“My impressions about my native land were as you could realize not very definite. The only thing I can write you is that I felt as if I was in a big village. After having left the hustling, noisy New York: works the calmness of a town like the Hague and Scheveningen as a anesthetic....”
Moloch crumpled the letter up and shoved it back in his pocket. It was the third time he had started to go through it. There were twenty-six pages to this letter, covering four continents, nine women, three royal families, ambassadors and potentates galore, innumerable quarts of champagne, coke dreams, camel rides, and two social diseases. But Moloch simply couldn’t pull himself together. The escapades of his old friend Jacques Dun failed to stir him. If the Stock Exchange had been blown up he wouldn’t have been stirred either. He was going about in a coma.
Blanche had risen early that morning, prepared his breakfast (an unusual thing!), and just as he was about to leave had informed him in a calm tone of voice that she intended to go away soon. She refused to say for how long. “I have no definite plans,” she announced. “I’m just tired of it all. … I want to go off somewhere and think things over.”
That afternoon she left with the child. She requested, in a note, that he put the furniture in storage. It was impossible, she had written, to say how long she would remain away. Perhaps she wouldn’t come back at all. She left no mailing address, though it was quite likely she knew where she was going.
The strangest thing about this leavetaking was that it caused him no unusual bitterness. As a husband perhaps he had a right to show some resentment. He had none. That evening he came home, moved about the house mechanically, and after he had read her note several times came to the conclusion that as a human being she had a right to make her own experiment, if that was what she was doing. The loss of the child affected him most. He realized then, more than ever before, how passionately he was attached to her. What if he were never to see her again?
He waited a day or two before making any move, hoping that Blanche would change her mind. He kept on the lookout for the mail man. When the bell rang he would rush to the door, expecting to see the two of them standing there with open arms.... Three days passed; then four, then five.... Still no word from Blanche.
Where the devil was she, and what was she doing with the little one? Hell, this was no way to treat a grown-up man! If she had found someone else, and she wanted to start all over again, why didn’t she let him know? He’d give her a clean bill of health. But this damned suspense! God, she might have been crazy enough to take the child and jump off a bridge… the two of them might be lying at the bottom of a river!
He was getting ready to tear his hair out.
He adopted her suggestion and put the things in storage. He tried to pull himself together. Maybe she was only giving him a dose of his own medicine.... During the day, head over heels in work, it was easier to banish them from his mind, but at night, when he was perfectly free and might have gone gallivanting with other women, he became moody and lost in melancholy reflections.
He was thinking about them a hell of a lot....
On the tenth day he received a letter. She was writing him from a little town in Massachusetts to let him know that the two of them were well and would like to hear from him. There was a pathetic little bit at the end to the effect that she was running short of funds… she didn’t want to ask him outright for aid, but if he cared to send her some she would appreciate it. He ran immediately to the telegraph office and wired her a tidy sum; then he sat down and wrote her a ten-page letter. He sent the letter special delivery.
Three days later he received another letter, thanking him for his great kindness and urging him to continue writing. She said nothing about moving on. There was no mention of plans at all. Through her letters there seemed to run a vein of quiet contentment. She wrote as one convalescing after a serious illness.
“Very well,” he thought to himself, “let it go on. She needs to take stock of herself… get well again inside.”
His own letters were carefully worded so as not to exert any undue influence. He tried to handle things delicately and avoid any semblance of pressure. It would be utterly foolish now, he reasoned, to implore her to do one thing or another. “Look after your health,” he wrote. “Enjoy yourself.... Perhaps I’ve been a big fool.”
Love he handled very gingerly, but if she had the least sense she could read between the lines that he fairly adored her now. The fact of the matter was, he was a very changed man during this vacation of his wife’s. He had no eyes for any other women. At lunchtime he walked about the streets, peering into shop windows, wondering what to send them that would be particularly appealing. Several times he telegraphed flowers. He mailed books, too, and sent her candy and clippings from the New York papers which he thought would interest her…. In this way they were really drawing closer together than if they had been home lying next to each other, their thoughts a thousand miles apart.
This sort of thing went on for about two months, and still Blanche said nothing about returning. There was nobody else on the scene, he felt quite sure of that. By this time the letters that passed between them had become more outspoken. Blanche no longer made any efforts to conceal her affection; her letters were brimming with love, albeit there was always a tinge of sadness which he in his ecstasy attributed to her isolation. Once in a while, when he was victimized by a mood, he would sit down and send her a scorcher, but in the next letter he would make amends for his passionate utterances by confining himself to general topics or inquiring solicitously about her circumstances.
Then one day he received a large bulging envelope. (Why is it that people, when they are in love, place such extraordinary emphasis on the thickness of the letters?) He tore the envelope open greedily. A little bundle of photographs fluttered out and spilled over the desk. He seized them with trembling hands. Now he could no longer contain himself. His mind was made up. … It was about ten o’clock of a Saturday morning. He rushed to his lodging and packed his bag in a sweat. Then he took a taxi to the depot and bought a ticket. At the first stop he sent a telegram that he was on his way….
