Vintage Books: Blackguard. 1923

The Struggle

CHAPTER I.


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 his thin lips and long nose did not hold that stalwart sleekness which one associates with earth. If some joker had taken a Gothic effigy of Christ, trimmed its beard, dressed it in grey and dirty clothes, and forced upon it an unwilling animation, he would have produced an exact duplicate of Carl’s aspect and gestures.

In the emotional confusion of the railroad-station, with its reluctant farewells and gushing greetings, Carl walked alone and abstracted, and he treated the scene as though it were a feverishly unreal mixture of drama and travesty. He strode with the careful haste of one who seeks to escape from an irritating dream but knows at the same time that his efforts are futile. He was without baggage, and his face held the strain that comes from battling with open spaces and strange faces—the hunted question of the hobo. His face showed two masks, one transparent and passive and the other tense and protesting. He had ridden for thirty-six hours in the chair of a day-coach, without food or sleep, and he was walking to the home of his parents because he lacked the necessary car-fare, but these circumstances were only partly responsible for his air of spectral weariness. He knew the stunned exhaustion of a man whose mind and heart had broken their questions against unfriendly walls, and at intervals he became immersed in vain efforts to understand the meaning of his wounds.

During the twenty-one years of his life he had resembled an amateur actor, forced to play the part of a troubled scullion in a first act that bewildered and enraged him. At high-school he had been known as “the poet-laureate of room sixteen,” a title invented by snickering pupils, and his timidly mystic lyrics about sandpipers, violets, and the embracing glee of the sun, had gained an unrestrained admiration from his English teachers. Teachers of English in American high-schools are not apt to insist upon originality and mental alertness in expression, since their own lives are usually automatic acceptances of a minor role, and Carl became convinced that writing poetry was only a question of selecting some applauded poet of the past and imitating his verse. “You must say the inspiring things that they have said, but see that your words are a little different from theirs,” he said to himself, and his words—“a little different”—became slightly incongruous upon the thoughts and emotions of Tennyson and Longfellow, the latter two having been selected because they seemed easier to flatter than other poets such as Browning and Swinburne. Another Carl Felman watched this proceeding from an inner dungeon but lacked the courage to interrupt it, for to a boy the opinions of his teachers, delivered with an air of weary authority, seem as inexorable as the laws of the Talmud or the blazing sincerity of sunlight. Carl was nearing seventeen at this time—a lonely, vaguely rebellious, anaemic, dumbly sullen boy, who tried in his feeble way to caress the life-chains which he did not dare to break. His parents, middle-aged Jews with starved imaginations and an anger at the respectable poverty of their lives, looked upon his poetic desires with mingled feelings of elation and uneasiness.

The phenomenon of an adolescent poet in the family is always liked and distrusted by simple people—liked because it pleasantly teases the monotone of their existence, and distrusted because they fear, without quite knowing why, that it will develop into a being at variance with the fundamental designs of their lives. Carl’s parents clucked their tongues in puzzled admiration when he read them one of his poems, and then, with a note of loquacious fear in their voices, told him that he must look upon writing as a “side-line”—a pretty, lightly smirking distraction that could snuggle into the hollows of a business-man’s life. Carl, who liked the importance of carrying secret plots within him, did not answer this suggestion, or gave it a sulky monosyllable, and his reticence frightened his parents. The simple person is reassured by garrulity, even when it attacks but can derive nothing from silence save the feeling of an unseen dagger. The Felmans wanted their son to attain the money that had seduced and eluded their longings, but deeper than that, they yearned for him to place a colored wreath over the brows of their tired imaginations—one that could convince them that their lives had not been mere sterile and oppressed bickerings. The father, a traveling-salesman for a whiskey-firm, wanted Carl to be prosperous and yet daring over his cups while the mother felt that he might become a celestial notary-public, placing his seal upon the unnoticed documents of her virtues.

Carl experienced the uncertain dreads of a dwarf futilely attempting to squirm from a ring of perspiring golden giants known to the world, and not even sure of whether he ought to escape, but knowing only that a vicious and unformed ache within him found little taste for the flat-footed routines of clerk or salesman. Upon another planet this initial writhing is doubtless offered the consolation of better compromises, but the treadmill uproars of this earth merely increased Carl’s feelings of shrinking anger.

