Maxwell Bodenheim

“ Then she heard a mingled rustle and splash and saw that the man was rising to his feet. He stood with bent knees over the mud of the ditch, his black clothes garlanded with slime, his face twitching into life beneath its stiff mask of earth. With a squeal of fright she scrambled to her feet and ran down the road. The man in the ditch, Carl Felman, felt that something was still evading him and once more experienced the hunter’s frenzy that had tumbled him over the night. Gripped by a superhuman agility, he transcended his stiff joints and pursued her down the road. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They sat in a hammock on the porch, and Carl suddenly kissed her with the theatrical intensity of one who is trying to shake off a deliberate role. The gasping expostulations of her voice were contradicted by the limpness of her body, and sighing at this prearranged incongruity, Carl kissed her again, still feeling like a skillful charlatan and still hoping to lure himself into a tumultuous spontaneity. This time she was silent but gripped his shoulders with both hands, while little shades of fright and desire gambled for her face. ”

“ The masked rush of their bodies deprived them of a divided sexual appearance and lure—men and women, touching elbows without emotion, were swept into one lustreless sex which darted in pursuit of a treacherously invisible reward. The entire structure around them—buildings, signs, and iron slabs—stood like a house of cards carefully supported by an essence that rose from the rushing people, and Carl felt that if these men and women were to become silent and motionless, in unison, the house of cards would instantly lose its meaning and tumble down. ”

“ The complacent roughness of his voice, divided by the shallow wisdoms of the underdog, destroyed the feeling of tired communion which Carl had been sheltering, and his exhaustion began to creep apart from the man, like a tottering aristocrat. He was once more a proudly baffled creator, shuffling along after a day of useless movements, and his hatred for human beings awoke from its short sleep and brandished a sneer on his loose and dirt-streaked face.
He walked into a corner saloon with Petersen and gulped down a glass of beer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A deliberate friendship rose between these men, like a translucent wall through which men can see each other without touching, for each one knew that the other held a baffling insincerity of imagination and was afraid that he might be deftly ridiculed if he failed to measure his words. Kone admired the nimble restlessness of Carl, a quality which he was compelled mechanically to imitate, while Carl liked the explosive way in which Kone evaded himself. ”

“ Since Carl almost never voiced his actual thoughts and emotions to people, he grasped, as usual, the luxury of speaking to himself.
“Electric light is only the molten fear of men,” he said, as he strode through the unreal haste of the crowds. “Men are afraid to look at the night and they have given it eyes as stiffly frightened as their own. Underneath the comforting glare of this second blindness they protect themselves. ”

“ As he looked at this woman Carl noticed that her eyes were not those of the usual flesh trader—shifting and infantile—but were filled with a tense distraction. The mere sullen aftermath of whiskey, or the departure of a man? No, it almost seemed that she was actually brooding over emotions that had removed her leagues from the bench against which her body was pressed. Eyes are often unwitting traitors and they tell the truth more readily than the rest of the face, or words, since human beings are not so conscious of what their eyes are announcing. ”

“ At some time in their lives all of these people felt, dimly or strongly, for a moment or for years, the ludicrous ache of a desire to stand out clearly against their scene, but the loaded momentum of past lives—the choked influence of past futilities—pushed them along with a force which they could not withstand. It is really a stream of adroitly dead men and women that is fleeing down this street—surreptitiously dead people living in the bodies of a present reality and perpetuating the defeated essence of their past lives. ”

“ Carl felt like an emancipated hermit suddenly thrown as a sacrifice to an uproar of contending philosophies and artistic creeds. His mind, accustomed to solitary decisions, became bewildered amidst the bloodless, tin-sword battle around him and he wondered how he could possibly make his own voice heard in the egoistic din. Each man assured him that the other man was a fool or a charlatan, and he listened to their conflicting assumptions of wisdom with a naive dismay. ”

“ In a dim light men and women could not easily escape from each other, for the darkness would tend to press them together, but in this violent stare of light they are divided by a self-assured indifference. Watch them as they stride along with an air of gigantic, amusing importance. The crowd is really a single symbol of many isolations joined to a huge one. It sees only those people who are unpleasantly conscious of the electric glare, and who hurry through it with gestures of alert dislike, or with a slow and morbid desire for pain. ”

“ You simply know it when you see it. It quickens your breath and drops like music upon your soul. It’s the thing that makes you know that you have a soul—the radiant weariness that springs from everything that is strong, and lonely, and delicate, and elusive, and tortured.”
“The adjectives are stirring and the fact that they happen to be meaningless is of little importance,” said Carl. “I like the way in which you make love to your emotions.” ”

“ He threw his vivid grin to Carl.
“Hah, poet who seems to sleep but is always awake—greetings,” he called out, in the crisply dramatic way in which he usually spoke. “‘Demons lurk in your dimples’—you should have written that line about yourself.”
“Portraits are merely pretexts—secret portraits of oneself tortuously extracted from the blankness of other people,” said Carl.
“You would like to believe that. The involved egoism of youth!” ”

