He took his usual squint. The ad was in all right. That meant a fine crop in the morning. He’d go through them like a dose of salts.... What’s this?
MEN!!!
DO YOU NEED
A FEW THOUSAND DOLLARS?
NOW AND THEN AS THE YEARS ROLL AROUND TOWARD THE HOLIDAY SEASON SOME OF US FEEL AS THOUGH WE’D LIKE TO DO A RIP VAN WINKLE TILL IT’S ALL OVER. THAT’S BECAUSE OF THE SLENDER BANKROLL. TO GIVE AT CHRISTMAS IS GREAT … IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO GIVE WITH. IF IT SHOULD HAPPEN THAT YOU NEED A FEW THOUSAND DOLLARS EXTRA THIS YEAR, whether you are
Engineer
Foreman
Shipping clerk
Retired business
Labor union leaders
Superintendents, &c.
or whatever your walk in life, IF YOU WANT TO MAKE A SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNT OF MONEY DURING THE NEXT FEW MONTHS WRITE ME A LETTER OR POSTAL CARD FOR AN INTERVIEW.
XYZ, World, Downtown.
“Dear Mr. XYZ,” Moloch dictated in his sleep, “Your ingratiating exhortation in today’s (yesterday’s) World almost leads me to believe that there really is a Santa Claus. Who of us has not suffered from a too slender bankroll at Christmastime? Until I read your pleasing expedient in the morning paper I was much agitated by the problem of just which soporific to resort to in order to induce that hibernating condition which you refer to euphemistically as “The Rip Van Winkle.” Now I am happy to learn that by merely spending the price of a postcard the secret of avoiding this periodical embarrassment can be revealed to me.
“You ask very pertinently (in capital letters) IF I NEED A FEW THOUSAND DOLLARS EXTRA. I not only need it extra, but constantly. In fact, to put it to you plainly—why should we keep anything from one another?—I should say conservatively that a few thousand dollars a year regularly would relieve me of the trying ordeal of writing you for information about some crack-brained scheme or other for peddling Christmas cards or silk hosiery.
“I have never been a retired businessman, or a labor union leader, nor even a shipping clerk, unfortunately. My previous occupational experience is necessarily denominated by that all-embracing caption ‘&c.’ Undoubtedly you are sufficiently astute to gather from this just whether or not I am suited to the proposition of raking in a few thousand shekels in my spare time.
“If so, please let me know when I may be favored with an interview. There is less than ninety days till Christmas, and I don’t like the idea of being stuck at the last minute (on Christmas Eve) with a measly seven or eight hundred in my wad.
“Yours for opulence in this world or the next.
“Dion Moloch, Esquire
or
Mr. Dion Moloch
or
Just Plain Dion Moloch.”
15
THE SERENITY THAT MOLOCH HAD BEGUN TO MANIFEST of late is proving a source of mystery and irritation to his spouse. This poise, this grip on life, as it were, Blanche unfortunately is capable of attributing only to the appearance of a new star in the firmament of his adulterous brain.
How can we best describe the change he felt coming over him? Certainly it was not a moral improvement. Perhaps the simplest way to express it is that his soul made itself known; he no longer thought of it as an intangible entity inhabiting the body, and deserting it at death. This soul of his suddenly began to take on apostolic dimensions. It required attention, like a plant.
The book he had promised himself to write was completed. The manuscript was now reposing in a drawer of Mr. Twilliger’s rolltop desk. It was to remain there for a period until that individual could go through it at his leisure. Neither Twilliger nor Moloch, at this time, had any apprehension of the fact that this simple-looking document would serve, not many days hence, as a pretext for the dismissal of the erstwhile employment manager Dion Moloch. However, our narrative does not carry us that far. We have no concern with Dion Moloch as job-hunter and temporary lodger in the Miravski menage.
