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Title: Introducing Irony: A Book of Poetic Short Stories and Poems

Author: Maxwell Bodenheim

Release date: October 5, 2019 [eBook #60427]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        file was produced from images generously made available
        by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTRODUCING IRONY: A BOOK OF POETIC SHORT STORIES AND POEMS ***




Produced by Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









  INTRODUCING
  IRONY




  INTRODUCING
  IRONY

  A BOOK OF POETIC SHORT
  STORIES AND POEMS


  BY

  MAXWELL BODENHEIM


  [Illustration]


  NEW YORK

  BONI AND LIVERIGHT

  1922




  COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
  BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

  _Printed in the United States of America_




  _To_

  FEDYA RAMSAY

  WHOSE HAND NEVER LEAVES MY SHOULDER




Some of the poems and stories in this book have appeared in _The
Dial_, _Harper’s Bazaar_, _The Little Review_, _The Nation_, _Cartoons
Magazine_, _Poetry_, _A Magazine of Verse_, _The New York Globe_, _The
Bookman_, _Vanity Fair_, _The Measure_ and _The Double Dealer_




CONTENTS


                                                          PAGE

  JACK ROSE                                                 11

  SEAWEED FROM MARS                                         13

  TURMOIL IN A MORGUE                                       18

  CONDENSED NOVEL                                           21

  MANNERS                                                   23

  AN ACROBAT, A VIOLINIST, AND A CHAMBERMAID CELEBRATE      25

  NOVEL CONVERSATION                                        28

  THE SCRUB-WOMAN                                           30

  MEDITATIONS IN A CEMETERY                                 32

  SIMPLE ACCOUNT OF A POET’S LIFE                           34

  CANDID NARRATIVE                                          37

  UNLITERARY AND SHAMELESS                                  39

  TWO SONNETS TO MY WIFE                                    40

  FINALITIES, I-VIII                                        41

  IMAGINARY PEOPLE, I-IV                                    47

  UNEASY REFLECTIONS                                        50

  SUMMER EVENING: NEW YORK SUBWAY STATION                   50

  GARBAGE HEAP                                              52

  IMPULSIVE DIALOGUE                                        53

  EMOTIONAL MONOLOGUE                                       56

  PRONOUNCED FANTASY                                        59

  WHEN SPIRITS SPEAK OF LIFE                                61


  INSANITY                                                  64

  POETRY                                                    68

  RELIGION                                                  72

  SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY                                     75

  ART                                                       78

  MUSIC                                                     82

  ETHICS                                                    86

  HISTORY                                                   90

  PSYCHIC PHENOMENA                                         94

  LOVE                                                      98




INTRODUCING
IRONY




JACK ROSE


  With crafty brooding life turned to Jack Rose
  And made him heroin-peddler, and his pose
  Was sullenly reflective since he feared
  That life, regarding him, had merely jeered.
  His vanity was small and could not call
  His egoism to the dubious hall
  Of fame, where average artists spend their hour.
  Doubting his powers he was forced to cower
  Within the shrill, damp alleys of his time,
  Immersed in that brisk midnight known as crime.
  He shunned the fiercely shrewd stuff that he sold
  To other people, and derived a cold
  Enjoyment from the writhing of their hearts.
  A speechless artist, he admired the arts
  Of blundering destruction, like a monk
  Viewing a play that made him mildly drunk.
  And so malicious and ascetic Jack
  Bent to his trade with a relentless back
  Until he tapped an unexpected smile--
  A woman’s smile as smooth and hard as tile.
  May Bulger pawned her flesh to him and gave
  His heroin to her brother, with a grave
  Reluctance fumbling at her painted lips.
  Though angry at herself, she took the whips
  Of undesired love, to quiet a boy
  Who wept inanely for his favorite toy.
  She hated Jack because he failed to gloss
  And soften the rough surface of her loss,
  His matter-of-fact frown biting at her heart.
  He hated her because her smiling guess
  Had robbed him of ascetic loneliness,
  And when her brother died, Jack sat beside
  Her grief and played a mouth-harp while she cried.
  But when she raised her head and smiled at him--
  A smile intensely stripped and subtly grim--
  His hate felt overawed and in a trap,
  And suddenly his head fell to her lap.
  For some time she sat stiffly in the chair,
  Then slowly raised her hand and stroked his hair.




SEAWEED FROM MARS


  I

  “Have you ever played on a violin
  Larger than ten thousand stars
  And warmer than what you call sin?”
  Torban, a young man from Mars,
  Gave me the stretch of his voice,
  And my “no” fell down like a pin
  On the echoed din of his words.
  He said: “Then I have no choice.
  I must use the barrenly involved
  Words with which you have not solved
  The wistful riddles of your days.
  Leave the pale and ruddy herds
  Of men, with their surrendering ways,
  And come with me to Mars.”


  II

  Drums of Autumn beat on Mars,
  Calling our minds to reunion.
  The avenues of seaweed spars
  Have attained a paleness
  Equal to that of earthly philosophies,
  And the trees have lost
  The diamond violence of Spring.
  Their purple leaves have turned to grey
  Just as a human religion
  Gradually changes to pretence.
  In Mars we have only two seasons,
  Spring and Autumn--their reasons
  Rest in a treacherous sun
  That suddenly runs away,
  Creating a twilight-suspense.
  When the sun reappears
  Mars is once more amazed
  By the blazing flatteries of Spring.
  Again the heavy leaves ring
  With odor and light deftly pressed
  Into a stormy chorus.
  Then we abandon the screaming violins
  Of our minds, and each man wins
  An understanding rest.
  Once more we roam and jest
  Upon the avenues, with voices
  One shade louder than the leaves,
  Or sail upon the choral seas
  And trade our words with molten ease.
  Throughout the Autumn we stand
  Still and deserted, while our minds
  Leap into sweeping tensions
  Blending sound and form
  Into one search across the universe.


  III

  What do we find in this search?
  All of your earthly words lurch
  Feebly upon the outskirts of my mind,
  And when they pass beyond them, they are blind.
  Outward forms are but the graves
  Of sound, and all the different waves
  Of light and odor, they are sound
  That floats unshaped and loosely gowned.
  When sound is broken into parts
  Your ears receive the smaller arts,
  But when it drifts in broad release
  You cannot hear its louder peace.
  Your houses, hills, and flesh of red
  Are shapes of sound, asleep or dead.
  In Mars a stronger Spring of sound
  Revives our forms and makes Profound
  Music, softer than the dins
  That rose from Autumn violins.
  Our minds, whose tense excursions spread
  In chase of noisy walls that fled,
  Relent and drop within our heads,
  Enjoying the timid sound of their beds.
  Filled with a gracious weariness,
  We place it, like a lighter dress,
  Upon the sounds from other stars
  Brought back to celebrate on Mars.


  IV

  A girl of Mars is burning
  Notes of thought within her throat.
  Her pale white lips are turning
  The fire to storied chords.
  The song is old but often made
  By girls who sit in Spring and braid
  The lanterned language of their hair.
  Its spacious gaiety cannot be sold
  To your narrow glow of words.
  The hint that I shall give is cold
  And like the sound of snowy air.

  _I shall journey with the men
  When my curling thoughts are ten.
  O the sternness of that number!
  Colored sounds from breath to umber
  Promising a first release.
  I have dwelt too long in peace
  Placing smallness on my breast.
  The prisoned whisper of my skin
  Longs to vanish in the din
  Of Autumn when great sounds are caught.
  Let the tall wildness of my thought
  Stride beside the thundering grace
  Of the man whose spring-time face
  Brought me tiny notes of rest._

  She sits within a house of stone
  That lends a wise and balanced tone:
  A roofless house whose walls are low
  And level with her head’s grey glow.
  The bright sounds of her parents fly
  Around the house--we do not die
  In Mars, but change to gleams of sounds
  And stay within our gayer rounds
  Until when tired Spring has gone
  We lead the Autumn searchers on.
  Before we change, our bodies curve
  Like yours save that our skins are gray:
  Light shades of gray that almost swerve
  To white, like earthly men who pray.


  V

  We do not love and hate in Mars.
  These earthly cries are flashing bars
  Of sound from which our minds are free.
  They stand in our mythology:
  Legends elusive and weird,
  Acrid Gods that once were feared.
  They vanished imperceptibly
  And none among us can agree
  Upon the tangled way in which they fled.
  Starlit symbols of dread,
  They slowly exhausted themselves and died
  In striding heralds of a wilder bride.
  We have no emotions in Mars.
  They are like long-healed wounds
  Whose scars are softened by the gleam of our minds.
  We approach them with clearer kinds
  Of sound from deeply resting thought.
  Our youths and maidens have not caught
  The treacherous and tightly bound
  Confusion of your loving sound,
  For sex to us is but the ring
  Of different shades of thought in Spring
  When men recline upon the breast
  Of women, dissolving into thoughtful rest.
  In Autumn sex is left behind.
  Men and women no longer lined
  By different bodies raise their dins
  Above the screaming violins.




TURMOIL IN A MORGUE


  Negro,
  Chinaman,
  White servant-girl,
  Russian woman,
  Are learning how to be dead,
  Aided by the impersonal boredom
  Of a morgue at evening.
  The morgue divides its whole
  Of dead mens’ contacts into four
  Parts, and places one in each
  Of these four bodies waiting for the carts.
  The frankness of their decay
  Breaks into contradictory symbols
  And sits erect upon the wooden tables,
  Thus cancelling the validity of time.
  In a voice as passive as slime
  The negro speaks.
  “Killed a woman: ripped her skin.
  Saw her heart floating in a tumbler of gin.
  Had to drink her heart because it wouldn’t leave the gin.
  Because I wanted to reach all of her
  They ripped my flesh.
  They wanted to reach all of me
  And their excuse was better than mine.”
  Cowed baby painted black,
  The negro sits upon fundamentals
  And troubles them a little with his hands.
  The beautiful insanity
  Of his eyes rebukes
  The common void of his face.
  Then the Chinaman speaks
  In a voice whose tones are brass
  From which emotion has been extracted.
  “Loved a woman: she was white.
  Her man blew my brains out into the night.
  Hatred is afraid of color.
  Color is the holiday
  Given to moods of understanding:
  Hatred does not understand.
  When stillness ends the fever of ideas
  Hatred will be a scarcely remembered spark.”
  Manikin at peace
  With the matchless deceit of a planet,
  The Chinaman fashions his placid immensity.
  The Chinaman chides his insignificance
  With a more impressive rapture
  Than that of western midgets.
  His rapture provides an excellent light
  For the silhouette of the negro’s curse.
  Then the white servant-girl
  Speaks in a voice whose syllables
  Fall like dripping flower-juice and offal,
  Both producing a similar sound.
  “I made a neat rug for a man.
  He cleaned his feet on me and I liked
  The tired, scheming way in which he did it.
  When he finished he decided
  That he needed a smoother texture,
  And found another lady.
  I killed myself because I couldn’t rub out
  The cunning marks that he left behind.”
  Impulsive doll made of rubbish
  On which a spark descended and ended,
  The white servant-girl, without question or answer,
  Accepts the jest of a universe.
  Then the Russian woman
  Speaks in a voice that is heat
  Ill-at-ease upon its couch of sound.
  “I married a man because
  His lips tormented my melancholy
  And made it long to be meek,
  And because, when he walked to his office each morning,
  He thought himself a kindled devil
  Enduring the smaller figures around him.
  He abandoned me for German intrigue
  And I chased him in other men,
  Never quite designing him.
  Death, a better megalomaniac,
  Relieved me of the pursuit.”
  Symbol of earth delighted
  With the vibration of its nerves,
  The Russian woman sunders life
  Into amusing deities of emotion
  And bestows a hurried worship.
  Then the morgue, attended by a whim,
  Slays the intonations of their trance
  And slips these people back to life.
  The air is cut by transformation.
  The white servant-girl retreats to a corner
  With a shriek, while the negro advances,
  And the Russian woman
  Nervously objects to the Chinaman’s question.
  The morgue, weary housewife for speechless decay,
  Spends its helplessness in gay revenge:
  Revenge of earth upon four manikins
  Who straightened up on wooden tables
  And betrayed her.




