With a cry of hatred, Carl struck his father in the face and watched him reel back against the wall of the dining-room with a feeling of warm triumph. He struck him again and revelled in the blood that decorated the man’s lips. His mother shrieked with fear; his father returned the blows; and the two men fought around the room, overturning chairs and vases. Several neighbors, brought by the cries of his mother, rushed in and overpowered him. Together with his father, they held him down while someone summoned a patrol wagon, and he was taken to a cell in a police station. As he sat in the flatly smelling semi-gloom of the cell he caressed, with an overpowering fondness, the blood that had stiffened upon parts of his face, for it mutely testified that he had conquered the remote lie around him and altered it to a satisfying enemy. He had persuaded himself that he was still alive, and the blows which he had given his father had been the first proof of this illusory emancipation. Throughout the night, as he shifted upon the iron shelf that was his bed, he muttered to himself at regular intervals, “I am alive, I am still alive,” as though he were trying to preserve a triumphant dream that would soon disappear, and the grief within him rocked to and fro upon the words, using them as a cradle.
But when the morning dodged shamefacedly into his cell, bringing with it a faint retinue of city sounds, the annoying fantasy returned with full vigor, and the ghost within him stealthily assumed possession of his flesh. Once more he was a thinly wounded spectator, filled with an impotent hatred at the melee about him and longing for the lusty release of physical motion. Two small boys, lying upon their stomachs, peered through the grating of his cell window, which stood on a level with the sidewalk outside, and jibed at him. He cursed them incessantly, with an anger that was not directed at them, but at the meaningless tensions of their voices, and with the tumult of his own voice he vainly strove to shake the wraith within him to firmer outlines.
As he stood before the magistrate a few hours later, an incredulous sneer was on his face, as though the man at the desk above him were a pompous, talkative scarecrow, and with a stubborn silence he confronted the questions that were thrown at him. In a low, hesitating voice his father declared that he feared that his son had become insane, and the judge ordered an examination by one of the city physicians. Carl was returned to his cell, after his parents had pelted him with half-angry and half-bewildered sentences in an ante-room of the court, and as he sat again in his cell, surveying the rigid jeer of the iron bars, his hatred began to listen to the advice of cunning—a cunning pilfered from the wilted depths of his despair. He began to see that physical blows and silence were crude and ineffective weapons in his attack upon the insulting commotion of life and that, if he desired to injure human beings so that both he and they might become real for a moment, he must use more indirect and ingenious methods.
When the city physician, a tall, briskly-balanced man with no imagination, questioned him in his cell, he became a blandly appealing and submissive actor.
“Yes, doctor, I had a nervous breakdown from overstudy, you know, and for a time I’m afraid that I lost my reason. They tell me that I struck my father and this has horrified me, as I haven’t the slightest recollection of what I did. But I’ve gathered myself together now and I can promise you that I’ll never lose control of myself again—never! And I’m awfully sorry for what I did. I can assure you of the sincerity of my repentance.”
The physician was putty in Carl’s adroit hands—this composed young man with an intelligent, contrite speech must, of course, be quite sane. Carl, as he spoke to this man, slowly formed an evil grin beneath the cool mask of his face, and he relished the task of showering upon this man earnest platitudes, smooth imitations of that limited sleep known as “common sense,” and words of self-reproach, because this trickery brought back to him his old sense of power over his surroundings and offered a subtle outlet for his hatred of life. The physician ended by shaking his hand with a genial respect and when evening came he was given his freedom.
He returned to his home, repeating the soft treachery of his words while his fists still longed to lunge out at the faces in front of him, but the shrewdness of a ghost determined to regain a semblance of life by cleverly deceiving and punishing the people around it came to his rescue and controlled his body. His parents had felt wrathful at the presence of something which they could only dimly see and which he made no effort to clarify, but life had taught them to make a god of submission, and a heavy tenderness mingled with an alert fear crept into their posture toward him. He trudged back to the loquacious, coarse emptiness of his clerkship at the tobacco shop and shunned the world that he had previously inhabited, for he feared that if he met anyone whom he knew he would feel again the irresistible inclination to interrogate their throats, and he knew that these impulses would only lead to his own destruction. When he accidentally met some acquaintance on the street, he would hurry on like a nervous criminal, ignoring the other’s greetings.
He prowled about the city, still in search of a violent dream that could offer its delusion of reckless strength to the mutilated spirit whose complaints drove him on. He ran to the soiled raptures of prostitutes and sensually oppressed, adventurous girls who could be picked up on the streets, and gave them a twisted symphony of blows, curses, whispered insinuations, lies, while he revelled in the illusion of cruelty that was lending a false reality to the thin futilities of his mind and flesh. With a mixture of brutality and delicately simulated caresses, he overawed these women and they felt themselves in the presence of a charming, abstracted fiend, whose kaleidoscopic insincerity only made them long to change it to a gesture of actual love. He sought the company of thieves and hoodlums, and at first they distrusted him because his restrained manners and gently removed look were not proper credentials, but when they saw how eager he was for the impact of fists, and how he could take a blow and rise with a grin of stunned delight, they accepted him as an eccentric brother. They did not know that these actions were not born of courage, but were caused by a gigantic longing for physical pain—pain that could shock his numb spirit into a feeling of sharply hideous communion with an actual world.
But finally this life began to weary him because it could not reach the flimsy loneliness that stood within him. He carried within him at all times an audience of ghostly thoughts and emotions, and they were at last becoming bored with the stolen melodrama. He determined to practice an economy in movements and words, and he walked alone at night and on streets where the possibility of meeting someone who knew him would be distant. He watched the syncopated gliding of people with the irritation of a stranger. The men and women who drifted or bobbed along were cardboard mannikins to him and he vainly tried to give life to their flatness and lack of color. Sometimes he would pause and touch his arm and face, wondering at the odd inadequateness of their presence. Olga had become a living but invisible being who was constantly groping for him, with eyes unused to the outlines of earth, and sometimes finding his shoulder in a fleeting and accidental way. When this happened, he would turn around abruptly and berate his inability to extract her form from the concealing air. At such times he would often speak to her. “Olga ... Olga ... what is this unsought blindness that has come to both of us?” he would cry into the night air of a street. “A cruel chicanery ... a blurred and simple pause ... a little fantasy within a huge one? Am I a coward rolling in the mud that stretches before a vast gate? Life seems a fantastic conspiracy, panting and rattling in its efforts to hide the emptiness beneath it.... Olga ... take me to your burnished hermitage ... I am tired.”
He would walk on, trying to imagine what her answer had been, and winning an elusive and deliberately wrought consolation that stayed for an hour and then gradually departed. His life had settled into the recurrence of these reactions, when a second invitation arrived from his wealthy uncle in the southern city, and he had accepted merely because he wanted a new arena for his struggle with a discredited reality—fresher targets and a change in the illusion’s surface.