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 CHICAGO 
 
 COVICI-M'GEE • PUBLISHERS 
 '925 
 
Copyright 1923 
 
 Covici-cMcGee 
 
 Chicago 
 
 First Printing, March, iq23 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 ^ART ONE 
 The Stru^^le Pa^e 1 
 
 ^ART TWO 
 The Knife Pa^e 121 
 
 ^ART THREE 
 Instigation Pa^e 181 
 
 891C4G 
 
PART I 
 THE STRUGGLE 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 The Stmg,g,le 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ARL Felman stepped from a train 
 at the Union Station of a mid- 
 western, 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 sleek- 
 ness 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 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 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 circum- 
 stances 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 be- 
 wildered and enraged him. At high-school he had 
 been known as "the poet-laureate of room six- 
 teen," 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 teach- 
 ers. Teachers of English in American high-schools 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 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 Long- 
 fellow, the latter two having been selected because 
 they seemed easier to flatter than other poets such 
 as Browning and Swinburne. Another Carl Fel- 
 man watched this proceeding from an inner dun- 
 geon 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, dumb- 
 ly 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 imag- 
 inations and an anger at the respectable poverty 
 of their lives, looked upon his poetic desires with 
 mingled feelings of elation and uneasiness. 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 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 be- 
 cause they fear, without quite knowing why, that 
 it will develop into a being at variance with the 
 fundamental designs of their lives. Carl's pa- 
 rents 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 sug- 
 gestion, or gave it a sulky monosyllable, and his 
 reticence frightened his parents. The simple per- 
 son is reassured by garrulity, even when it attacks 
 but can derive nothing from silence save the feel- 
 ing 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, 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 wanted Carl to be prosperous and yet daring over 
 his cups while the mother felt that ho 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 peaceful- 
 ness." 
 
 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 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 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 con- 
 tained 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 
 
 6 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 ended, and words trooped from them in right- 
 eously 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, sen- 
 sible boy!" 
 
 Carl listened with a feeling of impotent anger. 
 Yes, they were probably right in their commands 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 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 stick- 
 ing 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 pre- 
 tending 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 
 
 8 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 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 gradu- 
 ally 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 emo- 
 tional birth he became to himself a huge black 
 criminal staggering beneath the weight of unre- 
 leased plots, and he derived an angry joy 
 from this condition, reveling in the first guilty 
 importance that had invaded his meekly repressed 
 Me. 
 
 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 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 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 w^orkshop 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 
 
 lO 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 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 fra- 
 grance 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 car- 
 penters 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. 
 
 II 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 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 findmg his voice and 
 was using every possible subterfuge and device 
 to protect this obsession, leering at the forces 
 that were attempting to mtrude 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 mmor knave, seek- 
 ing to rationalize his mstmcts for crime, and 
 perhaps he merely held a naked determination 
 like that of a certain immoral slayer and plun- 
 derer 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 
 
 12 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 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 senti- 
 ments 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 jour- 
 neys. 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 
 
 13 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 muzzle them. And so, penniless and in dirty 
 clothes, he was now walking through the heavily 
 tawdry business district of a midwestern city. 
 
 14 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 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 over the scene. 
 Since Carl almost never voiced his actual thoughts 
 and emotions to people, he grasped, as usual, the 
 luxury of speaking to himself. 
 
 "Electric light is only the molten fear of men," 
 he said, as he strode through the unreal haste 
 of the crowds. "Men are afraid to look at the 
 night and they have given it eyes as stiffly fright- 
 ened as their own. Underneath the comforting 
 glare of this second blindness they protect them- 
 selves. In a dim light men and women could not 
 easily escape from each other, for the darkness 
 would tend to press them together, but in this 
 violent stare of light they are divided by a self- 
 assured indifference. Watch them as they stride 
 along with an air of gigantic, amusing importance. 
 The crowd is really a single symbol of many 
 isolations joined to a huge one. It sees only 
 those people who are unpleasantly conscious of 
 
 15 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 the electric glare, and who hurry through it \\'ith 
 gestures of alert dislike, or with a slow and morbid 
 desire for pain." 
 
 This fancy made him feel conspicuously dis- 
 robed, and the glances of passing people became 
 to him flitting symbols of derision directed at 
 his beard and dirty clothes. As he looked up at 
 the tall, unlit office buildings, grey and narrowly 
 vertical, they reminded him of coffins standing 
 on end and patiently waiting for a ci\ilization 
 to crumble, so that they might inter it and fall 
 to the ground with their task completed. He 
 reached the apartment-house section in which his 
 parents lived — rows of three and four-story build- 
 ings almost exactly like each other, and standing 
 like factory boxes awaiting shipment, but never 
 called for. In front of each building was a little, 
 square lawn hemmed in between the sidewalk and 
 the curbstone — tiny squares of dusty green lost 
 in a solved and colorless problem in material 
 geometry. Carl greeted them with a gesture of 
 ironical brotherhood as he hurried along the walk, 
 while people, observing his downcast gaze and 
 saluting hands, sometimes paused to doubt his 
 sanity. 
 
 The glib suavity of a midsummer night sprin- 
 
 i6 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 kled its sounds down the street and the doorsteps 
 and walks were hea^y with men. women and 
 children, parading the uncomfortable drabness of 
 their clothes and unwinding their idle talk. In 
 pairs and squads, youths and girls strolled past 
 Carl, laughing and playing to that exact degree 
 of animal abandon tolerated by the street lights 
 of a civilization, and som.etimes crossing the for- 
 bidden boundary line, with little bursts of guilty 
 spontaneity. Amid the openness of the street they 
 were forced to become jauntily evasive of the old 
 sensual madness brought by a summer evening, 
 and they sought the refuges of crudely taunting 
 words, snickering withdrawals, and tentative 
 invitations. They were sauntering toward the 
 kittenish excitements of ice-cream sundaes, mov- 
 ing pictures, and kisses traded upon the shaded 
 benches in a nearby public park. Thought had 
 subsided in their heads to a kindly mist that 
 clung to the rhythm of their emotions, though in 
 the main, their minds were merely emotions that 
 vainly strove to become discreet. Most people 
 are incapable of actual thought, and thinking to 
 them is merely emotion that calmly plots for more 
 concrete rewards and visions. 
 
 Carl looked upon the people on the sidewalks 
 with the attitude of an unscrupulous stranger. 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 and in his fancy he measured them for material 
 gains and attacks, without a trace of warm emo- 
 tion in his regard. To him they were merely 
 alien figures busily engaged in deifying the five 
 senses, and they mattered no more than shadowy 
 animals blind to his aims and presence. He had 
 long since frozen his emotions in self-defense and 
 nothing could unloosen them save the timidly 
 mystical lyrics which he wrenched from the 
 baffled surfaces of his heart. During the four 
 years of his life as a soldier and hobo he had 
 often looked upon some of the darker and more 
 rawly naked shades of sexual desire in the people 
 around him, but after a first period of mechanical 
 curiosity he had drawn aloof from what he con- 
 sidered a blind, shrieking, fantastic parade. "This 
 wearisome game of advancing and retreating flesh, 
 always trying to lend importance to an essential 
 monotone, can go to hell," he had muttered to 
 himself. "I'll yield to my sexual desires at rare 
 intervals, but I'll do it in the brief and matter- 
 of-fact manner in which a man spits into a 
 convenient cuspidor." Women to him were simply 
 moulds of dull intrigue, irritating him with their 
 pretenses of animation and with the oneness of 
 their appeal. 
 
 As he walked between the incongruities of hard 
 
 i8 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 street surfaces and soft noises, ever5i;hing around 
 him seemed to be vainly trying to conceal a hol- 
 low monotone. Middle-aged and old people sat 
 around the doorsteps of the box-like apartment- 
 houses, and the circumscribed and hair's-breadth 
 shades of intelligence and defeat on their faces 
 were transparent over one color and shape. Each 
 of these people strove to convince himself that his 
 relaxation on this summer evening was a glitter- 
 ing honor conferred by hours of virtuous toil, 
 though at times discontent suddenly raised their 
 voices high in the air. It was as though they 
 lifted musical instruments, gave them one help- 
 less blow, and retired to apathy, scarcely aware of 
 what they had done. Carl looked at them with 
 a weary indifference that almost verged upon 
 hatred, and hurried down the cement walk. 
 
 As he neared the apartment-house where his 
 parents lived it suddenly occurred to him that the 
 entrance might be decorated by people who would 
 recognize him and comment upon his appearance 
 and his abrupt return. The thought of their 
 amused and veiled contempt, or their assumption 
 of superior compassion, made him cringe a little 
 and he turned to a side-street that led to an alley 
 which extended behind the block in which his 
 parents lived. He passed through the dismal rear 
 
 19 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 yard of beaten earth and ascended the wooden 
 stairway. A negro janitor, who had been working 
 in this place for several years, gazed at him, at 
 first with suspicion and then with a slowly pitying 
 grin of recognition. 
 
 " 'Lo, Mistah Felman. What brings you-all 
 back here?" 
 
 Carl affected an irritated aloof ne^. 
 
 "I came back to enjoy a little shame," he said. 
 
 "What dat last word you said?" 
 
 "Shame, shame," repeated Carl, frowning at 
 the man. 
 
 "Guess you-all's crazy," said the negro, throw- 
 ing up his hands and stumping away. 
 
 This was one of Carl's favorite tricks. When- 
 ever he desired to avoid a forced exchange of 
 commonplaces, or the threat of a humiliation, he 
 would speak in a cryptic fashion that aroused 
 bewilderment or annoyance in the person before 
 him and helped him to end the conversation. He 
 found that the rear door of the apartment was 
 locked and knew that his parents were visiting an 
 adjacent moving-picture theater or sitting outside 
 on the tiny lawn. Happily, he eyed the open win- 
 dow and remembered how often in the past his 
 mother had scolded his father for that enormous 
 crime. Ah, the windows in their minds were well 
 
 20 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 nailed and shaded. He felt relieved at the knowl- 
 edge that he could probably sit for an hour or two 
 and rest before they returned. He climbed 
 through the window with the jocose satisfaction 
 of a criminal whose mock-hanging has been post- 
 poned, and sat on a weak- jointed rocking-chair in 
 the small dining-room. 
 
 Not a fraction of change had come to the clut- 
 tered dullness of the room. He saw the same 
 rickety table of round oak, where an inferior circle 
 was displaying with mild pride an embroidered 
 square of white linen; the modest and orderly 
 showing of cut-glass and silverware — ^tinsel of an 
 old defeat — ; the plaster-of-paris bust of an 
 Indian, violently colored and bearing an artificial 
 scowl ; the mantlepiece that held a little squatting 
 Chinaman made of colored lead and the bric-a- 
 brac effigy of a doll-like courtier in washed out 
 pinks and blues. On the wall opposite him a brass 
 clock, moulded into crude cherubs intertwined with 
 stiff blossoms, busily spoke of itself, forgetful of 
 the time that it was supposed to measure, and lit- 
 tle prints of uncertain landscapes hung in golden 
 frames upon the wall-paper that was stamped with 
 heavy purple grapes against a tan background. 
 Carl shuddered as though he were in the midst of 
 
 21 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 a weak and disorganized nightmare, in which real- 
 ity was indulging in a hackneyed burlesque at its 
 own expense, and he crashed his fist upon the oak, 
 table. 
 
 "Damn it, I'll get out of this some day," he 
 shouted, craving the sharp relief of sound, and 
 then he grinned at the clumsy futility of his explo- 
 sion. 
 
 "If you ever do manage to escape from this con- 
 spiracy of barren peace and flat lies it won't be 
 with angry noise," he said to himself. "A vicious 
 calmness will help you more." 
 
 He extracted a soiled roll of pencilled, smudged 
 papers from an inside pocket of his coat and 
 stroked them as though they were a gathering of 
 living presences. The paper became smooth skin 
 to him and he questioned it with his fingers. This 
 reaction was not a sensual one but sprang from his 
 longing for a reality that had so far eluded his 
 consciousness. His poems, peeping with eyes of 
 fanciful promises above the veils that redeemed 
 their faces, were more concrete to him than actual 
 flesh and breath. 
 
 22 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 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 fists. His parents 
 came into the room at l^st and turned on an elec- 
 tric light without at first noticing him in the semi- 
 gloom^. Turning, his mother saw him in the chair. 
 Her hands flew to her breast, in two tight slants, 
 as she impulsively pictured the presence of a 
 bearded burglar, and then she recognized him and 
 insulted her emotions with a cross between a gasp 
 and a squawk. 
 
 "It's Carl! Carl! For God's sake, v/hen did 
 you come in?" 
 
 "About an hour ago, through the window that 
 father always leaves open," said Carl, waiting 
 with a poised and resigned smile for the inevitable 
 cannonade. 
 
 His father came in from the kitchen, where he 
 had gone for a drink of water. Seeing Carl, he 
 slowly challenged him with sleepily prominent 
 eyes. 
 
 23 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "S-o-o, s-o! You're back here again," he said. 
 **I always said that you would come back. I knew 
 you would get tired of bumming around. I knew 
 it. Well, you loafer, what do you want from us 
 now? Some more money out of my pants-pockets, 
 maybe ? You're a son that I should be proud of ; 
 oh, yes !" 
 
 "Yes, and a fine condition he comes back in," 
 said Mrs. Felman, who was beginning to be angry 
 at herself because she was not quite as wrathful 
 at Carl as she felt that she should have been. A 
 louder voice might supply this missing intensity. 
 "A fine condition! Look, will you, at his shoes, 
 and his clothes, and the beard on his face. A nice 
 specimen to be trotting back to his parents after 
 four years! When he needs us he comes back, 
 oh, sure, but we wasn't good enough for him 
 when he ran away and stole our money. We 
 should tell him to go right back where he came 
 from. Right back!" 
 
 She sat down with an air of stifled indignation 
 that strained in its effort to capture an actual 
 condition, and with many gasping words she tried 
 to piece together the image of an inexplicable 
 reptile. She was a woman whose emotions, 
 garrulously bitter because of the material strait- 
 jackets in which they had writhed for years, were 
 
 24 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 ever determined to exalt their bondage, if only 
 to win relief from pain. Carl had always been 
 an evil enigma to her, one that was at times half 
 guessed — the accusing finger of her youth, some- 
 times barely discerned through the mist of lost 
 desires. To escape these momentary exposures 
 she had often swung the blindness of an anger 
 that was directed as much at herself as at Carl. 
 The father, however, had obliterated his past self 
 with a more jovial carelessness and had stolen 
 the consoling fumes of many taverns, so that he 
 felt little need for the shrouds of loud noise. 
 
 "Well, at least you showed good sense in coming 
 through the back way," he said, looking at his 
 son with a mixture of wonder and humorous con- 
 tempt. "You would have made a fine sight for 
 the neighbors on the front steps ! We would never 
 have heard the last of it. Noo, noo, what did you 
 come back for? If it's just to play your old tricks 
 again, you can walk right out of here, I tell you. 
 I'll stand for no more nonsense from you. Turn 
 over a new leaf and you're welcome here, but no 
 more of your writing, and fancy talk, and high 
 notions!" 
 
 "Look at him," said MrsT Felman. "Sits there 
 like a piece of wood! Have you nothing to say 
 for yourself? Why, you haven't told us how-do- 
 
 25 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 you-do. Inhuman! I don't see how I ever gave 
 birth to such a creature as you." 
 