CONDENSED NOVEL


  Shun the abundant paragraphs
  With which a novelist interviews shades
  Of physical appearance in one man,
  And regard the body of Alvin Spar
  Curtained by more aristocratic words.
  “Alvin Spar in adolescence
  Was neither slim nor rotund,
  But slightly aware of future corpulence.
  The face that Aristotle may have had
  Was interfering, bit by bit,
  With an outer face of pouting curves.
  Alvin Spar in youth
  Held half of the face that Aristotle
  May have had, and the pungent directness
  Of a stable-boy.
  Alvin Spar in middle age
  Had the face that Aristotle
  May have had--a large austerity
  Disputing the bloom of well-selected emotions.
  Straight nose, thick lips, low forehead
  Were apprentices to the austerity
  That often stepped beyond them.
  Alvin Spar in old age
  Had drawn the wrinkled bed-quilts
  Over the face that Aristotle
  May have had, but his eyes peered out,
  Fighting with sleep.”
  Shuffle the cards on which I have written
  Alvin Spar’s changes in physical appearance,
  And deal them out to the various players.
  Accident first, then the qualities of the players--
  These two will struggle to dominate
  The movements of the plot.
  The plot of this novel will ascend
  In twenty lines and escape
  The honoured adulteration so dear to men.
  “Alvin Spar loved a woman
  Who poured acid on his slumber
  By showing him the different fools within him.
  Sincerely longing for wisdom
  He married her, while she desired
  A pupil whom she could lazily beat.
  She convinced him that emotions
  Were simply periods of indecision
  Within the mind, and with emphasis
  He walked to another woman.
  The second woman loved him,
  But she was merely to him
  Clay for mental sculpture.
  She killed herself, believing
  That he might become to her in death
  A figure less remote and careful.
  He forgot her in an hour
  And used the rest of his life
  In finding women over whom he could tower....
  He died while madly straying over his heights.”
  The incidental people, chatter, and background?
  You will find them between
  Pages one and four-hundred
  Of the latest bulk in prose.




MANNERS


  Gingerly, the poets sit.
  Gingerly, they spend
  The adjectives of dribbling flatteries,
  With here and there a laceration
  Feeding on the poison of a smile.
  In the home of the poet-host
  That bears the slants of a commonplace,
  Eagerly distributed--
  The accepted lyrical note--
  The poets sit.
  The poets drink much wine
  And tug a little at their garments,
  Weighing the advantages of disrobing.
  (It is necessary to call them “poets”
  Since, according to custom,
  Titles are generously given to the attempt.)
  Sirona, cousin of the poet-host,
  Munches at the feast of words.
  She endeavors to convince herself
  That her hunger has become an illusion.
  The poets, capitulating to wine,
  Leave their birds and twilights,
  Their trees and cattle at evening,
  And study Sirona’s body--
  Their manacled hands still joined
  By the last half-broken link.
  Beneath her ill-fitting worship
  Young Sirona fears
  That the poets are wordy animals
  Circled by brocaded corsets....
  Sirona, if you stood on your head
  Now, and waved the brave plan of your legs,
  Undisturbed by cloth,
  The poets would be convinced
  That you were either insane or angling.
  But an exceptional poet,
  Never present at these parties,
  Would compliment your vigour
  And scoff at the vain deceptions of privacy.
  Vulgarity, Sirona, is often a word
  Invented by certain men to defend
  Their disdain for other men, who chuckle
  At the skulking tyrannies of fashion.
  Few men, Sirona, dare to become
  Completely vulgar, but many
  Nibble at the fringes.




AN ACROBAT, A VIOLINIST, AND A CHAMBERMAID CELEBRATE


  Geometry of souls.
  Dispute the roundness of gesturing flesh;
  Angles, and oblongs, and squares
  Slip with astounding precision
  Into the throes of lifted elbows;
  Into the searching perpendicular
  Of fingers rising to more than ten;
  Into the salient straightness of lips;
  Into the rock-like protest of knees.
  The flesh of human beings
  Is a beginner’s-lesson in mathematics.
  The pliant stupidity of flesh
  Mentions the bungling effort
  Of a novice to understand
  The concealed mathematics of the soul.
  Men will tell you that an arm
  Rising to the sky
  Indicates strident emotion;
  Reveals a scream of authority;
  Expresses the longing of a red engine
  Known as the heart;
  Rises like a flag-pole
  From which the mind signals.
  Men will fail to tell you
  That an arm rising to the sky
  Takes a straight line of the soul
  And strives to comprehend it;
  That the arm is a solid tunnel
  For a significance that shoots beyond it.
  The squares, and angles, and oblongs of the soul,
  The commencing lines of the soul
  Are pestered by a debris of words.
  Men shovel away the words:
  Falteringly in youth;
  Tamely and pompously in middle age;
  Vigorously in old age.
  Death takes the last shovel-full away:
  Death is accommodating.
  Nothing is wise except outline.
  The content held by outline
  Is a slave in the mass.
  Men with few outlines in their minds
  Try to give the outlines dignity
  By moulding them into towers two inches high,
  In which they sit in lonely, talkative importance.
  Men with many outlines
  Break them into more, and thus
  Playing, come with quickened breath
  To hints of spiritual contours.
  Seek only the decoration;
  Avoid the embryonic yelping
  Of argument, and scan your patterns
  For angles, oblongs, and squares of the soul.
  I overheard this concentrated prelude
  While listening to an acrobat, a violinist, and a chamber-maid
  Celebrate the removal of their flesh.
  While playing, the violinist’s upper arm
  Bisected the middle of the acrobat’s head
  As the latter knelt to hear,
  And the chamber-maid
  Stretched straight on the floor, with her forehead
  Touching the tips of the violinist’s feet.
  Motion knelt to receive
  The counselling touch of sound,
  And vigour, in a searching line,
  Reclined at the feet of sound,
  Buying a liquid release.
  Angles of arms and straight line of bodies
  Made a decoration.
  The violinist’s music
  Fell upon this decoration;
  Erased the vague embellishment of flesh;
  And came to angles, squares, and oblongs
  Of the soul.




NOVEL CONVERSATION


Certain favorite words of men have gathered in a vale made of
sound-waves. These words, far removed from human tongues and
impositions, enjoy an hour of freedom.


  _Emotion_

  Men believe that I can speak
  Without the aid of thought.
  True, I have murdered many kings,
  Leaned upon many cheeks,
  And sought the release of music,
  But when I ride upon words
  I am forced to steal them from the mind.
  Forgive me, now, if a trace of thought
  Invades my liquid purity!


  _Truth_

  You need not defend your argument
  With meek verbosity,
  As though you dreaded its possible subtleties.
  We are not men, but words!
  Men have made me a lofty acrobat
  Entertaining each of their desires
  With some old twist on the bars.
  But let us leave the frantic tasks
  Forced upon us by men.
  This is our grove of rest.


  _Intellect_

  Emotion, we have often crept
  From our separate palaces,
  Asking each other for secret favors.


  _Emotion_

  We laughed because the men who made us
  Could not see our desperate trading.
  We will end our laugh
  Upon the dust of the last man on earth
  And taste a peaceful strangeness.


  _Art_

  And I, the tortured child of your love,
  Will slip from the fringe of your grayness
  Into the void from which I came.


  _Poetry_

  And I, the moment when your arms
  Touched each other in the night,
  Will no longer strive
  To tell the happening to men.


  _Fantasy_

  And I, the glistening whim
  Of your secret love,
  Will change to a question lurking within your dust.


  _Suggestion_

  And I, the beckoning second
  When you curved a world in the twist of your fingers--
  I shall vanish into your completeness.


  _Intellect_

  The hope of this magic ending
  Is our only consolation.
  Emotion, a new philosopher
  Is forging blades for your torture,
  And a braggart poet
  Invites me to his disdain.
  Let us return to our burdens.




THE SCRUB-WOMAN

(_A Sentimental Poem_)


  Time has placed his careful insult
  Upon your body.
  In other ages Time gave rags
  To hags without riches, but now he brings
  Cotton, calico, and muslin--
  Tokens of his admiration
  For broken backs.
  Neat nonsense, stamped with checks and stripes,
  Fondles the deeply marked sneer
  That Time has dropped upon you.
  While Time, in one of his well-debated moods
  That men call an age, is attending to his manners,
  I shall scan the invisible banners
  Of meaning that unfurl when you move.


  II

  When you open your mouths
  I see a well, and strangled chastity
  At the bottom--not chastity
  Of the flesh, but lucid purity
  Of the mind choked by a design
  Of filth that has slowly turned cold,
  Like a sewer intruding
  Upon a small, dead face.
  This is not repulsive.
  Only things alive, with gaudy hollows,
  Can repulse, but your death holds
  A haggard candour that gently thrusts its way
  Into the unimportance of facts.
  You are not old: you were never young.
  Life caressed your senses
  With a heavy sterility,
  And you thanked him with the remnant
  Of thought that he left behind--
  His usual moment of absentminded kindness.
  When the muscles of your arm
  Punish the brush that rubs upon wood
  I see a rollicking mockery--
  Rhythm in starved pursuit
  Of petrified desire.
  When the palms of your hands
  Stay flat in dirty water
  I can observe your emotions
  Welcome refuse as perfume,
  Intent upon a last ghastly deception.
  When you grunt and touch your hair
  I perceive your exhaustion
  Reaching for a bit of pity
  And carefully rearranging it.

  Lift up your pails and go home;
  Take the false tenderness of rest;
  Drop your clothes, disordered, on the floor.
  Vindictive simplicity.




MEDITATIONS IN A CEMETERY

                       You can write nothing new about death

                                                           GEROID LATOUR


  Death,
  Grandiosely hackneyed subject,
  I live in a house one hundred years old
  Placed in the middle of a cemetery.
  The cemetery is bothered by mausoleums
  Where fragments of Greek and Gothic
  Lie in orderly shame.
  Slabs and crosses of stone
  Remain unacquainted with the bones
  That they must strive to introduce.
  The trees retain their guiltless sibilants.
  The trees tell me upon my morning walk:
  “In other cemeteries,
  Shakespeare, Maeterlinck and Shaw
  Fail to produce the slightest awe
  In trees that do not create for an audience.”
  Being finalities, the grass and trees
  Find no need for rules of etiquette.
  Delicacy must be effortless
  Or else it changes to a patched-up dress.
  But delicate and coarse are words
  For quickness that tries to linger,
  And slowness that strives to be fast!
  Emotions and thoughts are merely
  The improvisations of motion,
  And lack a permanent content.
  An aging tree is wiser
  Than an aging poet,
  And death is wiser than both.
  The scale ascends out of sight
  And I recall that the morning is light
  And smaller notes await me.
  The tomb-stones around my path
  Have been crisply visited by names
  To which they bear no relation.
  Imagine the perturbation
  Of a stone removed
  From the comprehension of a mountain
  And branded with the name of A. Rozinsky!
  Recollecting journeys of my own,
  I close my eyes and leave the stone.
  The names of other men entreat--
  Slight variations in line
  Ponderously refusing to resign.
  Men who will be forgotten
  Try to hinder the process with stone.
  Because they dread the affirmation
  Of ashes undiscovered in wind,
  I am walking through this cemetery.

  The old grave-diggers will soon
  Astonish the earth below this oak.
  From their faces adjectives have fled,
  Leaving the essential noun:
  Leaving also the unwilling frown
  With which they parley with the earth ...
  Death, I must tell you of these things
  Since you are unaware that they exist.
  You send an efficient servant
  To the almost unseen fluctuations
  Of tomb-stones, skulls, and lilies,
  Reserving your eyes for larger games.




