Part 4

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