Maxwell Bodenheim

“ Flower scents filtered through Carl’s open window, like softly dismayed sins and the cool repentance of a summer night glided into his room upon a pathway of moonlight. For a while he sat absent-mindedly burnishing the knives that had divided his evening. After he had undressed he fell upon his bed like one hurriedly obliterating an ordeal. His consciousness played with a black hood; then a crash mastered the room and the door swung open. His blanched face paid a spasmodic tribute to the sound and his grey eyes greeted the darkness as though it were an advancing mob. ”

“ Robert Calvin Taylor.
“Your mind and heart are no longer clad in their heavy mirages of love, fear, and sleep,” said the figure. “The surface pictures have gone and the twin bazaars of your heart and mind are exchanging a long-deferred greeting. Within the now mingled bazaars emotions and thoughts have become friends and sell each other endless variations in color, light, and form. I am the being who rules this proceeding.”
“Have you a name?” asked Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor, using the unashamed naïveté of a child.
“Men call me Aesthetics,” answered the figure. ”

“ ETHICS ETHEL CURN was an acrobat with Hearn’s Twelve Ring Circus, but her bones were riveted together by a precariously brittle dignity as she paraded down the field of daisies to a cliff at the edge of the sea. Perhaps acrobats walk stiffly during their leisure hours because their bodies become ascetic when released from an unreal, sensual agility. Ethel Curn sometimes stooped to pick a daisy and her body received motion in a deliberately ungallant manner, as though greeting an unwelcome mistress. Her face was an indiscreetly torn screen for emotions that had been dead for many years ”

“ Olga’s feet tamely saluted the crowded street-pavements. To her the crowd was an approach to the theater audience—a brisk indifference that made her eyes neglected spendthrifts. Its motion alone gave it a flickering mastery: if it had paused, for an hour, it would have become inane. The choked tirade of rolling street-cars and automobiles would have ended in a dismal curtain of silence—the chariots would have changed to mere hardware puzzled by the moonlight. A tall woman, encouraging the gorgeous tumult of her dresses, would have stood like a cluttered farce. ”

“ King Ferdinand turned to her, like a blind man peering into fantastically returning sight. Creative absorption had ruffled his middle-aged face into an ageless insurrection, but when he spoke a wrinkled order once more reigned beneath the granite lull of his forehead.
“Give each eye a different shade of color and, for the wall, make a blue of inhuman brightness: a blue that has swallowed a constellation and defies night,” he said. ”

“ Suddenly she became aware of a figure standing beside her. She turned with a gasp of strangled aloofness. The ethereal composure of her small face, defended by moonlight, sheered into an ebony cast of hermit-like annoyance. But when the color and outlines of the figure shrunk within her eyes, her face changed again. An astounded immersion crowned her head, tugging at her short nose, straightening her thick lips, and cleaving her gray eyes. The slightly deteriorated slenderness of her short body lowered a bit toward the earth, not from fear but because of a weakening incredulity. ”

“ She looked at her husband as though she considered his flesh an unimportant tragedy calmed by his words.
The smell of listening earth drifted through a window and bird-cries violated the air, like expiring emotions. King Ferdinand stood in the manner of one to whom motion has become a dim travesty, and the blood in his veins was a prisoned resonance. His folded arms were weighted in a marble posture beneath his long sleeves. Queen Muriel touched his arm and gave him life. She led him to a corner of the room and unveiled a small figure, and her hands were pliant consummations. ”

“ The mountain became a senseless giant; the waterfall changed to a commonplace ribbon: and the pine trees blended into the lethargy of dwarfs. The gray rock on the mountain was still gashed [77] into the face of a woman but her outlines were those of a transfigured virago. Eric strapped on his pack; gazed down at the rock, with the smile of a merchant emerging from drunken memories, and strode toward it. When he reached it he hammered away a flat fragment, for remembrance, and returned to the mountain path, with an expressionless face. ”

“ A man’s lips and beard are two-thirds of his being, unless he is an anchorite, and even in that case they can become impressively stunted. Geroid Latour was an angel rolling in red mud. From much rolling he had acquired the pert, raspberry beard, struggling lips, and the surreptitious grandeur of a nose, but the plastic grin of a singed angel sometimes listened to his face. ”

“ Geroid Latour rubbed his hands into a perpendicular lustre—he was a facetiously candid undertaker. He took the hand of the little girl whose face was like a candied moon and they ambled down the street.
“I have lost my friendship with gutters,” mused Geroid, looking down as he walked. “They quarrel with bits of orange peel and pins. Patiently they wait for the red rain that men give them every two hundred [65] years. ”

“ The devilishly poignant smile and the monologue met each other within her, while fleeing back to their graves, and their unpremeditated clash illuminated the renunciation upon her face. She looked into her upturned, yellow turban as though it held elusive dregs. Brooding experimented with her head and suddenly threw it to the ground, dissatisfied. She lay there like the impoverished effigy of a far off love—her black skirt revealed her slim legs, with gloomy discourtesy, and her fluffy pink waist gave its babyish sympathy to the sharpness of her back. ”

“ Just as its melancholy was heaving toward a climax Helma Solbert strode up the cinder walk leading to Mrs. Kildrick’s abode.
She was a woman of thirty with a body whose dying youth amply derided middle-age. Her ovally impertinent face spoke to the first warnings of dissolution and told them that their coming had been ill-advised. Weary but tenaciously merry, her gray eyes were close to those of one who has made the dagger in his side a cajoling saint. Her little nose was a straight invitation to her widely ripe lips and they turned upward as if to reach it. ”