SIMPLE ACCOUNT OF A POET’S LIFE


  In 1892
  When literature and art in America
  Presented a mildewed but decorous mien,
  He was born.
  During the first months of his life
  His senses had not yet learned to endure
  The majestic babble of old sterilities.
  The vacuum of his brain
  Felt a noisy thinness outside,
  Which it could not hear or see,
  And gave it the heavier substance
  Of yells that were really creation
  Fighting its way to form.
  (When babies shriek they seek
  Power in thought and action.
  Life objects to their intent
  And forces their voices to repent.)
  At the age of four he lived inwardly,
  With enormous shapeless emotions
  Taking his limbs, like waves.
  His mind was vapour censured
  By an occasional protest
  That mumbled and could not be heard.
  People to him were headless figures--
  Bodies surmounted by voices
  That tickled like feathers, or struck like rocks.
  Missiles thrown from moving mountain-tops
  And leaving only resentment at their touch.
  At ten the voices receded
  To invisible meanings
  That toyed with flesh-protected secrets of faces.
  The voices made promises
  Which the faces continually evaded,
  And often the voices in vengeance
  Changed a lip or an eye-brow
  To repeat their neglected demands.
  When swung to him the voices
  Were insolent enigmas,
  Tripping him as he stood
  Midway between fright and indifference.
  He sometimes tittered tranquilly
  At the obvious absurdity of this.
  His rages were false and sprang
  From aloof thoughts chanting over their chains.
  The immediate cause of each rage
  Merely opened a door
  Upon this changeless inner condition.
  That species of intoxicated thought
  Which men describe as emotion
  Used its merriment to blind his eye-sight.
  But anger, whose real roots are in the mind,
  Tendered him times of hot perception.
  He noticed that children held flexible flesh
  That wisely sought a variety of patterns--
  Flesh intent upon correcting
  Its closeted effect--
  While older people enticed their flesh
  Into erect and formal lies
  Repeated until their patience died
  And they tried an unpracticed rebellion.
  This was a formless revelation,
  Unattended by words
  But throwing its indistinct contrast
  Over his broad one-colored thought.
  At sixteen he employed words
  To flay the contrast into shapes.
  At seventeen he decided
  To emulate the gay wisdom of children’s flesh.
  He deliberately borrowed whiskey
  To wipe away the lessons of older people
  Lest they intrude their sterility
  Upon his plotting exuberance.
  He placed his hands on women,
  Gently, boldly, as one
  Experimenting with a piano.
  He stole money, begged on street-corners,
  And answered people with an actual knife
  Merely to give his thoughts and emotions
  A changing reason for existence.
  Moderation seemed to him
  A figure half asleep and half awake
  And mutilating the truth of each condition.
  At twenty-four his flesh became tired,
  And to amuse the weariness
  His hands wrote poetry.
  He had done this before,
  But only as a gleeful reprimand
  To the speed of his limbs.
  Now he wrote with the motives of one
  Whose flesh is passing into less visible manners.
  At times he returned to more concrete motions,
  To befriend the handmaiden of his flesh,
  But gradually he longed
  For the complete secrecy of written creation,
  Enjoying the novelty of a hiding-place.
  In 1962
  He died with a grin at the fact
  That literature and art in America
  Were still presenting a mildewed, decorous mien.




CANDID NARRATIVE


  I

  _A chorus-girl falls asleep and, in a dream, speaks to a former
  lover. In her dream she holds the intelligence of a poet but still
  clings to certain of the qualities and mannerisms of her wakeful
  self._

  Say, kid, I’m in a candid mood;
  The kind of mood that silences
  The babbling dampness of my character.
  I’m feeling as improbable
  As an overworked Grecian myth
  Fainting amid the smells of a Ghetto.
  Now, Hypocrisy
  Always slinks along
  Winking an opaque eye at reality.
  But when he spies a fantasy
  He feels disgraced and leaves in haste.
  What’s the use of telling a lie to a lie?
  So, since I’m only a dream,
  Listen to my candid scream.
  You like to press a rouged cheek
  Against your obscurity,
  Like a third-rate poet
  Pasting a sunset upon his emptiness.
  Bashful mountebanks like you
  Can seduce the eloquent delusion
  Of time and give it a speechless limp.
  The insincere trickle of your words
  Was neither silence nor sound
  But falteringly tempted both,
  Like a tiny fountain unnoticed
  At the feet of two large coquettes
  The intricate laziness
  Of your dimpled face
  Received a petulantly naked
  Ghost of thought, and seized it without desire.
  Again it held the furbished effigies
  Of sensuality
  And tried to give them life
  From the weariness of my face.
  Yet I could have endured you
  But for the fact that your moustache
  Scraped across my lips
  Like a clumsy imitation of passion.
  Trivial insults have tumbled down
  The pillared complacency of empires
  Just as the thrust of your lips
  Tripped my mercenary balance.
  My lover now has the face of a dog,
  With each corner of his lips
  Pointing to a different Heaven,
  Yet his greed and melancholy
  Sometimes fondle each other
  Upon the pressures of his mouth,
  And the monotony of his kiss
  Does not dissolve my stoicism.
  Women who measure their gifts for lovers
  Never hope for more than this.




  II

UNLITERARY AND SHAMELESS

  _A young woman who has been renounced by her lover, because of her
  lack of culture, answers his derision._

  Your cloistered naughtiness
  Makes me as boisterous
  As a savage attending
  A minstrel-show of regrets.
  The pampered carefulness
  With which you distil a series
  Of standardized perfumes from life
  Takes its promenade
  Between the realms of sanity and madness.
  You are too precise to be quite sane
  And too evasive to be insane,
  And all that you have left me
  Is a mood of windy sadness--
  Emotions becoming verbose
  In a last thin effort
  To persuade themselves that they loved
  A jewel that slipped from your fingers.
  Your mind is a limpid warehouse
  Filled with other mens’ creations,
  And you pilfer a bit from each,
  Disguising the scheme of your culture.
  I would rather be a naked fool
  Than a full-gowned erudite
  Imitation of other mens’ hands.
  I shall marry a desperado
  And give him strength with which to paint
  Black angels and muscular contortions
  On panels of taffeta.




TWO SONNETS TO MY WIFE


  I

  Because her voice is Schönberg in a dream
  In which his harshness plays with softer keys
  This does not mean that it is void of ease
  And cannot gather to a strolling gleam.
  Her voice is full of manners and they seem
  To place a masquerade on thought and tease
  Its strength until it finds that it has knees,
  And whimsically leaves its heavy scheme.

  Discords can be the search of harmony
  For worlds that lie beyond the reach of poise
  And must be captured with abandoned hands.
  The music of my wife strives to be free
  And often takes a light, unbalanced voice
  While madly walking over thoughtful lands.


  II

  My wife relents to life and does not speak
  Each moment with a deft and rapid note.
  Sometimes a clumsy weirdness finds in her throat
  And ushers in a music that is weak
  And bargains with the groping of her heart.
  But even then she plays with graver tones
  That do not sell themselves to laughs and moans
  But seek the counsel of a deeper art.

  She drapes her loud emotions in a shroud
  Of glistening thought that waves above their dance
  And sometimes parts to show their startled eyes.
  The depths of mind within her have not bowed
  To sleek emotion with its amorous glance.
  She slaps its face and laughs at its surprise!




FINALITIES


  I

  Pretend that night is grandiose,
  That stars win graves in every ditch;
  Pretend that moonlight is verbose
  And affable, like some grande-mère,
  And men will say that your despair
  Seduces luminous conceits,
  Or call you an anaemic fool
  Who stuffs himself with curdled sweets.
  Thus sentenced to obscurity,
  You can find more turbulent lips
  And spaciously retreat from men
  Immersed in pedestals and whips.
  Amusedly, you can say that stars
  Are wizened jests on every ditch;
  That moonlight is a trick that jars
  Your mind intent on other minds.
  Having agreed upon your station,
  Men will no longer heed your words,
  And with a galloping elation
  You can contradict yourself in peace.


  II

  The wary perturbations of convinced
  And secretly disdainful men are mild
  And deftly tepid to the ears of one
  Who entertains a careless, ungloved child.
  Above the sprightly idleness of plates
  Men sit and feign industrious respect,
  With eye-brows often slightly ill at ease--
  Cats in an argument are more erect.
  At last the tactful lustres of farewells
  Are traded: each man strolls off and forgets
  The other--not a frill is disarranged.
  The tension dexterously avoids regrets.
  Two men have unveiled carved finalities
  And made apologies for the event,
  With voices well-acquainted with a task
  Devoid of nakedness and ornament.
  And each man might have murmured, “Yes, I know
  What you will say and what I shall reply,”
  And each man might have watched the other man
  Smile helplessly into his mutton-pie.


  III

  This farcical clock is copying
  A wood-chopper with nimble poise,
  While Time, with still and fluid strides,
  Perplexedly listens to the noise.
  The room that holds this joke is filled
  With the relaxed complacencies
  Of poets hiding from themselves
  With measured trivialities.
  But one among them walks about
  And watches with embarrassed eyes.
  The others do not speak to him:
  His nudeness is a tight disguise.
  This fool is anxious to display
  Interrogations of his mind
  To poets who at work and play
  Are isolated from their kind.
  Reluctantly he finds his room,
  Sits on the floor, with legs tucked in,
  And grins up at another clock
  Aloofly measuring its din.


  IV

  When you are tired of ogling moltenly,
  Your undertones explosively confess.
  A shop-girl coughing over her cigarette
  Expresses the burlesque of your distress.
  Take your cocaine. It leaves a blistering stain,
  But phantom diamonds are immune from greed.
  You pluck them from the buttons of your vest,
  Wildly apologising for your need.
  Take more. Redress the thinness of your neck
  With diamonds; entertain them with your breast;
  Cajole them on the floor with fingertips
  That cannot pause, dipped in a demon’s zest.
  If you had not relented to a man
  Who meddled with your face and stole your clothes,
  Your shrill creative pleasures might be still
  Incarcerated in the usual pose.
  Hysteria shot its fist against your face
  One day, and left the blood-spot of your mouth,
  But when the morning strikes you there will be
  More than hysteria in your answering shout.


  V

  Laughter is a skeleton’s applause:
  Grief sells increase to sterility:
  Happiness protects its subtle flaws.
  These three significances make
  The part of you that men can see,
  As you recline upon this bed,
  Your hand defending one bare knee,
  Your shoulders trapped upon the quilt.
  But under the warm sophistry
  That turns your flesh, another form
  Abstractly bellicose and free
  Attacks the answer of your blood.
  Freedom is the lowest note
  Of slavery, and slavery
  The lowest freedom--you can feel
  The charm of your servility.
  True, you were once a chamber-maid
  Who won a thief and spoke to grief,
  And now your limbs have numbly strayed.
  Are these not harmless travesties?


  VI

  Snobs have pockets into which
  They crowd too many trinkets.
  You feel this, talking to the rich
  And lightly bulging mountebank.
  Untie the knots that close your bag
  And tempt him with a creed or need.
  Be as loquacious as a hag
  Who loves the details of her wares.
  There is a relish when you speak
  To one who cannot understand:
  You celebrate upon a peak
  And prod his helpless effigy.
  This is an unimportant game
  To men evading holidays,
  But introspection becomes tame
  Unless it compliments itself.
  The lightly bulging mountebank
  Is but an interval in which
  You take your garments off and thank
  The privacy that he bestows.


  VII

  Like other men you fly from adjectives.
  The plain terseness that lives in verbs and nouns
  Creates a panorama where you know
  That men are not a cloud of romping clowns.
  You greet the wideness of eternal curves
  Where beauty, death and silence give their height
  To those rare men who do not play with thought.
  But this fruit-peddler decorates his fright
  And polishes his peaches and his grapes
  Insanely. If his mercenary hopes
  Were bolder he would be a nimble poet.
  Slight in her bridal gown, his mind elopes
  With adjectives that find her incomplete:
  Your mind is hard and massively parades
  Across the earth with Homer and Villon.
  Since each of you with common sense evades
  Monotony, I join you and refuse
  To call you dwarf or giant. Let the fools
  Who criticise you bind you with these names
  And separate your dead bones with their rules!


  VIII

  Dead men sit down beside the telephones
  Within your brain and carefully relate
  Decisions and discretions of the past,
  Convinced that they will not deteriorate.
  But you have not their certainty: you try
  A question now and then that cautiously
  Assaults their whispered indolence until
  Their sharp words once more force you to agree.
  Then you insist that certain living men
  Whose tones are half-discreet may be allowed
  To greet their masters through the telephones,
  Provided that their words are not too loud.
  The new men imperceptibly entice
  Their elders, and a compromise is made,
  Both sides discovering that two or three
  Excluded men must be correctly flayed.
  And so the matter ends; conservative
  And radical revise their family-tree,
  While you report this happening with relief
  To liberals and victorious cups of tea.




IMAGINARY PEOPLE


I

POET

  You have escaped the comedy
  Of swift, pretentious praise and blame,
  And smashed a tavern where they sell
  The harlots’ wine that men call fame.
  Heralds of reckless solitude
  Have offered you another voice,
  But men are still a tempting jest.
  You roam and cannot make a choice.
  When you have played distractedly
  With a humility, you tire
  And change the pastime to a pride.
  These are but moods of one desire.
  You throw an imitating gleam
  Upon the dwarfs that line your road,
  Then with a worn hostility
  You tramp along beneath your load.


II

WOMAN

  To hide your isolation, you become
  Tame and loquacious, bowing to the men
  Who bring you ornaments and poverties.
  Your cryptic melancholy dwindles then,
  Solved by the distant contrast of your words.
  Your loneliness, with an amused relief,
  Sits listening to your volubility
  And idling with an enervated grief.
  The play does not begin until you say
  Your last “good-night,” for you have only made
  A swindled fantasy regain its parts.
  Throughout the night you held an unseen blade
  Upon your lap and trifled with its hilt,
  And now you lift it with submissive dread.
  Should you attack your loneliness and grief
  Now that they are asleep? You shake your head.


