A singular life she led with the Krupanowa woman. Drugged by the ritual of the mass, they staggered to the slaughterhouse, thence to the lives of the Popes. They ran their fingers over the skins of cretins and elephants, they photographed jewels and artificial flowers, and coolies stripped to the waist; they explored the pathologic monsters of the insect world and the still more pathologic monsters of Rome. At night they dreamed of the idols buried in the morain of Campeche and bulls charging from the stockade to expire under straw hats.
HER PULSE quickened as the tumultuous procession of thoughts drove the bright warm blood full-crested through her veins. She looked at the book in her lap and saw again these words:
“Taken as I am and as I shall always be, I feel that I am a force both of creation and of dissolution, that I am a real value, and have a right, a place, a mission among men.”
Suddenly, without let or warning, a dynamo broke loose inside her. Every particle of her molten being was convulsed with shuddering raptures. Mottled words drugged her with venomous lust. . . . She felt that in everything, sublime or ignoble, there was hidden a turbulent, a vital force, a significance and beauty of which art, however glorious, was but a pale reflection. “I want to live!” she muttered wildly. “I want to live!”
2
TONY BRING sat alone in a furnished room overlooking the harbor. It was midnight. That meant he had been two hours or more reading the same chapter. It was all very abstruse, an orgy of learning wrapped in ermine. He felt himself sinking deeper and deeper and the bottom nowhere.
It was only a few days ago that his friend had put this morphology of history, as it was called, in his hands. And now, he reflected, the body of his friend was quietly decomposing under a hummock smothered with roses.
He felt oppressed. It was not only that the spirit of his friend lay embalmed in the pages of the book, it was not only that the significance of the text was beyond him, it was that he could no longer tolerate the loneliness which came over him as he sat waiting to catch the sound of her steps.
This infernal waiting had been going on now for several weeks, not every night, it is true, but intermittently, and with a frequency that rasped his nerves. Down below, where the harbor expanded in a broad, inky splash, there was peace. The shagreened surface of the water, uniting with the pall of night, threw a screen of liquid silence over the earth. As he lifted the curtain aside to stare into the darkness he was seized with an inexplicable feeling of terror. It seemed to come upon him, as though for the first time, that he was utterly alone in the world. “We are all of us alone,” he mumbled to himself, but even as he said it he could not help but feel that he was more alone than anyone else in the world.
At least, he told himself (he had been telling himself this repeatedly), there was nothing definite to worry about. Wasn’t there though? The more he endeavored to reassure himself, the more convinced he became that there lurked a sinister misfortune whose reality and imminence was expressing itself in these tenuous, shadowy forebodings. Little comfort was there in the thought that the ordeal might be of limited duration. The question was whether it did not constitute but a prelude to a final, uninterrupted isolation. The periods of suspense, which in the beginning had a plausible span of an hour or two, were now stretching out to truly incommensurable lapses of time. By what calculus could one measure the sheer cumulative agony between an hour’s wait and five? What could the passage of time, as indicated by the slow-moving hands of a clock, yield in problems of this sort?
But there were explanations . . . ? Yes, of explanations there was no end. The air at times was blue with them. Yet nothing was explained. The very fact that there were explanations required explaining.
His mind dwelt for a while on the complexities of that life which is lived in big cities—the autumnal cities—wherein there reigned an ordered disorder, a crazy justice, a cold disunity that permitted one individual to sit peacefully before his fireplace while a stone’s throw away another was foully murdered. A city, he said to himself, is like a universe, each block a whirling constellation, each home a blazing star, or a burned-out planet. The warm, gregarious life, the smoke and the prayers, the clamor and parade, the whole bloody show was pivoted on a fulcrum of fear. If a man could love his neighbor he might have respect for himself; if he could have faith he might attain peace—but how, how, in a universe of bricks, a madhouse of egotists, an atmosphere of turmoil, strife, terror, violence? For the man of the autumnal cities there was left only the vision of the great whore, mother of harlots and abominations of the earth. These shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire. That was the revelation for the spiritually dead . . . chapter the last . . . book of books.
