Chapter VII: Introduction (6)

Hemmick nodded, thoughtfully, though without thought. He had never thought; for over twenty years he had seldom ever held opinions, save the opinions of the local press or of some majority made articulate through passion. There was a certain luxury in thinking that he had never been able to afford. When cases were set before him he either accepted them outright, if they were comprehensible to him, or rejected them if they required a modicum of concentration. Yet he was not a stupid man. He was poor and busy and tired and there were no ideas at large in his community, even had he been capable of grasping them. The idea that he did not think would have been equally incomprehensible to him. He was a closed book, half full of badly printed, uncorrelated trash.

Just now, his reaction to Abercrombie’s assertion was exceedingly simple. Since the remarks proceeded from a man who was a Southerner by birth, who was successful--moreover, who was confident and decisive and persuasive and suave--he was inclined to accept them without suspicion or resentment.

He took one of Abercrombie’s cigars and pulling on it, still with a stern imitation of profundity upon his tired face, watched the color glide out of the sky and the gray veils come down. The little boy and his bicycle, the baby, the nursemaid, the forlorn kitten, all had departed. In the stucco bungalows pianos gave out hot, weary notes that inspired the crickets to competitive sound, and squeaky graphophones filled in the intervals with patches of whining ragtime until the impression was created that each living room in the street opened directly out into the darkness.

“What _I_ want to find out,” Abercrombie was saying with a frown, “is why I didn’t have sense enough to _know_ that this was a worthless town. It was entirely an accident that I left here, an utterly blind chance, and as it happened, the very train that took me away was full of luck for me. The man I sat beside gave me my start in life.” His tone became resentful. “But I thought this was all right. I’d have stayed except that I’d gotten into a scrape down at the high school--I got expelled and my daddy told me he didn’t want me at home any more. Why didn’t I know the place wasn’t any good? Why I didn’t _see_?”

“Well, you’d probably never known anything better?” suggested Hemmick mildly.

“That wasn’t any excuse,” insisted Abercrombie. “If I’d been any good I’d have known. As a matter of fact--as--a--matter--of--fact,” he repeated slowly, “I think that at heart I was the sort of boy who’d have lived and died here happily and never known there was anything better.” He turned to Hemmick with a look almost of distress. “It worries me to think that my--that what’s happened to me can be ascribed to chance. But that’s the sort of boy I think I was. I didn’t start off with the Dick Whittington idea--I started off by accident.”

After this confession he stared out into the twilight with a dejected expression that Hemmick could not understand. It was impossible for the latter to share any sense of the importance of such a distinction--in fact, from a man of Abercrombie’s position it struck him as unnecessarily trivial. Still, he felt that some manifestation of acquiescence was only polite.

“Well,” he offered, “it’s just that some boys get the bee to get up and go North and some boys don’t. I happened to have the bee to go North. But I didn’t. That’s the difference between you and me.”

Abercrombie turned to him intently.

“You did?” he asked, with unexpected interest, “you wanted to get out?”

“At one time.” At Abercrombie’s eagerness Hemmick began to attach a new importance to the subject. “At one time,” he repeated, as though the singleness of the occasion was a thing he had often mused upon.

“How old were you?”

“Oh--’bout twenty.”

“What put it into your head?”

“Well, let me see--” Hemmick considered. “I don’t know whether I remember sure enough, but it seems to me that when I was down to the University--I was there two years--one of the professors told me that a smart boy ought to go North. He said, business wasn’t going to amount to much down here for the next fifty years. And I guessed he was right. My father died about then, so I got a job as runner in the bank here, and I didn’t have much interest in anything except saving up enough money to go North. I was bound I’d go.”

“Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you?” insisted Abercrombie in an aggrieved tone.

“Well,” Hemmick hesitated, “Well, I right near did but--things didn’t work out and I didn’t get to go. It was a funny sort of business. It all started about the smallest thing you can think of. It all started about a penny.”

“A penny?”

“That’s what did it--one little penny. That’s why I didn’t go ’way from here and all, like I intended.”

“Tell me about it, man,” exclaimed his companion. He looked at his watch impatiently. “I’d like to hear the story.”

Hemmick sat for a moment, distorting his mouth around the cigar.

“Well, to begin with,” he said at length, “I’m going to ask you if you remember a thing that happened here about twenty-five years ago. A fellow named Hoyt, the cashier of the Cotton National Bank, disappeared one night with about thirty thousand dollars in cash. Say, man, they didn’t talk about anything else down here at the time. The whole town was shaken up about it, and I reckin you can imagine the disturbance it caused down at all the banks and especially at the Cotton National.”

“I remember.”

“Well, they caught him, and they got most of the money back, and by and by the excitement died down, except in the bank where the thing had happened. Down there it seemed as if they’d never get used to it. Mr. Deems, the first vice-president, who’d always been pretty kind and decent, got to be a changed man. He was suspicious of the clerks, the tellers, the janitor, the watchman, most of the officers, and yes, by golly, I guess he got so he kept an eye on the president himself.

“I don’t mean he was just watchful--he was downright hipped on the subject. He’d come up and ask you funny questions when you were going about your business. He’d walk into the teller’s cage on tip-toe and watch him without saying anything. If there was any mistake of any kind in the bookkeeping, he’d not only fire a clerk or so, but he’d raise such a riot that he made you want to push him into a vault and slam the door on him.