 Carl had been sitting like a stone figure, dressed 
 by the playful passerby known as Life and yet 
 absolutely void of life. His mute indifference had 
 seduced all suggestions of flesh from him and 
 even his blonde beard and hair seemed pasted 
 upon an effigy. Finally the clever semblance of 
 emotion returned to his body and sent an experi- 
 mental tremble to see whether the flesh was 
 prepared to receive another animated disguise. 
 His hands twitched as though they were striving 
 to overcome their paralysis in an effort to obey 
 some powerful signal. As he listened to the jerky 
 tirades of his parents — sterility seeking to regain 
 a fertility by the use of a staccato voice — part 
 of him wanted to cringe and win the convulsive 
 shield of tears, while another part longed to bound 
 from the insipid, brittle room and glide aimlessly 
 into the night. The cringing mountebank, unfairly 
 aided by physical fatigue, won this inner skirmish, 
 and Carl decided to silence the anger of his parents 
 by speaking to them in a way that would make 
 them bewildered, since bewilderment is but a shade 
 removed from frightened respect. It was the only 
 pitiful little stunt that could offer him a small 
 respite from the poverties of noise that were 
 
 26 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 assailing him — the favorite purchase of Indian 
 medicine-men, Druid priests, circus barkers and 
 other childlike charlatans. 
 
 "You see, the situation has been complicated," 
 he answered slowly, with the voice of a loftily- 
 enervated teacher. "Complicated. I have tried 
 to save a possible poet from death — always a 
 noble but redundant proceeding — but it seems 
 that his skin must burn. I've come back now 
 to make his coffin and stud it with gold. Gold 
 would seem to be a favorite metal of yours, my 
 dear parents. Surely you will be satisfied now. 
 And it is also possible that you may help me with 
 the funeral arrangements, since this burial, unlike 
 plebeian ones, may extend over several years. 
 And what else do you want me to say? I have 
 so many acrobatic words and they would love to 
 perform for you, but I am tired to-night. True, 
 I am a rascal. Can you forget that embarrassing 
 challenge for one evening?" 
 
 He broke his stonelike repose into one forward 
 motion as he leaned toward his parents, turning 
 upon them the prominently somnolent eyes that 
 had been the sole gift from his father's face, and 
 smiling like an exhausted but lightly poised angel. 
 His parents were stunned, for their indignant 
 assurance had suddenly recoiled from an unex- 
 
 27 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 pected, blank wall. They could not quite under- 
 stand his words and yet they felt that he was 
 mocking them. The gracious glibness of his voice 
 dwarfed them with the mystery of its meanings. 
 This monster was not ashamed of himself — what 
 could it signify? But, after all, it was rather 
 difficult to be angry at a man when you were not 
 quite sure whether his words were flattering or 
 sneers. Carl rose abruptly from the chair. Now 
 he controlled the situation for a time. He kissed 
 his mother's forehead lightly and smiled at his 
 father. 
 
 "I'm tired and hungry," he said. "A little food 
 and sleep will fix me up, though, and to-morrow 
 I'll look for work of some kind." 
 
 "Crazy, crazy, just like he always was," said 
 his father, turning away with a partly appeased 
 and patient manner. After all, one must give the 
 proper blend of pity and tolerance to one who is 
 truly insane. 
 
 The face of his mother held a virtuous impa- 
 tience that made her large nose go up and down 
 like a see-saw, and on the see-saw a dash of 
 reluctant tenderness rode. 
 
 "I'll get you something from the ice-box," she 
 said. "You're still so young — twenty-two you'll 
 be next week — and we may yet live to be proud 
 
 28 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 of you. If you'll only get rid of your funny 
 writing notions and your stealing ideas. My God, 
 what a combination!" 
 
 Afterwards, as Carl ate, they sat at the kitchen 
 table with him. Mrs. Felman was tall and strong, 
 with a body on which plumpness and angles met 
 in a transfigured prizefight of lines. The long 
 narrowness of her face was captured by a steep 
 nose slightly hooked at the top and her thin lips 
 were not unlike the relics of a triumphant sneer. 
 Even when they tried to be satisfied they never 
 quite lost their expression of tight gloating. 
 Above her high cheek-bones her eyes were bitter 
 tensions of light, and a remnant of greyish-brown 
 hair receded from the moderate and indented rise 
 of her forehead. Her skin, once pink, was now 
 roughly florid, like a petal on which many boots 
 have been scraped and cleaned. Mr. Felman was 
 her violent refutation. Short and hampered by 
 plumpness, the large roundness of his face held 
 the smirking emphasis of a greyish-red mous- 
 tache, huge and clipped at the ends. His thick 
 lips blossomed uncompromisingly over his fair 
 double chin, and his low forehead, madly scratched 
 by a plowman, stood between the abrupt curve 
 of his small nose and a ruff of dark red hair 
 pestered by grey. An expression of carelessly 
 
 39 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 earthly humor, banqueting on shallowness, fitted 
 snugly upon his face and only his eyes, bulging 
 with sleep, brought a metaphysical contradiction. 
 He watched his son with a lazy, half -curious pity. 
 
 "Noo, what have you been doing all this time?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "I left the army a year ago. You know, I wrote 
 to you then and found out that you still lived 
 here. That was very kind of me, I'm sure. Since 
 then I've knocked about in different towns. Sleep 
 and work, work and sleep — the twin brothers of 
 man's inadequacy." 
 
 "Ye-es, still using long words, the twin brothers 
 of something or other," said Mrs. Felman, with a 
 light disapproval. "Learn to talk and act like 
 other people and you'll be better off. I used to 
 think a little different when I was young, but 
 believe me, you can't get along by just dreaming 
 and talking to yourself. The trouble with you is 
 that you got a lot of fancy words and no get-up." 
 
 "Philosophical discourse number sixty-two," 
 answered Carl, in the drowsily chanting voice of 
 a train announcer. "Or have I lost count of them ? 
 Your life hasn't made you very happy, mother, 
 and perhaps that's why your arguments are lack- 
 ing in the swagger of conviction. Or perhaps you 
 
 30 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 think that it's best to be unhappy, and in that 
 case I agree with you." 
 
 "Well, I wouldn't lower myself by trying to 
 argue with you," said Mrs. Felman. "I'm per- 
 fectly right in everything I say, but I simply 
 don't know how to fiddle with words like you do." 
 
 "Have you still got those poetry ideas in your 
 head?" asked Mr. Felman. "Poetry is no business 
 for a strong, grownup man. It's a lot of foolish- 
 ness good for women and children!" 
 
 "If you could write things that make money 
 now," said Mrs. Felman. "Why, only the other 
 day Mrs. Benjamin was telling me she has a 
 cousin who writes love stories for the Daily 
 Gazette. Nice stories that make you laugh and 
 cry. And this girl gets twenty dollars apiece for 
 them, too." 
 
 "Now, now, don't be trying to encourage him 
 again," said Mr. Felman. "Ain't we had enough 
 trouble over this writing of his ? Let him go out 
 and get a regular job, like other men!" 
 
 Carl laughed, and his laugh was like an emotion 
 interviewed by carbolic acid, and his parents eyed 
 him with an offended surprise. 
 
 "Still squabbling over the bones," he said, with 
 a sarcastic apathy. "If you were more delicate 
 you might realize that it is inappropriate to argue 
 
 31 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 at a funeral. I'm only a tongue-tied fool, but I 
 seem very elusively inarticulate to you because 
 you're even more tongue-tied. And now, as usual, 
 you haven't understood a word of what I've said." 
 
 "Well, you don't have to laugh at your parents," 
 said Mrs. Felman, with an air of pin-pricked 
 dignity. "iTou never did show any respect for us, 
 in spite of all that we've done for you. Never." 
 
 "Say, Carrie, you'll have to get a suit for him. 
 Something cheap, you know, at Pearlman's," said 
 the father. "He'll never get a job in those rags 
 of his." 
 
 "Money, money," said Mrs. Felman in a mechan- 
 ically mournful voice. "All I do is spend money. 
 It's terrible." 
 
 The sound of an opening door invaded the flat 
 tom-tom of their talk. 
 
 "It's Al Levy," said Mrs. Felman, with fear in 
 her voice. "It would be a shame now if he saw 
 Carl in this condition. Hurry, hurry, Carl, to the 
 bathroom before he comes in here. Your father's 
 razor is on the shelf and I'll get you a clean shirt 
 from the ones you left behind. Maybe they still 
 fit you, as I was always careful to buy them a 
 size too large." 
 
 Carl felt like an ignoble marionette who was 
 being hastily mended behind the curtain for fear 
 
 f 
 32 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 that he might cast ridicule upon the sleekly- 
 vacant play, and his emotions were evenly divided 
 between amusement and contempt. Driving his 
 heart and mind into a fitting blankness, he closed 
 the bathroom door. Levy had a room in the 
 Felman apartment and they treated him with 
 an unctuous respect that almost verged upon 
 an Oriental self-abasement. He was a man of 
 twenty-six who worked for a wealthy uncle, 
 received a large salary, and polished and scrubbed 
 the limited essentials of a semi-professional man- 
 about-town, with minor chorus girls and gamblers 
 helping him to flatter microscopically the fatigue 
 donated by his daily labors. 
 
 "Be very friendly to Al, please," said Mrs. Fel- 
 man, as they all sat around the dining-room table. 
 "He's a very smart man — works in the mail-order 
 business, selling cheap jewelry to country people, 
 and makes a pile of money. His seven dollars a 
 week come in mighty handy to us, I can tell you." 
 
 "Dammit, all business is going good except 
 whiskey," said Mr. Felman, as though he were 
 inviting an elusive conspiracy to share the firm- 
 ness of his tones. "These prohibition fanatics are 
 ruining everything. The saloon-keepers are all 
 afraid they're gonna be closed up, and they won't 
 buy. I haven't sold a barrel in two days. I don't 
 
 33 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 know what the world's coming to with all these 
 here prohibitions People are entirely too busy 
 telling each other what to do, and nobody minds 
 his own business any more. . . . Well, anyway, 
 Carl, there's still sample bottles for you to swipe 
 from my overcoat pockets." 
 
 He said the last words with a bearish joviality, 
 and had the expression of a bear who has paddled 
 to within a mile of irony and is sniffing at the 
 singular realm. 
 
 "Sol, don't remind me of his old wildness," said 
 Mrs. Felman, with a peevish dread. "I still 
 remember the time when he staggered along the 
 sidewalk in front of all the neighbors. Is there 
 anything bad that he hasn't done, I want to 
 know?" 
 
 One evening, just before running away from 
 home, Carl had taken some tiny bottles of whiskey 
 from his father's overcoat, without curiosity, but 
 longing for the feeling of sly self-assurance that 
 had balanced his blood from former sneaking sips. 
 He had repaired with the bottles to a neighboring 
 public park and emptied them in swiftly nervous 
 gulps, enjoying the vastly kinglike sneer at the 
 world which had brushed aside his melancholy 
 uncertainties. 
 
 "I am a poet!" he had cried out to the mur- 
 
 34 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 muring patience of the trees around him, "and 
 fools will some day gape along my road, and the 
 open circles of their mouths will be like the rims 
 of beggars' cups. My voice will rise above the 
 dreamless clink of their coins and they will stop 
 and look at me, as though I were a pilgrim- 
 problem. An angry amazement will lend its little 
 catastrophe to their faces. Yes, I will drop beauty 
 to them, in clearly abundant handfuls, and they 
 will sit quarreling over its value and tossing me 
 an occasional penny. But I will never stop to 
 join their discourses. My feet will be lighter than 
 breezes and more direct. I am a poet, and the 
 world is stagnation that I must ever torment !" 
 
 He had lurched back to the Felman apartment, 
 "dropping beauty" with an incisive exuberance to 
 the astonished neighbors seated around the door- 
 step, and commanding them to examine his gifts. 
 As he sat at the dining-room table now, he remem- 
 bered this episode, and similar ones, with a gust 
 of half-rebellious shame. 
 
 "This has been my only triumph so far — a 
 whiskey bottle raised beneath the stars, on a 
 summer evening, and reigning over an idle riot 
 of words," he said to himself with an exhausted 
 self-hatred. "Am I going to be contented with 
 this thwarted joke? And yet " 
 
 35 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Levy stepped into the room and provided a 
 slightly unwelcome ending to this secret sentence. 
 Short and slender, his blue serge suit clinging to 
 him like an emblem of shrewd victory, he made 
 an excellent period to the labors of thought. Upon 
 his small, light tan face a twirled-up black mous- 
 tache curved to a diminutive swagger and his 
 bending nose seemed to be vainly attempting to 
 caress the moustache — an unnecessary affirmation. 
 His black eyes incessantly drove little bargains 
 beneath the shine of his black hair. 
 
 "H'llo, folks," he chirruped, smiling with an 
 automatic ease at the Felmans. Then he noticed 
 Carl and looked at him with polite surprise. 
 
 The father and mother regarded each other 
 with a despondent indecision, dreading the 
 thought of introducing their drolly disreputable 
 son to this shining symbol of an outside world 
 and hating the undeserved appearance of inferior- 
 ity which had been thrown upon them. This queer 
 son had cast his shadow upon their assured and 
 humbly conservative position in life — in a world 
 of decently balanced regularities. Their ability at 
 loquacious pretense took up the burden with a 
 weary precision. 
 
 "This is my son Carl," said Mr. Felman, with 
 a prodigiously uneasy grin tickling the roundness 
 
 36 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 of his face. "Carl, this is Al Levy. You've heard 
 us talking of him, Al. He's just come back from 
 the army — surprised his old parents, you know." 
 
 "Glad to meet you, I'm sure," said Levy, with 
 an expert affability beneath which he exercised 
 his disdain for Carl's patched-up appearance and 
 his inkling of the actual situation. 
 
 He complimented a chair at the table briskly; 
 or, in other words, he sat down, employing a great 
 condescension of limbs. He and Felman began an 
 uncouth debate concerning the respective selling 
 merits of whiskey and cheap jewelry, while Carl 
 listened, bored and a little sick at the stomach. 
 Words to these men were crudely unveiled mis- ? 
 tresses, selling their favors for whatever hasty 
 coin might be thrown on the table. Levy turned 
 to Carl. 
 
 "How did you like the army?" he asked, with 
 a lightly superior kindliness, 
 
 Carl nervously wondered what he should answer 
 and bickered with his desire to return a curt 
 indifference to this vaguely garnished mannikin. 
 He decided to annoy the limited mind of the man 
 in front of him and take a comforting wraith of 
 revenge from this result — his customary device 
 for such situations, always used to evade a lan- 
 guage which he did not care to simulate. The 
 
 37 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 physical nearness of people made him snarl, for 
 then his imagination found it more difficult to 
 trifle with their outlines, and he would strive to 
 drive them away with insult. 
 
 "The army is a colorless workshop, where men 
 can forget their past and avoid gambling with 
 their future," he said, in an aloofly professorial 
 voice. "All of the hurried and obedient move- 
 ments of a day in the army, like a little drove of 
 dazed foxes, prevent a man from fully realizing 
 his own insignificance, and at night there is 
 always a nearby city in which the sorrowful 
 illusion can be captured again. Oh, yes, the army 
 is an excellent prison for men to whom life holds 
 a fixed horizon — men whose hearts and minds 
 have reduced curiosity to an ashen foothold." 
 
 Levy's brows bent to an unfamiliar process and 
 perplexity slowly loosened his lips, but a feeling 
 of irritated pride made him determined not to 
 show his confusion to one whom he looked upon 
 as a demented and windy subordinate. He knew 
 that this "fancy fool" was attempting to parade 
 a superior knowledge of English, thus creating a 
 counterfeit of wisdom. 
 