“ I have become immortal until I voluntarily tender my immortality to death, if he takes it.”
The wrinkles on King Ferdinand’s cheeks ascended to a sentence of belief hacked upon his forehead. His broadly cumbersome face shrunk to a lighter scope and his red moustache shone like a coal of expectation. His wife played with her dark green gown as though it were relaxed [91] gaiety. Her body, like a plump blunder, ended in the deft recklessness of her head; the high amber of her face raised its slightly turned lines of brooding abandon. ”

“ The noise reminded her of a middle-aged roué, snickering as he rolled his huge dice while gambling for a new mistress. She felt glad that her new lover, the night, did not seek to court her with such a blustering clatter.
The night was incredibly sophisticated but held the pungently awkward body of a youth, crashing against trees and bushes. This mixture pierced Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor and slid far beneath those sensual routines which are the delight of psycho-analysts—slid to a depth where aesthetic passion slays the flesh and blends it into a sexless potency. ”

“ It takes women years to perfect this masquerade, but they win a distracted pleasure that guards them from haggling memories. To generalize about women is to broaden our hope that one woman may serve for the rest. Philosophers disappointed in love often do this, though the man on the street is a fairly adept mimic. Ethel Curn’s bosom lightly scolded her pink waist and her poignantly devilish smile almost persuaded her that it was real. All the tragedy on her face spent itself in a distressed question. ”

“ We have no emotions in Mars.
They are like long-healed wounds
Whose scars are softened by the gleam of our minds.
We approach them with clearer kinds
Of sound from deeply resting thought.
Our youths and maidens have not caught
The treacherous and tightly bound
Confusion of your loving sound,
For sex to us is but the ring
Of different shades of thought in Spring
When men recline upon the breast
Of women, dissolving into thoughtful rest.
In Autumn sex is left behind.
Men and women no longer lined
By different bodies raise their dins
Above the screaming violins. ”

“ Airily suspended tales in light and colour, of no importance to philosophers, hung over the scene. Only a snail underneath the trees, steeped in a creeping evening, lived apart from the crisp medley of morning lights. Laboriously, the snail moved through his explanation of the universe. But, to blades of grass, their lives tersely centered in green, the morning was a mysterious pressure.
The morning glowed over the garden like an incoherent rhapsody. ”

“ The little pagan symmetries of her face, gaudily tantalizing when merely glimpsed, would have met in a kittenish argument. A tall man, blondly governing his polished discrepancies, would have changed to a stagnant buffoon. An old man, chiding his corpulent effulgence with endearments of motion, would have altered to a maudlin exaggeration.
Olga reached her room and summoned the meaningless stare of an electric light. Upon her short body plumpness and slenderness bargained with each other, and the result was a suave arbitration. ”

“ Obediently she laid a hand on his arm and they strolled [70] down the path between the peonies. She sidled along like an inspired puppet—she seemed a doll touched to life by some Christ. Upon her painted face a nun and a violinist grappled tentatively and her lips made a red scarf fallen from the struggle. Bolin left the peonies and wandered down the road. They came upon a boulder clad in an outline of smashed spears. Queen Anne’s Lace grew close to its base, like the remnants of some revel.
“This is the head of a philosopher,” said Bolin. ”

“ The acridly shortened man spoke.
“When you are dead, sire, your brothers will gamble for your throne by throwing roses at your head. He who first succeeds in striking your bulging eyes, will win.”
“Death does not like to be made a cheated jester,” said King Ferdinand. “He will doubtless devise a better joke for my winning brother.”
Queen Muriel, whose face had grown old with choked disdain, stepped forward. ”

“ Melodrama is a weirdly drunken plausibility and can not sincerely be disliked,” said Geroid. “But I must not leave without complimenting your lavender wrapper. Few people have mastered the art of being profoundly ridiculous.”
“I can see that you’re trying to be ridiculously profound,” said the woman as she threw a bucket of stale water at Geroid. He fled down the street, dragging the child with him. They left the cumbersome sterility of the city behind them and passed into the suburbs.
“Here we have a tragedy in shades of naked inertness,” said Geroid to the little girl. ”

“ Brown and red always sweep toward each other. Men are often unknowingly killed by these two huge colours treading the insects upon a path and walking to an ultimate trysting-place.”
The little girl whose face was like a molasses crescent cut off one of her yellow curls and hung it from her closed mouth.
“Why are you acting in this way?” asked Geroid.
“It’s something I’ve never done before,” she answered placidly.
Geroid stroked his raspberry beard with menacing longing but could not quite induce himself to pull it off. It would have been like cutting the throat of his mistress. ”

“ You are not a body—you are beauty receding into a resistless seclusion.”
“Kind fool, musically stifling himself in a row-boat—made kind by the desperate tenderness of a lie—you are serenading the chopped bodies of your emotions,” said the woman.
[74] Alvin Tor’s face cracked apart and the incredulously hurrying ghost of a child nodded a moment and was snuffed out.
“Mermaid of haunting despondency, what are you?” he asked.
“I am the symbol of your emotions,” the woman answered.
“I made them roses stepped upon by God,” said Alvin Tor.
“I am the symbol of your emotions,” said the woman. ”

“ Sorrow struck her face with a crazily gay second that extinguished her eyes. Her body improvised its lines into a wilted sexlessness that made her black skirt and pink waist mysterious. The torture of a lost love had feasted upon her flesh and reduced it to an abstraction. Hearn, the circus-master, presided over the feast like a chilly urbane magician. ”

“ Then, without remembering what had occurred, they let gay words poke each other and began to discuss colors for the monk’s figure rising from cupped hands and blossoming into indistinct triumph.
That night their carriage stopped upon a hilltop and they were killed by three men. One of the three had a thin nose and a brown beard—the tight inquisitiveness of a bright uniform revealed his tall body. Among historians he was to be noted as the man who killed an imbecile king and led his country to glory and prosperity. ”