“He was just about running the bank then, and he’d affected the other officers, and--oh, you can imagine the havoc a thing like that could work on any sort of an organization. Everybody was so nervous that they made mistakes whether they were careful or not. Clerks were staying downtown until eleven at night trying to account for a lost nickel. It was a thin year, anyhow, and everything financial was pretty rickety, so one thing worked on another until the crowd of us were as near craziness as anybody can be and carry on the banking business at all.

“I was a runner--and all through the heat of one God-forsaken summer I ran. I ran and I got mighty little money for it, and that was the time I hated that bank and this town, and all I wanted was to get out and go North. I was getting ten dollars a week, and I’d decided that when I’d saved fifty out of it I was going down to the depot and buy me a ticket to Cincinnati. I had an uncle in the banking business there, and he said he’d give me an opportunity with him. But he never offered to pay my way, and I guess he thought if I was worth having I’d manage to get up there by myself. Well, maybe I wasn’t worth having because, anyhow, I never did.

“One morning, on the hottest day of the hottest July I ever knew--and you know what that means down here--I left the bank to call on a man named Harlan and collect some money that’d come due on a note. Harlan had the cash waiting for me all right, and when I counted it I found it amounted to three hundred dollars and eighty-six cents, the change being in brand new coin that Harlan had drawn from another bank that morning. I put the three one-hundred-dollar bills in my wallet and the change in my vest pocket, signed a receipt and left. I was going straight back to the bank.

“Outside the heat was terrible. It was enough to make you dizzy, and I hadn’t been feeling right for a couple of days, so, while I waited in the shade for a street-car, I was congratulating myself that in a month or so I’d be out of this and up where it was some cooler. And then, as I stood there, it occurred to me all of a sudden that outside of the money which I’d just collected, which, of course, I couldn’t touch, I didn’t have a cent in my pocket. I’d have to walk back to the bank, and it was about fifteen blocks away. You see, on the night before, I’d found that my change came to just a dollar, and I’d traded it for a bill at the corner store and added it to the roll in the bottom of my trunk. So there was no help for it--I took off my coat and I stuck my handkerchief into my collar and struck off through the suffocating heat for the bank.

“Fifteen blocks--you can imagine what that was like, and I was sick when I started. From away up by Juniper Street--you remember where that is; the new Mieger Hospital’s there now--all the way down to Jackson. After about six blocks I began to stop and rest whenever I found a patch of shade wide enough to hold me, and as I got pretty near I could just keep going by thinking of the big glass of iced tea my mother’d have waiting beside my plate at lunch. But after that I began getting too sick to even want the iced tea--I wanted to get rid of that money and then lie down and die.

“When I was still about two blocks away from the bank I put my hand into my watch pocket and pulled out that change; was sort of jingling it in my hand; making myself believe that I was so close that it was convenient to have it ready. I happened to glance into my hand, and all of a sudden I stopped up short and reached down quick into my watch pocket. The pocket was empty. There was a little hole in the bottom, and my hand held only a half-dollar, a quarter and a dime. I had lost one cent.

“Well, sir, I can’t tell you, I can’t express to you the feeling of discouragement that this gave me. One penny, mind you--but think; just the week before a runner had lost his job because he was a little bit shy twice. It was only carelessness; but there you were! They were all in a panic that they might get fired themselves, and the best thing to do was to fire some one else--first.

“So you can see that it was up to me to appear with that penny.

“Where I got the energy to care as much about it as I did is more than I can understand. I was sick and hot and weak as a kitten, but it never occurred to me that I could do anything except find or replace that penny, and immediately I began casting about for a way to do it. I looked into a couple of stores, hoping I’d see some one I knew, but while there were a few fellows loafing in front, just as you saw them today, there wasn’t one that I felt like going up to and saying: ‘Here! You got a penny?’ I thought of a couple of offices where I could have gotten it without much trouble, but they were some distance off, and besides being pretty dizzy, I hated to go out of my route when I was carrying bank money, because it looked kind of strange.

“So what should I do but commence walking back along the street toward the Union Depot where I last remembered having the penny. It was a brand new penny, and I thought maybe I’d see it shining where it dropped. So I kept walking, looking pretty carefully at the sidewalk and thinking what I’d better do. I laughed a little, because I felt sort of silly for worrying about a penny, but I didn’t enjoy laughing, and it really didn’t seem silly to me at all.

“Well, by and by I got back to the Union Depot without having either seen the old penny or having thought what was the best way to get another. I hated to go all the way home, ’cause we lived a long distance out; but what else was I to do? So I found a piece of shade close to the depot, and stood there considering, thinking first one thing and then another, and not getting anywhere at all. One little penny, just _one_--something almost any man in sight would have given me; something even the nigger baggage-smashers were jingling around in their pockets.... I must have stood there about five minutes. I remember there was a line of about a dozen men in front of an army recruiting station they’d just opened, and a couple of them began to yell: ‘Join the Army!’ at me. That woke me up, and I moved on back toward the bank, getting worried now, getting mixed up and sicker and sicker and knowing a million ways to find a penny and not one that seemed convenient or right. I was exaggerating the importance of losing it, and I was exaggerating the difficulty of finding another, but you just have to believe that it seemed about as important to me just then as though it were a hundred dollars.