 "Oh, I don't think that the army is as bad as 
 all that," he said, in a glibly hurried voice, trying 
 to assume an attitude of careless disagreement. 
 
 38 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "I was a sergeant-major once in the National 
 Guard, down in Tennessee, and we had a pretty- 
 good time of it, I'll tell you. It gave us all a 
 splendid muscle and fine appetite, and it taught 
 us to obey the commands of our superior officers 
 without hesitating. You know, in life you've got ■ , 
 to follow the orders of someone who knows / 
 more than you do, or you'll never get anywhere. 
 Besides, we had a lot of intelligent men in our 
 outfit. Why, my company commander was one 
 of the best lawyers in Nashville." 
 
 "My planet is somewhat distant from yours. I 
 was barely able to hear you," said Carl, amusedly. 
 "Still, that doesn't mean that either of us is 
 better or worse than the other. Your eyes are 
 contented with what they see and mine are not. 
 But it would not be very important to tell you 
 of things that you have never missed." 
 
 Levy became involved in his cigarette smoking 
 while he futilely asked his mind for an adequate 
 and unconcerned retort. Mrs. Felman sensed his 
 annoyance and felt hugely angry at her son for 
 "not getting in right" with this splendid young 
 business-man and for speaking in a manner that 
 was mysteriously and trivially vexing. 
 
 "Ach, Carl always talks just like a hero in aT 
 story," she said, in an agitated effort at humorous > 
 
 39 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 masquerade and hoping to smooth over the errors 
 made by her freakish son. "Don't pay no attention 
 to him. I can never understand him myself." 
 
 Levy, once more completely the successful man 
 to his own vision, forgot the bite of the beetle, and 
 turned to the elder Felman. 
 
 "How about a little game of rummy?" 
 
 "Carrie, get the cards," Felman answered, in 
 quick tones of bright relief. "Carl will play — he 
 always was a rummy shark and he never changes 
 in anything. Such a stubborn boy! I bet you 
 that forty years from now he'll be just as foolish 
 as he ever was." 
 
 "Your optimism concerning the length of my 
 life intrigues me," said Carl. 
 
 Ten-cent pieces were placed on the table and 
 the cards were shuffled. To the other two men 
 the card game would have lacked interest without 
 the money to be battled for, not because of the 
 tiny gain involved, but because their desires for 
 relaxation were lacking in spontaneity and needed 
 the pettily deliberate strokes of a familiar whip 
 to encourage their birth. Whenever, on rare occa- 
 sions, they romped upon some lawn, tossing a ball 
 to a child, or read the lurid clumsinesses of some 
 magazine, they showed a sheepish hesitation and 
 hazily felt that they were wasting time that 
 
 40 
 
BLACKGUARD • 
 
 belonged to the shrewd importance of barter and 
 exchange. The presence of a coin upon a table, 
 however, held a glint of the missing coquette. 
 They swore elaborately and interminably at lost 
 hands — "that queen would have given it to me" 
 —flung down the paper oblongs with a tense ela- 
 tion when they were winning, and enjoyed the 
 presence of a milder but still keen market-place. 
 The gambling instinct is never anything more 
 than the desire to seduce an artificial uncertainty 
 from a life that has grown mildewed and pre- 
 arranged — the monotone must be circumvented 
 with little, straining devices. It pleased Carl to 
 imitate the motions of the other two men, out- 
 witting them at their own small game while still 
 remaining a repulsed bystander, and sneaking a 
 morsel of enjoyment from their genuine dismay 
 at some defeat. After several games had been 
 played the father yawned mightily, creating a 
 noise that sounded like a Mississippi River steam- 
 boat whistle heard at a distance, poignant and 
 full-throated. Perhaps with this yawn his soul 
 signaled a complaint against the disgrace which 
 this day had cast upon it — a nightly remonstrance 
 unheard by his mind and heart. Levy, subdued 
 and impressed by Carl's card-playing abilities, 
 pelted him with commonplaces which he tried to 
 
 41 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 make as genial as possible, and Carl, too sleepy 
 to be belligerent or aloof, gave him softly vague 
 responses. Mrs. Felman, for the first time, looked 
 out with heavy peace from behind the crinkling 
 newspaper where she had been placidly nibbling 
 at the perfumed logics of a latest divorce scandal. 
 Her son had finally redeemed the evening by 
 exhibiting a small but ordinary proficiency which 
 drew him a little nearer to the dully efficient level 
 of mankind, and her reflections upon his material 
 future became a shade less hopeless. 
 
 42 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 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 men, would not 
 see him from their windows, and at a department 
 store she purchased a cheap suit of clothes for 
 him. He dressed behind a small screen in the 
 store, feeling like a small, eccentric lamb who was 
 being glossed for the market. She left him at an 
 elevated railroad station, extracting a dollar from 
 her pocketbook with an air of intensely solemn 
 and reflective importance. 
 
 "Don't waste it now; I know your tricks," she 
 said. "Be sure and get the afternoon paper and 
 look through the want ads. Take anything at the 
 start — don't be high-toned." 
 
 Carl gave her the necessary monosyllables of 
 assent and walked down the street, his mind busy 
 with many insinuations. 
 
 "Perhaps I'd better stop stealing for a while," 
 he said to himself. "If I keep it up without an 
 intermission it's going to land me in jail again 
 
 43 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 and I'm not anxious for that circumscribed trav- 
 esty to happen. That term of three months in 
 Texas gave me a great deal of time in which to 
 write, but the little animals in that place intruded 
 with a bite that was both wistful and inadequate. 
 It's a little difficult to write about beauty and 
 scratch your skin simultaneously — the proud stare 
 of the former does not like to sit in the prison 
 of a small irritation. It is an intricately adjusted 
 equilibrium and the lunge of a finger nail can 
 desecrate this subtly balanced aloofness. There 
 is little difference between the bars of mind and 
 actual iron rods, but when you are still partly 
 inarticulate, physical motion can become a neces- 
 sary recompense. No, for the time being I had 
 better strain my hands in prayer against the tiny 
 implements with which men felicitate their stupid- 
 ity. Back and forth — but what else can I do?" 
 It was his habit to think only in metaphors and 
 V ' similes, and in this way he evaded the realities 
 that would otherwise have crushed him. He 
 walked down the street, practicing an emotion of 
 stolid submission, and this surface humility 
 played pranks with his blonde-topped head and 
 made his thin lips loosely unrelated to the rest 
 of his face. As he strode through the business 
 district of the city, with its sun-steeped frenzies 
 
 44 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 of men and vehicles, the scene pressed upon him 
 and yet was remote at the same time. It was as 
 though he were studying a feverishly capering 
 unreality and vainly striving to persuade himself 
 that he formed a significant part of it. 
 
 The unrelenting roar of automobiles, wagons 
 and cars became the laughable and inarticulate 
 attempt of a dream to convince him that it held 
 a power over his mind and body. Men and women 
 darted past him with a rapidity that made them 
 appear to be the mere figments of a magic trick. 
 Here he caught the thick tension of lips, and 
 there the abstracted flash of eyes, but they were 
 gone before he could believe that they had inter- 
 fered with his vision. He paused beside a dark 
 green news-stand squeezed under the iron slant 
 of an elevated-railroad stairway and strove to pin 
 the scene to his mind and fix his relation to the 
 people who were jesting with his eyes. Young and 
 old, dressed in complications of timidly colored 
 cloth, each seemed to be running an exquisitely 
 senseless race in the effort to gain a nonsensical 
 foot on the other person. The masked rush of 
 their bodies deprived them of a divided sexual 
 appearance and lure — men and women, touching 
 elbows without emotion, were swept into one 
 lustreless sex which darted in pursuit of a treach- 
 
 4S 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 erously invisible reward. The entire structure 
 around them — buildings, signs, and iron slabs — 
 stood like a house of cards carefully supported by 
 an essence that rose from the rushing people, and 
 Carl felt that if these men and women were to 
 become silent and motionless, in unison, the house 
 of cards would instantly lose its meaning and 
 tumble down. 
 
 "What are they gliding and stumbling toward ?" 
 he asked himself — the old, poignantly futile first 
 question of youth. "Each man, with an ingenious 
 treason, is trying to forget his inability at self- 
 expression and soiling the void with an increasing 
 burden that will prevent him from complaining too 
 much. At some time in their lives all of these 
 people felt, dimly or strongly, for a moment or 
 for years, the ludicrous ache of a desire to stand 
 out clearly against their scene, but the loaded 
 momentum of past lives — the choked influence of 
 past futilities — pushed them along with a force 
 which they could not withstand. It is really a 
 stream of adroitly dead men and women that is 
 fleeing down this street — surreptitiously dead 
 people living in the bodies of a present reality and 
 perpetuating the defeated essence of their past 
 lives." 
 
 As he stood and watched the crowd he found it 
 
 46 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 necessary to ask himself the words: "What gave 
 its slyly amused signal for this plaintive race 
 through the centuries?" 
 
 He also found it necessary to answer: "A 
 languid idiot, much in need of consolation, 
 refuses to abandon his dream." 
 
 Here and there, apart from the main lunge of 
 the crowd, were men and women, standing still, 
 as though motion had betrayed them, or loitering 
 in a carelessly placid fashion. Vacancy and inde- 
 cision tampered with most of their faces. 
 
 "How many minor poets have stood upon these 
 street corners, making arrangements for a gradual 
 and unnoticed death ?" he asked himself, with the 
 sentimental self-importance of youth. 
 
 But the stage hands clamored that he was neg- 
 lecting the play — a habit falsely known as laziness 
 — and that, with appropriate cunning, they had 
 erected this city scene so that he and hordes of 
 others should find it difficult to forget their tamely 
 borrowed lines. With an uncomplaining wrench 
 he returned to his surface role of a youth sent 
 out in weakly gruesome clothes to look for some 
 task that would begin to answer the flatly strident 
 requests of an average life. The humble stupor 
 fell back upon his shoulders and he walked to a 
 bench in a public square, seated himself, and read 
 
 47 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 the "want-ad" section of a newspaper. He spied, 
 with a prostrate frown, the barren jest of: 
 "Wanted — Young man for clerical work ; must be 
 neat, industrious, wide-awake, sober, well edu- 
 cated, reliable, good at details, ambitious, honest, 
 painstaking; salary twelve dollars a week." He 
 muttered certain useless words to himself. "The 
 illusion of a reluctant penny for fresh vigor. If 
 the applicant is morbidly patient and reasonably 
 deft at following orders he may after many years 
 attain the virtue of writing the same trivially 
 unfair appeal to other men. And even that 
 exquisite victory is uncertain." 
 
 He saw that as usual his only choice rested 
 between an office-boy's task, dignified by the title 
 of junior clerk to make it more enticing, and 
 unskilled manual labor. 
 
 "Now, how will you become tired — mentally or 
 physically?" he asked himself with great for- 
 mality. 
 
 Abruptly, and in that conscious and secret plot 
 which men insist upon calling subconscious, he 
 peered at the picture of a black man and a white 
 man throwing a wilted rose back and forth to 
 each other and catching it without a trace of 
 emotion. The little, ridiculous rose lost a petal 
 after each catch, but in spite of its smallness 
 
 48 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 the number of petals seemed to be inexhaustible. 
 At a distance the black and white man exactly 
 resembled each other, but on approaching closer 
 it could be seen that the black man held the face 
 of an incredibly stolid ruffian, while the white 
 man's face was engraved with the patience of a 
 cowed child. Not being acquainted with psycho- 
 analysis — that blind exaggeration of sexual 
 routines — Carl did not believe, after he returned 
 to the touch of the park bench, that this picture 
 had slyly veiled the direction of his physical 
 desires. He knew that a fantastic whim had 
 slipped from his mind and induced him to probe, 
 his choice between two equally drab kinds of 
 labor, striving to make this choice endurable for 
 a moment. 
 
 He selected three advertisements, all of them 
 asking for manual laborers, walked from the park, 
 and boarded a street car. The first place that he 
 visited was a box factory — a slate-colored crate 
 of a building, bearing that flatly unexpectant tone 
 that expresses the year-long mating of smoke and 
 dirt. As he ascended the gloomy stairway an 
 endless drone and clatter battled with his ears. 
 It seemed a senseless blasphemy directed at noth- 
 ing in particular — the complaint of a dull-witted, 
 harnessed giant who was being driven on without 
 
 49 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 knowing why. Carl entered a huge room dishev- 
 eled with sawdust and shavings and cluttered with 
 black belts and wheels. Men with swarthy, 
 motionless faces and feverish arms leaned over the 
 wheels and saws. As he stood near the doorway, 
 feeling dwarfed and uncertain, a man came toward 
 him. Sturdy and short, the man looked like a 
 magnified and absent-minded gnome, too busy to 
 realize that civilization had played an obscene 
 trick on him by stealing his fairy disguise and 
 substituting the colorless inanities of overalls and 
 a black shirt. The large and heavily twisted fea- 
 tures on his face were partially hidden by a brown 
 stubble of beard, and like all men who work for- 
 ever in factories, he had an ageless air in which 
 youth, middle age and old age were pounded into 
 one dull evasion. 
 
 "What d'ya want?" he asked, the words jumbled 
 to a bark. 
 
 "I'm looking for work. Saw your ad in the 
 paper." 
 
 He examined the region between Carl's toes and 
 cap, measuring the unimportance of flesh. 
 
 "We want good strong men to load boxes and 
 carry lumber," he said. "You don't look like a 
 man for the job, bo. You're dressed like a travelin' 
 
 50 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 salesman an' we want men who ain't afraid to 
 get dirt on their clothes. Get me?" 
 
 "Don't mind this suit of mine," said Carl. "I 
 have a much dirtier one at home and I'll be only 
 too glad to wear it here. You see, I always feel 
 more peaceful in dirty clothes, but someone played 
 a joke on me and made me wear this suit." 
 
 "Well, you ought to come ready for work, if 
 you're lookin' for it" — the man peered again at 
 Carl. 
 
 "Nope. Nope. You ain't got the build for 
 heavy work. We're after big, husky men. Sorry, 
 Jack, but there's nothin' doin'." 
 
 "Say, be reasonable," said Carl. "Fve done hard 
 work off and on for the last four years and I'm 
 much stronger than I look. Come on, give me a 
 chance." 
 
 The man shook his head as his eyes received 
 Carl's slender arms and narrow shoulders, and he 
 did not know that this weak aspect concealed an 
 inhuman amount of endurance. After another 
 useless expostulation Carl walked out, grinning 
 forlornly as he strode down the street. Cheated 
 out of the phantom opiate of a beautiful box- 
 piling job because of a deceptive physical appear- 
 ance and a twenty-dollar suit, reduced to nineteen 
 through the expert pleading of his mother! He 
 
 51 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 looked down with delicate aversion at the grey, 
 neatly-pressed cloth which concealed his material 
 humility with lines of dreamless confidence, and 
 felt a sudden impulse to tear it off and go nakedly 
 cavorting down the street, taking the cries of 
 onlookers as a suitable reward, but that sleek 
 caution born from rough faces and rougher 
 hands chided him back to sanity. After calling at 
 another factory and receiving the same refusal, 
 he decided to wait until the morrow, when he 
 could don his old, dirty clothes and avert sus- 
 picion. 
 
 The city turmoil was slackening, like a huge, 
 human top beginning to spin weakly. The warm 
 hardness of a summer evening between city 
 streets tried a little laughter in an unpracticed 
 voice, and revolving streams of men and women 
 hid the pavements — a satiated army returning 
 from an unsettled conflict. The scene was a mixed 
 metaphor trying to straighten itself out. Feeling 
 forlornly alert and useless in the midst of all this 
 important exhaustion, Carl made his way home. 
 
