. Lost in the obliterations of his grief, he felt infinitely nearer to these abject, musical negroes outside than to the artificially silent, stiffly satisfied white people with whom he was riding. Grief, which is an insane tyrant among emotions, has an effortless way of crossing all boundaries and walls, but it does not reveal any hidden oneness between human beings. Grief places men and women in a vacuum of renunciation, or shows them that they have little connection with the people around them and that they have been enduring an alien camp. Ruled by this latter discovery, Carl looked with an undisguised hatred at the formal, complacent white people in the railway coach and felt that he was deeply related to the negroes outside.

Almost three months had passed since the invisible knife had swung into the middle of his being, and since he had staggered across the agitated sincerity of night to the peaceful compassion of the young school teacher. Now and then he remembered their silent walk down the sturdy brightness of the country road—a silence which had been a soft wreath ironically thrown upon the weakness of words—and the troubled way in which she had helped him brush his clothes and wash his face, and the stumbling simplicity of the words with which she had tried to comfort him. Although he had been a stranger to her, she had thrown aside that distrust which is born of sensual pride and a cheaply purchased worldly wisdom, influenced by the helpless directness of his demeanor and by the supple humility which a grief of her own had once left within her. The force of her fearlessness had fallen upon him like the sweeping touch of another world, and in his daze he had actually believed that she had been sent by the woman whom he had lost as an alert messenger striving to teach him how to hold his ghostlike shoulders up beneath a future burden. If she had held a human aspect to him he would have hated and reviled her, for then she would have been merely an atom in the vast, turbid reality that had slowly lured him to an imbecilic torture. He accepted the curves of her body as an unearthly visitation and possessed them as one who passes through a fragile ritual. But after his departure from her, as he once more walked down the shaggy, solid country road, she had tiptoed away from him with a spectral quickness, and the clamor of a world had once more attacked him, like the scattered falsehoods of an idiot. The rustle of trees had become an insignificant whisper of defeat; the songs of birds had changed to the shrill vacuities with which a monster entertained himself; the colored groups of flowers had become the pitiful remains of a violated carnival; the earth beneath his feet had altered to the stolid aloofness of a giant moron; and the sunlight had seemed to be a theatrical accident.

When he had reached the city, with its orderly ranks of houses and factories and its dully precise pavements, the scene had been to him a cunning mirage made by dying people to suppress their realization of the advancing destruction. The people on the streets had held the complicated glee and perplexity of an insane slave trying to extract an imaginary importance from his bondage. He had longed to jump at their throats and silence the feverish lie that was reviling the truthful stare of his eyes and only his physical exhaustion had prevented him from doing this. Grief is a spontaneous welcome sent to the insanity that lurks within all human beings, and its invitation greets a responsive strength or a frightened weakness of imagination, according to the man or woman who receives it.

And so he had plodded back to his home, carrying within him a numb confusion that was sometimes disrupted by vicious impulses, and forcing the ghost of himself into a motion which it could not understand. He had tried to answer the angry and uneasy questions of his parents with plausible lies at his own expense. Yes, he had met someone who had given him bad news and in a fit of temper he had rushed from the railroad station and deserted his valises. What was in the telegram? Oh, just a message from a friend. Where had he been for the past two days? Why, he had gone on a spree and had slept off his drunkenness at the house of a friend. Shouldn’t he be locked in an insane asylum? Yes, but life had already granted him that favor. With a glib tongue he tried to serenade the barren comedy of improbabilities to which he had returned, but he scarcely heard the words that he was uttering, and as he wrung them from the empty ghost that was within him he longed to strike his parents in the face and feed greedily upon their rage and astonishment, in an effort to convince himself that he was still substantially powerful, still able to assert his reality by injuring the people around him. With an act of this kind he could destroy the indifferent fantasy of life and change it to a tangible and active opponent. The man standing before him—his father—was merely an irritating puppet whose lack of understanding moved jerkily, governed by the hands of an ignorant dream.