“Then I saw a couple of men talking in front of Moody’s soda place, and recognized one of them--Mr. Burling--who’d been a friend of my father’s. That was relief, I can tell you. Before I knew it I was chattering to him so quick that he couldn’t follow what I was getting at.

“‘Now,’ he said, ‘you know I’m a little deaf and can’t understand when you talk that fast! What is it you want, Henry? Tell me from the beginning.’

“‘Have you got any change with you?’ I asked him just as loud as I dared. ‘I just want--’ Then I stopped short; a man a few feet away had turned around and was looking at us. It was Mr. Deems, the first vice-president of the Cotton National Bank.”

Hemmick paused, and it was still light enough for Abercrombie to see that he was shaking his head to and fro in a puzzled way. When he spoke his voice held a quality of pained surprise, a quality that it might have carried over twenty years.

“I never _could_ understand what it was that came over me then. I must have been sort of crazy with the heat--that’s all I can decide. Instead of just saying ‘Howdy’ to Mr. Deems, in a natural way, and telling Mr. Burling I wanted to borrow a nickel for tobacco, because I’d left my purse at home, I turned away quick as a flash and began walking up the street at a great rate, feeling like a criminal who had come near being caught.

“Before I’d gone a block I was sorry. I could almost hear the conversation that must’ve been taking place between those two men:

“‘What do you reckon’s the matter with that young man?’ Mr. Burling would say, without meaning any harm. ‘Came up to me all excited and wanted to know if I had any money, and then he saw you and rushed away like he was crazy.’

“And I could almost see Mr. Deems’ big eyes get narrow with suspicion and watch him twist up his trousers and come strolling along after me. I was in a real panic now, and no mistake. Suddenly I saw a one-horse surrey going by, and recognized Bill Kennedy, a friend of mine, driving it. I yelled at him, but he didn’t hear me. Then I yelled again, but he didn’t pay any attention, so I started after him at a run, swaying from side to side, I guess, like I was drunk, and calling his name every few minutes. He looked around once, but he didn’t see me; he kept right on going and turned out of sight at the next corner. I stopped then, because I was too weak to go any farther. I was just about to sit down on the curb and rest when I looked around, and the first thing I saw was Mr. Deems walking after me as fast as he could come. There wasn’t any of my imagination about it this time--the look in his eyes showed he wanted to know what was the matter with _me_!

“Well, that’s about all I can remember clearly until about twenty minutes later, when I was at home trying to unlock my trunk with fingers that were trembling like a tuning fork. Before I could get it open, Mr. Deems and a policeman came in. I began talking all at once about not being a thief and trying to tell them what had happened, but I guess I was sort of hysterical, and the more I said the worse matters were. When I managed to get the story out it seemed sort of crazy, even to me--and it was true--it was true, true as I’ve told you--every word!--that one penny that I lost somewhere down by the station--” Hemmick broke off and began laughing grotesquely--as though the excitement that had come over him as he finished his tale was a weakness of which he was ashamed. When he resumed it was with an affectation of nonchalance.

“I’m not going into the details of what happened, because nothing much did--at least, not on the scale you judge events by up North. It cost me my job, and I changed a good name for a bad one. Somebody tattled and somebody lied, and the impression got around that I’d lost a lot of the bank’s money and had been tryin’ to cover it up.

“I had an awful time getting a job after that. Finally I got a statement out of the bank that contradicted the wildest of the stories that had started, but the people who were still interested said it was just because the bank didn’t want any fuss or scandal--and the rest had forgotten: that is, they’d forgotten what had happened, but they remembered that somehow I just wasn’t a young fellow to be trusted----”

Hemmick paused and laughed again, still without enjoyment, but bitterly, uncomprehendingly, and with a profound helplessness.

“So, you see, that’s why I didn’t go to Cincinnati,” he said slowly; “my mother was alive then, and this was a pretty bad blow to her. She had an idea--one of those old-fashioned Southern ideas that stick in people’s heads down here--that somehow I ought to stay here in town and prove myself honest. She had it on her mind, and she wouldn’t hear of my going. She said that the day I went ’d be the day she’d die. So I sort of had to stay till I’d got back my--my reputation.”

“How long did that take?” asked Abercrombie quietly.

“About--ten years.”

“Oh----”

“Ten years,” repeated Hemmick, staring out into the gathering darkness. “This is a little town you see: I say ten years because it was about ten years when the last reference to it came to my ears. But I was married long before that; had a kid. Cincinnati was out of my mind by that time.”

“Of course,” agreed Abercrombie.

They were both silent for a moment--then Hemmick added apologetically:

“That was sort of a long story, and I don’t know if it could have interested you much. But you asked me----”

“It _did_ interest me,” answered Abercrombie politely. “It interested me tremendously. It interested me much more than I thought it would.”

It occurred to Hemmick that he himself had never realized what a curious, rounded tale it was. He saw dimly now that what had seemed to him only a fragment, a grotesque interlude was really significant, complete. It was an interesting story; it was the story upon which turned the failure of his life. Abercrombie’s voice broke in upon his thoughts.