Significant of Moloch’s changed attitude is his complete silence about the other sex. It is impossible for Blanche to fathom his motives. If she had consulted him in the matter it might not have proven such a mystery. Valeska had been transferred to a post of importance in Havana as soon as the President of the company got wind of the fact that she was not a pure Caucasian. How the President acquired this delicate piece of information is another story; it is enough to hint that Mr. Twilliger’s chief tailor was still proving his ability to earn his salt. As for Marcelle, well—Moloch began to realize that she had never been anything more than a depraved virgin. Her virginity stank, like Father Zossima’s corpse. Concerning Marcello’s virginity Blanche, of course, affected a complete ignorance. Possibly she never thought of the young lady’s virginity in a purely analytical way. As for such an expression—”depraved virginity”—it is doubtful if Blanche could ever regard it as having anything more than a vague literary connotation.
The sullen bitterness of the woman, her morose defiance, the silent, repressed fury whose malignant potency would heretofore have goaded him into desperation—all this he endured now with a calm, pervasive air. He had acquired the habit recently of referring, in a dark way, to his spiritual state, or condition. Blanche regarded this enigmatic nonsense as a religious travesty. She dosed him with vitriolic shafts of ridicule. It was not, as with some husbands who pose before the world as martyrs, a showcase stoicism that Moloch displayed. Indeed, there was nothing of suffering, or of consciously willed forbearance, in his attitude. He was simply possessed by a fantastic exuberance.
In this condition of exaltation he came home one evening to find his supper on the stove. Blanche was not there. He examined the food that had been left for him with an abstract air. Presently there was a knock at the door, and the woman upstairs poked her head through the door. She came to inform him that Blanche had gone to the theater.
He smiled tenderly at her. Was it so, indeed? He seemed overjoyed at the news. Had Blanche gone to see Androcles and the Lion? No? He mentioned another. Not that either? The woman repeated that she hadn’t the least idea where Blanche had gone. Well, what did it matter? He would go out and purchase a bouquet for her. Perhaps the good woman would sit down a few moments and sip a little port wine with him? It was always well to keep a little port wine about the house for just such occasions as these. He apologized for the absence of anything better than port wine Ideal weather, wasn’t it? Had she noticed the moon this evening? Why did people insist on mentioning green cheese when they referred to the moon? It was more like a mauve scimitar, if you asked his opinion. Had she ever thought about the moon?—that is, in dactylic hexameters?
The woman listened to him as if he were a broken shutter slapping against a stone wall. She had expected a radically different tune. If a palliative had been necessary she was there with a harmless little fib or two up her sleeve.
“A man’s home is his palace, eh what? God, that supper smells inviting! I should have said ‘an Englishman’s home.’ Come on in. Don’t stick your head in the crack like that. You’re not afraid of me, are you? How about some wine … or a little marmalade?”
The old harridan wagged her solemn, tousled head.
“Well, as you please,” he mumbled, and fell to.
He finished the meal hastily. The bottle he had dug up stood on the table untouched. “Drink deep,” said the poet, “or taste not of the Pierian spring.” He walked into the living room on pads of velvet. The disorder which greeted him was a philosophic disorder. It reminded him of a chapter from Creative Evolution. He was accustomed to thinking of this room as a birdcage in which his intoxicated guests deposited their cigarette butts, crumbs of Streusselkuchen. But now he thought, “Only a German can be annoyed by untidiness.” He sat down at the piano and crossed his legs. With his left foot on the right-hand pedal he played the opening measures of Stojowski’s “Love Song.” His technique was rusty. He uncrossed his legs and turned to Czerny’s studies in velocity. “Bah!” he muttered disconsolately. “Life is too rich to
be squandered in exercises.” Anyway, it was getting too late in the day to ever become a musician. He wished someone had taught him a ruder instrument. Somewhere he had once read of artists returning to their cold garrets in the Latin Quarter and silencing their hunger with an accordion…. Probably Delineator artists!
