Carl gave a sigh to the grave dullness that marched forth in his uncle’s voice and meditated upon the curious differences in sound with which people petted their limitations and discretions. These differences were known as words, and when they pleased a great number of people they were hailed as symbols of genius or power, but Carl could see no distinction between any of them. Like a horde of tired servants, they pranced to the prides and hatreds of men and then returned to their common grave, and only their exact arrangement gave them a flitting assumption of life. “What is the difference between this old man and myself? Several keys to false doors of thought and emotion, misplaced or lost in his youth and found in mine.” Through reiterating these plausibilities he tried to give bulk and texture to the fantasy of existence.
The automobile stopped before the Edleman home, which was a large two-story structure—a partial reproduction of the Colonial period modified to conform to the more exuberant inclinations of an Alsatian Jew. Four broad, high wooden pillars, painted white, rose over a wide veranda and ended in a slanting roof of black slate, and the walls were of red brick courted by an abundance of vines. A large garden, with tons of fruit trees and brilliant episodes of flowers, surrounded the house and was enclosed by a level hedge of shrubs and a low iron fence. An impression of dreamlessly cluttered luxury, verging in spots upon bland somnolence, proclaimed the empty heart of the place, but it was almost a distinct flattery to Carl, who had grown tired of aggressive angles and plain surfaces. Here, at least, the mirage held a sleek flirtation with bunches of color and burdened curves.
His aunt Bertha, a short, stout woman in a gown of brown taffeta and white lace, welcomed him in a babbling and languid fashion and showed him to his room. She was a softly shallow woman whose major interests were card parties and the lingering intricacies of gossip. The flabby roundness of her face was in the last grip of middle age and her mind was as scanty and precisely glistening as the greyish-brown hair that slanted back from her low forehead. After the dinner, she hurried off to the mildly mercenary rites of a bridge whist party and Carl was left to wander idly around the garden. He sat on the grass beneath a persimmon tree and played with lazy, cruel thoughts in which he slapped a man’s face or tortured a woman’s cheek, still moved by his old mania to profane the empty dream which life had become to him, forcing it into a vigorous duplicate of reality.
The bright afternoon, with its myriads of shrilly clear and hissing sounds, was like a troubled falsetto rapture and he weakly fought to bring it nearer to his senses. As he sat beneath the tree he resolved to give his mind some labor with which it could transform the vision to a more solid picture, and he thought of the people who would soon be embarrassing him with their mouths and eyes. They were Jews of a kind that had rapidly spread over the south. The older people among them had migrated to the south some forty years previously and had gradually won large or comfortable fortunes by means of their thriftiness and trading abilities. They were now contented grand-and great-grand-parents, surrounded by two generations of their offspring, and all of them were strangely indifferent to the austere mysticism for which the Jewish race is so verbosely noted. Dreamless, voluble, self-assured, they angled with their religion in a half-hearted way and blackmailed, with money, the occasional flutters of mental curiosity. They had picked up several mannerisms of the south—softly drawling voices and unhurried movements—and the only things that distinguished them as Jews were the curved gusto of their faces and the fact that they mingled only with each other—a last, lukewarm trace of loyalty left by the surge of centuries of past incidents.
Carl went into the house and returned, with paper and pencil, to his station beneath the persimmon tree. He strove to write a poem to the woman whom he had lost. It was a torture that, like a starved monster, devoured the softer spaces within his heart. It was as though he were endeavoring to compress the ruins of an entire world, making them narrower and narrower, more and more alive, until at last they formed the body of a woman. The effort brought him an actual physical pain; drops of sweat were born on his forehead, and his spirit reeled like a mesmerized, beaten drunkard. “All of life is a lie unless I make her appear on this paper,” he cried aloud to the persimmon-tree leaves, for the lack of better gods. He detested his own futility and sought to avenge himself upon it. When the poem was finished he fell into a troubled, plundered sleep in which his consciousness busily made reports that were unheeded. He could still see the trees and flowers, but they were like the edge of the universe miraculously brought near to his eyes. Finally, with an effort like a straight line thrusting aside several worlds, he roused himself and read the poem. It failed to satisfy him; it was a tangle of treacherous promises and pleading fragments—the line of one of her arms, with an ashen delicateness; the nervously boyish rebuke of her eyes; the tenuous defiance of her heart; the curled merriments of her hair—fragments fastened to a slip of white paper and lacking the great surge of breath that could have whirled them into a speaking whole. He had written other poems to her and they had produced the same result; but still, huddled under the tree, he continued to write, much like a dying man who has no choice save to gasp for breath, only in his case it was a ghost that struggled to avoid a second death. The ghost was seeking to escape a final extinction. He wrote until the lengthened shadow of the tree told him that he must return to the house; but it took him at least ten minutes before he could censure his face and control his breath. At last, with the thinly passive mask once more adjusted and held by the slenderest of threads, he walked from the garden.
