He extracted a soiled roll of pencilled, smudged papers from an inside pocket of his coat and stroked them as though they were a gathering of living presences. The paper became smooth skin to him and he questioned it with his fingers. This reaction was not a sensual one but sprang from his longing for a reality that had so far eluded his consciousness. His poems, peeping with eyes of fanciful promises above the veils that redeemed their faces, were more concrete to him than actual flesh and breath.
CHAPTER III.
He sat in the rocking-chair, tired and vaguely oppressed, clutching the paper in the manner of one who clings to a tangible encouragement in the midst of fantastic lies and fists. His parents came into the room at last and turned on an electric light without at first noticing him in the semi-gloom. Turning, his mother saw him in the chair. Her hands flew to her breast, in two tight slants, as she impulsively pictured the presence of a bearded burglar, and then she recognized him and insulted her emotions with a cross between a gasp and a squawk.
“It’s Carl! Carl! For God’s sake, when did you come in?”
“About an hour ago, through the window that father always leaves open,” said Carl, waiting with a poised and resigned smile for the inevitable cannonade.
His father came in from the kitchen, where he had gone for a drink of water. Seeing Carl, he slowly challenged him with sleepily prominent eyes.
“S-o-o, s-o! You’re back here again,” he said. “I always said that you would come back. I knew you would get tired of bumming around. I knew it. Well, you loafer, what do you want from us now? Some more money out of my pants-pockets, maybe? You’re a son that I should be proud of; oh, yes!”
“Yes, and a fine condition he comes back in,” said Mrs. Felman, who was beginning to be angry at herself because she was not quite as wrathful at Carl as she felt that she should have been. A louder voice might supply this missing intensity. “A fine condition! Look, will you, at his shoes, and his clothes, and the beard on his face. A nice specimen to be trotting back to his parents after four years! When he needs us he comes back, oh, sure, but we wasn’t good enough for him when he ran away and stole our money. We should tell him to go right back where he came from. Right back!”
She sat down with an air of stifled indignation that strained in its effort to capture an actual condition, and with many gasping words she tried to piece together the image of an inexplicable reptile. She was a woman whose emotions, garrulously bitter because of the material strait-jackets in which they had writhed for years, were ever determined to exalt their bondage, if only to win relief from pain. Carl had always been an evil enigma to her, one that was at times half guessed—the accusing finger of her youth, sometimes barely discerned through the mist of lost desires. To escape these momentary exposures she had often swung the blindness of an anger that was directed as much at herself as at Carl. The father, however, had obliterated his past self with a more jovial carelessness and had stolen the consoling fumes of many taverns, so that he felt little need for the shrouds of loud noise.
“Well, at least you showed good sense in coming through the back way,” he said, looking at his son with a mixture of wonder and humorous contempt. “You would have made a fine sight for the neighbors on the front steps! We would never have heard the last of it. Noo, noo, what did you come back for? If it’s just to play your old tricks again, you can walk right out of here, I tell you. I’ll stand for no more nonsense from you. Turn over a new leaf and you’re welcome here, but no more of your writing, and fancy talk, and high notions!”