“You see, it’s so different from my story,” Abercrombie was saying. “It was an accident that you stayed--and it was an accident that I went away. You deserve more actual--actual credit, if there is such a thing in the world, for your intention of getting out and getting on. You see, I’d more or less gone wrong at seventeen. I was--well, what you call a Jelly-bean. All I wanted was to take it easy through life--and one day I just happened to see a sign up above my head that had on it: ‘Special rate to Atlanta, three dollars and forty-two cents.’ So I took out my change and counted it----”

Hemmick nodded. Still absorbed in his own story, he had forgotten the importance, the comparative magnificence of Abercrombie. Then suddenly he found himself listening sharply:

“I had just three dollars and forty-one cents in my pocket. But, you see, I was standing in line with a lot of other young fellows down by the Union Depot about to enlist in the army for three years. And I saw that extra penny on the walk not three feet away. I saw it because it was brand new and shining in the sun like gold.”

The Georgia night had settled over the street, and as the blue drew down upon the dust the outlines of the two men had become less distinct, so that it was not easy for any one who passed along the walk to tell that one of these men was of the few and the other of no importance. All the detail was gone--Abercrombie’s fine gold wrist watch, his collar, that he ordered by the dozen from London, the dignity that sat upon him in his chair--all faded and were engulfed with Hemmick’s awkward suit and preposterous humped shoes into that pervasive depth of night that, like death, made nothing matter, nothing differentiate, nothing remain. And a little later on a passerby saw only the two glowing disks about the size of a penny that marked the rise and fall of their cigars.

[10] Copyright, 1922, by The Metropolitan Magazine Company.
Copyright, 1923, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

JOHN THE BAPTIST[11]

By WALDO FRANK

(From _The Dial_)

The room was bright with the sun. Three stories up.

Three dark halls, three worn stairs, the mustiness of walls to which grimed hands, worn shoulders had rubbed their intricate soiled burden, held up this room that was all bright with the sun.

The door was open: two windows with their mesh Dutch curtains were thrown high: Clara Jones dusted.

She was a short woman, colored a dark brown in which were shadows of blue and orange. She was of indeterminate age. She worked slowly, diligently, with a sort of submissive rhythm to the sweep of her arms, the sway of her head, as if an invisible Master timed her work with gentle strokes on her bent back. The contours and objects of the room were a familiar haze against her hands. Her eyes did not take in the books upon the mantel, the morris chair which her hands groomed and shifted, the blue cover of the couch which the room’s tenant used for a bed. Her eyes were focused dimly beyond the room, beyond the sunlight also that did not make them blink--beyond the sun. At times a murmur as of words answering in herself, a shred of tune, came from her. And these were in unison with the rapt measure of her work. And it with the distant fixedness of her eyes that moved as if to remain upon some point either far within or far without herself. Or both....

A tall young man ... almost a boy ... stood in the door. He buttressed both his palms against the threshold’s sides: he watched her.

Her face turned to her shoulder, then fell forwards back into its somnolent rhythm.

“Lor’! that you already? You-all _quick_ this mo’nin’.”

“May I come in?”

“Sho’ly, sho’ly. Sit down over th’ah.”

She did not stop. She held a broom in her two brown hands. With a steady stroke of shoulder, back and forth it went, rasping ... swinging; her small, soft body cadenced with its stiff advance.

“Th’ah you are, Mr. Loer!” She waved a musty rag over his desk, over a picture nailed above it. “Th’ah you are.”

She turned and smiled at him. He was still standing in the threshold. She had a round, small face, and her big mouth smiling seemed to cover it. Her eyes still focused distantly.

She dropped the broom against a shoulder and flung the rag into the fold of an elbow. She laughed.

“What yo’ got, this mo’nin’? I’m done. Come along in.”

“I don’t feel like being alone this morning, Clara.”

Clara’s smile was tender. Her face tilted to a side.

“Lonely, Mr. Loer?” she said. He felt caressed.

“Oh, no.” He stepped into the room, lifting his knees unnecessarily high. He sank down in the morris chair and primed a pipe.

“Clara,” he seemed to hold her, “how’d you sleep last night?”

She folded her hands.

“Oh, fine, Mr. Loer. You know I always sleeps fine.”

“Well I slept rotten.”

“I wouldn’t sleep none at all, Mr. Loer ... ef I went to sleep same as you does.”

He looked up from his pipe. “What do you mean?”

“’Thout prayin’. Yo’ tole me so yo’self. No wonder you sleep rotten. Lor’! I wouldn’t sleep none at all ... ef ... I went to sleep ’thout prayin’.” She paused. “Watch out, Mr. Loer,” she said with a sweet tremulousness. “Supposin’ the time comes when you cyant sleep at all.”

“I don’t know whom to pray to.”

The old woman looked at the broomstick standing against her shoulder.

“And you so--eddicated,” she declared.

She ambled out, still keyed to that impalpable warm measure kindling her feet, her hips, the drone of her soft voice.

The door’s gentle click made him alone.

He relaxed forward in his chair. Crumpled hands held his sharp, fine chin. His eyes were disturbed. They wandered. They saw his room: sharply each object in his room caught in his eyes and held there. His eyes were hurt because they saw no farther.

He jumped up, flung his coat. He ran his fingers through the high, blond hair. He faced his books.