So absorbed was he in his reverie that when suddenly he turned his head, saw her standing at the threshold, he almost collapsed.
BENEATH HER purple smock she was nude. He held her at arm’s length and gazed at her long, intently.
“Why do you look at me like that?” she gasped, still breathless.
“I was thinking how different . . .”
“You’re going to begin that again?”
“No,” he said quietly, “I’m not going to harp on it, but . . . well, look here, Hildred, sometimes you do look frightful, simply frightful. You can look worse than a whore when you try.” (He lacked the courage to say plump out: “Where were you?” or “What have you been doing all this time?”)
She went to the bathroom to reappear almost immediately with a small bottle of olive oil and a Turkish towel. Spilling a few drops of the oil into the palm of her hand, she proceeded forthwith to smear her face with it. The soft, spongy nap of the towel absorbed the dirt and grease which had collected in her pores. It looked like a rag on which an artist wipes his brushes.
“Weren’t you worried about me?” she asked.
“Of course I was.”
“Of course! What a way to put it! And no sooner do I arrive than you tell me I look like a whore . . . worse than a whore.”
“You know I didn’t call you a whore,” he said.
“It amounts to the same thing. You like to call me names. You’re not happy unless you’re criticizing me.”
“Oh, don’t let’s go into that,” he said wearily. He felt like screaming, “The hell with all this! Do you love me, that’s all I want to know! Do you love me?” But before he could whip it out she was already lulling him with her deep, vibrant voice. Her tongue was fluent . . . too fluent. The throb of her dark, lush cadences pulsing through him like the warm blood of her veins awakened sensations that mingled confusedly with the meaning of her words. Darkly clustering, profuse and obscure, his thoughts penetrated hers and hung there behind the words, a veil which the slightest wind might rend.
3
THERE HE sat, the villainous little duffer, with his golden locks and his pointy Chinese nails. He was almost in the show window, his back turned to the street. Remarkable what a ringer he was for John the Baptist. When he stood up and presented himself full on he changed suddenly into a mastiff, that intelligent sort that learns to walk on its hind legs after snatching a few pieces of raw meat. He wore a habitually placid expression. Either he had just fed well or he was about to feed well. An Oriental passivity. A glass lake, which if it rippled, would crack.
Vanya’s broad shoulders and towering build almost hid him from view. It was comical to behold his solicitude. Seizing her hand, he wet it with his lips like some whelp licking the hand of its mistress.
An odor of rancid food was all-pervasive.
“Eat, Vanya, eat!” he implored obsequiously. “Eat all you want. Eat until you burst!” Hildred he politely ignored, or if he was obliged to address her, he elaborated his remarks with such flowery insincerity that she felt like strangling him. He had a way of drawing back his upper lip and smiling through his yellow teeth—a most revolting blandishment. “You look very charming tonight,” he would say, “very charming,” and turn his b
ack before he had even finished the compliment.
A mild commotion was taking place because of the presence of a poet who insisted on shoving spaghetti into his vest pockets. In the last stages of intoxication, he was endeavoring to amuse a couple of females who were hanging on to him like vultures. Beneath their fur coats, which he opened occasionally, they were nude. The corners of his bloodshot eyes were filled with a whitish substance; the lids, which had shed their lashes, looked like sore gums. When he grinned there showed between his thick, shapeless lips a few charred stumps and the tip of a moist tongue. He laughed incessantly, a laugh that was like the gurgle of a sewer.
The sluts for whose ears his stuttering delicacies were intended regarded him with fatuous incomprehension. With regard to the other sex he acknowledged only one concern—that his women possess the organs essential for his gratification. Beyond that it mattered little whether they were brown or white, cross-eyed or deaf, diseased or imbecilic. As for that little duffer Willie Hyslop and his gang, one could not tell unless one looked below the waist, and even then the problem was complicated.
“Vile, disgusting creature!” Hildred exploded after they had left the cafeteria. “I don’t see how you can tolerate him.”