III

CHILD

  Like puffs of smoke inquisitively blown
  Across the slight transparency of dawn,
  The births of thought disperse upon your face.
  A tenuous arrogance, when they have gone,
  Clings to its tiny wisdom and denies
  The feeble challenge. Warm emotions swarm
  Upon the flushed impatience of your face
  And merge to lordly, evanescent form.
  New sights bring light oppression to your mind.
  You struggle with a hunger that transcends
  The glistening indecisions of your eyes
  And wins a flitting certainty. Your trends
  Lead to a fabled turmoil that escapes
  The stunted messengers of trembling thought.
  Yet, when your hand for moments closes tight
  You feel a dagger that your fears have caught.


IV

OLD MAN

  Below your skull a social gathering glows.
  Weak animosities exchange a last
  Chat with emotional ambassadors
  Who honor the importance of your past.
  You turn your hammock and surrender limbs
  To sunlight, and increase the hammock’s swing
  As though you suavely bargained with a friend.
  Its answers are impersonal and bring
  A tolerance that wounds your lack of strength.
  A final insurrection cleaves your rest.
  You raise your back, then lower it convinced
  That motion now would be a needless test....
  And with your falling back, the gathering
  Within your head melts through a door, chagrined,
  And everything within you dies except
  A blue and golden hammock in the wind.




UNEASY REFLECTIONS


  Determinedly peppered with signs,
  The omnibus ambles without curiosity.
  Southampton Row, Malborne Road, Charing Cross--
  These names have no relation
  To the buildings they partition
  If one mutters, “I shall go to Euston Road,”
  Imagination is relieved of all errands
  And, decently ticketed, enters the omnibus.
  If one muttered, “I shall go to protesting angles,
  Surreptitiously middle-aged,
  And find a reticent line to play with,”
  One would violate
  The hasty convenience of labels
  And seriously examine one’s destination.
  If poplar-trees, brief violets and green glades
  On any country road had each received
  An incongruous name--Smith’s Tree,
  C. Jackson’s Clump, or Ferguson’s Depression--
  And city streets had never known a label,
  Most poets would have turned their fluid obsession
  On lamp-posts and the grandeur of ash-cans.
  It would be grimly realistic now
  To write about a violet or a cow.




SUMMER EVENING: NEW YORK SUBWAY-STATION


  Perspiring violence derides
  The pathetic collapse of dirt.
  An effervescence of noises
  Depends upon cement for its madness.
  Electric light is taut and dull,
  Like a nauseated suspense.
  This kind of heat is the recollection
  Of an orgy in a swamp.
  Soiled caskets joined together
  Slide to rasping stand-stills.
  People savagely tamper
  With each other’s bodies,
  Scampering in and out of doorways.
  Weighted with apathetic bales of people
  The soiled caskets rattle on.
  The scene consists of mosaics
  Jerkily pieced together and blown apart.
  A symbol of billowing torment,
  This sturdy girl leans against an iron girder.
  Weariness has loosened her face
  With its shining cruelty.
  Round and poverty-stricken
  Her face renounces life.
  Her white cotton waist is a wet skin on her breast:
  Her black hat, crisp and delicate,
  Does not understand her head.
  An old man stoops beside her,
  Sweat and wrinkles erupting
  Upon the blunt remnants of his face.
  A little black pot of a hat
  Corrupts his grey-haired head.

  Two figures on a subway-platform,
  Pieced together by an old complaint.




GARBAGE-HEAP


  The wind was shrill and mercenary,
  Like a housewife pacing down the sky.
  Green weeds and tin-cans in the yard
  Made a debris of ludicrous dissipations.
  The ochre of cold elations
  Had settled on the cans.
  Their brilliant labels peeped from the weeds,
  Like the remains of a charlatan.
  A bone reclined against a fence-post
  And mouldily congratulated life.
  A woman’s garter wasted its faded frills
  Upon a newspaper argument.
  The shipwrecked rancor of bottles and boxes
  Was pressed to disfigured complexities.
  A smell of torrential asperity
  Knew the spirit of the yard.

  Contented or incensed,
  The wreckage stood in the yard,
  One shade below the sardonic.




IMPULSIVE DIALOGUE


  _Poet_

  Will you, like other men,
  Offer me indigo indignities?


  _Undertaker_

  Indigo indignities!
  The words are like a mermaid and a saint
  Doubting each other’s existence with a kiss.


  _Poet_

  The words of most men kiss
  With satiated familiarity.
  Indigo is dark and vehement,
  But one word in place of two
  Angers barmaids and critics.


  _Undertaker_

  Straining after originality
  You argue with its ghost!
  A simple beauty, like morning
  Harnessed by a wide sparkle
  And plodding into the hearts of men,
  Cannot reach your frantic juggling.


  _Poet_

  I can appreciate
  The spontaneous redundancy of nature
  Without the aid of an echo
  From men who lack her impersonal size.


  _Undertaker_

  The sweeping purchase of an evening
  By an army of stars;
  The bold incoherence of love;
  The peaceful mountain-roads of friendship--
  These things evade your dexterous epigrams!


  _Poet_

  A statue, polished and large,
  Dominates when it stands alone.
  Placed in a huge profusion of statues
  Its outlines become humiliated.
  Simplicity demands one gesture
  And men give it endless thousands.
  Complexity wanders through a forest,
  Glimpsing details in the gloom.


  _Undertaker_

  I do not crave the dainty pleasure
  Of chasing ghosts in a forest!
  Nor do I care to pluck
  Exaggerated mushrooms in the gloom.
  I have lost myself on roads
  Crossed by tossing hosts of men.
  Pain and anger have scorched our slow feet:
  Peace has washed our foreheads.


  _Poet_

  Futility, massive and endless,
  Captures a stumbling grandeur
  Embalmed in history.
  In my forest you could see this
  From a distance and lose
  Your limited intolerance.
  Simplicity and subtlety
  At different times are backgrounds for each other,
  Changing with the position of our eyes.
  Death will burn your eyes
  With his taciturn complexity.


  _Undertaker_

  Death will strike your eyes
  With his wild simplicity!


  _Poet_

  Words are soldiers of fortune
  Hired by different ideas
  To provide an importance for life
  But within the glens of silence
  They meet in secret peace....
  Undertaker, do you make of death
  A puffing wretch forever pursued
  By duplicates of vanquished forms?
  Or do you make him a sneering King
  Brushing flies from his bloodless cheeks?
  Do you see him as an unappeased brooding
  Walking over the dust of men?
  Do you make him an eager giant
  Discovering and blending into his consciousness
  The tiny parts of his limitless mind?


  _Undertaker_

  Death and I do not know each other.
  I am the stolid janitor
  Who cleans the litter he has left
  And claims a fancied payment.


  _Poet_

  Come to my fantastic forest
  And you will not need to rise
  From simple labours, asking death
  For final wages.




EMOTIONAL MONOLOGUE


  _A man is sitting within the enigmatic turmoil of a railroad station.
  His face is narrow and young, and his nose, lips, and eyes carved to
  a Semitic sharpness, have been sundered by a bloodless catastrophe.
  A traveling-bag stands at his feet. Around him people are clutching
  farewells and shouting greetings. Within him a monologue addresses an
  empty theatre._

  I am strangling emotions
  And casting them into the seats
  Of an empty theatre.
  When my lifeless audience is complete,
  The ghosts of former emotions
  Will entertain their dead masters.
  After each short act
  A humorous ghost will fly through the audience,
  Striking the limp hands into applause,
  And between the acts
  Sepulchral indifference will mingle
  With the dust upon the backs of seats.
  Upon the stage a melodrama
  And a travesty will romp
  Against a back-drop of fugitive resignation.
  Climax and anti-climax
  Will jilt each other and drift
  Into a cheated insincerity.
  Sometimes the lights will retire
  While a shriek and laugh
  Make a martyr of the darkness.
  When the lights reappear
  An actor-ghost will assure the audience
  That nothing has happened save
  The efforts of a fellow ghost
  To capture life again.
  In his role of usher
  Another ghost will arrange
  The lifeless limbs of the audience
  Into postures of relief.
  Sometimes a comedy will trip
  The feet of an assassin,
  Declaring that if ghosts were forced
  To undergo a second death
  Their thinness might become unbearable.
  At other times indignant tragedy
  Will banish an intruding farce,
  Claiming that life should not retain
  The luxury of another laugh.
  The first act of the play will show
  The owner of the theatre
  Conversing with the ghost of a woman.
  As unresponsive as stone
  Solidly repelling a spectral world,
  His words will keenly betray
  The bloodless control of his features.
  He will say: “With slightly lowered shoulders,
  Because of a knife sticking in my back,
  I shall trifle with crowded highways,
  Buying decorations
  For an interrupted bridal-party.
  This process will be unimportant
  To the workshop of my mind
  Where love and death are only
  Colourless problems upon a chart.”
  The ghost of the woman will say:
  “Your mind is but the rebellious servant
  Of sensitive emotions
  And brings them clearer dominance.”
  And what shall I mournfully answer?
  I am strangling emotions
  And casting them into the seats
  Of an empty theatre.




PRONOUNCED FANTASY


  A negro girl with skin
  As black as a psychic threat,
  And plentiful swells of blonde hair,
  Sat at a badly tuned piano
  And vanquished her fingers upon the keys.
  A midnight exultation
  Fastened itself on her face,
  Quivering over the shrouded prominence
  Of her lips and nose.
  Her dress was pink and short,
  And hung upon her tall, thin body,
  Like a lesson in buffoonery.
  She lectured her heart on the piano
  With violence of minor chords.
  Her voice was a prisoner
  Whose strong hands turned the bars of his cell
  Into musical strings.
  _Wen’ tuh Houston, tuh get mah trunk,
  Did’n get mah trunk, but ah got dam’ drunk.
  Well, ahm satisfi-i-ied
  Cause ah gotta be-e-e-ee._
  The negro girl turned and cursed
  With religious incision
  At a parrot in a white spittoon.
  He pampered his derision
  While she played another tune.
  Then he saw her long blonde hair
  And paused in the midst of his squawk.


  II

  I found the negro girl
  Walking down a railroad track.
  The unconscious humour of sunlight
  Disputed the gloom of her skin.
  Her gray and dirty clothes
  Disgraced the haste of her body.
  Her feet and arms were bare
  And thin as sensual disappointments.
  An egg stood straight upon
  The blonde attention of her hair.
  The upturned remonstrance of her head
  Revealed her balancing effort.
  Lacking a more intense food
  She dined upon the air
  And sang with loosened despair.

  _Gonna lay mah head right down upon dat--
  Down upon dat railroad track!
  Gonna rest mah head right down upon dat railroad track.
  An’ wen the train goes by--’m boy--
  Ahm gonna snatch it back._

  The negro girl received my gaze
  And broke it on her poignant face.
  “Why do you carry the egg?” I said.
  “If I could only hate it less
  I might break it, and undress,”
  She answered with motionless lips.




WHEN SPIRITS SPEAK OF LIFE


_Three spirits sit upon a low stone wall placed on the top of a hill.
Their figures are gray, with human outlines, and their faces are those
of a boy, a woman, and an old man. Light is greeting intimations of
evening. The wall, the hill, and the figures exist only to the spirits
who have created them._


  _First Spirit_

  We have made a wall
  And take it gravely.


  _Second Spirit_

  The pensive vagary
  That led us to return to earth
  Welcomes these pretty illusions.
  Stone wall, hill, and evening
  Become the touch of spice
  Precious to our weariness.


  _Third Spirit_

  The animated brevity
  Of this world is captivating!
  We have journeyed inward
  To the ever-distant center of life,
  Where language is a universe
  Seething with variations,
  And form becomes the changing warmth
  Of wrestling influences;
  Where motion is the plunging light of thoughts
  Dying upon each other.


  _First Spirit_

  We find an incredulous pleasure
  In changing from violent influences
  To breath that is mutilated with outlines.
  With a subtle suspicion, we greet
  The tiny fables of our hands and feet.
  We take the little blindness of eyes
  To reassure ourselves
  That the fables will not vanish.
  Humorously we trade
  Languages, like one who gives a plateau
  For a drop of old liquor!


  _Second Spirit_

  Once we were germs of thought
  Squirming under elastic disguises--
  The bank-clerk inscribing tombstones;
  The poet playing surgeon to his heart;
  The cardinal starving his flesh.
  Our bodies were images made by thought
  And symbolizing the pain of its birth.
  Murder, love, and theft
  Were only struggling experiments
  Made by germs of thought emerging to form.


