FSF
‘Shakespeare was a Bilphist,” she assured him through a fixed smile. “Oh, yes! He was a Bilphist, its been proved.”
At this Dick would look a bit blank.
“If you’ve read ‘Hamlet’ you can’t help but see.”
“Well, he—he lived in a more credulous age—a more religious age.”
But she demanded the whole loaf:
“Oh, yes, but you see Bilphism isn’t a religion. It’s the science of all religions.” She smiled defiantly at him. This was the bon mot of her belief. There was something in the arrangement of words which grasped her mind so definitely that the statement became superior to any obligation to define itself. It is not unlikely that she would have accepted any idea encased in this radiant formula—which was perhaps not a formula; it was the reductio ad absurdum of all formulas.
&
Muriel Kane had originated in a rising family of East Orange. She was short rather than small, and hovered audaciously between plumpness and width. Her hair was black and elaborately arranged. This, in conjunction with her handsome, rather bovine eyes, and her over-red lips, combined to make her resemble Theda Bara, the prominent motion picture actress. People told her constantly that she was a “vampire,” and she believed them. She suspected hopefully that they were afraid of her, and she did her utmost under all circumstances to give the impression of danger. An imaginative man could see the red flag that she constantly carried, waving it wildly, beseechingly—and, alas, to little spectacular avail. She was also tremendously timely: she knew the latest songs, all the latest songs—when one of them was played on the phonograph she would rise to her feet and rock her shoulders back anq forth snap her fingers, and if there was no music she might accompany herself by humming. Her conversation was also timely: “I don’t care » would say, “I should worry and lose my figure” She again: “I can’t make my feet behave when I hear the tune. Oh, baby!” Her finger-nails were too long and ornate, polished te a pink and unnatural fever. Her clothes were too tight, too stylish, too vivid, her eyes too roguish, her smi too coy. She was almost pitifully overemphasized from head to foot.
&
The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.
Along the shelves of Anthony’s library, filling a wall amply, crept a chill and insolent pencil of sunlight touching with frigid disapproval Thérése of France and Ann the Superwoman, Jenny of the Orient Ballet and Zuleika the Conjurer—and Hoosier Cora—then down a shelf and into the years, resting pityingly on the over-invoked shades of Helen, Thais, Salome, and Cleopatra.
&
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t say you’re sorry | If you can’t think anything better than that, just keep quiet!”
“I love you.”
“I don’t care.”
There was a pause. Anthony was depressed, . At length Gloria murmured:
“I’m sorry I was mean.”
“You weren’t. I was the one.”
Peace was restored—the ensuing moments were go much more sweet and sharp and poignant. They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expressionyet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.
Telling Mrs. Gilbert had been an embarrassed matter. She sat stuffed into a small chair and listened with an intense and very blinky sort of concentration. She must have known it—for three weeks Gloria had seen no one else—and she must have noticed that this time there was an authentic difference in her daughter’s attitude. She had been given special deliveries to post; she had heeded, as all mothers seem to heed, the hither end of telephone conversations, disguised but still rather warm—
—Yet she had delicately professed surprise and declared herself immensely pleased; she doubtless was
&
Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony snapped out his lights and, feeling impersonal and fragile as a piece of china waiting on a serving table, got into bed. It was a warm night—a sheet was enough for comfort—and through his wide-open windows came sound, evanescent and summery, alive with remote anticipation. He was thinking that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful, had been lived in facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long dust. And there was something beyond that; he knew now. There was the union of his soul with Gloria’s, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made. From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissclving soundsomething the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in jittle parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness—and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more. It was then that a new note separated itself jarringly from the soft crying of the night. It was a noise from an areaway within a hundred feet from his rear window, the noise of a woman’s laughter. It began low, incessant and whining—some servant-maid with her fellow, he thought—and then it grew in volume and became hysterical, until it reminded him of a girl he had seen overcome with nervous laughter at a vaudeville performance. ‘Then it sank, receded, only to rise again and include words—a coarse joke, some bit of obscure horseplay he could not distinguish. It would break off for a moment and he would just catch the low rumble of a man’s voice, then begin again—interminably; at first annoying, then strangely terrible. He shivered, and getting up out of bed went to the window. It had reached a high point, tensed and stifled, almost the quality of a scream—then it ceased and left behind it a silence empty and menacing as the greater silence overhead. Anthony stood by the window a moment longer before he returned to his bed. He found himself upset and shaken. Try as he might to strangle his reaction, some animal quality in that unrestrained laughter had grasped at his imagination, and for the first time in four months aroused his old aversion and horror toward all the business of life. The room had grown smothery He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind. Life was that sound out there, that ghastly reiterated female sound.
“Oh, my God” he cried, drawing in his breath sharply. Burying his face in the pillows he tried in vain to concentrate upon the details of the next day.
&
The idyl passed, bearing with it its extortion of youth. Came a day when Gloria found that other men no longer bored her; came a day when Anthony discovered that he could sit again late into the evening, talking with Dick of those tremendous abstractions that had once occupied his world. But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love in gered—by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, way of deep and intimate kindnesses they devel toward each other, by way of their laughing at the absurdities and thinking the same things noble and same things sad.
&
I shall tell you the story of my education" continued Maury, “under these sardonic constellations,”
“Do! Please!”