 A group of neighbors sat with a clean and 
 well-brushed peace around the doorstep. In the 
 heat of the summer evening they seemed mere 
 figures of slightly animated flesh, with their 
 thoughts and emotions reduced to placidly con- 
 
 53 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 tented wraiths. Three middle-aged Jewish women 
 sat in rocking chairs and knitted with an effortless 
 incision, unaware of the spiritual prominence that 
 is usually discovered in their race. Their bulky- 
 bodies censured the lightness of evening air and 
 their deeply-marked brown faces were those of 
 self-assured, thoughtless queens issuing orders to 
 a tiny domain, with palmetto fans for scepters and 
 rhinestone combs for crowns. Incessantly they 
 chatted about the personal details of their daily 
 lives, splitting these details into even smaller 
 atoms and fondling the minute particles with a 
 lazy relish. Children romped at their feet or 
 brought some tiny request to their laps — children 
 that seemed to be dreams of cherubic hilarity, 
 released from the busy sleep of the middle-aged 
 women and reproving it. Behind them, sitting 
 on the stone steps, a middle-aged Jewish man 
 glued his depressed weariness to a newspaper. 
 The orderly sleekness of his clothes had met with 
 the familiarity of a summer day and the rim of 
 his once stiff collar, drenched with perspiration, 
 made a pathetic curve around his fat, brown neck. 
 His eyes were like fiat discs of metal placed on 
 each side of an enormous, confident nose. Noses 
 express the spirit of people far better than lips 
 and eyes, for they cannot be moved and changed 
 
 53 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 to suit the fears and desires of a person, but 
 stand with an outline of uncompromising reveal- 
 ment. Their still silence is often the only sincerity 
 upon a human face, and the nose of this man 
 showed a strident green that was contradicted a 
 bit by the drooping little indentations just above 
 the nostrils, indicating that the man had his 
 moments of self-doubt, but refused to yield to 
 them. 
 
 It seemed incredible to Carl that these people 
 were housing hearts and minds, for he could see 
 them only as so many sterile lumps of flesh that 
 were using every desperate trick to minimize the 
 crawling shadow of their unimportant graves. 
 Two of the women knew him and greeted him 
 with an insincere and inquisitive cordiality. 
 
 "Wh-y-y, Mister Felman, when did you get 
 back?" said Mrs. Rosenthal, the fattest of the 
 group. 
 
 "I returned yesterday," answered Carl, injecting 
 a great solemnity into his voice. 
 
 "Yesterday? Well, well. And did you have a 
 nice time in the army? I've been told that it's 
 really marvelous for a man — makes him so strong 
 and healthy. And then all the traveling about, 
 you know, must be so interesting." 
 
 "Oh, ye-e-es, it's a wonderful place," said Carl, 
 
 54 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 gravely mimicking her drawling voice. "Bands, 
 and uniforms, and parades. It's really quite fasci- 
 nating." 
 
 "Well, I'm so glad you liked it," said Mrs. Ben- 
 jamin, another woman in the group, who felt that 
 it was time to advance a well-placed sentence. "I 
 want you to meet my husband. Mo, this is Mister 
 Felman, who's just come back from the army." 
 
 "Glad t' meet yuh," said the man on the door- 
 step, blurring the words in a swiftly mechanical 
 fashion, but looking very closely at Carl. 
 
 Carl returned the salutation in the same fashion, 
 taking a shade of amusement from his parrot- 
 like impulse. These hollow creatures — what else 
 could one do save to imitate their mannerisms and 
 ideas, for self-protection, and rob and defraud 
 them at every opportunity, thus giving them a 
 mild apology for existence? After another round 
 of wary commonplaces he managed to break away. 
 His mother met him at the door and he said 
 "Hello" and was about to pass her when her sharp 
 voice halted him. 
 
 "You haven't got an ounce of affection in you! 
 A nice way to greet your mother! Hello, and he 
 walks right by like I was some boy he met on the 
 street." 
 
 For a moment Carl stood without answering. 
 
 55 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 This woman who had given birth to him — an 
 incomprehensible chuckle of an incident — was 
 almost non-existent to his emotions — a mere 
 shadow that held an incongruously raucous voice 
 and guarded one of the gates of his surface prison. 
 As he stood in the hallway, doubting the reality 
 of her shrill voice, he asked himself: "Am I an 
 inhuman monster, unfit to touch this woman's 
 dress, or am I a poet standing with candid erect- 
 ness in an alien situation ?" 
 
 Suddenly the question became unimportant to 
 him and he felt that he had merely offered his 
 inevitable self the choice between an imaginary 
 halo and an equally fantastic strait- jacket. If his 
 mother actually longed for an affection which he 
 did not hold, it would be inexpensive to toss her 
 the counterfeit coins of gestures and words. When 
 she finished her staccato diatribe, he bowed deeply 
 to her, with the palm of one hand lightly interro- 
 gating the buttons of his coat, raised her hand 
 to his lips, and kissed it at great length. 
 
 "Na-a, go away with your silliness," she said. 
 "I know you don't mean it." 
 
 Her narrow face loosened for a moment and a 
 shimmer of compensation found her eyes. This 
 queer son of hers might be faintly realizing, after 
 all, the unselfish intensity of her efforts to give 
 
 56 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 him a position of honor and respectability in the 
 world. Perhaps he was only wild and young, and 
 would finally press his shoulders against the 
 admired harness of material success. It could not 
 be possible that one who had struggled from her 
 flesh would remain a remote idiot and ignore the 
 warm shrewdness within her that life had some- 
 how swindled. 
 
 The elder Felman was reading his paper in the 
 dining-room. He greeted Carl with a somnolent 
 imitation of interest, but the heat, aided by a 
 day spent in pungent saloons, had cheated him 
 of most of his mental consciousness. He had 
 Decome so thoroughly accustomed to drink that 
 an artificial buoyancy scarcely ever invaded the 
 dull ending of his days. 
 
 "We-e-ell, where did you go to-day?" he asked, 
 feeling some slight craving for sound and trying 
 to rouse his material anticipations. 
 
 He abandoned his seductive newspaper, with its 
 melodrama that was pleasant because it murdered 
 at a distance, and questioned Carl with his sleepy 
 eyes. 
 
 "Went to a couple of factories, but the foremen 
 were disgusted with the cut of my clothes," said 
 Carl. "They felt that the wearing of a new and 
 unwrinkled suit revealed an intelligence which 
 
 57 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 should not be possessed by an applicant for manual 
 labor. I tried to convince them that the semblance 
 was false in my case, but they refused to be 
 persuaded." 
 
 "Always trying to joke. That won't get you 
 anything. The main thing is — did you get work, 
 or didn't you?" 
 
 "No, I did not. I applied for manual labor, but 
 I forgot to put on overalls." 
 
 Mrs. Felman stood in the doorway and lifted a 
 skillet in simple wrath. 
 
 "Factories he goes to !" she cried, in a voice that 
 was not unlike the previous rattling of the skillet. 
 "I bought him a new suit and shoes this morning 
 so he could look for common, dirty work! It's 
 terrible. Here we sent him to high-school for 
 four years and his only ambition is to work as a 
 common laborer." 
 
 The father smiled dubiously at her explosion. 
 
 "Now, Carrie, don't let all the neighbors know 
 your business," he said. "Your holler is enough 
 to drive anyone crazy. There's no harm in honest 
 work, Carrie, and besides he'll soon get tired of 
 sweating in factories and look for something 
 decent. Don't worry." 
 
 "I guess anything will be better than that silly 
 scribbling that's ruined his life so far," said Mrs. 
 
 58 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Felman, her anger dwindling to a guttural sulki- 
 ness. Carl, who had been sitting with a suffering 
 grin on his face, gave them soothing words and 
 once more held them at arm's length. 
 
 59 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 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 line- 
 man's helper for a telephone company. He was 
 required to climb up the wooden poles ; hand tools 
 to the lineman ; unwind huge spools of wire ; make 
 simple repairs under the lineman's guidance. 
 As he labored from pole to pole, down a suburban 
 street, taking the impersonal whip of the sun and 
 winning the pricks of insects on his sweat-dappled 
 face, he felt dully grateful toward the physical 
 orders that were crudely obliterating the con- 
 fused demands of his heart and mind. As he 
 toiled on, this dull feeling gradually rose to a self- 
 lacerating joy. He revelled in the cheap vexa- 
 tions brought by his tasks — the unpleasant scrap- 
 ing of shins against iron rungs and the sting of 
 dust in his eyes — and his self-hatred stood apart, 
 delightedly watching the slavish antics of the 
 physical mannikin. 
 
 Then, when this emotion paused to catch its 
 breath it was replaced by a calmer one, and his 
 
 60 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 insignificance receded a bit, beneath the substan- 
 tial lure of arms and legs that were moving 
 toward a fixed purpose. "I am doing something 
 definite now and that is at least a shade better 
 than the indefinite uselessness of my thoughts," 
 he mumbled to himself as he lurched from pole 
 to pole. The slowly mounting ache of his muscles 
 became a bitter hint of approaching peace and 
 he looked forward to the moment when he would 
 quit his labors and enjoy the returning inde- 
 pendence of his body, as though it were a god's 
 condescension. He worked quickly and breath- 
 lessly, as one who hurries to a distant lover's 
 arms. Filled with a doggedly naive hatred for 
 his own deficiencies, he welcomed this chance 
 to insult them with disagreeable and infinitely 
 humble postures, and he gladly punished him- 
 self underneath the violence of the sun. It was, 
 indeed, a spiritual sadism deigning to make use 
 of the flesh. 
 
 "Hey, Jack, take it a little easier," the lineman 
 called down to him once. "Don't kill yourself at 
 this job. It's too damned hot to work hard." 
 
 Carl gave him a beaten grin and moved his 
 arms even faster while the lineman bewilderedly 
 meditated upon this imbecility. The lineman was 
 a burly young Swede with a broadly upturned 
 
 6i 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 nose and thickly wide lips. His face suggested 
 poorly carved wood. The blankness of his mind 
 held few skirmishes with thought on this rasping 
 afternoon and his mental images were confined 
 to tools, stray glasses of beer, yielding pillows, 
 and feminine contours — the flitting promises that 
 held him to his day of toil. He possessed no 
 human significance to Carl — he was a drably acci- 
 dental automaton who shouted down the blessed 
 orders that gave Carl little time for definite 
 thoughts and emotions: an unconscious helper in 
 the flogging of mind and soul. 
 
 As they walked down the street after the day's 
 work Carl looked closely at him for the first time. 
 Sweat and dirt were violating the youthful out- 
 lines of his face, and his small blue eyes were 
 contracted and deeply sunk as though still direct- 
 ing the movements of his arms. The blunt 
 strength of his body sagged beneath the color- 
 lessness of clothes and his head was wearily bent 
 forward — the grey frenzies of a civilization had 
 exacted their daily tribute and it is possible that 
 he was not aware of the glory and impressiveness 
 which certain poets find in his cringing role. For 
 a time Carl looked at him with an exhausted 
 friendliness and felt tied to him by the intimate 
 
 62 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 bonds of confessing sweat and conquered toil, and 
 this illusion did not vanish until he spoke. 
 
 "Me for beer and somethin' to eat," he said, 
 with heavy anticipation. "A day shust like this '11 
 take the guts outa any man. Come along, Jack, 
 I'll stand treat for the suds. . . . An' say, lemme 
 give ya a tip — don't overwork yourself out on 
 this job. It don't pay. You won't get a cent 
 more at the end of the week. Do whatcha gotta 
 do but take it kinda easy. Kinda easy. The boss 
 is too busy most of the time to notice who's doin' 
 the most work an' unless you loaf on the job you 
 can get by without killin' yourself." 
 
 The complacent roughness of his voice, divided 
 by the shallow wisdoms of the underdog, destroyed 
 the feeling of tired communion which Carl had 
 been sheltering, and his exhaustion began to creep 
 apart from the man, like a tottering aristocrat. 
 He was once more a proudly baffled creator, shuf- 
 fling along after a day of useless movements, and 
 his hatred for human beings awoke from its short 
 sleep and brandished a sneer on his loose and dirt- 
 streaked face. 
 
 He walked into a corner saloon with Petersen 
 and gulped down a glass of beer. Its cool interior 
 kiss aroused a bit of vigor within him and he 
 looked around at the men who were amiably fight- 
 
 63 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 ing to place their elbows on the imitation mahog- 
 any bar. Their faces were relaxed and soiled, 
 heavily betraying the aftermath of a day of toil, 
 and an expression of brief elation teased their 
 faces as they swallowed the beer and whiskey and 
 licked their lips. After each drink they stood with 
 blustering indecision, like generals striving to for- 
 get a menial dream and regain their command of 
 an army, or quietly tried to erase the blunders and 
 supplications of a day, seeking nothing save the 
 solace of lazy conversation and weakly clownish 
 arguments. The strained, corrupt clamor of 
 voices debating over women, prize-fighters, and 
 money swayed back and forth and was timidly 
 disputed by the whir of electric-fans and the clink 
 of glasses. A wave of sleepy carelessness stormed 
 Carl as he watched these men. Inevitably thrown 
 in with them, as a sacrifice to a dubious reality, 
 he felt inclined to copy their actions and inanely 
 insult his actual self, since at this moment all 
 words and gestures seemed equally futile to him. 
 "What essential difference is there between a 
 poet, boasting of his reputation, and a workman 
 bragging about the women who have allowed him 
 to molest their bodies ?" he asked himself, forcing 
 the question out of the drained limpness of his 
 mind. "The poet has taught better manners to 
 
 64 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 his vanity, with many an inquisitive artifice, 
 while the other man is more natural and clumsy." 
 
 Petersen's voice interrupted the soliloquy. 
 
 "Come on, have another." 
 
 "Make it whiskey this time," said Carl to the 
 bartender. "I'll pay for this one, Petersen." 
 
 "Keep your money, keep it," answered Petersen, 
 warmed by his beers to an insistent generosity. 
 "I got plenty of it. But say, I'll be a little shorter 
 in kale tuhnight when Katie gets through with 
 me. There's no way of spendin' money that that 
 dame don't know, but I guess all women are like 
 that. They make you fly some to get 'em. Gonna 
 meet her at eight tonight." 
 
 "Who's Katie?" asked Carl, drowsily amused 
 after his whiskey. 
 
 "She's a little brunette I'm goin' with. I'm 
 blonde myself so I like 'em dark an' well-built. 
 Fine-lookin' girl she is. Some curve! She ain't a 
 fast dame by no means but I give her money so's 
 she can look decent. You know the wages they 
 pay at them damn department-stores! I don't 
 wanna be ashamed of her when I take her out so 
 I get her the best of every thin' — silk stockings, 
 nice hat, swell shoes." 
 
 "Don't she feel kinda small about a man paying 
 
 65 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 for her clothes?" asked Carl, slipping into Peter- 
 sen's language. 
 
 "Well, she said no at first but I told her that 
 she didn't have to give me nothin' except what 
 she wanted to," said Petersen. "I'm a straight 
 guy with women, I am." 
 
 "Do you love her?" asked Carl, wondering how 
 Petersen would take the question. 
 
 He looked at Carl with a heavy disapproval. 
 
 "Say, cut out the kiddin'," he answered. "D'ya 
 lo-o-ove her" — he mimicked the words with aston- 
 ished derision — "none of that soft stuff for me. 
 She's a good-lookin', wise girl, and if I don't see 
 anyone I like better I'll prob'ly marry her, but 
 she ain't got no ropes tied to me. You bet not! 
 There's plenty of fish in the pond. Jack." 
 