“Oh, well, I’ll work in a store or sell something, and make money. Life won’t let you do anything else,” he said to himself. “But inside of me, m-m, there I’ll do as I please. I’ll make a country where poets and other begging men live in little huts on the obscure hills and rear their families of thoughts and emotions, with a haughty peacefulness.”

He shunned the people around him as much as possible, studying his lessons in a precisely weary manner and squatting on the grass of a public park near his home where he wrote his dimly placid lyrics to the sun and moon. He had no companions at school, for the children around him were quick to jibe at any remark of his that contained a searching wraith of thought, and he did not join in the school’s minor activities because of his angry pride at the giggling accusations of queerness which he received from the other boys and girls. They regarded him for moments as an enticing target, reviling his exact grammar and mild manners, but for the most part they paid little heed to this grotesque atom lost in the swirl of their games and plans. In a smaller school the strident inquisitiveness of average children thrown upon each other might have overwhelmed him, but in the immense city high-school he managed effortlessly to isolate himself, and the children, once having dubbed him poet-laureate—sarcastically mimicking the phraseology of their elders—proceeded to forget about him.

When at length he was graduated, he begged his parents to send him to college, desperately fighting for another long period in which he could brush aside dry information and rhyme “earth” with “birth,” since he preferred the frolic of misty promises to a world of prearranged shouts and sweating dreads. But his parents felt that their period of uneasy indulgence had inevitably ended, and words trooped from them in righteously redundant regiments.

“You’re a big boy now, yes, a big boy, and you know that we’ve sacrificed everything to give you a good education,” said Mrs. Felman. “Not that we regret it, no indeed, we only hope that it helps you to get along in life, but this college stuff, now, is a lot of foolishness. That’s only for people with rich parents, or them that can afford to go a long time without working; and not only that, but it fills your head, you know, with a lot of nonsense. It’s time now that you go out and make money to help your parents. You know that we’re just barely able to get along on what your father makes. Not that we’re begging you for your help, you understand, but you should be only too proud to give comfort to your parents. Uncle Emil can use a smart boy like you in his clothing business and he told us only the other night that he’d give you a good job the minute you come down. You’ve got to give up those writing notions of yours! They don’t bring you in anything, and a man must go out into the world and make his own living. Writing is no business for a strong, sensible boy!”

Carl listened with a feeling of impotent anger. Yes, they were probably right in their commands and he would be a scoundrel if he refused to obey them and rescue them from their poverty; but—well, he preferred to be a scoundrel. “Beyond a doubt I’m a lazy, ungrateful wretch, and all that I care for is to put words together—that seems to relieve me somehow—but say, how about sticking to what I am?” he asked himself. “I know perfectly well that I’ll never change, and if I make a liar out of the rest of my life that won’t make me any the less guilty. Besides, it’s funny, but I don’t know whether I want to change. There’s something satisfactory about being a scoundrel—it lets you do the things that you want to do; while being good, as far as I can see, is just pretending that you like to do the things that you don’t want to do. Well, I’m not going to stand for that! I’ve got to choose between hurting my parents and hurting myself and they are going to be the victims. This will be mighty selfish, I know, but I guess I’m a naturally selfish person. Anyway, I don’t feel much love for them and I don’t see that it will help them if I try to hide my feelings. They would find out sooner or later what an inhuman person I am and they might as well find out now.”

Carl answered the verbose commands and advice of his parents with a mechanical “yes” now and then—a small shield to protect the inner unfolding of his thoughts—and walked into his bedroom, where he rested his dull broodings upon a pillow. The lives of some men represent a scale of gradually increasing compromises with, or victories against, the forces surrounding them, while other men crowd their decision into one early moment and walk swiftly down an unchanging road. The boy with Carl died upon the bed in his room and the fumbling, stiffly vindictive beginning of a man rose and walked into the street, with an evil smile petrifying the softness of his face. In this emotional birth he became to himself a huge black criminal staggering beneath the weight of unreleased plots, and he derived an angry joy from this condition, reveling in the first guilty importance that had invaded his meekly repressed life.