He got up and took a seat in a low-cushioned armless chair. Did Blanche ever think of the associations wrapped up in that chair? he asked himself. To tell the truth, he hadn’t thought about that chair for three years himself. It belonged to another period—the period called courtship. Marriage dissolves courtship just as vinegar dissolves pearls. (Cleopatra once dissolved her pearls in an effort to swallow a fortune.) A sentimental song from Laubscher’s Biergarten came to his lips: “Es War So Schon Gewesen.” … Try that on your piano when the sands of the desert grow cold.
His fingers were toying with the frazzled edges of an unframed picture. It was done in crayon on a piece of pasteboard. The edges were fat and greasy, like a well-used pack of playing cards. The picture had hung in the one spot so long it had almost lost its meaning. But it seemed a wonderful study now—an eloquent expression of the artist’s joy. The peace that hung in the room made the picture dance. The appearance of the room was, as usual, drab. If anything it was a trifle drabber, filthier. But the peace that was in his heart transformed everything.
The young lady who had made the sketch was dead. She had become so thoroughly saturated with the drunkenness of life that she up and killed herself one day. She up and killed herself out of sheer joy. It’s the fashion nowadays to deride such tales. It is said “people don’t do such things … out of joy!” Or some “smart aleck,” as Stanley would say, will mention Dostoevsky … as though only in Russian literature, among the epileptoid geniuses, do we encounter such … such—shall we call it— bravado? But Milka had acted in precisely this manner. He turned the sketch over. On the back she had penciled: “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.” That was her idea about everything. Wherever she went, she used to affix as her seal and signature this quotation from Augustus Caesar’s prime ballyhoo artist. Perhaps it sounds indelicate to mention this, but it was so—she had even put her signature on the toilet box one day. The sound of gurgling water trickling through the drainpipes—that, too, she had to lend the stamp of her approval … the “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.” A great girl, Milka!
He examined the work carefully. There was a great superabundance of vitality in it. He scrutinized it meticulously, as if it were the very first time he had looked upon it… It represented a female nude, with Nile-green hair, squatting on her haunches. The interstices made by the junctions of her arms and legs were outlined by black triangles, some isosceles, some scalene. The one which a casual observer would notice first was a daring scalene, within the boundaries of which the artist had traced her initials. For the most part, the stuff of which this nude was made was nothing more than the untouched pasteboard. The crayon had been employed most liberally for the highlights and the luminous shadows of her contours, the artist being of the opinion of Mallarmé, whose dictum it was that “to name is to destroy, to suggest is to create.” If one looked more closely at these innocent highlights fantastic shapes emerged: the hostile poise of a cobra along the right forearm, a penguin airily traced along the shinbone of the left leg, and an Achilles heel (Milka insisted it was “Achilles”) on the visible breast, a great Amazonian breast that seemed chiseled in marble. The nipple of the breast was a bright drop of blood. It was the brightest spot, with the possible exception of the lips, in the entire conception. Despite the railway curves of her crouch, the subject revealed more straight lines than the human figure can be said to boast. One such line was made of the top of the right hand, which might conveniently have supported a card tray, only Milka had seen fit to rest on it a cumulus cloud through which a wild goose was flying. Milka had insisted it was a wild goose, though it was so conventionalized, and had such a rigidity, that everyone said it resembled a roast turkey. However, if the artist saw a wild goose, a wild goose it must have been.... The reader must be aware, at this point, that Milka was untrammeled by academic canons.... Irritation was likewise often expressed by the liberties that Milka had taken with the right knee of the nude. The knee had been sacrificed to the imagination, owing to the enormous length of the upper leg, which which would have been cramped in the narrow confines of its pasteboard frame. When Milka was taken to task for this desecration, she observed in her quaint way that only a master could do justice to the knee of a virgin. But surely the nude had two knees? Absolutely! (Milka had not borrowed her subject from a Coney Island freak show.) But the other knee was hidden, you understand, and very skillfully, too, by a huge pendant breast which forever threatened to be metamorphosed into a cataract of human gore.… There was one other object, in the foreground, which deserves mention. It had no other reason for existence than the artist’s will. What it was can only be conjectured. Milka styled it a geranium without a flower pot. She never said simply—a geranium. It was always a geranium without a flower pot, as if some mystic import were to be attached to the naming of an invisible object. It sounded very much as if one were to say—”Beethoven without a hat.”