 "Yes, if you've got the right kind of bait," 
 answered Carl, deliberately falling into the other 
 man's verbal stride, "but be sure that someone else 
 isn't fishing for you at the same time. Hooked 
 from above, while not watching, you know." 
 
 "You're a regular kidder, ain't ya," said Peter- 
 sen, who dimly felt that Carl was masking the sly 
 wisdom of sexual pursuits and respected him for 
 it. "But say, Katie's got a nice friend — Lucy's 
 her name. She's a little thin, not much curve to 
 
 66 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 her, but some men like 'em that way. An' she's 
 kinda quiet too, don't talk much, but I don't care 
 for them when they're always laughin' and cuttin' 
 up. Then they're usually tryin' to get on your 
 good side an' work you for somethin.' Would ya 
 like to meet this dame? I don't know just how 
 far she'll go but she might come across if you 
 work her right." 
 
 "Sure, lead me to her," said Carl, inaudibly 
 laughing to himself. 
 
 "Alright, I'll make it for eight tuhmorrow night. 
 The four of us'll go somewhere . . Well, one more 
 an' we'll beat it. Jack." 
 
 Glancing swiftly ahead, Carl saw that this 
 engagement would demand a certain sum of 
 money and he wondered how he could obtain it 
 since he would not be paid for his present work 
 until the end of the week. While he stood, grasp- 
 ing this little perplexity, he noticed that a man 
 at his left had placed a ten-dollar bill on the bar, 
 in payment for a drink, and that the man was 
 immersed in a violent argument with a friend, 
 with his back turned to the bar. The bartender 
 was at the other end of the counter, and after a 
 glance at Petersen, who stood dully peering into 
 his empty glass, Carl whisked the bill into one of 
 
 67 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 his coat pockets. Then he quickly prodded Peter- 
 sen's shoulder. 
 
 "Come on, let's go," he said, and the two walked 
 out of the saloon, Carl taking care to stroll in a 
 reluctant fashion and steeling himself for the 
 angry shout that might come. 
 
 As Carl walked down the street he felt a twinge 
 of regret at having stolen the money of a stum- 
 bling, minor puppet. He told himself that this 
 petty gesture had been forced upon him by an 
 innately vicious contortion known as life, but his 
 emotions cringed as they arranged an appropriate 
 explanation. 
 
 "This man whom I have robbed will curse the 
 treacherous unfairness of life and his eyes, dilated 
 with bitterness, will see more clearly his relation 
 to the things around him. In this way I have 
 really befriended him. The railroad-detective, 
 who once struck me on the head with the butt of 
 a pistol, when I was offering no resistance, was 
 trying to obtain revenge — revenge upon the people 
 who had made him their snarling slave — and he 
 blindly reached out for the object nearest to him, 
 which happened to be my head. But there was no 
 desire for vengeance in my own gesture. I steal 
 from men in order to prevent life from stealing 
 
 68 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 an occasional refuge for my thoughts and emo- 
 tions. A purely practical device." 
 
 He left Petersen at the next street-corner and 
 boarded a crowded street-car, reflecting on his 
 engagement to meet the "quiet an' thin Lucy" as 
 he stood wearily clinging to the leather strap. 
 Petersen's attitude toward women was a familiar 
 joke. Dressed in its little array of fixed and con- 
 fident variations it had pursued Carl in the past 
 without repulsing or flattering him. To him it 
 was an elaborately pitiful delusion of dominance 
 made by hosts of men, who felt the craving to 
 inject a dramatic variety and assurance into the 
 frightened monotones of their lives. In an aching 
 effort to dignify their barren days these men 
 adopted the roles of hunters and masters among 
 women. They entered, with infinite coarseness 
 and precision, a glamorous realm of lies, jealous- 
 ies, cruelties, and haloes, and in this wildly fan- 
 tastic land they managed to forget the flatly sub- 
 missive attitudes of another world. Carl was tell- 
 ing himself that he had been waiting for a woman 
 who could bring him something more than the 
 crudely veiled undulation of flesh but he fashioned 
 the starving little romance with great deliberate- 
 ness. 
 
 69 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "Women have excited my flesh and it has often 
 yielded to them, but that is simply a necessary 
 triviality," he said to himself. "I, too, must seek 
 to evade the monotonies and restrictions of my 
 life, lest I become mad, but at least I am quite 
 conscious of the joke. The cheap little drug-store 
 does not witness any hoodwinked swaggers on my 
 part! So on to quiet Lucy, with her stiff stupidi- 
 ties and elastic curves." 
 
 Once more he had to pass the garrulous sentries 
 at the gate — the neighbors around the doorstep. 
 They eyed the dirt upon his clothes and face with 
 an amazed contempt — Carrie Felman's son a com- 
 mon laborer ! — and lost in their scrutiny they gave 
 him monosyllabic greetings. 
 
 "Well, judging from the dirt all over you you've 
 found a job," said his mother in tones of blunt 
 resignation. 
 
 "Yes, I'm working as a lineman's helper for the 
 telephone company," he answered in an expres- 
 sionless voice. 
 
 After he had washed his parents pelted him 
 with amiable questions — the details of his work, 
 wages, and companions — a dash of solicitude 
 swinging with their desire to entertain the dull 
 aftermath of a hot summer day. He answered 
 
 70 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 their questions patiently and they were glad that 
 their son seemed ready to plunge his "wildness" 
 into the soothing currents of an average life. 
 Their affection for him was only able to dominate 
 their hearts when he failed to challenge the peace- 
 ful assumptions and bargains of their lives, for 
 otherwise it verged into hatred because it was con- 
 fronted by a stabbing mystery which it could not 
 understand. 
 
 After the evening meal he sat in an easy chair 
 upholstered with violent green plush and usually 
 occupied at such times by his father, but donated 
 to him in honor of his first evening of submission. 
 He sprawled in the chair, trifling with the head- 
 lines of a newspaper and throwing them aside. A 
 warm and not unpleasant stupor began to descend 
 upon his thoughts and emotions and they fluttered 
 spasmodically, like circles of drugged butterflies. 
 He closed his eyes. His legs and arms held a heav- 
 iness which he enjoyed because he was not forced 
 to raise it. 
 
 "Will this be my end — a swinging of arms and 
 legs during the daytime and then different shades 
 of sleep or sensual bravado at night?" he asked 
 himself drowsily — a well-remembered sentence 
 that needed little consciousness. 
 
 71 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Suddenlj'-, an emotional revolt within him tore 
 against his physical lethargy, like lightnings from 
 some unguessed depth of his soul, and he was 
 astonished to find himself sitting upright in the 
 chair. He saluted the victory joyously. 
 
 "By God, I won't give in as easily as this," he 
 whispered to the purple grapes on the tan wall- 
 paper, addressing them because their ugliness was 
 at least helplessly inert. "You're concrete sym- 
 bols, if nothing else, and you don't stumble amidst 
 unconquered clouds. I'll go to the park and try to 
 write a poem." 
 
 Agreeably amazed at the returning vestige of 
 strength in his legs he walked to the public-park 
 and sat down upon a bench. Ignoring the people 
 who were strolling or romping around him he bent 
 over his paper-pad and tugged at the smooth inso- 
 lence of rhyme and meter, but the fight was an 
 uneven one since his mind and emotions were still 
 brittle and dazed from their day of hurried sub- 
 jection. After crumbling sheets of paper for two 
 hours he wrote : 
 
 TO A SAND-PIPER 
 One blast — a mildly frightened little host 
 Of liquid sprites, each holding one high 
 note, 
 
 72 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Aroused from some repentance in the 
 
 throat 
 Of this grey-yellow bird who skims the 
 
 coast — 
 And silence. Far off I can somehow feel 
 The drooping-winged sprites back to 
 
 covert steal. 
 The poem did not satisfy him, and in a measure 
 
 he felt like a sleepwalker who was imitating ges- 
 tures that had lost their meaning to him, but he 
 dared not substitute his actual thoughts and emo- 
 tions in place of the tenuous or stilted fancies 
 which he believed were all that poetry was allowed 
 to achieve. All that he wanted to say, and all 
 that he did say in conversation with himself, mut- 
 tered unhappily within him as he sat on the 
 bench and strained to capture the pretty sugges- 
 tions of a mystical rapture, but he was slave to 
 the belief that poetry was a thinly aristocratic 
 experience in which thoughts and emotions, 
 serene, noble, and ludicrously artificial, disdained 
 the lunges of thought and the turmoils of an ac- 
 tual world — pale, washed-out princes contending 
 among themselves for trinket-devices known as 
 rhymes and meters. 
 
 He rose from the bench, impoverished by the 
 effort that he had made to counteract a day of 
 toil, and trudged homeward. 
 
 73 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 After stumbling through another day of heav- 
 ing 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-town street- 
 corner, grinning at the thought of what this 
 experience might hold, for he liked the idea of 
 pretending to be a sensual beggar while a sneer 
 within him played the part of a bystander. 
 
 Petersen's sweetheart, Katie Anderson, was a 
 short, plump girl who tried, with the incessant 
 swiftness of her tongue, to apologize for the 
 excessive slowness of her thoughts. The coarse 
 roundness of her face was determinedly obscured 
 by rouge and powder, and her large brown eyes 
 were continually shifting, as though they feared 
 that stillness might betray some secret which they 
 held. Her face knew a species of sly and mild 
 cunning not unlike that of a rabbit frequently 
 beaten by life but clinging to its mask of courage 
 while hopping through the forest of sensual 
 experience. Her friend, Lucy Melkin, was more 
 subdued and helplessly candid. Her small slender 
 
 74 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 body stooped a little as though some unseen hand 
 were pressing too familiarly upon one of her 
 shoulders — a hand of exhausted fear — and the 
 pale oval of her face had the twist of a loosely 
 pleading infant beneath its idiotic red and white. 
 Her blue eyes seemed to be endlessly waiting for 
 something to strike them and wondering why the 
 blow failed to arrive on time. 
 
 Petersen suggested that they should visit an 
 adjacent vaudeville theater and when Carl and the 
 others agreed they walked through the crowded 
 streets. 
 
 "Baby, but I've had some day," said Katie. 
 "Them shoppers sure get on your nerves, I'm tell- 
 ing you. But you're not gonna let me work all 
 the time, are you, Charlie dear?" 
 
 "There's no harm in workin'," said Petersen, 
 not wanting to be quite placed in the position of 
 disdaining an essential fact within his life. "No 
 harm. I gotta take a lot of sass myself from the 
 foreman but it's all in the day's game. You don't 
 get nothin' easy in this world, 'less you're a crook, 
 and if y'are you'll soon wind up in a place where 
 ya don't wanta be. But still, a good-iookin' girl 
 like you, Katie, shouldn't hafta stand on her feet 
 
 75 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 all day. Don't be afraid, I'll make it easier for ya 
 pretty soon." 
 
 "Now Charle-e, the way you flatter is some- 
 thin' terrible," said Katie, with a simper of nude 
 delight. "I suppose Mister Felman would like to 
 get some nice girl too, wouldn't you, Mister Fel- 
 man? Or maybe you've got two or three already. 
 You men can never be trusted." 
 
 "No, I haven't been lucky," said Carl, secretly 
 exploding with a laughter that was partly directed 
 at himself. 
 
 He had been afraid that these girls would prove 
 to be of the shallowly sophisticated, carefully 
 sulky type and he felt relieved at their coarsely 
 direct naivetes. An axe, with baby-blue ribbon 
 tied around it, was more entertaining than a 
 pocket-knife steeped in cheap perfume. 
 
 "No, I haven't been lucky," he went on, "but, 
 you know, we're always waiting for the right one." 
 
 "Why, that's just what Lucy always says," said 
 Katie, rolling her eyes as she looked at the other 
 girl in a ponderously insinuating manner. "She's 
 always been rowmantic, like you. Mister Felman. 
 Why if I was to tell you of all the fellas she's 
 turned down you wouldn't believe me." 
 
 "No, perhaps I wouldn't," answered Carl, keep- 
 
 76 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 ing his face sober with a massive effort. 
 
 "Now, Katie, you keep quiet," said Lucy, and 
 Carl was surprised at the actual anger that hard- 
 ened her voice. "I'm perfectly able to talk about 
 my own business without your helpin' an' it's not 
 nice to be sayin' such things to a gen'lman who's 
 just met me. I'm sure he's not interested in my 
 past an' even if he is I'm the one to tell him an* 
 not you. You make me tired!" 
 
 "Well, of all things," cried Katie. "I was only 
 try in' to be nice an' here you go and get real 
 angry about it. I've never had a girl frien' who 
 was as touchy as you are. I didn't really tell 
 Mister Felman anything about you 'cept that 
 you was rowmantic, an' that's nothin' to be 
 ashamed about." 
 
 "See here, stop all this quarrelin'," said Peter- 
 sen, to whom the speech of women was always an 
 ignorance that assailed the patience of masculine 
 wisdom. "You women can talk for ten hours 
 about nothin'! I didn't bring my friend down to 
 have him lissen to your squabblin'. Cut it out, I 
 tell ya." 
 
 This storm in an earthen jar was amusing to 
 Carl. He marvelled at the ability of these people 
 to whip words into redundantly nondescript droves 
 
 77 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 in which thought gasped weakly as it strove to 
 follow the uproar of simple emotions. Continually, 
 he felt the reactions of a visitor from another 
 planet, witnessing an incredible vaudeville-show. 
 All human beings to him were hollow and secretly 
 despairing falsehoods separated only by the clev- 
 erness or crudeness of their verbal disguises, and 
 he heard them with an emotion that was evenly 
 divided between amazement and a chuckle. 
 
 "I'm sure that Miss Anderson meant no harm," 
 said Carl, with a whim to become the glib peace- 
 maker. "She was just feeling gay and frisky, 
 and I took her words in the right spirit. Miss 
 Melkin was a little angry because she thought that 
 I didn't understand Miss Anderson's intentions, 
 but she needn't be afraid. I never misinterpret. 
 It was just a little misunderstanding on both sides 
 so let's forget about it." 
 
 "Mister Felman, you're such a perfect gen'l- 
 man," said Katie, blithely. 
 
 Carl looked at Lucy and saw that a wistfully 
 surprised expression was liking his words and try- 
 ing to explain them to her mind. It was the look 
 of a baby flirting with an incongruous sophistica- 
 tion and striving to create a fusion between ingen- 
 uousness and a certain sensual wisdom learned in 
 the alleys of life. 
 
 78 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "Ah, these starved dwarfs, how little it takes to 
 please them," Carl sighed to himself. 
 
 After the wiry, tawdry spectacle of the vaude- 
 ville show, with its weary acrobats and falsetto 
 singers, the four visited a grimly gaudy Chinese 
 restaurant, where the Orient becomes an awk- 
 ward prostitute for Occidental dollars, and while 
 Petersen and Katie gossiped about their friends 
 Carl and Lucy traded hesitant sentences and 
 threw little sensual appeals from the steady gaze 
 of their eyes. Lucy, with her look of a stunned 
 infant, made him feel vaguely troubled — the 
 ghost of a fatherly impulse. After the meal the 
 group separated, since the girls lived in different 
 parts of the city, and as Carl and Lucy rode in the 
 trolley car they tried to make their anticipations 
 more at ease, with the veils of conversation. 
 
 "Why do you live?" asked Carl, abruptly, to 
 see whether one or two words in her answer might 
 be different from what he expected. 
 