Spencer’s “First Principles” ... “Introduction to Anthropology” ... Dewey’s “How We Think” ... caught like long splinters in his eyes. He shook his head as if to shake them out.

Then he took the psychology book and settled, rigid in his chair, to read.

His mind held back. It seemed stiff and small, dry and remote. It gave no attention to the book. It gave no attention, now, to the movement of his body as the book fell from limp hands and he was stepping to the corner where stood his ’cello.

He placed a stool. His body flexed and grew co-ordinate as it received the instrument. Softly, with eyes arching beyond him and his mind still gone, he began to bow. His mind held away no more. It broke forward. It leaped, it sang: his fingers moved with delicate precision making slow music.

... The street. A woman, tall, clouded in dark glow, whom he had seen, whom he had seen in the street. His mind out there beat against her uprightness; it was a sea beating and breaking against her. It went up, it went down--as did his fingers--avail-less.

... Then his mother. There was no doubt, she reminded him of his mother who had died when he was a lad in Holland.

Karl Loer bent his face upon his loved ’cello and played deep, plaintive words. He saw the woman whom he had passed so often in the street.... She has arms piteous towards a man who is her husband. She pleads with her arms. She wears a straight black dress. And underneath her dress he saw her breast. It is bleeding! There is an iron bar, clamped hard and close, on the breasts of the woman!

His fingers stopped. He drew his bow dazedly back and forth. He jumped up.

“O you! O you!” he cried, clutching his loved instrument. “I could wring your neck. I could dash you to bits--” He lifted his ’cello in violence with both hands above his face. Softly he laid it on the couch.

He stood now with eyes free and found that he was thinking of his life.

“What nonsense! what nonsense!” he began. He had forgotten how he had begun.... “Mother, this woman ... two women I have never known.” He loved his mother. She was French. He recalled her stately and dark in a town of light, plump people. He recalled her lovely in a world of clods.

The whole world knew that she had been unfaithful, and had disappeared ... disappeared for ever and for ever: that was eternity, her disappearing ... after his father turned her out. He and his two brothers knew how sensual indulgence grew like the fat upon his father, clogged him, clotted his brain ... and he had turned her out. His father’s soul shrank famished, he was a sucking brute. Then he was mad ... she was gone ... and Karl had come away.

America! He brought to it, he thought, his yearning and his music. He dwelt in misery. He dwelt, it seemed to his free eyes, in misery that grew more deep, more blind.

He wondered why.

“I have a good mind,” he said aloud. He swung his chair to face the row of books upon his mantel. So he sat looking at his books. Proud of them--I wonder why?

And as he sat, he forgot the books that stood within his eyes. He thought again of his mother. Why had she been unfaithful? What had driven her, and what his father? Was his brutality the way of sorrow? Had she found joy in that eternity where he had lost her?... Sudden like a stroke across his brain, the woman with white breasts crushed in a clamping iron: her piteous arms stretched towards a man--not he.

He walked up and down. He forgot the vision.

“There,” he said aloud, with an emphasis that was a plea, “there is what comes of music ... of emotion. Idiotic ideas ... visions. That woman ... what do you know about that woman? Rot!”

He bent down and picked up the book that he had failed to read.

“Here’s the place for your mind,” he said aloud.

“You,” he turned to his ’cello, “you’ll go on earning my living.” He stroked the fragile wine-hued wooden breast. “For a while.... But you’ll not boss me, hear?” He stood the instrument away.

There was a knock. Clara with a letter.

He took it. He seemed strangely perturbed. He laid the letter, unread, aside. As she reached for the door, “Clara,” he said.

She turned.

“Clara,” he said again, “why are you so happy? What have you, Clara?”

Her round face was all warmth and smile. She found her ease on her feet.

“I had fo’ babies, Mr. Loer. An’ ev’ one of ’em died afo’ they was six. An’ my husband that I nussed fo’ ten years--he was sick ten years a-dyin’ on his back--he’s gone too. They is all in Heaven, Mr. Loer. They is all waitin’ th’ah fo’ me. Ev’y onct in a while, they comes to me at night. I sees ’em, sees ’em standin’ th’ah as clar--why as clar as you is! An’ they speaks to me: wuds as clar--as clar as mine is. They’s all gone and safe, awaitin’ for me up th’ah. Tha’s why I’m happy, Mr. Loer.”

Old woman and young man stood very still, looking at each other. Karl stirred first. His hands, then his head. He walked up and down. She was still.

“But Clara--but Clara--”

She beamed on him. He stopped. He smiled also. He grasped his cap. He rushed into the street.

Into the street his smile and her words went with him ... shredding his speed, eating into the mood of his release, until his smile went and he stood stock still.

The sun splintered into the block, from the east, through mouldy cornices of houses. Men and women moved separate upon stone, moved from sun to shadow, brokenly. The day was yet too young to have welded them into the substance of the block. Each was a particle thrown out from a separate home.

Karl stood, looked down through the scatter of men and women, the scatter of shade and sun. Athwart shoulders and skirts and hats that bobbed like dark flotsam in a golden sluggish stream, he saw a man move up.

A weight rose from his bowels, clutched at his throat. The man he had seen once, with the woman he had seen often!--Her husband....