“ If some joker had taken a Gothic effigy of Christ, trimmed its beard, dressed it in grey and dirty clothes, and forced upon it an unwilling animation, he would have produced an exact duplicate of Carl’s aspect and gestures.
In the emotional confusion of the railroad-station, with its reluctant farewells and gushing greetings, Carl walked alone and abstracted, and he treated the scene as though it were a feverishly unreal mixture of drama and travesty. He strode with the careful haste of one who seeks to escape from an irritating dream but knows at the same time that his efforts are futile. ”

“ Life to her was a series of stiffly draped and modulated curves, violated only by rare moments of guarded exasperation and anger.
“Would you advise me to stop writing?” asked Carl.
“No, indeed,” she answered, with her first small smile. “Your work is rather promising and you seem to be quite young. Some of it reminds me of Arthur Symons. Of course, I don’t think that you will ever become a great poet, but we need lesser voices as well as greater ones, you know.” ”

“ Melodrama is the only real sincerity that life holds—the one surprising directness in a world of false and prearranged contortions. Perhaps I could ravish my fears and welcome it. I don’t know, and no one can until it actually arrives.”
But the two weeks died without the blundering interruption of drama, and Lucy and Carl parted on the last morning with a chuckling stoicism—tears and the syllables of laughter are always similar—the madcap protest of a last kiss—lips and tongues intent upon a future compensation—and a final flitting of hands. ”

“ Her breasts heaving beneath the blue muslin waist suggested the movements of loosely despairing hands. She sat with Carl on the grass of a park and wept in a barely audible manner as though she were intent upon giving firmer outlines to a blurred and elusive grief. Carl felt a softly potent disgust with himself and life. Human beings—what did they ever bring each other except pain cunningly disguised or reaching for a phantom ecstasy? ”

“ The strained melee of lights and noises became an intensely sympathetic audience, urging on his race, and the faces and forms of human beings met in an applauding confusion. With the cunning of a blind animal, he darted through their ranks and avoided collisions. Finally he reached another apartment-house region—large brick boxes without a vestige of expression. “The faces are gone!” he cried, with a gasping incredulity, as though inanimate things had alone become real to him. Moonlight, unable to fathom their petty baldness, clung to them with an attitude of limpid disgust. ”

“ Thought had subsided in their heads to a kindly mist that clung to the rhythm of their emotions, though in the main, their minds were merely emotions that vainly strove to become discreet. Most people are incapable of actual thought, and thinking to them is merely emotion that calmly plots for more concrete rewards and visions.
Carl looked upon the people on the sidewalks with the attitude of an unscrupulous stranger, and in his fancy he measured them for material gains and attacks, without a trace of warm emotion in his regard. ”

“ People surreptitiously filtered from the houses and walked down the street with Carl—chorus girls with plump, sneaky faces, underworld hoodlums with an air of wanly etched bravado, ponderously rollicking servant girls, clerks with the faces of genial mice, and meekly dazed old men stumping to their dish-washing jobs. To Carl they were also hurrying after something that had vanished and cajoling their mingled emptiness and pain with swift motion. ”

“ Kone had already arrived at the apartment and was waiting on the front porch. His heavy body, of medium height, held the arrogant bulge of muscles beneath his light grey suit and his pale brown face cradled a wraith of bitter alertness—a sneer attempting to break through the concealing flesh. He had a short flattened nose, thick lips, and the eyes of a forced and sprightly demon, and the dark abundance of his eyebrows receded into a low forehead, which in turn ended in a mass of black hair brushed backward. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the previous night he had met Petersen and had yielded to an invitation to accompany “two swell brunettes who don’t object to a gay time,” and the recollection of his violent, drunken contortions came to him like a weirdly teasing dream of no particular significance but leaving the temptation of nausea behind it. He had released a desecrating ghost of himself from the sneering recesses of his self-despair. Yes, you could burn away the sensual rubbish, with derisive gestures, but your emptiness and weariness always returned for their slow revenge. ”

“ The sleekly loquacious man in front of him, offering his shop-worn little adulterations of worldly wisdom, aroused Carl to a lightly vicious mood.
“You’ve wandered away from your natural field, Levy,” he said. “Talk about the cheap jewelry that you sell, or the physical merits of a woman, or the next candidate for mayor, or the latest prize-fight, but don’t speak about something that’s simply an irritating mystery to you. You know as much about poetry as I do about credits and discounts, but you’re a swaggering, muddy fool who imagines that the wisdom of the world has kissed his head. ”

“ She listened, like a convinced and mysterious referee, while Kone and Carl indulged in the precise uselessness of argument—a discussion on whether Dostoevsky was an insane mystic, drunk with the details of reality, or an emotional search-light stopping at the edge of the world. The talk led to a question of the exact value of originality.
“So, you are looking for originality,” said Kone with a metallic mockery in his voice. “A man may stand on his head without in any way disturbing the universe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am, of course, anxious to know what may be wrong with my work, and also what faint virtues it may hold. Sometimes I feel sure that I am not a poet and I allow myself the luxury of becoming angry at the persistent longing that makes me run after futilities. Will you read some of these poems and tell me whether I am a fool, or a faltering pilgrim, or anything definite?”
The abashed and yet softly incisive candor would have unloosened or entertained the emotions of anyone except Mary Aldridge. ”