“Shall I, really?”
They waited expectantly white he directed a ruminative yawn toward the white smiling moon.
“Well,” he began, “‘as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred ‘Now I lay me’s.’ ”
“Throw down a cigarette,” murmured some one.
A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian command:
“Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies.”
Below, a lighted match was passed from cigarette to cigarette. ‘The voice resumed:
“I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I believed that because a man cried out ‘My God!’ when a safe fell on him, it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went to school. For fourteea years half a hundred earnest men pointed to ancient flint-locks and cried to me: ‘There’s the real thing. These new rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.’ They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them ‘clever.’
“‘And so I turned, canny for my years, from the pro fessors to the poets, listening—to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of Shelley, to Shake speare with his first bass and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlow, bassos profundo, I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I learned a little of beauty—enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth—and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition. ...
“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.
“The transition was subtle—the thing had lain in wait for me for some time. It has its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for every one. With me? NoI didn’t try to seduce the janitor’s wife—nor did I run through the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility. It is never quite passion that does the businessit is the dress that passion wears. I became bored—that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts. Beauty was behind me, do you understand ?—I was grown.” He paused. “End of school and college period. Opening of Part Two.”
Three quietly active points of light showed the location of his listeners. Gloria was now half sitting, half lying, in Anthony’s lap. His arm was around her so tightly that she could hear the beating of his heart. Richard Caramel, perched on the apple-barrel, from time to time stirred and gave off a faint grunt.
“I grew up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts, But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on. I read Smith, who laughed at charity and insisted that the aneer was the highest form of self-expression but Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light. I read Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism—and_ behold! Jones was still in my way. I did not think—I was a battle-ground for the thoughts of many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries over which the great powers surge back and forth.
“I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life—and of being beaten and bewildered just the same.
“But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you—it’s a wall that an active you runs up against. So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable scepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”
He broke off to give emphasis to his last observation —after a moment he yawned and resumed.
“I suppose that the beginning of the second phase of my education was a ghastly dissatisfaction at being used in spite of myself for some inscrutable purpose of whose ultimate goal I was unaware—if, indeed, there was an ultimate goal. It was a difficult choice. The schoolmistress seemed to be saying, ‘We’re going to play football and nothing but football. If you don’t want to play football you can’t play at all ?
‘What was I to do—the playtime was so short!
““You see, I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, sav, a gray autumn day before a fire?—I don’t think I did that. I was a great deal too warm for that, and too alive.
“For it seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature—nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of the inferior and thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher—or, let us say, her more amusingthough still unconscious and accidental intentions. And, actuated by the highest gifts of the enlightenment, we were seeking to circumvent her. In this republic I saw the black beginning to mingle with the white—in Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the one mastery that might organize them for material prosperity.
“We produce a Christ who can raise up the leperand presently the breed of the leper is the salt of the earth. If any one can find any lesson in that, let him Stand forth.”
““There’s only one lesson to be learned from life, anyway interrupted Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement.
“What’s that ?’”’ demanded Maury sharply.
‘That there’s no lesson to be learned from life.”
......
“You're crazy! By your own statement I should have attained some expericnce by trying.”
“Trying what?” cried Maury fiercely. “Trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas? Struggling in a laboratory through weary years for one iota of relative truth in a mass of wheels or a test tube——”
“Have you?”
Maury paused, and in his answer, when it came, there was a measure of weariness, a bitter overnote that lingered for a moment in those three minds before it floated up and off like a bubble bound for the moon.
“Not I,” he said softly. ‘I was born tired—but with the quality of mother wit, the gift of women like Gloria —to that, for all my talking and listening, my waiting in vain for the eternal generality that seems to lie just beyond every argument and every speculation, to that I have added not one jot.”
In the distance a deep sound that had been audible for some moments identified itself by a plaintive mooing like that of a gigantic cow and by the pearly spot of a headlight apparent half a mile away. It was a steamdriven train this time, rumbling and groaning, and as it tumbled by with a monstrous complaint it sent a shower of sparks and cinders over the platform. “Not one jot!’”? Again Maury’s voice dropped down to them as from a great height. ‘‘What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the aniverse——why, intelligence never built a steam engine { Circumstances built a steam engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.
“I could quote you the philosophy of the hour—but, for all we know, fifty years may see a complete reversal of this abnegation that’s absorbing the intellectuals to-day, the triumph of Christ over Anatole France—” He hesitated, and then added: “‘But all I know—the tremendous importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that importance to myself—these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born knowing, these things and the painful futility of trying to know anything else. -
“Well, I started to tell you of my education, didn’t I? But I learned nothing, you see, very little even about myself. And if I had I should die with my lips shut and the guard on my fountain pen—as the wisest men have done since—oh, since the failure of a certain matter—a strange matter, by the way. It concerned some sceptics who thought they were far-sighted, just as you and I. Let me tell you about them by way of an evening prayer before you all drop off to sleep.
“Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief, But i¢ wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another: “‘Let’s join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives’ tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compileta deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he’ll become a byword foe laughter the world over—and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there? be no more nonsense in the world.
“‘Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a wit~ ness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.’
‘So the men did, and they died.
“But the book lived always, so beautifully hhadit been written, and so astounding the quality of iimagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.”
Only Maury Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house.
&
No comments:
Post a Comment