 "What a funny question !" cried Lucy. "I don't 
 know. Maybe it's because I wanta be happy. I 
 never am mosta the time, but then I'm always 
 hopin' that things'll change. Why'd you ask me 
 that funny question?" 
 
 The fumbling bewilderment of her words irri- 
 
 79 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 tated and saddened Carl, simultaneously, and in 
 an effort to slay the reaction he simulated a com- 
 passion. 
 
 "Happiness doesn't always speak the truth," he 
 said, struggling to mould his words so that they 
 could reach her understanding. "It's sometimes a 
 beautiful lie. You understand ? A beautiful, soft, 
 desperate lie. And we say the lie because we 
 want to change ourselves and somebody else to 
 something that can make us forget our smallness. 
 You see, we are not very large, either in our bodies 
 or in our thoughts, and we try to make ourselves 
 several feet taller, tall enough to put our heads 
 on a level with the trees, tall enough to imagine 
 that the wind respects us. Beautiful, desperate 
 lies. Do you understand?" 
 
 "I don't quite understand you," said Lucy. "You 
 speak so different from all the men I know, so 
 different, and yet I like the way you speak. Do 
 you mean it's not good for anyone to be happy?" 
 
 "If your happiness doesn't put you to sleep it's 
 good for you. When people try to be happy for 
 more than a little while it makes them sleepy. 
 And, you see, it's much better to be very much 
 alive, or very dead." 
 
 "Honest, I'd like to get what you're sayin'," 
 
 80 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 said Lucy, perplexed and softly candid. "Maybe 
 you mean that we oughta keep movin' all the time, 
 hearin' and seein' different things, an' maybe 
 you're right about that. I get tired of goin' down 
 to work every mornin' and coming back to the 
 same room every night. I'd like to travel around, 
 an' see different people an' places, an' find out 
 what everything's like. But I guess I never will." 
 "It's much easier than you imagine," said Carl. 
 "Just pack up your grip some morning and ride 
 away to another city and see what happens there. 
 After you've done it you'll wonder what held you 
 back." 
 
 "Oh I just couldn't do that. I'd make my 
 mother so unhappy if I did, an' besides, I'd be 
 afraid of goin' somewhere all alone. I might not 
 find any work in the place where I went, an' then 
 I'd be up against it. I'd like to travel around with 
 plenty of money, an' nothin' to worry me, an' " 
 
 Her words trailed off into a revealing silence, 
 and Carl smiled sadly at the little, pitifully obvious 
 hint within her faltering. Perhaps it might be 
 best to marry this simple, mildly wistful, ignorant 
 girl and surrender himself to monotonous toil and 
 sensual warmth, forgetting the schemes that were 
 torturing his heart and mind. The reaction cap- 
 
 8i 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 tured him for a time and then died. No, he was 
 gripped by a snarling, nimble blackguard who was 
 determined to lead him to destruction or victory. 
 And in the meantime, here was sensual forgetf ul- 
 ness — an interlude with a girl to whom happiness 
 was merely physical desire captivated by filmy 
 and soothing disguises. 
 
 They reached her home, a grey cottage in the 
 suburbs, with a little yard of dusty grass and a 
 modest porch. It bore an aspect of abject sim- 
 plicity, and that meditative leer possessed by the 
 fronts of all cottages. They sat in a hammock 
 on the porch, and Carl suddenly kissed her with 
 the theatrical intensity of one who is trying to 
 shake off a deliberate role. The gasping expostu- 
 lations of her voice were contradicted by the limp- 
 ness of her body, and sighing at this prearranged 
 incongruity, Carl kissed her again, still feeling 
 like a skillful charlatan and still hoping to lure 
 himself into a tumultuous spontaneity. This time 
 she was silent but gripped his shoulders with both 
 hands, while little shades of fright and desire 
 gambled for her face. Suddenly, a meek candor 
 came to her eyes and the seriousness of a child 
 lost in an overwhelming forest moulded her lips. 
 
 "Will you be good to me if I let you ?" she whis- 
 pered. 
 
 82 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 The pathetic, cringing frankness of her words 
 made a stabbing lunge at his deliberateness and 
 a feeling of troubled tenderness mastered his 
 heart. He wept inaudibly, as though he himself 
 had become a begging child, and the illusion of 
 rare experience, cheated and twisted out of his 
 life, returned to betray him. His head struck her 
 shoulder like the death of regret. 
 
 83 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 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 child, to the arms 
 of Lucy, washed into a dreamless rest by the 
 simple flow of her desire for him and her sight- 
 less worship. To her he was an enigmatic, statu- 
 esque prince delighting her with queer words 
 which she could finger as though they were new 
 toys and bringing her an eager compression of 
 grief and joy which she had never known before. 
 She realized, dimly, that he was fundamentally 
 alien to her, and she often said to herself: "Some 
 day he'll meet a child who c'n understand all of 
 his funny words and then he'll forget about me," 
 but this fear only increased the stubbornness of 
 her grasp. And so his life wavered between toil, 
 and sensual peace, and little mildly stunted poems 
 until one morning in late autumn when, at the 
 main office of the telephone company, he was 
 discharged with the information that his job had 
 been merely a temporary one. 
 
 84 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "Thanks, old boy," he said loudly in the face of 
 the astonished cashier. "If you knew what a 
 relief this is to me you'd take a drink with me to 
 celebrate the occasion." 
 
 "Now what in the devil's the matter with you?" 
 — the man voiced his peevish perplexity as he 
 fished for Carl's pay envelope. 
 
 "I was getting accustomed to the chains, but 
 now that you've benignly removed them I'll make 
 another effort to escape," he answered, in the grip 
 of a gay and aimless relief. 
 
 The clerk tapped his forehead, with a scowl, 
 and contemptuously tossed over the envelope. 
 Carl carelessly stuffed the sixteen dollars into a 
 pocket and walked out upon the crowded down- 
 town streets. The streets were touched with the 
 middle of forenoon, that hour when the business 
 section of an American city is most leisurely and 
 nondescript in its make-up. The wagons and 
 trucks were not yet bombarding time with the 
 full climax of their inane roar and the flatly 
 hideous elevated railroad trains were firing at 
 longer intervals. Noise had not yet become the 
 confused and staggering slave of an ill-tempered 
 avarice. The nomads and idlers of the city's popu- 
 lace were flitting in and out among housewives on 
 
 85 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 an early shopping-tour and those sleekly bloated 
 men who stroll belatedly to their "offices. A sleepy 
 young vaudeville actress, painted and satiated, 
 hurried to some booking-agency; a middle-aged 
 pickpocket emphasized his grey and white checked 
 suit with sturdy limbs and examined passersby, 
 with the face of a shaved fox ; an undertaker, tall 
 and old, paced along with that air of worried 
 dignity which his calling affects; a fairly young 
 housewife pounded the sedate roundness of her 
 body over the pavement and held the hand of a 
 small, oppressed boy ; a stock-raiser from the west 
 slid his bulky ruddiness along the street, while 
 beneath his broad-brimmed hat his face held an 
 expression of awe-stricken delight; a college-girl, 
 slender and carefully hidden by silk, strove with 
 every mincing twist of her body to remind you 
 that she was pretty; a youth, trimly effeminate 
 and attended by an inexpensive perfume, trotted 
 along, eyeing the scene with an affected air of dis- 
 approval. 
 
 The streets were cluttered with a ludicrous, 
 artificial union of people — people who were 
 close together and yet essentially unaware of each 
 other's presence, and the invisible, purposeless 
 walls of civilization crossed each other every- 
 
 86 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 where. If he swerved two inches to the right the 
 chained trance of this lonely farm-hand might 
 strike the shoulder of this dully wounded cham- 
 bermaid from the Rialto Hotel, and with this hap- 
 pening their lives might become an inch less bur- 
 dened and struggling. Their sidelong glances 
 cross for a moment, like tensely held spears, but 
 they pass each other from cautious habit, strid- 
 ing to more prearranged and empty contacts. 
 Civilization has raised wall-making to a fine art, 
 striving to hide its dreamlessness beneath an as- 
 pect of complex reticence, and keeping its human 
 atoms feeble and solitary, since pressed together 
 they might break it into ruins. During the rush- 
 hours of a city you can see those streams of people 
 who are busily making and repairing the walls, 
 but during the lulls in the fever upon city streets 
 you may observe the stragglers, wanderers, and 
 grown-up children who are not quite connected 
 with this task and who humbly or viciously hurdle 
 the barriers that separate them. 
 
 These thoughts and emotions formed them- 
 selves in Carl's mood as he strolled through the 
 clattering, mercenary sounds of a midwestern 
 city. The joy of not being compelled to cope with 
 undesired physical movements brought its light- 
 
 87 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 ness to his legs, and he hurriedly fished for secrets 
 from the thousands of faces gliding past him. 
 This shrouded girl with a scowling face — was she 
 meditating upon the possibility of suicide, or won- 
 dering why her sweetheart had failed to purchase 
 a more expensive box of candy ? Each face curved 
 its flesh over a triviality or an important affair 
 and swiftly taunted his imagination, challenging 
 it to remove the masks that confronted it. 
 
 "Life holds a measure of anticipation and mys- 
 tery because people for the most part pass each 
 other in silence. If they stopped to talk to each 
 other they would become transparent and weari- 
 some." 
 
 As Carl walked along hope began to sing its 
 juvenile ballade within his contorted heart. He 
 planned to send his poems to the magazines and he 
 felt strengthened by the unexpected lull of this 
 late autumn morning. He hurried to his favorite 
 bench in the public square, one that he alv/ays 
 occupied if it happened to be vacant when he 
 passed. He had a shyly whimsical fancy — a last 
 remnant of youth asserting itself within him — 
 that his touch upon this bench stayed there while 
 he was absent and gave a sense of invisible, prod- 
 ding communion to other pilgrim-acrobats who 
 
 88 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 occupied this seat at times — an abashed bit of sen- 
 timentality evading itself with an image. Filled 
 with the alert meeting of hope and bitterness he 
 wrote with a degree of fluid ease that had never 
 visited him before, and for the first time his 
 lyrics grazed a phrase or two that rumored recal- 
 citrantly of a proud story known as beauty. In 
 one attempted poem he asserted that an old, 
 blind, Greek huckster on the side street of an 
 American city had suddenly towered above the 
 barrenly angular buildings, in a massive reincar- 
 nation of Homer, and he wrote in part : 
 
 A purplish pallor stole 
 
 Over your antique face — 
 
 The warning of a soul 
 
 Rising with tireless grace. 
 
 Rising above your cart 
 
 Of apples, figs, and plums, 
 
 And with its swelling art 
 
 Deriding the city's drums. 
 
 With a quivering immersion he bent over his 
 paper, lost to the keen realities of a city day. 
 Sidling vagrants and transients from small towns 
 glanced at him with morose disfavor and some- 
 times stopped to stare at this shabby young man 
 whose head was never raised from his writing. 
 
 89 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 His abstraction was an insult to their sense of idle 
 release. He wrote for hours and only paused 
 when hunger of a different kind began irresistibly 
 to whisper within him, for he had not eaten since 
 morning. It was six o'clock when he hastened 
 from the park. He joined the homeward bound 
 masses, feeling satiated and apart, and dreading 
 the evening contact with his sagging, verbose 
 parents. They were sitting and standing in two 
 of the few postures that life still absentmindedly 
 allowed them — bending over newspaper and fry- 
 ing-pan. 
 
 "Well, I've lost my job," he said to his father. 
 
 His father dropped the newspaper and his 
 mother shuffled in from the kitchen. 
 
 "Lost your job — what do you mean?" said his 
 mother with slow incredulity, as though she had 
 just escaped being crushed by a falling wall. 
 
 "They told me this morning that it had only 
 been a temporary one and they paid me off. I 
 thanked the clerk for his news but he didn't seem 
 to take it in the right spirit." 
 
 "Ach, I knew it would happen, I knew it," said 
 Mrs. Felman. "Here's what you get from your 
 ma-anooal labor! What kind of work is that for 
 an educated boy like you ? With your brains, now, 
 
 90 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 you could go out on the road and sell goods. You 
 should have more get-up about you. Mrs. Feins- 
 thai was telling me at my whist-club today that 
 her son Harry is making piles of money with 
 Liebman and Company. Sells notions and knick- 
 knacks. You could easy do the same if you had 
 any sense in your head." 
 
 "Carrie's right, this slavery is no work for a 
 smart man," said Mr. Felman. "Any fool, you 
 know, can work with his hands, but it takes real 
 intelligence to make a man buy something. I 
 want you to be able to laugh at people, and feel 
 independent, and not be a poor schlemiel all your 
 life." 
 
 "Well, you've been a travelling salesman for 
 twenty years," said Carl, with a weary smile, "and 
 before that you tried a general merchandise store, 
 but it doesn't seem to have brought you much 
 money or happiness. You recommend a treacher- 
 ous wine. The thing that you've fought for has 
 always scarred and eluded you. What's the rea- 
 son?" 
 
 Mr. Felman lowered his head while the round 
 fatness of his face revealed a huddled confusion 
 of emotions in which shame and annoyance pre- 
 dominated. He sat, tormenting his greyish red 
 
 91 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 moustache, as though it were a fraudulent badge, 
 and gazing with still eyes at a newspaper which he 
 was not reading. 
 
 "Perhaps I've inherited nothing from you save 
 your curious inability at making money," said 
 Carl, trying to feel a ghost of compassion for this 
 petrified, minor soldier lost in the uproar of a 
 battle but still worshipping his glittering general. 
 "You've spent all of your life in chasing a frigid 
 will-o'-the-wisp, made out of the lining of your 
 heart, and you want me to stumble after the same 
 mutilated futility. You're not unintelligent, as 
 far as business ability goes, and yet, you've always 
 been doomed to a kind of respectable poverty. 
 Something else within you must have constantly 
 fought with another delusion to produce such a 
 result. You can't simply blame it on luck — that's 
 an overworked excuse. Perhaps you failed to win 
 your god because you've never been able to teach 
 efficiency and strength to the spirit of cruelty 
 within you. You have not been remorselessly 
 shrewd, my father, and now you are paying the 
 penalty." 
 
 "Well, because I've been a fool that's no sign 
 that you should be one, too," answered Mr. Fel- 
 man in a voice of reluctant and secretly tortured 
 
 92 . 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 self-reproach. "Yes, I've been too kind-hearted 
 for my own good, dammit, but I want that you 
 should be different. It's been too easy for people 
 to swindle me. Yes, I want you to show them 
 something that your poor old father couldn't. 
 Yes. And as for your talk about chasing money, 
 tell me, how can a man live decent without plenty 
 of money ? How can he ?" 
 
 "We would have our nice store this very minute 
 if your father had listened to me," said Mrs. Fel- 
 man, mournfully. "He never would let me handle 
 the reins. I know how to be firm with people, 
 believe me, but your father would always give 
 credit to every Tom-Dick-and-Harry that walked 
 into the store. And whenever he did have money 
 he always gambled it away. Gambling has been 
 the ruination of his life! All of your wildness, 
 Carl, has come from your father's side and not 
 from mine!" 
 
 Mr. i^'elman looked at his son with an embar- 
 rassed admission of secret sins, while for a mo- 
 ment he became a faun lamenting his awkward- 
 ness, and his uneasy smile quivered as it tried to 
 say : "Alas, I am not so much better than you are, 
 my crazy, foolish son." Carl grinned in return 
 and for the first time in his life was on the verge 
 
 93 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 of feeling a slight communion with his shamefaced 
 father. As the mother went on with her endless 
 story of the father's crimes and incapacities the 
 rubbing of her words produced a glimmer of ill- 
 temper. 
 