A sense of omen cloaked his head and made him dizzy. He felt only his body free, his head was cloaked. The street was suddenly a force, physical and relentless, fixing him there within the channel of this man.

He could no longer fight for the fading word in him: Folly!

The man was almost abreast of him standing to face him. There, in himself he heard, sharp like a fusillade, the words that were his own.

“_I’m stopping you! Because your wife’s in danger! Look at her! Who put the iron bar across her breast?_”

A young man leisurely moved up. A smile in his ruddy face, his red lips mumbling as if he discoursed amiably to himself. His eyes wandered amenably. He saw Karl. Something furrowed his brow into a question. Karl swerved aside. They passed each other....

And now the word that had been fading ... “folly” ... shrieked. It besieged him and shrieked. It was very brave.

“Fool! Fool!”--what did the words mean? Why am I in the street? Why did her husband cross me in the street?

His mind reached for the surety of his mantel and of its row of sober books. These casual things could be explained. He was lonely. Perhaps he was a bit ... unreally, of course, since what did he know of her?... in love. Nonsense.

He jerked his cap over his eyes.... _Look at her! Take away the bar! Place your arms there!_... he returned to the house he lived in.

The area-gate was open, so he went in by it.

His mind, he was very sure, was master now. It was a hard fight of course. He had had so little training! For so very long, he had weltered in emotion. At home, the emotion of rage and of salvation against the brutal gluttony of his father: the emotion of faith against the crass certainty of his world that his mother was bad. And in America, above all, the emotion of hunger. With one way only to destroy it ... his easiest gift ... the emotion of music with which he earned his bread.

--But it shall not master!

His mind pictured the book on psychology upon his mantel. I’ll learn about that. And then some day I’ll dash the old ’cello ... no, absurd!... I’ll sell it.

His feet led him into Clara’s kitchen.

She was alone. An ironing board was laid from table to low shelf. He saw her back. A bent old back ... a small round head ... a mass of tousled hair dusted with white. Yet as the bare arm pressed the steaming iron to and fro, he felt with a new poignance how a wind, tropical and fresh, wielded this woman.

He tiptoed in, sat down and watched her. The rhythm fleshed.... A naked woman, tall and firm and glowing like red earth. Her hands are above her head. Her hands are flowers with the wind in them. There is a tree above her. And her long, bare feet, with the straight toes, are intertwined to the tree’s roots.

Clara moved to the farther side of the board so as to iron and see him. Her shoes were huge misshapen shreds of leather barely holding about her feet, so that but for the glide of her body, her moving might have seemed a shuffle. He saw her smile now over her board at him. He thought of a cloud saturate with sun.

“Clara,” he said, “I should be studying. But I’m a good for nothing.”

“Yo’ mustn’t say that, Mr. Loer!” As her words came, her arms went to and fro, pressing the steamy steel. Her shoulders spoke in concord.

--Nigger woman ... you are all _one_!... What a strange thing to think about a person!

“No, Mr. Loer,” she crooned, “yo’ mus’n’t say that! We is all good fo’ som’p’n. We doan know what a heap o’ de time. But we all is--”

“How can you be so sure of Heaven?”

She rested her elbow on the board. “I done seen it, Mr. Loer. I sees it ... _offen_.”

“How do you know you see it?”

“How do I know I’se a-seein’ you?”

“You could describe me, Clara. Could you describe Heaven?”

“Why, ob co’se I could! What I sees I can describe....” She ironed. “It’s a great big place! Mos’ly light ... glorious, golden light! An’ angels in white wings an’ harps a-singin’, a-singin’.... When yo’ plays sometimes, Mr. Loer ... dem waily shatterin’ tones ... dey sings like dat. Dey music ... it starts _away_ down an’ it leaps _away_ up!”

She ironed.

“Clara, what would you say if I told you that was all a dream--what you saw?”

She beamed and ironed.

“The wise people, Clara, the wise men who study deep and who write books ... they say all that is nonsense.”

Clara beamed. “Dey ain’t wise ef dey say dat, Mr. Loer.”

She was bent over her towels, beaming upon her towels. Towel after towel she ironed, folded, laid upon the pile of towels at her side ... her brown face beaming.

She stopped. She straightened and looked at Karl. Then she went back to her work....

II

Karl was at work. From twelve to half-past-two, from half-past-six to twelve, six days of the week, Karl played in the Trio at The Bismarck. Played sentimental music ... grime of German and Italian soil, froth and scum of Broadway. He drew with his bow complacencies and veiled obscenities ... at work. His mind and his senses in revolt leaped away towards life: swirled, delved, circled; beaten, brought back to his heart which sent them a burden whose eternity he could not understand, would not accept: of Pain.

His eyes saw the café for whose lounging patrons his hand fingered, his hand drew a bow. His eyes saw his associates ... clever, ugly: Stumm with bald, blond-ruffed head at the piano; Silvis, the leader, dark, agonizingly eager to be artistic, swaying, who was a muddy cloud about his violin.

Karl was at work and his mind and senses beating out of tune.