“Oh, he really isn’t such a bad sort,” said Vanya. “I don’t see why you should despise him any more than the others.”
“I can’t help it,” said Hildred. “It annoys me that you should permit him to use you.”
“But I’ve told you, I’m broke . . . dead broke. If it weren’t for him, the little fool that he is, I don’t know where I would be now.”
These remarks were passed on the street, at Vanya’s door.
Why does she stand here? thought Hildred. Why doesn’t she invite me up?
As if divining her thoughts, Vanya shifted uneasily, grew strangely embarrassed, and made vacillatory attempts to prolong the conversation. There was something on her mind which she had been trying all evening to give expression to. More than once she had attempted to approach the subject obliquely, but Hildred was either obtuse or else unwilling to render the smallest assistance.
“You would like to go to Paris with me, then?” said Vanya impulsively.
“I would like it better than anything in the world. But . . .”
“Listen, you don’t think it strange that I should talk to you the way I did tonight?”
“I feel as though I had known you all my life.” And then suddenly she added quietly: “This is where you live?”
“For the present,” answered Vanya, nodding her head.
They were silent a moment.
“Vanya,” said Hildred, impulsively again and in a low, eager voice, “Vanya, I want you to let me help you. You must! You can’t go on this way.”
Vanya grasped Hildred’s hand. They stood looking into each other’s eyes. For a full minute they stood thus, neither daring to trespass beyond the spoken word.
Finally said Vanya calmly: “Yes, I will let you help me . . . gladly . . . but how?”
Hildred hesitated. “That,” she answered, “I don’t know myself.” The words dropped slowly, like flakes of snow from her lips. “Just consider me your friend,” she added earnestly.
Whether it was the effect of these last few words or a determination to carry out a preconceived idea, at any rate, Vanya turned abruptly and bounded up the stoop. Looking down upon her somewhat startled companion, her friend, she pleaded with her to wait. “Just a few minutes,” she begged. “I have something I want to give you.”
4
IN THE beginning there were cow paths and the cow paths were all there was of the Village. Today she sprawls out like a sick bitch debilitated by an attack of delirium tremens. Dreary. Greasy. Depressing. Tourists dragging themselves along by the roots of the hair. Poets who haven’t written anything since 1917. Jewish pirates whose cutlasses intimidate nobody. Insomnia. Cock-eyed dreams of love. Rape in a telephone booth. Perverts from the vice squad hugging the lampposts. Cossacks with fallen arches. A bohemian world jacked up with a truss. Hammocks on the third floor.
Every night, regular as clockwork, a rubberneck drew up in front of the Caravan and deposited its load. A fine goofy joint with atmosphere or what was left of atmosphere. Wasn’t it here that O. Henry tossed off his masterpieces? And didn’t Valentino come here, and Bobby Walthour? Who that had ever been anybody had not been here at one time or another? Why, Mary Garden herself had been known to swish majestically through this Liebestod of candle grease and burnt umbers. And Frank Harris—he with the luxurious mustachios and the pontifical swagger—was it not in this same bat-gloom that he sat listening to the tiresome pribble of his admirers? It was here that O’Neill nursed his lecherous dreams, here that Dreiser plopped, dour, morose, scouring mankind with his fierce, brooding eyes, eyes of melancholy, eyes of genius, any kind of eyes you want.
IT WAS well after the lunch hour when Tony Bring entered the Caravan. A tall girl with red hair was moving from table to table blowing out the candles. A piano tinkled in the corner. An underground life, he thought, as he scrutinized the sodden faces on which the shadows bit cruel marks of sloth and vice. Somehow, not the evil of existence but its dismal, thwarting aspect oppressed him. Veils of cigarette smoke collected in blue wisps and floated like thin chords of music above a screen of silhouettes. Here and there a candle sputtered its last, filling the room with an acrid, choking odor.