  _Third Spirit_

  What men call mysticism
  Is the lull in which their germ
  Of thought compensates itself
  By dreaming of a future form.
  But when the struggle is resumed,
  It often derides its inactivity,
  Scorning the brilliant trance of its exhaustion!


  _First Spirit_

  And now, three tired spirits,
  Seeking a weird trinket of the past,
  Have slipped into a replica of birth.


  _Second Spirit_

  Because the gliding search of our life
  Is lacking in one quality, amusement,
  We shall often return
  To evenings, men, and walls of stone.




INSANITY


Geroid Latour was a lean, grandiose Frenchman whose curly beard
resembled a cluster of ripe raspberries. His lips were maroon-colored
and slightly distended, as though forever slyly inviting some
stubbornly inarticulate thought--as though slyly inviting Geroid
Latour. A man’s lips and beard are two-thirds of his being, unless he
is an anchorite, and even in that case they can become impressively
stunted. Geroid Latour was an angel rolling in red mud. From much
rolling he had acquired the pert, raspberry beard, struggling lips, and
the surreptitious grandeur of a nose, but the plastic grin of a singed
angel sometimes listened to his face.

His wife, having futilely tried to wrench his beard off, sought to
reach his eyes with a hat-pin.

“This is unnecessary,” he expostulated. “Another woman once did it much
better with a word.”

A plum-colored parrot in the room shrieked: “I am dumb! I am dumb!”
Geroid Latour had painted it once, in a sober moment. Geroid and his
wife wept over the parrot; slapped each other regretfully; and sat down
to eat a pear. A little girl ran into the room. Her face was like a
candied moon.

“My mother has died and my father wants a coffin,” she said.

Geroid Latour rubbed his hands into a perpendicular lustre--he was a
facetiously candid undertaker. He took the hand of the little girl
whose face was like a candied moon and they ambled down the street.

“I have lost my friendship with gutters,” mused Geroid, looking down as
he walked. “They quarrel with bits of orange peel and pins. Patiently
they wait for the red rain that men give them every two hundred years.
Brown and red always sweep toward each other. Men are often unknowingly
killed by these two huge colours treading the insects upon a path and
walking to an ultimate trysting-place.”

The little girl whose face was like a molasses crescent cut off one of
her yellow curls and hung it from her closed mouth.

“Why are you acting in this way?” asked Geroid.

“It’s something I’ve never done before,” she answered placidly.

Geroid stroked his raspberry beard with menacing longing but could not
quite induce himself to pull it off. It would have been like cutting
the throat of his mistress.

They passed an insincerely littered courtyard, tame beneath its gray
tatters, and saw a black cat chasing a yellow cat.

“A cat never eats a cat--goldfish and dead lions are more to his
taste,” said Geroid. “Indulgently he flees from other cats or pursues
them in turn.”

“I see that you dislike melodrama,” observed a bulbous woman in
penitent lavender, who was beating a carpet in the courtyard.

“You’re mistaken. Melodrama is a weirdly drunken plausibility and can
not sincerely be disliked,” said Geroid. “But I must not leave without
complimenting your lavender wrapper. Few people have mastered the art
of being profoundly ridiculous.”

“I can see that you’re trying to be ridiculously profound,” said the
woman as she threw a bucket of stale water at Geroid. He fled down the
street, dragging the child with him. They left the cumbersome sterility
of the city behind them and passed into the suburbs.

“Here we have a tragedy in shades of naked inertness,” said Geroid to
the little girl.

“I don’t quite understand you,” answered the little girl. “I see
nothing but scowls and brownness.”

A tree stood out like the black veins on an unseen fist. A square
house raised its toothless snarl and all the other houses were jealous
imitators. Wooden fences crossed each other with dejected, mathematical
precision. A rat underneath a veranda scuffled with an empty candy box.
The green of dried grasses spread out like poisonous impotence.

“Here is the house where my mother lies dead,” said the little girl.

Her father--peace germinating into greasy overalls--came down the
steps. His blue eyes were parodies on the sky--discs of sinisterly
humourous blue; his face reminded one of a pear that had been stepped
on--resiliently flattened.

“I have come to measure your wife for her coffin,” said Geroid Latour.

“You’ll find her at the bottom of the well in the back-yard,” answered
the man.

“Trying to cheat a poor old undertaker out of his business!” said
Latour, waggishly.

“No, I’ll leave that to death,” said the man. “Come inside and warm
your candour.”

“No, thank you, shrieks travel faster through the open air,” said
Geroid, squinting at the man’s sportively cerulean eyes.

“Come out to the well and we’ll haul her up,” said the man.

The little girl darted into the house, like a disappointed hobgoblin,
and Geroid Latour followed the man to the well at the rear of the
house. Suddenly he saw a mountainous washerwoman dancing on her toes
over the black loam. Her sparse grayish black hair flapped behind her
like a dishrag and her naked body had the color of trampled snow. An
empty beer-bottle was balanced on her head. She had the face of an old
Columbine who still thought herself beautiful.

“A neighbour of mine,” said the man in an awed voice. “She was a
ballet-dancer in her youth and every midnight she makes my back-yard a
theater. In the morning she scrubs my floors. Here, in my back-yard,
she chases the phantoms of her former triumphs. Moonlight turns her
knee joints into miracles!”

“Ah, from enormous wildness and pretence, squeezed together, comes the
little drop of happiness,” said Geroid Latour, sentimentally.

“My wife objected to my joining this woman’s midnight dance,” said the
man. “To prevent her from informing the police, I killed her. I could
not see a miracle ruined.”

“Only the insane are entertaining,” answered Geroid. “The egoism of
sane people is gruesome--a modulated scale of complacent gaieties--but
insane people often display an artificial ego which is divine. The
artist, gracefully gesticulating about himself, on his divan, is
hideous, but if he danced on a boulder and waved a lilac bough in one
hand and a broom in the other, one could respect him.”

As Geroid finished talking the mountainous washerwoman drew nearer and
stopped in front of the man. Blossoming glints of water dropped from
her grayish white skin.

“You haven’t killed me yet, my dear husband,” she shouted to the man.
Then, snatching the beer-bottle balanced on her head she struck at him.
Geroid fled to the front gate and sped down the road. Looking back,
from a safe distance, he saw the mountainous woman, the man, and the
little child earnestly gesticulating in the moonlight.




POETRY


Morning light anxiously pinched the cheeks of these poplar trees. The
silver blood rushed to their faces and they blushed. The garden walls
forgot their stolidity for a moment and seemed inclined to leap away,
but became sober again, resisting the twinkling trickery of morning
light. Airily suspended tales in light and colour, of no importance to
philosophers, hung over the scene. Only a snail underneath the trees,
steeped in a creeping evening, lived apart from the crisp medley of
morning lights. Laboriously, the snail moved through his explanation of
the universe. But, to blades of grass, their lives tersely centered in
green, the morning was a mysterious pressure.

The morning glowed over the garden like an incoherent rhapsody. It
lacked order and thought, and the serious eyes of teachers and jesters
would have spurned it. But Halfert Bolin, walking between rows of cold
peonies, regarded the morning with harsh approval and spoke.

“You have the brightness and flatness of a distracted virgin but your
eyes are mildly opaque. The tinseled swiftness of a courtesan’s memoirs
is yours but your heart is as shy as the clink of glass. You glow like
an incoherent rhapsody over the peonies in this garden!”

A woman whose painted face was a lurid snarl tapped Bolin on the
shoulder. Her red hair was brushed upward into a pinnacle of burnished
frenzy; her blue serge dress cast its plaintive monotone over the body
of a sagging amazon; a pink straw hat dangled from her hand. Bolin
allowed his admiration to bow.

“A babyish lisp slipping from you would make your grewsomeness perfect,
madame,” he said.

“I don’t getcha, friend,” she responded. “I’m a sporting lady from the
roadhouse down the way an’ I’m out for a morning walk. Who planted you
here, old duck?”

“I’m a cow browsing amidst the peonies,” said Bolin seriously. “Without
a thought, I feed on light and colour.”

“You don’t look like a cow,” said the woman, dubiously. “Maybe you’re
spoofing me, you funny old turnip!”

“No, I only jest with the morning,” Bolin answered, unperturbed.
“It ignores me with soaring colours and I prefer this to the minute
antagonisms of human beings. You don’t understand a word I say--you
bend beneath tepid apprehension, so I find a pleasure in speaking to
you--it’s like humming a love-song to a mud-turtle.”

“Don’t get insultin’,” said the woman with disgruntled amazement. “I
think you’re crazy.”

Bolin turned, with a smile like a distant spark, and walked away
between the peonies. The woman regarded him a moment, while a
fascinated frown battled with her painted face. Then she strode after
him and gripped his arm.

“Hey, watcha leavin’ me for?” she said in a piteously strident voice.

“For the peonies in this garden,” answered Bolin, mildly.

“Listen, don’t get mad at me,” she said. “I don’t care whether you’re
crazy or not. I like your face.”

Bolin gazed at her while sorrow loosened his face and made it glisten
spaciously.

“Can you become as spontaneously tranquil as these peonies?” he asked.

The woman tendered him her dazed frown, like an anxious servant.

“Walk with me and be quiet unless I ask you to speak,” said Bolin with
sudden harshness.

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

“This is the head of a philosopher,” said Bolin.

The woman jerkily turned her body, while pallid perplexity ate into her
paint and made her face narrow.

“You can speak,” said Bolin.

“It looks like a rock,” she answered in the voice of a child clinking
his fetters.

“We have both spoken words,” said Bolin mildly.

The shy blindness on her face glided to and fro, like a prisoner. As
she strolled with Bolin she still seemed a puppet dragged along the
dust of a road by some Christ. Bolin’s middle-aged face whistled, with
limpid chagrin, to his youth. His high cheek-bones were like hidden
fists straining against his sallow skin.

They came upon a dead rabbit stiffening by the roadside.

“Bury him,” said Bolin, gravely.

The woman clutched at her habitual self.

“S-a-a-y, what’s the idea?” she asked in a shrilly lengthened voice.

“Bury him,” repeated Bolin gravely.

With a dazed giggle she picked a dead branch from the ground and jabbed
at the loose black loam. Then she gingerly prodded the dead rabbit with
the branch, shoving it into the depression she had made. She scooped
earth over it with her foot.

“Now we’re both crazy,” she said uncertainly, and her nervous smile was
the juggled wreck of a silver helmet.

“You have buried your meekness,” said Bolin, calmly amused. “Now walk
beside me and do not speak unless, being brave, you desire to leave me.”

The woman stood gaping at him, like a vision poignantly doubting
the magician who has created it. Sullenness made her lips straight
for a moment, then faded into twitching awe. She slid her arm into
his and once more seemed a doll dragged along the dust of a road by
some distracted giant. Bolin retraced his steps; he and the woman
passed by the garden of cold peonies and came to a bend in the road.
Late afternoon blundered sedately through shades of green foliage
beneath them. Below the hilltop on which they stood, a barn-like house
crouched, its tan cerements repelling the afternoon light.

The woman tapped her chin with two fingers in a drum-beat of reality.

“Gotta get back to work, old dear,” she said, amiably squinting at
Bolin.

Bolin’s sallow face shook once and became chiseled apathy.

“So do I,” he answered, his voice like the accidental ring of light
metals. “I’m the new waiter Foley hired last week. You’ve been too busy
to notice me much.”

For a full minute the woman stood staring at him, her hands upon her
hips, her slightly bulging gray eyes like water-drops threatening to
roll down her shattered face.

“You’re the guy they call Nutty Louie,” she said at last, as though
confiding a ludicrously startling message to herself.

Then for another full minute she stood staring at him.

“We’re bughouse,” she said in a mesmerised whisper. “Bughouse.”

Bolin walked forward without a word. The woman gaped at him for a
moment and then ran after him as she had in the garden of peonies.




RELIGION


Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat and read the Bible. Green waves
died upon each other, like a cohesive fantasy. Each small wave rose as
high as the other and ended in a swan’s neck of white interrogation.
Sunlight blinded the water as style dazes the contents of a poem and
the blue sky lifted itself to symmetrical stupor. The air fell against
one like a soothing religion. The bristling melancholia of pine trees
lined the wide river. But Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat,
reading the Bible. He read the Songs of Solomon, and a sensual
pantomime made a taut stage of his face. When not reading the Songs
of Solomon he was as staidly poised as a monk’s folded arms. He had
borrowed the colours of his life from that spectrum of desire which he
called God. Different shades of green leaves were, to him, the playful
jealousies of a presence; the tossed colours of birds became the
ineffably light gestures of a lost poet.

