“Look at him,” said Mrs. Felman. “Sits there like a piece of wood! Have you nothing to say for yourself? Why, you haven’t told us how-do-you-do. Inhuman! I don’t see how I ever gave birth to such a creature as you.”
Carl had been sitting like a stone figure, dressed by the playful passerby known as Life and yet absolutely void of life. His mute indifference had seduced all suggestions of flesh from him and even his blonde beard and hair seemed pasted upon an effigy. Finally the clever semblance of emotion returned to his body and sent an experimental tremble to see whether the flesh was prepared to receive another animated disguise. His hands twitched as though they were striving to overcome their paralysis in an effort to obey some powerful signal. As he listened to the jerky tirades of his parents—sterility seeking to regain a fertility by the use of a staccato voice—part of him wanted to cringe and win the convulsive shield of tears, while another part longed to bound from the insipid, brittle room and glide aimlessly into the night. The cringing mountebank, unfairly aided by physical fatigue, won this inner skirmish, and Carl decided to silence the anger of his parents by speaking to them in a way that would make them bewildered, since bewilderment is but a shade removed from frightened respect. It was the only pitiful little stunt that could offer him a small respite from the poverties of noise that were assailing him—the favorite purchase of Indian medicine-men, Druid priests, circus barkers and other childlike charlatans.
“You see, the situation has been complicated,” he answered slowly, with the voice of a loftily enervated teacher. “Complicated. I have tried to save a possible poet from death—always a noble but redundant proceeding—but it seems that his skin must burn. I’ve come back now to make his coffin and stud it with gold. Gold would seem to be a favorite metal of yours, my dear parents. Surely you will be satisfied now. And it is also possible that you may help me with the funeral arrangements, since this burial, unlike plebeian ones, may extend over several years. And what else do you want me to say? I have so many acrobatic words and they would love to perform for you, but I am tired to-night. True, I am a rascal. Can you forget that embarrassing challenge for one evening?”
He broke his stonelike repose into one forward motion as he leaned toward his parents, turning upon them the prominently somnolent eyes that had been the sole gift from his father’s face, and smiling like an exhausted but lightly poised angel. His parents were stunned, for their indignant assurance had suddenly recoiled from an unexpected, blank wall. They could not quite understand his words and yet they felt that he was mocking them. The gracious glibness of his voice dwarfed them with the mystery of its meanings. This monster was not ashamed of himself—what could it signify? But, after all, it was rather difficult to be angry at a man when you were not quite sure whether his words were flattering or sneers. Carl rose abruptly from the chair. Now he controlled the situation for a time. He kissed his mother’s forehead lightly and smiled at his father.
“I’m tired and hungry,” he said. “A little food and sleep will fix me up, though, and to-morrow I’ll look for work of some kind.”
“Crazy, crazy, just like he always was,” said his father, turning away with a partly appeased and patient manner. After all, one must give the proper blend of pity and tolerance to one who is truly insane.
The face of his mother held a virtuous impatience that made her large nose go up and down like a see-saw, and on the see-saw a dash of reluctant tenderness rode.
“I’ll get you something from the ice-box,” she said. “You’re still so young—twenty-two you’ll be next week—and we may yet live to be proud of you. If you’ll only get rid of your funny writing notions and your stealing ideas. My God, what a combination!”
Afterwards, as Carl ate, they sat at the kitchen table with him. Mrs. Felman was tall and strong, with a body on which plumpness and angles met in a transfigured prizefight of lines. The long narrowness of her face was captured by a steep nose slightly hooked at the top and her thin lips were not unlike the relics of a triumphant sneer. Even when they tried to be satisfied they never quite lost their expression of tight gloating. Above her high cheek-bones her eyes were bitter tensions of light, and a remnant of greyish-brown hair receded from the moderate and indented rise of her forehead. Her skin, once pink, was now roughly florid, like a petal on which many boots have been scraped and cleaned. Mr. Felman was her violent refutation. Short and hampered by plumpness, the large roundness of his face held the smirking emphasis of a greyish-red moustache, huge and clipped at the ends. His thick lips blossomed uncompromisingly over his fair double chin, and his low forehead, madly scratched by a plowman, stood between the abrupt curve of his small nose and a ruff of dark red hair pestered by grey. An expression of carelessly earthly humor, banqueting on shallowness, fitted snugly upon his face and only his eyes, bulging with sleep, brought a metaphysical contradiction. He watched his son with a lazy, half-curious pity.
“Noo, what have you been doing all this time?” he asked.