The flamboyant German Hall: smoked woodwork, paneled and carved in Gothic sayings, beermugs and flags under the sombre rafters like brittle colors falling, unable to rest. And in the sudden alcoves, men and women: idle eyes that took in so little, moist mouths, distended bellies that took in so much. Karl bowing an aria from Bohème; and the crass glint of the hall with its arrogant beer mugs, its mottoes, its elbow-leaning guests currying his mind and his senses as they yearned forth towards purer air.... The bald head of Stumm was round, it rested upon his neck like the head of a pin. His wrists bounced up and down. They dragged Karl back from the purer air he sought. Silvis crossed a knee upon the other and swayed with a small finger fluttering from his bow. His eyes were half shut in an absorbent leer ... absorbing Puccini whom he loved. The weak grace of his body, swaying, leading, sucked Karl from his need to be away....

Last chord. _D A F-sharp D_.... Stumm swung about on his stool. Silvis’ legs stretched forward, abdomen collapsed--like a bug stiffened no more into organic form by its creamy fluid ... the music ... now all oozed out. Their words scraped Karl’s head. When their words spoke to him, it was, this day, as if their fingers touched his lips.

“Lehnstein says, next fall we are going to move for a raise--”

“Did you hear about his wife? I guess she’s his wife--”

“Why don’t Max bring that beer?”

The hard loom of the hall, the coldness of men and women abject before their senses, taking in heat ... heat of air, heat of sound, heat of food, heat of sex ... into their coldness: the soil of these two men, his partners, playing this parody of life for an unreal living: himself with truant senses reeling back and bringing to his heart what pitiful crumbled fragments?--a woman stately with white breasts clamped in iron, a woman with brown beaming smile, all One, a woman of whom he knew no good, no ill, save that she had been his Mother--or to bar him from these a row of brittle books upon his mantel?... Karl with a burst of pain he could not understand, at work making his living to know that this was life?

He covered his ’cello and stood it away in the corner made by the piano.

“Ain’t you going to eat?”

“No, thank you.”

He was in the street.

Where was his mind? What was he suffering for? What about?

A lovely day. Here was pure air. Why did he breathe it and not taste it? He wanted more of it than he could breathe. What was air? Why was it pure ironically to him?

Long stiff rows of dirty houses exuding like sweat and excrement his sisters and his brothers. Cold houses sweating in the spring. Sick houses emptying their bowels upon the pure air.

He climbed by stairs into a house.

A swarthy little man in a great white vest with gold chain larding it from arm-pit to stomach, opened the door. Hands brandishing, lying, welcomed him.

“Well, Loer!... Come in.”

“Just a moment, Dooch. I’m in a hurry.” Hurry for what? What am I hurrying towards? “Will you, as a great favor, Dooch, take my place tonight at The Bismarck?”

Brandishing lying hands: “O, my dear fellow. Y’ know I’d love to--anything to help you out. But I’m so busy ... lessons ... lessons ... all day. I must have my rest. At night ... the only time. Why don’t you ask, let me see ... well Facker’d be glad....”

Another visit? “Ten dollars, if you’ll do it, Dooch.”

Hands dropping from lying. “Well, you know, I’d do anything for you.... Half-past-six?”

“Thank you, Dooch.”

Hands sincere, palm upward: waiting. A bill in a hand happy, silent. Once more the air....

Sudden Karl heard these words in himself above the beat of his feet: “I have never learned to use my mind. It’s hard. That is what hurts.... It will come.”

His legs walked on. He walked through desolation.

“O God, let me find _something_--” He stiffened, hearing his words. “Of all prayers, if one is absurdest, this is the one.”

But he walked still through desolation. He sensed how he walked swiftly. Interminable houses were a heavy, fluttering canopy that passed him: banners they were of some arrogant dominion, dragged through mud, stiffened in frost. They shut him out.

Warm air. It was spring.

Children went under his beating knees like the drip of frozen houses melting in spring.

“Let me think! What do I want?... Something more solid than air.... Something as pure that is more solid than air.”

His right hand clasped his left wrist behind him. His knees and chin thrust forward. From waist to shoulder he tended back. So he walked.

He walked through his life. He ached as he walked through his life. He felt himself trample. He trampled what he felt. Was it not clear? Clarity. He had lived in a pigsty. He had come forth. He was young. He would make a better way for himself in the world than the way of Silvis and Stumm. He would study, he sensed already, and was it not good that already beyond the bowing of fiddles he had won the trenchant accent of Reason--Spencer, Darwin, Huxley? He yearned towards the ecstacy of their release from mist and frowziness ... from beer and Puccini. A crumble of old churches falling in dust, drenching the air with dust. He had hands to tear down. He partook of the ecstacy of the release that lay in clear books, clear eyes, hands tearing down....

His father went to church. He saw again the great stomach and the little eyes and the twist of the wreathing mouth ... the heft of fat red hands he felt ... they were sodden in hair ... beating against him, beating the children of his father’s house. Karl’s arm swung at his side, his chin no longer thrust. He felt now his mother’s voice: it lay like a warm purple scarf against the chill of his thoughts; his mother had a red, sweet mouth shut upon her mystery; she moved beyond the shoulder of the town like a sunset bleeding. Karl’s hand clasped a wrist once more beyond his back.... The woman whom he had seen in the street and who haunted him ... he struggling against her.

“Think! Think! Conquer yourself!”

He walked now heavy and stiff.

“Very well. What is she?” he fought.