His Swedish peasant’s face had singed its dimples in a bit of
sophistication but his eyes were undeceived. His heart was a secluded
soliloquy transforming the shouts of the world into tinkling surmises.
His broad nose and long lips were always at ease and his ruddy skin
held the texture of fresh bunting. His eyes knew the unkindled
reticence of a rustic boy.

This man of one mood sat in his floating row-boat, reading the Bible.
He reached the mouth of the river and drifted out to sea. The sea was
a menacing lethargy of rhythm: green swells sensed his row-boat with
dramatic leisure. A sea gull skimmed over the water, like a haphazard
adventure. Looking up from his Bible Alvin Tor saw the body of a
woman floating beside his boat. With one jerk his face swerved into
blankness. The tip of his tongue met his upper lip as though it were
a fading rim of reality. The fingers of one hand distressed his flaxen
hair.

The woman floated on her back with infinite abandon. Little ripples of
green water died fondling her body. The green swells barely lifting her
were great rhythms disturbed by an inert discord. Sunlight, fumbling at
her body, relinquished its promiscuous desires and became abashed. _Her
wet brown hair had a drugged gentility: its short dark curls hugged
her head with despondent understanding. Her face had been washed to
an imperturbable transparency: it had the whiteness of reclining foam
overcast with a twinge of green--the sea had lent her its skin._ Her
eyes were limply unworried and violated to gray disintegration. In
separated bits of outlines the remains of thinly impudent features were
slipping from her face. The bloated pity of black and white garments
hid her lean body.

As Alvin Tor watched her, tendrils of peace gradually interfered with
the blankness on his face. His lips sustained an unpremeditated repose.
A sensitive compassion dropped the sparks of its coming into his eyes.
His clothes became a jest upon an inhuman body; the earth of him
effortlessly transcended itself in the gesture of his arm flung out to
the woman.

“Impalpable relic of a soul, the spirit you held must have severed
its shadow to preserve you forever from the waves,” he said, his face
blindfolded with ecstasy, “for you grasp the water with immortal
relaxation. You are not a body--you are beauty receding into a
resistless seclusion.”

“Kind fool, musically stifling himself in a row-boat--made kind by the
desperate tenderness of a lie--you are serenading the chopped bodies of
your emotions,” said the woman.

Alvin Tor’s face cracked apart and the incredulously hurrying ghost of
a child nodded a moment and was snuffed out.

“Mermaid of haunting despondency, what are you?” he asked.

“I am the symbol of your emotions,” the woman answered.

“I made them roses stepped upon by God,” said Alvin Tor.

“I am the symbol of your emotions,” said the woman.

Alvin Tor heavily dropped his raised arm, like a man smashing a
trumpet. Restless white hands compressed the ruddy broadness of his
face. The woman slid into the green swells like exhausted magic. Alvin
Tor rowed back to the river.


II

A woman lifted the green window-shades in her room and resentfully
blinked at the sun-plastered clamours of a street. She turned to the
bed upon which another woman reclined.

“Say, wasn’t that a nutty drunk we had last night?” she said. “Huggin’
a Bible and ravin’ about waves and mermaids and a lot of funny stuff!”

She dropped the green shade and stood against it a moment in the
smouldering gloom of the room. _Her brown hair had a drugged gentility:
its short dark curls hugged her head with despondent understanding.
Her face had been washed to an imperturbable transparency: it had the
whiteness of reclining foam overcast with a twinge of green--the sea
had lent her its skin._




SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY


The concentrated vehemence of a mountain halted against the sky in
a thin line of thwarted hostility. A waterfall hurdled its crazed
parabola between gray rocks, flying into a stifled scream of motion far
below. When the pine trees moved a mathematician solved his problems,
and his acrid exultation hypnotized the air. The pungent truculence of
earth that had never been stepped on raised its brown shades.

Eric Lane stopped in an alcove of pine trees; lifted a pack from his
back; pitched his tent; and broke dead pine branches across his knee.
There were scars on his face where philosophies had broken and died
and the beaming redundancy of one that survived. For Eric believed
that the visible and audible surface of man’s conduct and dreams,
when interpreted and compared, could reveal his frustrated hungers.
Metaphysics, to him, was a beggar rattling his chains into insincere
victories of sound--a beggar painting seraphs upon the strained
finality of his brain.

Eric looked up from his task of breaking dead pine branches. A first
shade of twilight climbed the mountain, like a dazed negro runner. The
mountain impassively confessed that its vehemence had been a lie. It
met the sky with an immense line of collapsed reticence. The waterfall
became the squirming of a white hermit who finds a black stranger
invading his cell. Twilight was a body gradually returning to the
festooned skeletons of the pine trees. The rocks were enticed into
attitudes--one was a giant fondling the spear that had wounded him;
another curved over like a gray serf who had broken his back. Eric
stared at a huge rock standing on the mountainside and outlined against
the distant base of a second mountain. It held the tensely embalmed
profile of a woman. Her rigidly woebegone features had withdrawn
from some devil’s cliff of desire; they made a line of incomplete
crucifixion. Her hidden eyes germinated into ghouls stealthily
absorbing the gray harvest of her face. Designed by a shattered surmise
her face retreated from the valley. Her forehead was like a sword
cracked in the middle; her nose and lips were the remains of an autopsy
on emotion. Demons and virgins had gained one grave in the grayness
assailing her face.

Eric regarded her at first with a celebrating scepticism; then
sallowness slowly marked his face into a hanging scroll of terror.
Lightness vanished from his black hair and it became a charred crown.
He tottered three steps in the direction of the rock-face and then,
with unannounced dexterity, a smile revived his face. The diminutive
city of his mind had sent its lord-mayor to restore him. Eric returned
to his task of breaking dead pine branches. The diminutive city of
his mind sent slender pæans into electric threads. Eric kindled the
branches into a fire, and a carnival of flames pirouetted into startled
death. Eric stretched his arms out, like a concubine stroking the walls
of her black tent, and his face became idly immobile. Then he altered
completely, in the leap of a moment, as though slipping from a loose
costume with infinite ease. His face stiffened into the unearthly
equilibrium of thought witnessing the torture of emotion. The fire, to
him, became a gaudy funeral-pyre. When sleep finally interfered with
his face he dropped slowly to the ground, like satiated revenge.

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

       *       *       *       *       *

Eric Lane ended his lecture on scientific philosophy and tapped a
desecrating hand, for a moment, on the profile that had told me a story
during his talk. He had left the mountain pass but he was unaware of
that. He would have laughed at the idea, like a beggar who rattles his
chains into insincere victories of sound. Of that, too, he was unaware.




ART


Mrs. Calvin and Mrs. Kildrick stood on opposite sides of a back-yard
fence. Around them the romping improbabilities of early spring were
dispersed amidst the sour reality of suburban houses. Pale green
surrounded the small, square abodes, like an impish irrelevance. Each
house carried a shade of dull green, brown and red, and these shades
fitted into each other and made a meekly repressed story. Cinder
side-walks stretched in front of the houses--remorsefully dry remains
of fire, sacrificing themselves to occasional feet. The entire scene
was an unconscious reflection of the minds of Mrs. Calvin and Mrs.
Kildrick, standing on opposite sides of a back-yard fence.

These women held an unblossoming stoutness, like buds that had swollen
enormously but failed to open. Their gray muslin wrappers were too
undistinguished to be shrouds and sepulchrally flirted with red
ruffles. Mrs. Calvin had an implacably round face and it reminded one
of a merchant scolding an infant. Mrs. Kildrick’s face was round, but
softer, like that of a frustrated milk-maid.

“You ought to see her room,” said Mrs. Kildrick. “It looks like a
drunkard’s confession, as my husband says, the funniest clay figgers
and paintins you ever saw.”

“I couldn’t believe it when you told me,” said Mrs. Calvin, “the poor
dear looks so-o respectable--what can be ailing her?”

“She calls it her a-art,” said Mrs. Kildrick. “Well, as my husband does
say, we should pity those whose minds are a little bit cracked!”

The ladies continued to adulterate the wanness of their doubts and the
sunlight continued its blunt rummaging way among the rubbish-cans and
fences. The afternoon jovially began to change its glowing costume for
a pretended death scene, studying and lingering over gray effects. Just
as its melancholy was heaving toward a climax Helma Solbert strode up
the cinder walk leading to Mrs. Kildrick’s abode.

She was a woman of thirty with a body whose dying youth amply derided
middle-age. Her ovally impertinent face spoke to the first warnings of
dissolution and told them that their coming had been ill-advised. Weary
but tenaciously merry, her gray eyes were close to those of one who
has made the dagger in his side a cajoling saint. Her little nose was
a straight invitation to her widely ripe lips and they turned upward
as if to reach it. She wore a blue serge suit that was an incongruous
commonplace but did not quite succeed in effacing her. Round and black,
her small hat rested lightly upon her brown and abundant hair, like an
inconspicuous accident. She entered her room, abandoned her hat and
coat, and measured herself in a mirror as though encouraging a stranger
to play with his burden. Then a smile of delighted futility plucked
at her lips and she closed her eyes to avoid robbing the stranger of
his forlornly puzzling charm. With her eyes still closed she walked to
a couch and stretched out upon it, and everything vanished from her
face except its flesh. Framed canvases hung upon the yellow plaster
walls of the room and each frame had a shape that obviously failed
to harmonize with the painting it enclosed. Unconscious of the stiff
challenges holding them, the canvases stood in the fading afternoon
light, like a disconnected fable. One above the couch represented a
small red apple split by an enormous dark green hatchet. The hatchet
had driven one of its points into a wooden table and slanted steeply
upward, its slender handle rising to an upper corner of the painting.
Two little hemispheres of red and white apple cowered on each side
of the hatchet’s blade. The visible, level top of the table was dark
brown and terminated against a feebly violet background. The following
sentimental words were painted in black letters high upon the violet.

“The hatchet struck at weak beauty, but--”

The canvas was enclosed by a round frame painted in a shade of apple
red. Each canvas in the room held the first line of a poem that was
completed by the colored forms of the painting or a last line preceded
by visual symbols. With the air of a fanatic whose blood had tightened
into loops of fire that cast their sheen upon his voice, Helma would
say to rare visitors viewing her paintings:

“By blending into one, art, literature and painting can lose their
deficiencies and gain perfection. I am merely experimenting with the
crude promise of this future union.”

On a canvas at the opposite side of the room a huge complexly broken
arrow emerged from a pale red sky. The black arrow pieces were dotted
with tiny yellow, indigo and pink birds. Dark red lips, each twisted to
a different expression, stood in the corners of the canvas. Extending
down the left side of the painting the following line was written in
black against a strip of bare canvas.

“Thus I spoke one afternoon, because--”

Helma Solbert rose from her couch, lit a candle and stood before the
arrow-framed painting, gazing at it with a pierced and subtly colorless
face. Then she turned on an electric light and its artificial stare,
in an instant, brought her an obliterating self-consciousness. With
the bearing of one who impudently walks to a gruesome sacrifice she
disappeared behind a lavender screen in a corner of the room and fried
her evening meal. When she emerged from the screen her face had once
more perfected its defensive impertinence. Even in her sleep some hours
later her features retained the blurred suspicion of a smile that
stayed like a lurking sentinel.

The following morning she was too ill to rise and Mrs. Kildrick
summoned a doctor. He was a portly man with a steeply florid face and
a dominating beard that had the color of wet sand. While he was in the
midst of examining his patient she rose to a sitting posture and stared
at him.

“You’re what I tried to hide from; why have you come to plague me?” she
said, loudly.




MUSIC


Olga Crawford fiercely divorced herself from all expression as she
maltreated her violin at the Symphony Moving Picture Theater. In
its average moments of vivacity her face was a dissembling friar
who brightly listened to her sensual lips, but as she played, her
face became an emptiness profaned by the wail of her instrument. Her
arms desecrated their errands and her head sloped into an unwilling
counterfeit of wakefulness. On the screen above her men and women
frantically guarded their hallucination of life and a decrepit
plot vaguely imitated love and bravery. Rows of faces stolidly
massacred the gloom of the theater and stood like a regiment waiting,
without thought, for some command. But when one looked closer three
expressions broke from the stolidity, as three major harmonies might
charm the mind of a composer. The first was a somnolent elation--the
mien of a hungry person dozing over some crumbs he is almost too
tired to eat. Shop-girls, with pertly robbed faces, became victims
of this expression, although an occasional man with lips like
determined fiascoes also attained it. The second was a tightly laced
impatience--the enmity of one whose feelings have been openly censored.
Fat women with flabbily throttled faces and glistening men with bodies
like bulky scandals received this expression. The third was a seraphic
stupor--the demeanour of one whose formless delights have benignly
exiled thought.