Supposing you were in the habit of placing your cane in a certain corner of the office, and then one day you were to march in absentmindedly, like a proofreader, and place it in the spittoon. Now the same incongruity applied to this Amazon’s breast. It was as importunate as a harelip…. As Moloch concentrated his powers upon it his mind raced back to another Amazon … a buxom, two-breasted Amazon by the name of Cora. There was a time when to have possessed Cora would have meant his soul’s salvation.
But Cora is out of the picture....
“Can a man by taking thought add a cubit to his stature?” He pondered that as if the words were stuck under his nose in six-inch Goudy type.
“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Aye, he pondered that, too.
When a man takes to feeling deeply he is apt to let the Bible go to his head; he is apt to forget that the love his wife bears him is a caldron of hate which she delights in heaping anew each day upon his head. For what did her love—their love—amount to? It was nothing less than an unholy antagonism that had reached such bounds as to resemble more the celebrated Darwinian struggle than a bed of roses. If his wife embraced him it was only to ask: “Whom do I remind you of now?” If he touched her familiarly, as a husband will, she bristled and said: “All you think of is sex.”
In his exalted spiritual condition much of the bitterness had dropped out of his soul. When a person loses the power of sight in one eye the other eye makes up for the deficiency … compensates, we say. So it was with these two. What he lost in powers of hatred Blanche supplied. No longer did he get up in the morning, draped in an old-fashioned nightshirt, and dance about her like a zany. It was disgustingly true that very often in the past he had carried on in a gross, buffoonish manner. It was true, also, that he had done so with the express purpose of irritating her. To rid his wife of that devastating glacial stare he had been capable, in the past, of resorting to any licentious prank. Better to see her rage than to withstand the cold, piercing hostility of the women. Sometimes, prompted by an inexplicable diabolism, he would stand before his wife, making abscence grimaces, pelting her with vile epithets that made her wince and blanche. Why? To goad her into behaving like a human being. To befoul her, if necessary, in order to get that “reaction” Prigozi always spoke about. You see, he had already committed himself to that belief that he was dealing with a type of pathologic abnormality. He never defined the type; he was satisfied to call her a “diseased soul.” Blanche, in turn, made her own diagnoses. She used the word “hyper-sexed.” No matter what the argument was about, no matter what turn the quarrel took, Blanche always ended up with “hyper-sexed.” She flung it at him as if it were a red-hot poker. Later, when he had time to reflect, and devoted his attention to analyzing her condu
ct, he found refuge behind such phrases as “vicious slut,” “ingrown Puritanism,” etc. And of all the afflictions that humanity was heir to, he was ready to swear that Puritanism was the worst. There was something leprous about that condition of the soul. Its ravages brought a stench to the nostrils....
But this evening all such behavior, all the wanton, vicious thoughts which he was able to summon on the slightest provocation, vanished. He could scarcely wait for Blanche to appear. Never again was she to suffer for any deviltry of his … not even if she ridiculed him and taunted him. He looked back upon his cruel, senseless behavior with abhorrence. “By God!” he swore. “This madness must come to an end!”
He reviewed kaleidoscopically the stormy course of their marital career. A conviction began to steal over him that his had been the blame, his entirely. Thinking back to one quarrel upon another, he could put his finger on the root of every one … himself.
Oh, if Blanche would only walk in now, this very minute, that he might sweep away all her hatred, all her profound disgust, and prostrate himself at her feet. “Blanche,” he murmured aloud, “Blanche, my poor little dear, it is I who am guilty … I, I, I.”