At supper he met his cousin, Dr. Joseph Rosenstein, who was living at the Edleman home and who treated him with a suspecting affability. The presence of a poet is always a vague challenge to those people who feel that he is somehow at variance with the complacent finalities of their lives, but who cannot draw the difference into a clearer antagonism. For this reason they try to cover their distrust with a nervous and questioning amiability. After jovially advising Carl to write a sonnet to a doctor, protesting to a great admiration for the prettiness of poetry, and asking Carl whether he didn’t think that practical people were also of some use in the world, Rosenstein deserted the farce and began to discuss the technical details of an operation with Dr. Edleman. Bertha Edleman uttered some placid remarks concerning the possibility of Carl’s writing short stories that would bring him a great deal of money; inquired after his parents in a detailed but listless way; and then, with more vigor, commenced to speak of engagements, marriages and divorces within her immediate circle. Dr. Edleman, by turns waggish and blunt, presided over the groups of corrupted words. Since Carl was anxious not to provoke these people, he stooped to the task of uttering pleasantly obvious remarks in a timid and deliberate fashion, and since they secretly felt that his work gave him a rank lower than theirs, they liked the subdued and abashed manner in which he spoke.
CHAPTER XVIII.
After that evening he managed to protect his loneliness with clever words. He told the Edlemans that he was looking for material for short stories and that he intended to roam about the city; and, elated at his purpose, they did not object. Since most of his relatives were still displaying their dignity, jewelry, and card-playing abilities at northern summer resorts, he found it easy to be alone.
In the midst of his restless, empty wanderings he often sat for a while in a little park that rustled and nodded upon the top of a bluff overlooking a broad river. There he would stare out at the wide, yellowish-brown flat of water, and the dull green convolutions of the distant shore, and the water would become an ethereal canvas where he painted fugitive salutes to the woman who had fled from life’s semblances. Under the spell of a melting daze he would sit for hours, almost unconscious of the fact that he held a body of slowly breathing flesh. At one end of the park the line of benches turned sharply in toward the city, and this shaded place, guarded by bushes and trees, was known as “Rounder’s Corner.” It was frequented by thieves, drug peddlers, sly, lacquered women and an occasional vagrant, and they gathered there from twilight on and drained the fierce insincerities of conversation and whiskey, with sometimes the lucid edge of cocaine. Since Carl came to this spot only during the afternoons, he did not see these people until, one evening, he managed to absent himself from the Edleman home on the pretense of desiring a trip on a river steamboat, and strolled into the park.
He sat on a bench and looked around him, trying to become interested in the immediate contortions of the fantasy. One glance told him the identity of the social circle into which he had dropped and he felt a jerk of attention, for the more openly rough and cruel people in life were to him reflections of his ghostly self, spied in a coarsely exaggerated mirror but none the less valid. Fresh from the lazy inanities of the Edleman house, he felt a little baffled vigor—the ghost lamenting its lack of exercise—and he longed to roll once more in that plastic phenomenon which men insist on calling mud. It was only through plastering himself with the concentrated moistness of earth that he could force himself to believe, for a time, in the reality of life, and he welcomed his chance to repeat this process. He scanned the whispering, laughing, loose-faced people around him and turned over in his mind different ways of approaching them, since he knew how easy it was to heap fuel upon their suspicions.