To Olga these people gathered into a blanched duplicate of life--a
remote comedy that made the monotone of her evening self-conscious.
If they had excoriated her she could have forgotten them, but their
weighty indifference raped her attention. The dryly sinuous smell of
their clothes pelted her like a sandstorm: the little, desperate
perfumes they used scarcely survived. Their eyes were scores of tinily
inviting bulls-eyes never reached by her hurried arrows.

She finished her playing; the people shuffled out like an apologetic
delusion. Ferenz, the pianist, a cowed Toreador of a man, gave his
browns and blacks a ponderous recreation.

“Nother grind passed,” he said in a thick voice corrupted by pity.
“Hand over them sheets, Joe.”

Joe, fat as a gourmand’s revery, handed him the sheets. The features on
Joe’s face were as abject as crumbs on a shallow plate. The Symphony
Theater orchestra flaunted its yawning moroseness a little while longer
and filed through a low exit.

Olga’s feet tamely saluted the crowded street-pavements. To her the
crowd was an approach to the theater audience--a brisk indifference
that made her eyes neglected spendthrifts. Its motion alone gave it
a flickering mastery: if it had paused, for an hour, it would have
become inane. The choked tirade of rolling street-cars and automobiles
would have ended in a dismal curtain of silence--the chariots would
have changed to mere hardware puzzled by the moonlight. A tall woman,
encouraging the gorgeous tumult of her dresses, would have stood like
a cluttered farce. The little pagan symmetries of her face, gaudily
tantalizing when merely glimpsed, would have met in a kittenish
argument. A tall man, blondly governing his polished discrepancies,
would have changed to a stagnant buffoon. An old man, chiding his
corpulent effulgence with endearments of motion, would have altered to
a maudlin exaggeration.

Olga reached her room and summoned the meaningless stare of an electric
light. Upon her short body plumpness and slenderness bargained with
each other, and the result was a suave arbitration. Her dark green
skirt and white waist made a subdued affirmation: their coloured lines
did not emphasise the lurking essences of her body. Surrounded by black
disturbances of hair the sardonic parts of her face were molested by
sentimental inconsistencies. Her nose was a salient inquisition but her
full mouth had a negroid flash; her chin was coldly bellicose but her
cheeks were softly turned. Beneath her moderate brow her blue and white
eyes were related to glaciers.

She sat at an upright piano and trifled with the keys, almost
inaudibly. It was midnight and an acrimonious man in the next
room often remonstrated with the wall when her piano conversed
too impulsively. Since she was an unknown composer the moment is
appropriate for an attack upon her obscurity. Her music was the
compact Sunday of her life. There she deserted the trite miserliness
of narrative and definite concepts and designed a spacious holiday.
Her notes loafed and romped into inquisitive patterns and were only
intent upon shifting their positions. Thought and emotion presided
over the experimental revels of their servants but issued no narrow
commands and became broadly festive guidances. In her music the rules
of harmony were neither neglected nor worshipped. When they felt an
immense friendliness for the romping of her notes they made a natural
background: otherwise, they did not intrude. Her music did not strive
to suggest or interpret concepts and pictures nor did it salaam to
emotions. All three were seconds rising and dying as her sounds changed
their places. The first few notes of each composition were repeated
above as the title, not because they dominated the piece, but merely as
a means of identification.

In her wanly nondescript room which she did not own, from midnight
to dawn, this woman whose face was a bewilderment of contrasts, sat
furnishing the momentum for a reveling deluge of music. But an evening
decided to interrupt this performance.

Olga stood in the shop of a neighborhood cobbler. He was a frayed
apologia, with a scant distraction of gray hair and a dustily crushed
face.

“When you play violin in theater I have heard,” he said. “Maybe you
would like to hear my boy. He is only eleven but he play almost so good
as you. Maybe you will tell him how he can play better.”

Olga followed him to the rear of his shop, with a surface purchase of
pity. He trotted out his son, a comedy in light browns relieved by the
smothered fixity of gray eyes. With whining precision the boy twisted
his way through Massenet’s Elegy, defending each sliding note with
his arms and his head. The syrupy embrace of a world stirred upon his
acceptant face; the whites of his eyes hovered against Olga’s face,
like a writhing request. In the midst of his playing she turned and
fled, terror-stricken, down the street.




ETHICS


Ethel Curn was an acrobat with Hearn’s Twelve Ring Circus, but her
bones were riveted together by a precariously brittle dignity as she
paraded down the field of daisies to a cliff at the edge of the sea.
Perhaps acrobats walk stiffly during their leisure hours because
their bodies become ascetic when released from an unreal, sensual
agility. Ethel Curn sometimes stooped to pick a daisy and her body
received motion in a deliberately ungallant manner, as though greeting
an unwelcome mistress. Her face was an indiscreetly torn screen for
emotions that had been dead for many years; her low forehead broke into
the tinily pointed lustres of her features; her body was as slim as a
symbolised cricket’s lament. She crossed the field of daisies intensely
dissolved into a forethought of afternoon and stood underneath a tree
at the edge of the cliff. As she leaned against the tree it seemed as
if a giant had courteously lent his umbrella to a rudely unresponsive
dwarf. Below her the sea grunted with automatic fury and receded, like
a pleased actor. Winds threw their weird applause against the blue
and gray rocks. The calmer air underneath the tree was not unlike a
distressed mind caught between the noises.

Ethel Curn seated herself beneath the tree and read a paper-bound
novel entitled, “The Fate of Eleanor Martin,” but the sea and the
rocks interfered too effectively with Eleanor and her pretended life
slid into the reality at the foot of the tree, while Ethel peered
aggressively down at the waves. A whim winked its narcotic eye at
her mind--the waves became fellow-workers and she was an audience
critically examining their turns. “A little higher with that green
somersault! Come on, old chicken, you can do a longer slide if you
try!” her mind cried amiably. Lost in the syncopation of admiration
her body swayed with the waves and her brown hair went adventuring.
Then, like a jilted servant, her mood ran from her, brandishing its
abashed haste over her body. Sorrow struck her face with a crazily gay
second that extinguished her eyes. Her body improvised its lines into a
wilted sexlessness that made her black skirt and pink waist mysterious.
The torture of a lost love had feasted upon her flesh and reduced it
to an abstraction. Hearn, the circus-master, presided over the feast
like a chilly urbane magician. Without a trace of sensual longing she
recalled his little black moustache, standing like a curt intrigue
over his lips, and the way in which it had bitten into her mouth
became the unreal memento of something she had never possessed. Like
all women gazing back at a departed love, she felt a swindled poverty
that could not quite decide whether it had once owned wealth or not.
This feeling translated itself in exclamatory vowels that could not
find the consonants of her past passion. She smiled like a bedraggled,
masquerading tragedy. It takes women years to perfect this masquerade,
but they win a distracted pleasure that guards them from haggling
memories. To generalize about women is to broaden our hope that one
woman may serve for the rest. Philosophers disappointed in love
often do this, though the man on the street is a fairly adept mimic.
Ethel Curn’s bosom lightly scolded her pink waist and her poignantly
devilish smile almost persuaded her that it was real. All the tragedy
on her face spent itself in a distressed question. In unison with this
proceeding a perturbed monologue within her addressed her vanity which
was silkily perched upon an emotional balcony.

“Hearn treated me white--blue garters with a real diamond in the
center--he never smiled when he kissed me--God, why couldn’t I keep
him?--He stayed with me a year and there’s not a woman in the troupe
who’s had him more than a month--he’s a lying rat, but he never
smiled when he kissed me--I wonder whether he’d smile if I slit his
throat?--what did I ever see in that fat face--he’ll be a joke in a
few years--they all throw you down unless you get in ahead of them--If
I broke a bottle against his mug I’d only make him happy--it had blue
silk tassles and he paid three hundred for it--I drank too much--blue
silk tassles--He’s better than most of them--I knew what he wanted and
I’m bawling him out because he got it--He treated me white--blue silk
garters with real diamonds that would make the Queen of England wink--”

The devilishly poignant smile and the monologue met each other within
her, while fleeing back to their graves, and their unpremeditated
clash illuminated the renunciation upon her face. She looked into her
upturned, yellow turban as though it held elusive dregs. Brooding
experimented with her head and suddenly threw it to the ground,
dissatisfied. She lay there like the impoverished effigy of a far off
love--her black skirt revealed her slim legs, with gloomy discourtesy,
and her fluffy pink waist gave its babyish sympathy to the sharpness
of her back. Her slender but muscular arms, stretching over the grass,
were senseless branches touching the shoulders of the armless effigy.
The wind trifled with her loose brown hair and incited it to ironically
flitting imitations of life. Dead thoughts and emotions united upon her
hidden face and gripped it with decayed finesse. She rested, perilously
unconcerned, upon the sloping edge of the cliff. Suddenly, in a
sibilant prank, the earth fled beneath her body and she disappeared.

       *       *       *       *       *

They knelt around her prostrate figure hugged by the pale blue
indelicacy of tights and the scant impudence of her yellow bodice.
High above her a little wooden board dangled helplessly from a long
wire, while another wire hung loosely above it. She opened her eyes
and stared, with a lustreless disbelief, at the people who were like a
tension ready to snap.

“Damn him, he did me dirty!” she cried to the amazed, painted faces
above her.




HISTORY


Sunlight stuck to the gray floor like curdled honey and clung to
the black wall like visible fever on the breast of a savage. This
contradiction gave a fugitive radiance to the room in which King
Ferdinand stood, moulding figures of happiness. On sunless days the
room was a depressed insult to his rejoicing, forcing it into adroit
retorts. He had made this chamber a necessary enemy.

As he moulded his figures of happiness, his wife stood beside him,
ready with colors.

“You have almost finished this half-pyramid of eyes emerging from a
flat surface and ending against a vertical wall,” she said, as though
the sound of her words made their obviousness subtle. “What color shall
I use to excite your design?”

King Ferdinand turned to her, like a blind man peering into
fantastically returning sight. Creative absorption had ruffled his
middle-aged face into an ageless insurrection, but when he spoke a
wrinkled order once more reigned beneath the granite lull of his
forehead.

“Give each eye a different shade of color and, for the wall, make a
blue of inhuman brightness: a blue that has swallowed a constellation
and defies night,” he said. “This form symbolises my last happiness,
wherein the clashing sequences of my life have been smashed to a
challenging glare. I have become immortal until I voluntarily tender my
immortality to death, if he takes it.”

The wrinkles on King Ferdinand’s cheeks ascended to a sentence of
belief hacked upon his forehead. His broadly cumbersome face shrunk to
a lighter scope and his red moustache shone like a coal of expectation.
His wife played with her dark green gown as though it were relaxed
gaiety. Her body, like a plump blunder, ended in the deft recklessness
of her head; the high amber of her face raised its slightly turned
lines of brooding abandon. She looked at her husband as though she
considered his flesh an unimportant tragedy calmed by his words.

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

“My first happiness,” she said, in a voice of climbing distinctness.
They carried the figure to the light. Almost as slim as a personified
plant-stem, a conventionalised monk grew straight from the center of
two lean hands cupped into the semblance of a flower-pot. The hands met
each other in an effortless tenderness; the thinly high monk bore the
suggestions of hood and cassock and his face wore a look of indistinct
triumph.

“And so I like to believe that your happiness has grown uncertainly
from the rarely caught touch of my hands,” she said.

The door of the room opened and two men strode in. One of them curved
upward into pompous impatience. The tight inquisitiveness of a gaudy
uniform revealed his tall body. His face was like an expansive
fallacy--large rolls of flesh indecisively interrogated the thin slant
of his nose and slid into the refuge of his brown beard. The second man
was waspishly abbreviated and clad in mincing castrations of color. His
tinily sharp face suggested a soulless beetle.

“Have you come, as usual, to bestow your explosive admiration on
my figures?” said King Ferdinand to the man whose face resembled a
redundant mistake.

“Three men of your guard will murder you, with restrained admiration,
tomorrow noon,” answered the other man, in whose voice a sneer and
apprehension were partners in a minuet. “You will be killed on the
palace steps and the cheers of a huge audience will make death’s leer
articulate to you. While you have taken the role of a hermit in an
aesthetic petticoat your friends have been arranging a last happiness
for you. You are considered an imbecile who paints pretty figures with
the blood of his country.”

The flashing hardnesses of a wintry repose assaulted King Ferdinand’s
face.