“We have come into this world to accept it, not merely to know it. We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy.” The words of the poet—he had always accepted Tagore’s prose as a beautiful thing in itself—now conveyed to his heightened senses a mystical import that veiled their fragility with a mask of profundity and solemnity. “We have come into this world to accept it!” What a clear, noble view! The evil and ugliness of life seemed far behind. Could a man grasp the significance of that thought, hold on to it like a rudder, what a sane course he might steer through the turbulent waters of life! He closed the volume of prose and stared with vacant eyes at the fleeting panorama. The brooks, the trees, the drab mill towns, the sodded, desiccated faces of the New England milieu were so many dreary items of a world that had lost its ecstasy. His lids shut down instinctively on the plangent realities of the world about him. It was a living world, a world of strife and sorrow, a distorted world that mocked the serene logic of the philosopher, the dignity and pathos of the poet, the security and aloofness of the heart of a spectator.
The train sped on through the miserable lands of the Pilgrims which he had blotted out. Hands he could not see pawed monotonously over the looms and lasts; women with flaccid breasts waited in dirty hovels for the whistle to blow that they might pick up the thread of life again; lean-visaged, hard-fisted Yankees were breaking their backs over stony potato patches, their souls as warped and twisted as the barren soil that nourished them; bloodless spinsters licked the spittle from their prattling lips, gooey with gossip, cancerous with hate and envy; village parsons, narrow and limited as their cabin’d confines, raised scrawny pious hands over the wickedness of a sinful people.
Somewhere in the midst of this cultural blight a mother and child were waiting for him. A lover was stretching out her arms, her breasts big with longing. He could see
her heart exposed and bleeding, like the religious decoration on a alabaster virgin.... “Dearest boy,” she had written, “you are so thoughtful, so good to me … you mean so much more than you can ever realize. I want so much to make you happy. I do so want to prove to you the depth of feeling which I have for you—but I cannot! I want you always for just my own, but if I cannot have you— well, my happiness will be in seeing you happy. You dear, good boy—how I love you!”
The afternoon was pouring through the window of the train, touching his quivering lids with golden wands. The royal emissaries of the Lord were beckoning to his spirit; they bade him open his eyes and greet the pageant of the soil. At that moment he felt himself to be but an infinitestimal particle of a universe wheeling through the trackless space. He opened the volume which lay in his lap. A single paragraph sufficed. It was impossible to go on....
“The prosody of the stars can be explained in a classroom by a diagram but the poetry of the stars is in the silent meeting of soul with soul, at the confluence of the light and dark, where the infinite prints his kiss on the forehead of the finite, where we can hear the music of the ‘Great I Am’ peeling from the grand organ of creation through its countless reeds in endless harmonies.”
The deep, bituminous snorts of the engine were the echoes of a thunderous celestial music that rocked the town and its drowsy inhabitants. He clung ecstatically to the cushioned seat as the dripping, iron flanks of the monster grazed their way through the edges of the little Massachusetts town. The babble rising up out of the coach sounded to his ears like the frail, bleeding notes of a peaceful oblivion. His muffled flesh dimmed the roar of frantic trumpet calls. His soul was a broken shadow dancing over a precipice....
For three days and nights they celebrated the marriage of the flesh. On the fourth day he could no longer put off his return. He was in jubilant spirits, his soul set free and soaring. Little Edda swayed unsteadily in her tiny bare feet and lisped in a quailing voice, “Goodbye, Daddy.” In his absence Blanche had taught her to say a number of pretty things. The night of his arrival they had stood over her crib together and listened to the precious gurgling sounds issusing from her tired little throat. They were sounds no father could resist. How proud he felt over this tiny bundle of flesh, and a mist came over his eyes. What was there in life to equal this? “Excuse me,” he said to Blanche, and rushed into the bathroom to hide his sobs.
Now he was bidding Blanche farewell, their hearts united in peace and love. She clung to him and drew him back inside the doorway for one final seal of affection. She whispered something in his ear. He blushed. Then the door closed behind him softly, like a curtain descending on an audience hushed and lacrimal. … His fingertips throbbed with the remembrance of her tinglish flesh.
When he had ridden a little way he opened his bag to look for some trifle and discovered to his great surprise a gift from Blanche. It was a small volume of Hamsun’s called Victoria. In the flyleaf Blanche had traced this message;
“I am a grotesque written upon an old oak leaf vomited by a storm in late winter.”
He swallowed this cruelly beautiful tale at one gulp. This berserker, with the heart of Strindberg and the neariness of Dos-toevsky, lacerated his tender heart. He reviewed the closing pages of the book once more. What a monument to frustrated love, that last letter of Victoria’s!
“Dear Johannes,” she wrote, “when you read this letter I shall be dead O God, if you knew how I have loved you, Johannes.