 "Noo, don't you ever stop ?" he cried. "Always 
 nagging about the past! I might be a rich man 
 now if you hadn't driven me crazy with your end- 
 less complaints and hollering. Never a moment 
 of peace from the day I married you." 
 
 "I'll have to give both of you something else to 
 complain about," said Carl. "I'm going to stop 
 working for a while and write poetry, and send it 
 away to magazines." 
 
 "Ach, I thought those writing notions were out 
 of your head," cried Mrs. Felman. "Who will buy 
 your good-for-nothing stuff? I can't understand 
 a word of it myself! Writing again! Will my 
 miseries never end?" 
 
 Mr. Felman glared at his son and the old hos- 
 tility fell opaquely between them. 
 
 "Between you and your mother I'll be in the 
 grave soon!" he shouted. "I'm done with you!" 
 
 He arose and stalked out of the apartment, mut- 
 tering and producing a loud period of sound as he 
 closed the door. 
 
 94 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Al Levy strolled into the dining room, tri- 
 umphantly tinkering with one of the points of 
 his small black moustache; lightly whistling a 
 tune from some latest musical comedy ; and bear- 
 ing upon his face the look of bored patience which 
 he assumed when in the presence of an inferior 
 being. After he and Carl had exchanged con- 
 strained "helloes" he sat at the table and ner- 
 vously interested himself in his cigar, as though 
 silently signaling for future words. 
 
 "See here, Carl, I don't want to butt in, and of 
 course, it's none of my business, but I couldn't 
 help hearing some of the argument that you've 
 just had with your parents and I want to give you 
 a little advice, purely for your own good. You're 
 on the wrong track, old boy. You're living in a 
 world that wasn't made to order for you and you 
 can't change it. If you don't bow to the world the 
 old steam-roller will get you, and what satisfaction 
 is that going to bring you ? This poetry of yours 
 is all very well as a side-line, something to fill in 
 the time when you're not working, and of course 
 it's very pretty stuff. I like to read poetry myself 
 sometimes. But really you shouldn't take it more 
 seriously than that. I'm telling you all this 
 
 95 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 because you've really got a fairly good head on 
 you and I hate to see you go wrong." 
 
 The sleekly loquacious man in front of him, 
 offering his shop-worn little adulterations of 
 worldly wisdom, aroused Carl to a lightly vicious 
 mood. 
 
 "You've wandered away from your natural 
 field, Levy," he said. "Talk about the cheap jew- 
 elry that you sell, or the physical merits of a 
 woman, or the next candidate for mayor, or the 
 latest prize-fight, but don't speak about something 
 that's simply an irritating mystery to you. You 
 know as much about poetry as I do about credits 
 and discounts, but you're a swaggering, muddy 
 fool who imagines that the wisdom of the world 
 has kissed his head. I'm not interested in you or 
 your words — you're simply five crude senses 
 dressed in a blue serge suit and trying to scoop in 
 as much drooling pleasure as they can before they 
 decay. Go out to your poolroom or down-town 
 theater and leave me in peace!" 
 
 Levy gasped blankly for a moment and then 
 frowned with an enormous hatred. 
 
 "Why, you stupid fool, this is the thanks I get 
 for giving you a little sensible advice ! " he cried. 
 "You think that you're better than everyone else 
 
 96 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 with all the rot you write about roses and love, but 
 let me tell you something, a common bricklayer 
 is more important than you are, any day in the 
 year ! A man like that is helping the progress of 
 the world while you're nothing but a puffed-up 
 little idler ! And even you have got to do manual 
 labor because you're not fit for anything else. 
 You're just a bag of easy words. If it wasn't for 
 your parents I'd punch you in the face and teach 
 you a lesson!" 
 
 Mrs. Felman, who had been knitting on the rear 
 porch, rushed into the room. 
 
 "Boys, boys, stop it!" she cried, in anguish. 
 "Are you out of your minds — fighting in the 
 house! Don't pay any attention to what Carl 
 says, Al. You know he's crazy and not respon- 
 sible." 
 
 "Well, after all, you're right, I shouldn't pay 
 any attention to him," said Levy with a sulky 
 loftiness. "I only spoke to him for your sake, 
 you know, but I'll leave him alone after this." 
 
 Carl grimaced with the aid of his eyebrows and 
 suppressed the easy words with which he could 
 have clubbed the man in front of him. After 
 Levy departed Carl fled to the street to escape his 
 mother's enraged words concerning the possible 
 loss of a valuable roomer. 
 
 97 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 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 rejection-slips, 
 fresh from the printer, began to reach him with 
 each return mail. Many of his uncertain, mys- 
 tical poems were equal to the quality of verse 
 maintained by certain American publications, but 
 editors scarcely ever trouble themselves to read 
 verse that is copied in pen and ink and bears the 
 spirals of deceptively boyish handwriting. Under 
 the blow of each returned poem Carl receded inch 
 by inch to his old cell of faltering insignificance. 
 He went back to the tame routines of physical 
 labor, finding work as a plumber's assistant, and 
 still consoled himself by creeping, like a soiled and 
 weeping child, to Lucy's blind and half-motherly 
 worship. 
 
 One evening, after he had stepped into the 
 brightly dismal sitting-room of Lucy's home, he 
 noticed an uneasy politeness in the greeting of 
 her parents — the usual well-smeared cordiality 
 
 98 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 was absent. At first he felt that he might have 
 made a mistake, but one glance at the nervous 
 distress upon Lucy's transparent little face indi- 
 cated that some change had taken place in her 
 family's regard for him. Lucy was never suc- 
 cessful in her efforts at evasion, and each one of 
 the pitifully comical masks that she wore merely 
 snugly revealed the outline of the emotion which 
 they were attempting to conceal. With a strained 
 gaiety she suggested a walk and after they had 
 reached the street he questioned her. 
 
 "Well, what's the trouble. Luce? The graceful, 
 January note in your parent's voices was not 
 quite expected. Tell me what it's all about." 
 
 "Oh, it's nothing, nothing, Carl dear." 
 
 "I'm quite sure that it's nothing in reality, 
 since your parents are almost incapable of 
 thought, but at any rate, you might explain the 
 empty gesture to me." 
 
 "Carl, you're talking so funny again. I adore 
 you when you say things that I can't understand. 
 But, oh Carl, I've forgotten, I mustn't say that to 
 you any more. I mustn't. You don't know what's 
 happened." 
 
 "No, I don't. What is it?" 
 
 "Why, my father says that he's convinced by 
 
 99 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 now that your intentions to me aren't serious an' 
 he says that he doesn't want me to go with you 
 any more. He says that you're only triflin' with 
 my affections else you'd have asked me to marry 
 you long ago, an' my mother says I shouldn't go 
 with you 'cause you don't seem to have any ambi- 
 tion to rise in the world an' 'cause you haven't 
 enough money to support a wife. . . . Gee, if you 
 knew the jawin' they've been givin' me for the 
 last two nights!" 
 
 "Yes, but why has all this come so suddenly?" 
 asked Carl. 
 
 "I don't want to tell you, Carl." 
 
 "You might as well, Luce. I can see part of it 
 on your face now, because you always talk best 
 when you're silent. Tell me." 
 
 "Well, you know my second cousin Fred has 
 always been runnin' after me, only I've always 
 been cool to him because I don't love him, of 
 course, but a couple of nights ago he came to my 
 father an' said that he wanted to marry me an' 
 that I wouldn't have him. An' ever since then 
 they've all been on top of me! He's got a store 
 on the north side, a gents' furnishing store, an' he 
 makes piles of money, an' all my family are just 
 crazy for me to marry him. They say I'm just 
 
 100 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 wastin' my time with you an' they've forbidden 
 me to see you after tonight." 
 
 Carl felt the incongruous embrace of amuse- 
 ment and compassion as he listened to her simple, 
 broken, troubled words. This thinly yearning, 
 stifled girl who had folded him in the arms of her 
 puzzled adoration, was life really on the verge of 
 wounding the diminutive misty mendicant that 
 was her heart? He felt helpless, and a little 
 guilty because he was not as troubled as he should 
 have been. 
 
 "Do you want to give me up ?" he asked. 
 
 "Carl, you know I don't! You know it. But, 
 Carl, you wouldn't ever marry me, would you ?" 
 
 "No, I'm not the kind of a person that you ought 
 to marry. Luce." 
 
 She was silent for a time and he watched her 
 with a pitying question. Had he been unfair to 
 this poignantly cringing child? Yes, but unfair- 
 ness was inevitable when people from those differ- 
 ent planets contained within an earth yield to a 
 surface emotional attraction. 
 
 "Carl, I've always known that we'd hafta part 
 sometime," she said, "only I tried to make believe 
 that I didn't know it. But I did. We're too differ- 
 ent from each other, Carl, an' you know so much 
 
 lOI 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 more than I do an' you're so much better than I 
 am. I wanted to hold on to you 'cause I wanted 
 to make you happy, but all the time I knew that 
 we wasn't meant for each other. I knew it so 
 well!" 
 
 "I'm not in any way better than you are," said 
 Carl. "It's just that we each want different 
 things from the world. You want to settle down 
 in a home, and polish your kettles, and sing to 
 your children, and blithely wait for your tired 
 husband every night, while I want to write fool- 
 ish words on slips of paper and escape from the 
 world around me." 
 
 "But, Carl, it'll be so hard for me to leave you," 
 she said, in the mournful, dazed voice of one who 
 turns away from a stone wall of whose existence 
 he is not quite certain. 
 
 A tumult of frail inquiries found the corners of 
 her face and lips. Her breasts heaving beneath 
 the blue muslin waist suggested the movements 
 of loosely despairing hands. She sat with Carl 
 on the grass of a park and wept in a barely audible 
 manner as though she were intent upon giving 
 firmer outlines to a blurred and elusive grief. 
 Carl felt a softly potent disgust with himself and 
 life. Human beings — what did they ever bring 
 each other except pain cunningly disguised or 
 
 1 02 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 reaching for a phantom ecstasy? Now he would 
 be alone again ; the slender thread binding him to 
 animated life would snap; while this child, who 
 held a cloud where a brain should have resided, 
 would hide her glimpse of a grotesquely forbidden 
 heaven and plod back to the soothing subterfuges 
 of her world. Flitting lies seducing a black void 
 into an attitude of false friendship. A stumbling 
 urge, mistaking its own drops of perspiring ardor 
 for permanent, actual jewels. 
 
 As they stood upon the porch of her home she 
 looked at the darkened windows and then clutched 
 the lapels of his coat. 
 
 "They're all in bed now," she whispered. "Carl, 
 I've got to have you once more before you go. 
 I've got to. Maybe I'm a bad girl, maybe, I don't 
 know, but I want to hold you again." 
 
 "This will be the least thing that I can give 
 you," said Carl inaudibly as they sat upon the 
 hammock. With great care he tried to form 
 within himself the intensity of a despairing father, 
 drawing the swift incense of motion into a fare- 
 well to his child, in the hope that she might be 
 idiotic enough to preserve it afterwards as a 
 tangible comfort. 
 
 He closed his eyes as he kissed her, a little 
 afraid to look into her face. 
 
 103 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 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 brunettes 
 who don't object to a gay time," and the recollec- 
 tion of his violent, drunken contortions came to 
 him like a wierdly teasing dream of no particular 
 significance but leaving the temptation of nausea 
 behind it. He had released a desecrating ghost 
 of himself from the sneering recesses of his self- 
 despair. Yes, you could burn away the sensual 
 rubbish, with derisive gestures, but your empti- 
 ness and weariness always returned for their slow 
 revenge. He sought to put his thoughts to sleep 
 with the hasty versions of loves, catastrophes, 
 and law-suits that winked maliciously at him from 
 the newspaper. 
 
 In the middle of one page he came upon a 
 rectangle of gossip concerning a poetry magazine 
 of whose existence he had never known, and 
 darting from his insensitive trance he lingered 
 greedily over the news. Through the efforts of 
 
 104 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 an elderly poetess several society people had 
 agreed to endow a small magazine that would be 
 entirely devoted to verse, and the newspaper item 
 was heralding the fact that one of these people 
 had contributed a sonnet to a recent issue of the 
 magazine. "Mr. Robert Endicott, the well-known 
 clubman and member of fashionable sets, appears 
 with a delicate contribution in this month's issue 
 of The Poetry Review, our aristocratic little maga- 
 zine of the muse. This will be a surprise to those 
 who know Mr. Endicott only in his role of 
 business-man and society leader." Carl strove to 
 be properly impressed by the surprise, decorating 
 it with the Order of the Nasty Chuckle. 
 
 He felt that it might be consoling to receive 
 a rejection slip from an upper- world magazine of 
 this kind — a dab of caviar on the empty plate — 
 and so he sent them three poems. The paper 
 oblong came, but its blank side held the following 
 note: "Dear Mr. Felman: Your work interests 
 me. Won't you drop into the office some time? 
 Clara Messenger." 
 
 What men call triumph is a fanciful exaltation 
 that may fall alike upon atoms and temples — a 
 grandiose child of hope, whose mother is egoism 
 and whose father is pain. Men, whose life is but 
 
 105 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 a sensitive or oblivious second — a fleeting stam- 
 pede within mist — seek the absurd consolation of 
 believing that their work will become immortal, 
 and this phantom lie has induced many a soldier 
 to writhe upon some trivial battlefield and many 
 a minor poet to fight with threats of the gutter, 
 Carl Felman, obscure, gasping struggler, commun- 
 ing with the marks left by endless whips, felt 
 foolishly thrilled at this first glimpse of personal 
 attention from a magazine and became like a 
 swain to whom a glove has been thrown from 
 an enticingly high balcony. He stood peering up 
 with a timid excitement. 
 
 On the following afternoon he managed to leave 
 the plumbing shop, with a plea of illness, and 
 raced to the office of the magazine. A feathery 
 swirl of quickly purchased emotions — fragments 
 of a youth that had been shattered — revolved 
 within his heart. As he closed the door of the 
 large office he saw two women seated at different 
 desks and poised over the rustle of papers. One 
 was elderly and sedate, and her sober clothes were 
 reprimanding a substantial body. Beneath a sur- 
 vival of greyish-brown hair, plainly gathered, the 
 narrow oval of her face looked at life with a 
 politely questioning air. It was the mellowly 
 
 io6 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 distorted expression of one who has arrived at 
 final convictions regarding the major parts of 
 life, and is patiently and inflexibly regarding the 
 lesser perceptions surrounding her. Her slightly 
 wrinkled face was dominated by a long, thin nose 
 and thin, tightly expectant lips, and it seemed 
 that her tired emotions had gone to sleep and 
 were staring out from a dream of suave wake- 
 fulness. The other woman was hovering near the 
 last climax of her youth, and her slender body 
 rose unobtrusively to the pale repressions of her 
 face. Small and round, her face carried a well- 
 trimmed self-satisfaction — the reward of one 
 whose dreams have lived inwardly, with only an 
 occasional sip of forbidden cordials. Her loosely 
 parted lips guarded a receding chin and her barely 
 curved nose ascended to large brown eyes and a 
 high forehead. 
 
 Carl walked to her desk and stood for a moment 
 like a child in a cumbersome robe who is waiting 
 for some inevitable rebuke. The harshly weary 
 assurance which he was able to display to other 
 people vanished in this imagined shrine of an 
 unattained art. The young woman looked up with 
 courteous blankness. 
 
 "My name is Carl Felman. You wrote me a note 
 
 107 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 last week," said Carl, delicately groping for the 
 inconsequential words. 
 
