Blackguard

He sat in the rocking-chair, tired and vaguely oppressed, clutching the paper in the manner of one who clings to a tangible encouragement in the midst of fantastic lies and fist...

At an early hour on the following morning she hurried Carl to the business section of the city so that the neighboring women, who slept late after getting breakfast for their me...

The train in which Carl was riding rolled slowly through the outskirts of a southern city and he looked out at the rows of negro cottages and hovels that plaintively cringed und...

One Sunday morning, Carl sat at home, lightly wandering through a newspaper. On the previous night he had met Petersen and had yielded to an invitation to accompany “two swell b...

In the dirty clothes that he had worn upon his arrival, qualified by a clean shirt, he went forth on the next morning and found work as a lineman’s helper for a telephone compan...

From that night on his life fell into a regular stride--days of wrenching labor and nights of rebellious weariness, broken by intervals in which he crept, like a swindled, dirty...

Carl Felman stepped from a train at the Union Station of a midwestern American city. His young face, partly obscured by a blonde stubble of beard, was a passive concealment, and...

Kone had already arrived at the apartment and was waiting on the front porch. His heavy body, of medium height, held the arrogant bulge of muscles beneath his light grey suit an...

One afternoon, four months after the Apperson party, Carl, Kone, and Jenesco, a Roumanian painter, sat in the latter’s little blending of studio and bedroom and looked at a land...

He turned from the window and strove to place an expression of close-lipped serenity on his face, for the train had almost reached the station. He had not seen his uncle for yea...

After stumbling through another day of heaving muscles and bruised shins, with his self-hatred gloating over the slavery of his body, he met Petersen and the two girls at a down...

After that evening he managed to protect his loneliness with clever words. He told the Edlemans that he was looking for material for short stories and that he intended to roam a...

The winter bickered with spring; days gave their imaginary separation of time; Olga and Carl stooped to the task of conjuring myriads of fancifully plausible tongues from their...

Carl returned to the minor, suavely gesturing groups of hypocrites in the city in which he lived, and in going back to this “art and literary world” he had the feeling of one wh...

On the streets martyred by crowds, electric lights pencilled the night with their trivial appeals, and an ineffectual approach to daylight spread its desperately dotted jest ove...

With Clara Messenger as his guide, Carl began to discover that another world nestled between the dull apartment houses, raucous markets, and underworld saloons which had confine...

Filled with these gloomy realities he walked down a roughly bright street where the underworld tiptoed furtively between the ranks of semi-respectable working-people--a street o...

During the next two weeks Carl sat in his drably dark room, slowly copying his poems with a stiff, perfect handwriting and mailing them to magazines and newspapers, but rejectio...