With the inquisitive grin of one who is quite convinced that he is an embryonic monster, he arose at five o’clock on the next morning, stole into the bedroom of his sleeping parents, pilfered fifteen dollars from the trousers of his father, and took the train to a distant city, where he enlisted in the United States Army. He had first intended to do this at the nearest recruiting station, but with the triumphant shrewdness of a budding knave he decided that if he joined the army in another city he could more easily escape being arrested for his theft. He had robbed his parents with an actually quivering delight, feeling that it was the first gesture of his attack upon an unresponsive world. In joining the army he had not been lured by the recruiting poster’s gaudy lies concerning “adventure, travel, and recreation,” but his reasons were more practical and involved. He longed for the stimulus of a physical motion that would not be concerned with the capture of pennies and he believed that he could be more alone with himself in a new whirlpool than in the drably protected alcove from which he had fled. He felt also that if he were going to prey upon the world he must make haste to learn the tricks and signals of a rogue and pay for this knowledge with physical pain and weariness.

The details of his army life need not interfere with this quickly sculptured hint of his birth. He emerged from the lustreless workshop of the army with the patient bitterness of one whose dreams have become the blundering slaves of a colorless reality. For some time he wandered about the country, in a stumbling dance with various kinds of manual labor—cotton picking, wood chopping, factory work. At intervals he engaged in little thefts, such as the money from a drunken man’s pockets, the purses of rooming-house landladies, and articles from the counters of shops, and used them for a week or two of leisure in which he wrote of nightingales inebriated with the fragrance of lilac bushes, or dawn robbing the hills of their favorite shawl.

His role of desultory sneak-thief failed to cause within him the slightest shame or self-reproach and he felt that his longings were using trivial weapons in a furtive manner merely to protect a secretly delicate bravery within him.

“I don’t care whether the world is filled with poets or not,” he sometimes said to himself. “If it were, I might want to be a carpenter or a clerk then and make that my form of rebellion. I don’t know. But the world wants to be filled with carpenters and clerks, and it’s not as fair as I am. The unfairness makes me angry and I strike against it.... You must guard your only reason for living. All that I want to do is to keep on writing, and since no one cares to pay me for this kind of work I’ll have to arrange for the payment myself. When I do hard work during the day I’m too tired to write at night, and the only way in which I can get leisure time for writing is to steal. If this is evil, it’s been forced upon me. Of course, I’d much rather steal out in the open; but that would instantly bring me to jail. No, this complicated game known as a world is unaware of my existence and I must be equally absent-minded in my own attitude.”

His youthful gesture of contorted cynicism, qualified a bit by the remaining ghosts of a naively wounded idealism, made him resolve to become a crafty underdog—a man who had become obsessed with the task of finding his voice and was using every possible subterfuge and device to protect this obsession, leering at the forces that were attempting to intrude upon his religious concentration. Right and wrong to him were unfair scarecrows that slipped from the huge indifference of his surroundings and demanded an attention which they were unwilling to give in return. Perhaps he was a minor knave, seeking to rationalize his instincts for crime, and perhaps he merely held a naked determination like that of a certain immoral slayer and plunderer known as Nature. The question is a frayed one and derives little benefit from the tensions of exhausted arguments. Carl was constantly harassed by a feeling of inarticulate insignificance, and the poems which he twisted from his heart, on park benches and in the long weeds of ditches beside railroad tracks, were like bunches of forget-me-nots plucked by a dirty, bewildered child and thrown as offerings against the stone breast of an unheeding giant. He still believed that poetry was a cloak of blurred embroidery that should be cast over the shoulders of sentiments such as love, faith, charity, mercy, chivalry, courage and honor, and he felt both consoled and amused at the thought that he was using a rogue to guard within himself the better man that life had not allowed him to become. His love for the sentiments which he tipped with rhymes was partly caused, however, by the fear that without them he might become too utterly inhuman for earthly survival.

For a year he wrestled with different manual labors, and stole when their perspiring monotones weakened and angered his desire to write lyrics that were half trite and half thinly wistful, but he finally decided to return to the midwestern city and brave the reactions of his parents, whose wrathful letters had sometimes visited his journeys. He determined to rest awhile amid the moderate comforts of his former home and felt that he could disarm the anger of his parents with a masterful, jesting attitude that would muzzle them. And so, penniless and in dirty clothes, he was now walking through the heavily tawdry business district of a midwestern city………….