“I have not been able to show it to you, so many things have come in my way, and above all my own nature…. If I got well again now I would never be unkind to you anymore, Johannes. How I haVe cried and thought about that! Oh, I would go out and stroke all the stones in the street and stop and thank every step of the stairs as I went by and be good to all…. My life is so unlived, I have not been able to do anything for anybody, and this failure of a life is to end now And today I was thinking — how would you take it, I wonder, if I came straight up to you in the street one day when I was nicely dressed, and did not say anything to hurt you as I have done, but gave you a rose which I had bought on purpose? .. . Ah, Johannes, I have loved you, loved only you all my life. It is Victoria who writes this and God is reading it over my shoulder.…”
He thought and thought and thought about this heartrending drama that was being enacted all over the world, wherever man and woman came together and whispered the piteous, tear-laden words that crushed them and raised them up and exalted them before God Almighty. He sat helplessly, blinded with tears, making himself small in a corner of the seat against the window. He wept for himself, for Blanche, for Johannes, for all the world … for all who have or ever will be touched by the insanity of love. The need to say something to Blanche, to call out to her, to get down on his knees and scream out his love, seized him by the throat.
Meanwhile Blanche was sitting in a little room in a squalid Massachusetts town; she was hypnotized by a sheet of blank writing paper soaked with tears. The pen rested in her hand, waiting for the tears to dry. She could not hear him screaming his love … he was so far away now, and the earth was so full of groans and wailing.
That night, when Dion Moloch reached his cheerless lodging, his brain was afire. He was determined to put an end to his vagabond days, to leave off the foolish role he had chosen, and strike out in deeper, unknown waters. He spoke aloud to himself. “What has my life amounted to? What am I living for?” He went on muttering to himself with clenched fists. “Do something—no matter how mad, no matter how terrible! Say something to the world: answer life with life. Strike out. .. free yourself from the clutches of a comfortable existence. …”
It was imperative to tell his thoughts to someone. With feverish energy he sat down and put his crazy thoughts on paper. He addressed them to his wife.
“Dear Victoria,” he scribbled. “What have you done to me? I am naked and lost in a forest of pines. My heart is an Easter morning. What terrible, beautiful things are happening to me inside! Black rivulets of pain are pouring from the open wounds in my heart which your love cauterized only a few hours ago. This world is my world, my stamping-ground. I must run free, mad-hearted, bellowing with pain and ecstasy, charging with lowered horns, ripping up the barricades that hem me in and stifle me. I must have room to expand … vast, silent spaces to charge in so that my voice may be heard to the outermost limits and shake the unseen walls of this cruel universe. I must do something, dear Blanche, dear Victoria.... No longer can I go on as a cog in a wheel. Let me implore you to help, to save me from this daily degradation.
“Only now it has dawned on me what life can hold. I feel all life rising up in me, shouting Hallelujah!
“It is I, your husband, writing this. Not Johannes. Yes, I read your inscription on the flyleaf … “Something vomited by a storm in late winter.” I prefer, however, to think of page 39, on which it is written:
”‘Ah, Love turns the heart of man into a garden of fungus, a luxuriant and shameless garden wherein mysterious and immodest toadstools raise their heads.’“
18
A GAUNT BARE OAK WITH BLACK-AND-PURPLE BOUGHS drew a dojo grotesque shadow on a neighboring wall. Moloch thought of chesspieces he had seen in the museum, rugged Yakut figures with horses like that crazy shadow.
He had returned to his room after posting the letter to his wife and was now gazing idly out of the window wondering how to while away the tedium of the brief interval before bedtime. The profound silence weighed on him and drove his thoughts into strange realms. He thought, for instance, of the austere and vicarious devotions of the monks in the Buddhist lamaseries in the Himalayas, where for centuries it has been the custom of these recluses to get up in the middle of the night and pray for all who sleep so that men and women all over the world, when they awake in the morning, may be purified and begin the day with thoughts that are pure, kind, and brave. He thought, too, of that ill-fated genius Gauguin, who in the midst of his career had been reduced to the ignominy o
f pasting advertisements on the walls of the Gare du Nord. Gauguin had once said: “The duty of the artist is to affirm the dignity of life.” Very well, then, was he prepared to go ahead and break his neck in order to affirm the dignity of life.
The dignity of life! The majesty of the phrase invoked a consciousness of suggestions forever denied the vehicle of words. The words were like a filament separating the palpable from the impalpable. They created the image of a sensuous world, a world beyond all expression or analysis, neither of the intellect wholly, nor of the senses.
He was seized with an inexplicable and overwhelming desire to rush down to the waterfront, to get down on his knees under the dilapidated elevator structure whose splintered limbs dangled and groped for the cold waters of the river. He wanted that very instant to be translated to the spot so that he might look above him, in dazzled awe, at the somber fretwork of the Brooklyn Bridge, that airy Titan’s span over which a profilerous cortege shuttles with muffled scraping and the sizzling drone of an ocean of Vichy. He wanted to see the bridge lights flaring with cold luminosity, shedding fantastic naphtha gleams on the swollen tidewater deep below.