“My brothers are quite willing to use this blood as an unsolicited
rouge for the lips of their mistresses,” he answered in a tone of
remotely amused reproach. “I have not assailed my subjects with taxes
or led them to wars and that has been a serious error. They are
probably in the position of a man with his chains removed, who is angry
because he has forgotten how to dance!”

The acridly shortened man spoke.

“When you are dead, sire, your brothers will gamble for your throne by
throwing roses at your head. He who first succeeds in striking your
bulging eyes, will win.”

“Death does not like to be made a cheated jester,” said King Ferdinand.
“He will doubtless devise a better joke for my winning brother.”

Queen Muriel, whose face had grown old with choked disdain, stepped
forward.

“Now that your shrewd bantering has made itself sufficiently nude, tell
us why you have come,” she said.

The tall man, who carried with him the air of an animated mausoleum,
spoke.

“Today I saw an old libertine tottering down the boulevard. Glancing
to his feet he spied a lily, clipped and fresh. He sidled blithely to
the edge of the walk to avoid stepping on the flower. There is little
pleasure, after all, in flattening a child from another world.... My
carriage will take you to the frontier, tonight.”

“My caprices have never been able to strut gorgeously because they hold
a sincere sympathy for motion,” said King Ferdinand, still mechanically
jesting. His hand rose to one cheek as though signaling for a friendly
trance and his eyes closed unceremoniously.

“We will take your carriage,” he said in the voice of an abstracted
tight-rope walker.

The two men tilted their gaudiness into imperceptible bows and
departed. King Ferdinand and his wife stood staring at each other as
though their bodies were teasing curtains. Then, without remembering
what had occurred, they let gay words poke each other and began to
discuss colors for the monk’s figure rising from cupped hands and
blossoming into indistinct triumph.

That night their carriage stopped upon a hilltop and they were killed
by three men. One of the three had a thin nose and a brown beard--the
tight inquisitiveness of a bright uniform revealed his tall body. Among
historians he was to be noted as the man who killed an imbecile king
and led his country to glory and prosperity.




PSYCHIC PHENOMENA


Carl Dell and Anita Starr were speaking of a dead woman who had
influenced their eyes. She had also refined their heads to a chill
protest. Their faces, involved and disconsolate, had not solved her
absence, and their voices were freighted with a primitive martyrdom.
Carl was fencing with the end of his youth. His body held that
inpenetrable cringing which pretends to ignore the coming of middle age
and is only betrayed by rare gestures. He was tall, with a slenderness
that barely escaped being feminine. The upper part of his face was
scholarly and the lower part roguish, and the two gave him the effect
of a sprite who has become erudite but still retains the memory of
his former identity. His protruding eyes were embarrassed, as though
someone behind them had unexpectedly pushed them from a refuge. With
immense finesse they apologised for intruding upon the world. It is
almost tautology to say that they were gray. His small brown moustache
had a candidly misplaced air as it touched the thin bacchanale of his
lips. It was a mourner at the feast.

Anita Starr’s form would have seemed stout but for the sweeping
discipline of its lines, but this careful suppression ended in a riot
when it came to her face. Her face was a small, lyrical revel that had
terminated in a fight. Her nose and chin were strident but her cheeks
and mouth were subtlely unassuming. Her blue eyes brilliantly and
impartially aided both sides of the conflict. Glistening spirals of
reddish brown hair courted her head.

Sitting in the parlor of the Starr home Anita and Carl spoke of a
dead woman who had influenced their eyes. It was two A. M. and the
atmosphere resembled a disillusioned reminiscence: still and heavy.
They had talked about this dead woman throughout the evening,
welcoming any sound that might surprise her profile into life. When
alive she had been the chanting whirlpool of their existences, and when
she died sound ceased for them. Their voices became mere copies of its
past reign.

“Because I loved her any common pebble became a chance word concerning
her and flowers were enthusiastic anecdotes of her presence,” said Carl.

For an hour he had been breaking his love into insatiable
variations--one who seduces the fleeting expressions of a past torture.

“She may have been an august vagabond from another planet--a planet
where loitering is a solemn profession,” said Anita. “Even when she
performed a menial task she awed it with her thoughtful reluctance.
Like a fitful gleaner she crept through bare fields of people,
accepting their bits of laughter and refusal. When she met us she
stepped backward, as from a tempting unreality, and knocked against
death.”

Carl sat, like a groveling fantasy weary of attempting to capture
a genuine animation, but Anita had forced herself into a tormented
erectness. The clock struck three. Without a word or glance in each
other’s direction they left their chairs, turned out the lights, and
ascended the stairway, Carl slightly in advance. They halted at the
first landing and faced each other with the uncomplaining helplessness
of people suddenly scalded by reality.

“In the morning we will eat oranges from a silver dish and glibly cheat
our emotions,” said Carl.

“This deftly impolite proceeding never stops to ask our consent,” said
Anita in a voice whose lethargy barely observed a satirical twinkle.

Another word would have been a ridiculous impropriety. They parted
and entered their rooms. Flower scents filtered through Carl’s open
window, like softly dismayed sins and the cool repentance of a summer
night glided into his room upon a pathway of moonlight. For a while
he sat absent-mindedly burnishing the knives that had divided his
evening. After he had undressed he fell upon his bed like one hurriedly
obliterating an ordeal. His consciousness played with a black hood;
then a crash mastered the room and the door swung open. His blanched
face paid a spasmodic tribute to the sound and his grey eyes greeted
the darkness as though it were an advancing mob. With a strained
stoicism he waited for a repetition of the sound. The moments were
sledge-hammers fanning his face with their close passage. Then his bed
weirdly meddled with his body and became a light cradle rocked by some
arrogant hand. The darkness tingled lifelessly, like an electrocuted
man.

Carl’s waiting began to feel sharply disgraced and his senses planned
a revolt. He tried to rise to a sitting posture but his body insulted
his desire. At this point the darkness softened to the disguised
struggle of a woman striving to reach him. The significance of this
cast an impalpable but potent consolation upon the straining of his
chained body. The rocking of his bed measured a powerfully cryptic
welcome and he tried to decipher it with the beat of his heart. Each
of its syllables became the cadenced impact of another person against
a toughly pliant wall. His body demolished its tenseness and pressed a
refrain into the swaying bed. He decorated the darkness with the crisp
flight of his voice.

“Perish upon the turmoil of each day and make it inaudible, but let the
night be our hermitage,” he cried to a dead woman. As though replying,
the rocking of his bed gradually lessened and the darkness became
an opaque farewell. He turned to the shaft of moonlight which was
tactfully intercepting the floor of his room; it had the unobtrusive
intensity of a melted Chinaman. For hours he gave it his eyes and dimly
contradicted it with his heart. When the dawn made his room aware of
its limitations, he closed his eyes.

At the breakfast table he and Anita greeted each other with a worn
brevity: their eyes found an empty solace in the white tablecloth
and their minds felt a bright impotence, like beggars idling in the
sun. For a while the tinkle of their spoons amiably pardoned their
constraint, but Anita finally spoke with the staccato of one who snaps
unbearable thongs.

“She came to me last night. I heard a sound like a huge menace
stumbling over a chair. The door opened and the darkness grew as heavy
as dead flesh. My bed swayed with the precision of a grieving head.”

Carl’s face broke and gleamed like a soft ground flogged by sudden rain.

“The same things happened to me,” he said in the voice of a child
wrestling with a minor chord.

They sat heavily disputing each other with their eyes.

“Did you lie afterwards, censuring the moonlight?” asked Anita.

Carl nodded. Anita’s mother majestically blundered into the room.
Exuberantly substantial, with the face of a child skillfully rebuked by
an elderly masquerade, she flattered a chair at the table.

“Wasn’t that a terrible storm we had last night,” she babbled. “The
rain kept me awake for hours--I’m such a light sleeper, you know. I do
hope you children managed to rest.”




LOVE


The night received the moonlight in the manner of a sophisticated
braggart who slaps the face of an old, impassive man. Mrs. Robert
Calvin Taylor observed this illusion and painted it upon one of the
lanterns lighting a little party within her heart. The guests at the
party, fat sophists and slatterns in gay, patched clothes, gathered
around the lantern and felt relieved at the impersonal novelty of its
decoration. If Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor had been a philosopher or a
scientist she would have changed the night to an unseen background, or
a chemical diagram; she would have ignored the pleading of her heart
for pictorial distraction. But since she was a society-woman, tired
of sensual toys and a mental twilight, she welcomed the night as her
first effectual lover. Sitting in the garden of her country home she
could see the lighted windows of her crowded ballroom, and hear the
saccharine pandemonium of a jazz orchestra. The noise reminded her of a
middle-aged roué, snickering as he rolled his huge dice while gambling
for a new mistress. She felt glad that her new lover, the night, did
not seek to court her with such a blustering clatter.

The night was incredibly sophisticated but held the pungently awkward
body of a youth, crashing against trees and bushes. This mixture
pierced Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor and slid far beneath those sensual
routines which are the delight of psycho-analysts--slid to a depth
where aesthetic passion slays the flesh and blends it into a sexless
potency. She felt a sense of bodiless conflagration striding with wide
steps beside the night. When the limitless glow died within her, she
glanced down and found that she was naked. The complicated shrewdness
of her clothes had disappeared.

By this time she had ceased to be Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor--she had
become an expectant novice in a new world, and even the jazz music
and ballroom laughter had changed to the mumbled rumours of a past
existence. Therefore her nakedness failed to disconcert her. She
touched her shoulder, with a gesture of matter-of-fact congratulation,
and loosened her hair to rid herself of a last dab of incongruity.
Then she rose from the stone bench and walked down a pathway leading
to the great lake that bounded one side of her country estate. She
felt the powerful and sober curiosity of one who has decided to become
a recluse and examines the deserted possibilities of his roofless
plateau. She reached a high bluff rising over the placid vanity of
the huge lake, combing its bluish black hair with moonlight. Suddenly
she became aware of a figure standing beside her. She turned with
a gasp of strangled aloofness. The ethereal composure of her small
face, defended by moonlight, sheered into an ebony cast of hermit-like
annoyance. But when the color and outlines of the figure shrunk within
her eyes, her face changed again. An astounded immersion crowned her
head, tugging at her short nose, straightening her thick lips, and
cleaving her gray eyes. The slightly deteriorated slenderness of her
short body lowered a bit toward the earth, not from fear but because
of a weakening incredulity. The figure before her was that of a
sexless human being, small and slim of statute, nude, and hued with
an inhumanly concentrated black. The head held large eyes that shone
like metaphysical diamonds, as though ten thousand stars were carousing
together, in a realm of compressed light. The figure spoke to Mrs.
Robert Calvin Taylor, and its voice seemed thrown forth by the rays
from its eyes. The voice was distinct and subdued.

“You are not a hermit who has turned a garden into a solitary castle,”
said the figure.

“What am I?” asked Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor.

“Your mind and heart are no longer clad in their heavy mirages of love,
fear, and sleep,” said the figure. “The surface pictures have gone and
the twin bazaars of your heart and mind are exchanging a long-deferred
greeting. Within the now mingled bazaars emotions and thoughts have
become friends and sell each other endless variations in color, light,
and form. I am the being who rules this proceeding.”

“Have you a name?” asked Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor, using the unashamed
naïveté of a child.

“Men call me Aesthetics,” answered the figure. “In my weakest form
I make the eyes of the shop-girl hesitate a bit, as she views an
unusually gaudy sunset. In my strongest manifestations I help poets and
artists to contradict their personal lives. But these are merely my
outward indications. I line the hearts and minds of all human beings,
often remaining within them, unfelt, until they die. In rare cases such
as yours the mirages hiding and dividing me are slain, and I clap my
hands, sending motion to the twin bazaars of heart and mind.”

“What caused me to uncover you within myself?” said Mrs. Robert Calvin
Taylor.

“You yielded to a whim and made the night your lover. Dissatisfied with
the loves and fears he found within you, the night threw them aside,
one by one, thus slaying the mirages that hid me. Your other lovers
of the past were content with more material gifts and did not seek to
uncover you.”

“I am bare now. What will you do with me?” said Mrs. Robert Calvin
Taylor. The figure laid a hand upon her shoulder. His eyes burnt her to
a petal of ashes that fell down between them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Robert Calvin Taylor stood over the form of his young wife, who
sat slouched down upon a stone bench within their garden. He shook her
shoulder, lightly. She uttered a perturbed mumble and did not raise the
head resting upon one of her arms. The moonlight fell upon the silken
complexities of her dress.

“Poor Dot, I warned her not to take a third glass,” he muttered to
himself as he raised her in his arms and staggered down the garden
pathway.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.







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