He turned upon this woman with clamped breasts ... this myth ... this nonsense. Why was she like green fields? Why was his mind like lead? Married ... a stranger! Oh, she was suffering, he knew.

--Once I spoke to her; but my lips trembled.

“No, I am married,” came her pleading whisper. But her hand moved toward him....

A complacent clod of a little man. But husband. Married. A stranger....

Why was his mind a forest of hot trees when he needed a path? A pavement. Hard, clear, cool, like here where his feet were pounding.

Tedium. He played in a waste of soiled senses. He walked through a waste of frozen thoughts. He was frozen in tedium.

He sat down, for he was tired. He opened his eyes.

III

The East Park gasped its scanty green between the loom of the streets of men and the black tumult of the river. Here he, sitting upon a bench....

Before his eyes first, two boys playing tether-ball. One of them strong and with fresh eyes swung his racket well: it rose from a clear forearm, muscle moulded, mazed with faint gold sleeping hair. His mouth shut firm as he stroked. Against him, a boy, shorter, dark, older. He lunged with mouth slant open, and dull feet. One of his eyes stared wide, the other was half shut. He lost swiftly.

The victor stood bored, easefully; looking beyond for a comrade who did not come. Saliva wet the chin of the other, whose effort had been great. His hand hung, palm forward, near his knee.

“Let’s try again,” he said. “You give me your side where the sun’s not in my eyes. That’s fair.” They exchanged places. The battle went on, the same.

Karl was very tired. He leaned back in his bench.

In three straight strokes came to his passive eyes sky, river, park. The sky was steadfast and still. The river was dense and still, boats and waves moving upon the river were like the shiver of sun-motes upon a steadfast sky. The park swayed under the stillness of sky and water. Its swaying was a word that came from moveless lips; its swaying was a word issued from moveless lips. Three horizontal strokes in the eyes of Karl, of a world that did not move.

Stillness came within him.

He turned his head from side to side, as within steadfastness, not stirring it. He saw no more, no less, by turning his head. He was within a focus where all was steadfast and where stillness was all. He moved his hands, and felt how he was wrapped in movelessness. He was not prisoned. He felt free, fluent, felt the accessibility of flight within stillness, within changelessness as within air.

He sat upright on his bench and was not tired.

He swung his left arm slowly under his face; he felt how the world swung with him so that naught had moved.

Upon the cuff of his left sleeve a spot caught him and made him focus his eyes.... A cockroach moved on his cuff. It moved. It moved against the world. It lied.

It flowed into the mass of his right hand. It was crushed. It was killed.

He said aloud: “I am sorry, life. But I cannot have you around.” He was not surprised at his words.

But his words were another stroke, perpendicular to the three-fold stroke of park and river and sky. A stroke cutting along and lifting a veil before his eyes. The movelessness of life won by this fourth stroke of his words another dimension still. So it was that things seemed to happen. Within his immobile vision, he watched things happen ... people move, sun slant farther beneath the green fingers of trees ... as if this fourth stroke of his words saying, “Things happen,” were a knife cutting a cord, unfolding a magic parchment.

Men sat upon benches as he sat upon a bench. Men had feet on a pavement as he had feet on a pavement. Men had faces written with thought as he had a written face. All this he saw as if it were happening just now. There was ease in his soul which took each happening and put it away and knew that all was one.

A man with a black, thick, filthy beard, black, bushed eyebrows beneath which glistened black eyes, a man with a nose inordinately long, falling sheer from his sooty brow, moved upon legs that carried him circularly, level, as if they were wheels ... moved about. He dipped his talonous hand into a refuse can: his shoulders swung like the walking-beam of a boat. He dipped the other hand. There was refuse in his hand. He put it in his mouth. He dove under benches; he ransacked the scanty grass; he sought refuse. He put it in his mouth.

As he ate, his black eyes looked at Karl; they gleamed with a joy so full that Karl breathed against the glisten of his eyes sparking the air.

A little man with a face ghostly white, lips red like a gash of blood soaking through chalk, a little man with up-pointed shoulders and sleeves that were tatters to the elbow, moved, isolate, intent; picking up scraps of paper. Each scrap his fingers feverishly smoothed, his lean eyes bent and read what was there to read. Then his fingers tossed the paper from his eyes behind his back ... eyes roaming, roaming to another scrap.

As he read each message, his lips moved; as his lips moved they bled.

A man wide as a hogshead, short as a boy, wider than long, black as black earth, a negro dwarf with a huge head sat with legs dangling from a bench and looked at Karl. Karl saw him. The dwarf raised a hand to his head and doffed his derby hat. Courteously he smiled, swinging his hat and his arm. He had white separate teeth and no lips. Beneath the frowze of his muddy trousers were patent leather boots. And they dangled.

As he bowed, Karl knew that within the patent leather boots his toes were twitching.

Karl sat easefully and still, and was not surprised to find beside him on the bench the bearded tramp whom he had seen so often, here and elsewhere, on his walks.

The tramp had always interested him; he had always wondered what could be his story. But a terrible reticence, savage or divine, fended this shambling blond man who with great tender eyes, long beard and skin transparent, blue-veined, now sat beside him. This man, he felt, speaks to no one. There is an embryon word, yet dumb, sheathed by his presence. They had sat before in this park on a single bench; it had been impossible to touch his eyes.