In the far gloom, drumming nervously with his thick fingers, sat a massive, stonelike figure. From a distance his features were not unpleasant; up close they had a frizzled, pounded look, as if they had come but an hour ago from the butcher’s block. It was the face of a gladiator, worn down, crumbled, like a statue exposed to centuries of rain and frost.
Crush ‘em quick—that was Earl Biggers’ style. And the bigger they were the better he liked it. They could grease themselves all they liked. Once he caught hold it was curtains and a free ride to the hospital. But to see the glum look on his face at this moment one might well imagine that it was he who had been defeated last night. He was sore as a pup. Mechanically he felt of his ears, one of which was closed like a bud. A sour smile passed over his face. Another year of this, he said to himself, and I’ll be fit for the zoo.
The girl with the red hair brushed by him. He grabbed her arm. “No funny business now,” he said. “Tell me, where did that bare-legged bitch disappear to?”
“Don’t be so rough,” said the girl. “I told you she’ll be back any minute.”
“She’s gone for a walk, I suppose . . . with her friend.”
“Yeah, with her friend.”
“Listen, if she wants something masculine, why don’t she take me? Look at me! I’m a man, do you see?” And he blew out his chest.
Tony Bring, occupied with his own thoughts, paid no attention to the conversation going on, but there were others who were listening amusedly. His thoughts dribbled away into the gloom, taking neither form nor content.
As he sat there musing, Hildred fluttered in. Glued to her side was a tall, silent creature whose raven hair, parted in the middle, fell in a copious sweep to her shoulders. She was like a piece of marble not completely detached from the block.
“Hey, there!” came a big, booming voice. Hildred wheeled around instantly. The soft, waning light of the street suffused her face with a dull glow; about her lips there played an eager trembling, delicate, sensitive, a movement scarcely perceptible. As she moved toward him, buoyant and seraphic, he remarked the glow which radiated from her and transfigured her. So compelling was the vision that when a ponderous, apelike figure rose up between them and intercepted her it seemed as if a meaningless cloud had for a moment obscured his sight. He waited a moment, in that state of suspense which precedes disillusionment, and then, inexplicable and unbelievable though it appeared, Hildred sat down, sat down beside the ape and commenced talking to it.
A gesture of politeness, he assured himself, observing her quietly as she leaned forward, her face uplifted,
her eyes flashing, when she laughed revealing her milk-white teeth, so smooth, so even. The hand which she had extended in greeting remained in the big, hairy paw which had closed over it. It was clamped there, as in a vise. And then he noticed that she was making an effort to free herself, but the other still held her hand. Suddenly, with her free hand, she struck out. The man’s hand opened instinctively. The blood leaped to his face.
Now, he thought, she will surely get up and come over. At the same time he asked himself how often a scene like this took place. Was it really a reproof, that slap in the face? He waited. Waited for some sign of recognition. But her glance never once rested upon him. Not by the subtlest sign did she communicate to him an awareness of his presence. “Good God!” he muttered. “Could she have failed to see me?” Impossible! Why, she had looked straight at him, she had started toward him, and then this big ape had moved in and intercepted her. And the way she had looked at him! Such a look! Suddenly a black, damnable suspicion entered his mind. No, it was too preposterous—he dismissed it at once. She had seen him, all right, he was certain of it. Back of this malingering there was some deep reason, some purpose whose meaning would be made clear later on. Only too well did he understand the deceptions she was obliged to practice. What roles they had played, the two of them! Sometimes, when these fantastic situations passed through his head, he found it difficult to draw the line between pretense and actuality. So far, and this appeared as a comforting reflection, they had always played together, opposite each other, as it were. He studied her now, as one would study an actress from the wings, while she sat talking to this idiot, enveloping him most likely in her clever net of deceit and falsehood. What was she saying to him? What sort of lies was she handing out? How candid and ingenuous was her smile—and yet it was no deeper than her lips. She was an actress, that wife of his, if ever there was one. A veritable honeycomb of dissimulation. . . . The more he watched her the more pleased he became. His pleasure was that of a child taking apart a complicated toy.