 "Oh, yes, I remember" — her face attained a 
 careful smile, tempered by a modest curiosity. 
 "I'm so glad that you came down." 
 
 She turned to the other woman. 
 
 "Mary, this is Mr. Felman, the gentleman that 
 I spoke to you about. He sent us a rather inter- 
 esting group of poems, you know." 
 
 Carl winced at the word "rather" — it was asso- 
 ciated to him with "more or less," "somewhat," 
 "somehow," and "to some extent," those words 
 and phrases with which cultured people manage 
 to say nothing and yet preserve the faint 
 appearance of saying something. His breathless 
 attention disappeared and was replaced by the old 
 morose aloofness. If this woman had asserted 
 that his poems were trivial or stifled, he would 
 have respected her, but now he spat contemptu- 
 ously at the smooth veil of her words. 
 
 Mary Aldridge, editor of The Poetry Review, 
 moved her lips into an attitude that came within 
 a hair's breadth of being a smile — an expression 
 of slightly amused and restrained condescension. 
 She lifted a pencil as though it were an age-old 
 scepter held by practiced fingers. 
 
 io8 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "How do you do, Mr. Felman," she said. 
 
 Some people are able to say "how do you do" 
 in a way that makes it sound like "why are you 
 here?" and Carl inwardly complimented her on 
 this minor ability and said his repetition in a 
 voice that made it mean "slip down, fathead." 
 After this exchange of vocal inflections, part of 
 the general vacuity with which human beings 
 greet each other for the first or last time, he 
 seated himself and clutched a roll of manuscripts 
 in the manner of a father who is frantically 
 shielding his child from some invisible danger. 
 
 "I sent you some poems which were returned, 
 but I have some others here," he said. "Perhaps 
 you will do me the favor of reading them. I am, 
 of course, anxious to know what may be wrong 
 with my work, and also what faint virtues it may 
 hold. Sometimes I feel sure that I am not a poet 
 and I allow myself the luxury of becoming angry 
 at the persistent longing that makes me run after 
 futilities. Will you read some of these poems and 
 tell me whether I am a fool, or a faltering pilgrim, 
 or anything definite?" 
 
 The abashed and yet softly incisive candor 
 would have unloosened or entertained the emo- 
 tions of anyone except Mary Aldridge. She 
 
 109 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 regarded him with a coldly amused impatience. 
 
 "We-ell, I'm very busy just now," she said, 
 "but I'll glance through some of your things. As 
 I recall, your work had a rather promising line 
 here and there." 
 
 He handed her his roll and she scanned the 
 poems, thrusting each one aside with a quick 
 frown. She lingered a bit over the last one, in 
 which he had extracted a sleeping Homer from 
 the soiled and cowering figure of a blind Greek 
 peddler. 
 
 "M-m, this one isn't so bad," she said, "though 
 I think that the last lines are a little forced." 
 
 "If I decide to alter them, will you take the 
 poem?" asked Carl, bluntly. 
 
 "Oh, no, no, Mr. Felman; your work is by no 
 means good enough for publication," she answered. 
 "I merely meant that this poem in particular had 
 an element of interest." 
 
 Accustomed to blows of all kinds, Carl felt 
 relieved that her frigid shroud had been finally 
 lifted, and with a smile he reached for his cap. 
 Conversation is merely a tenuous or sturdy pro- 
 tection given to an instinctive like or dislike, 
 and with their first words people unconsciously 
 reveal the attitude toward each other which they 
 
 no 
 
BLACKGUABD 
 
 will afterward try to excuse and defend with 
 great deliberation. Carl hated the woman in 
 front of him, not because she had slighted his 
 work, but because she held to him an attenuated 
 and brightly burnished hypocrisy that was like 
 a shriveled mask incessantly polished by her 
 words. He could have imagined her stamping 
 upon a hyacinth as though she were conferring 
 a careful favor upon the petals and calyx. Mary 
 Aldridge, on her part, disliked the straight lines 
 of intent which she could sense beneath his terse 
 questions and missed the bland insincerities of 
 those smoothly adjusted postures known as good 
 manners. Life to her was a series of stiffly 
 draped and modulated curves, violated only by 
 rare moments of guarded exasperation and anger. 
 
 "Would you advise me to stop writing?" asked 
 Carl. 
 
 "No, indeed," she answered, with her first small 
 smile. "Your work is rather promising and you 
 seem to be quite young. Some of it reminds me 
 of Arthur Symons. Of course, I don't think that 
 you will ever become a great poet, but we need 
 lesser voices as well as greater ones, you know." 
 
 "Would you mind if I asked you to stop using 
 that word ra-ather and try a little spontaneous 
 directness?" asked Carl, blithely. 
 
 Ill 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 She rose suddenly and addressed the other 
 woman, ignoring his words as though they had 
 been a trivial insult. 
 
 "I've just remembered that I must meet Mr. 
 Seeman at three," she said. "Fm afraid that I 
 shall have to leave you with this impulsive gen- 
 tleman." 
 
 Carl stood up, but the other woman revealed 
 with an unrestrained smile that she was actually 
 aware of his presence. 
 
 "Won't you stay awhile?" she asked. "We can 
 talk a bit over your work, if you care." 
 
 Carl looked at her with suspicion and interest 
 — a trace of gracious attention in this place. He 
 resolved to explore the seeming phenomenon and 
 settled back in his chair, while Mary Aldridge, 
 with a barely audible farewell, walked out of the 
 office. 
 
 "Don't you think you were a little crudely 
 sarcastic in your last remark to Miss Aldridge?" 
 asked Clara Messenger. 
 
 "I like an axe sometimes," said Carl, "although 
 I don't worship it monotonously. For certain 
 purposes it works far better than the swifter 
 exuberance of a stiletto. Unless a person is 
 unassumingly frank to me I don't feel that he 
 has earned a delicate retort." 
 
 112 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "Why,- it's impossible to live in the world with 
 a code like that. One would have to become a 
 hermit." 
 
 "No, even hermits are never absolutely isolated. 
 Living on another planet would be the only rem- 
 edy, I guess." 
 
 "What a curious, lunging person you are ! But 
 you shouldn't have minded Miss Aldridge so much. 
 She's always afraid that if she openly encourages 
 a young poet he'll imagine that he's a genius." 
 
 "That's a harmless trick of imagination and it 
 doesn't need any encouragement or censure. It's 
 a shade better, perhaps, than imagining that you 
 are a fool." 
 
 "What an old-young person you are. When you 
 talk I feel that I'm listening to an insolent essay. 
 I'm not so sure that a poet doesn't need praise. 
 It's part of his task to change the polite praise 
 around him to an understanding appreciation, and 
 that can be very necessary and exciting." 
 
 "To a poet the appreciation of other people 
 must be like a glass of lukewarm wine taken after 
 work," said Carl. 
 
 "Well, I know that it means a great deal to 
 me," said Clara Messenger. "It reassures me that 
 Fm speaking to the hearts and minds of the 
 
 113 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 people around me and I'd feel very unimportant 
 if at least a few people didn't like my work. One 
 can't live in a vacuum, after all." 
 
 "No ? I've done it for five years or so. I think 
 that all of us secretly live in vacuums, but we 
 use our imaginations to conceal that fact. Words 
 were really invented to hide this essential empti- 
 ness." 
 
 "You're a massive pessimist! The strangest 
 man of twenty-three that I've ever seen! If 
 things are so utterly hollow to you, why do you 
 live?" 
 
 "In order to persuade myself that I have a 
 reason for living — a defiant entertainment in the 
 presence of an empty theater. . But it's always 
 futile to defend your reason for living. Tell me, 
 instead, what do you think of your associate. Miss 
 Aldridge?" 
 
 "I really think that she treated you a little 
 heartlessly, but at the same time I don't think 
 that she meant to," said Clara. "Mary is a woman 
 who grew into the habit of hiding herself from 
 people because so many of those who looked at 
 her youth, at one time, failed to understand it." 
 
 "I can understand that process, though I don't 
 believe that it applies in her case. It's a slow 
 
 114 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 and sullen withdrawing from the jibing strangers 
 around you — a wounded desire to meet their walls 
 of misunderstanding with even harder walls of 
 your own. As you grow older, I suppose, the 
 sullenness may change to a well-mannered and 
 hopeless aloofness. Age softens the attitude and, 
 still self-immersed, it seeks the distraction of 
 words." 
 
 "What has happened to make you say this?" 
 asked Clara, with a mistily maternal impulse. 
 
 "Just now I'm working in a plumber's shop, 
 helping the sewers with their sluggish germs of 
 future turbulence," said Carl, "and that, of course, 
 can play its part in the making of a pessimist. . 
 But tell me what you think of my work?" 
 
 "Plumbing or poetry?" 
 
 "Both of them are interwoven." 
 
 "Your poems are stiff and dimly tinted, like a 
 row of plaster-of-paris dolls standing on a dusty 
 and venerated shelf. Don't you see? You talk 
 about twenty times better than you write, and 
 I can't understand this peculiar incongruity. 
 Perhaps you've been taught that poetry is some- 
 thing that must be ethereal and noble at all costs, 
 and perhaps you've been inarticulate because the 
 rest of you has been at war with this one illusion. 
 
 115 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 I don't feel that you've looked upon poetry as 
 a place where you could expr.ess your actual 
 thoughts and feelings." 
 
 When a man has been intangibly blind for a 
 long time, he usually stumbles at last, accidentally, 
 upon an incident or challenge that makes him 
 totter on the edge of vision, and in that moment 
 it is revealed whether this blindness has been 
 innate or not. If he wavers, then his lack of 
 sight has been an artificial ailment, and if his 
 first reaction after the stumble is one of stubborn 
 irritation his tightly-shut eyes are not apt to 
 open. Carl felt, without quite being able to shape 
 the picture, that he was walking out of a sublime 
 bric-a-brac shop, and yet the contact of him, left 
 behind in the shop, continued to speak with his 
 words. As he discussed poetry with Clara he 
 began slowly to feel that he had been a minute 
 and prisoned fool, although his words writhed in 
 an effort to escape an absolute admission. She 
 gave him practical scoldings, also, concerning 
 the exact way in which manuscripts should be 
 submitted to editors, and he listened with the 
 amusement that a man feels when he suddenly 
 sees that he has been walking along a street with 
 his shoes unlaced. She gave him, again and again, 
 
 ii6 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 her hazily maternal smile in which sensual desires 
 selfishly clothed themselves in an ancient and 
 soothing dress known as kindness. 
 
 "I do hope that I've helped you," she said. "I'd 
 like to feel that I've aided someone to discover 
 his real self." 
 
 When he returned to his room he applied a 
 match to everything that he had ever written and 
 watched the flaming pile of papers with an emo- 
 tion in which dread, tenderness, and elation were 
 oddly contending against each other. These bits 
 of paper, with their symbols of shimmering con- 
 fusion, had been decorated by the sweat of his 
 body, the brittle despair of his heart, and the 
 anger of his soul, and their death brought him 
 a helpless and jumbled sadness; but gradually 
 another reaction began to possess him. The naked 
 quivers of a fighter, crouched in the plan of his 
 first blow, centered around his heart, and all of 
 the thoughts within his mind gave one shout in 
 unison — a meaningless hurrah just before the 
 first leap of a creative battle. During the next 
 two months he wrote with an insane speed, and 
 all of his thoughts and emotions rushed out in 
 an irresistible, nondescript mob scene — a French 
 Revolution swinging its torches and howls against 
 
 117 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 every repression and constraint within him. Good, 
 bad, and mediocre, they rain in the circles of a 
 celebrated revenge, and his main purpose was 
 expressed in these first four lines of one of his 
 poems : 
 
 You have escaped the comedy 
 
 Of swift, pretentious praise and blame, 
 And smashed a tavern where they sell 
 The harlot's wine that men call fame. 
 
 ii8 
 
^ARTII 
 THE KNIFE 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 TKe Knife 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 ITH 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 confined his body — a 
 world of smoother parlors and studios, in which 
 stood "poets," painters, sculptors, novelists, critics, 
 Little Theater actors, art patrons, students of the 
 arts, all leading their little squads of camp follow- 
 ers or plodding methodically in the ranks. This 
 world was swaggering and overheated, and within 
 it hosts of minor people were raising their falter- 
 ing or blissfully insincere prayers to a god with 
 a thousand faces, whom they called Artistic 
 Expression — a god of astigmatic egoism dressed 
 in cautious shades of emotion and thought, and 
 obsessed with a fear of irony and originality. 
 Carl felt like an emancipated hermit suddenly 
 
 121 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 thrown as a sacrifice to an uproar of contending 
 philosophies and artistic creeds. His mind, accus- 
 tomed to solitary decisions, became bewildered 
 amidst the bloodless, tin-sword battle around him 
 and he wondered how he could possibly make hig 
 own voice heard in the egoistic din. Each man 
 assured him that the other man was a fool or 
 a charlatan, and he listened to their conflicting 
 assumptions of wisdom with a naive dismay. 
 
 "What has lured these people into their atti- 
 tudes of isolated and weary superiority?" he 
 asked himself, "and if the attitudes are genuine, 
 why do these people make a garrulous religion 
 of attacking each other ? If they actually believed 
 that their convictions were mountain ranges, with 
 some snow of immortality soft beneath their feet, 
 they would dwell with a more pensive calmness 
 upon these substantial protests, instead of assidu- 
 ously pelting each other with flecks of mud in 
 the valleys." 
 
 With the melancholy idealism of his youth 
 Carl had made an emotional sketch in which 
 artists and writers were a band of profoundly 
 misunderstood martyrs, clinging to each other as 
 they accepted the indifference and ridicule of a 
 
 • 
 
 practical world, and he was amazed to find that 
 
 122 
 
BLACKGUARD I 
 
 almost all of them were far too easy to under- 
 stand, and thronged with shudders of words at 
 the idea of clinging to one another. Like an 
 array of famished and animated housewives, they 
 traded gaiety and friendly argument while in 
 each other's presence, while in secret they carved 
 each other with gossiping exaggerations, three- 
 penny sneers, and every hair's-breadth edge of 
 derision. Even among their different "schools" 
 and cliques he found little fusion — the members 
 of each group were plotting to unseat their leader 
 because they had commenced to fear that he was 
 merely using them as a step-ladder. 
 
 This trivial drama, with malice performing 
 menial duties in the service of the old, egoistic 
 dream of immortal expression and emotional tall- 
 ness, was a new reality to Carl and he surveyed 
 it with an alert contempt. 
 
 "Why all of this clownish, papier-mache melo- 
 drama, with words playing the part of overworked 
 murderers?" he asked himself. "Is it possible 
 that faint voices whisper within these people that 
 they are not as important and all-seeing as they 
 would like to be? Most ludicrous tragedy! The 
 noise, alas, must ever continue, since their doubts 
 and fears require a constant pounding. Poor, 
 
 123 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 astounding people ! . . . The critic, stroking his 
 suave patter above a tea-table: 'Oh, yes, Mr. X. 
 is a very sound man, very sound.' 'Mr. C. is indeed 
 a great poet, for there's a certain simplicity and 
 sincerity in everything he does.' 'Mr. E. is amaz- 
 ingly clever and erudite — a most important man.' 
 'Mr. B. ? I'm afraid that he's only a minor Baude- 
 laire, you know, the old morbid straining after 
 originality' — this critic is merely allowing his 
 thoughts and emotions to perform their private 
 functions upon the publicity of a fanciful pedestal, 
 to retch, relieve themselves of fluids and rubbishes, 
 and scratch their smarts. It is, in truth, a weird, 
 prolonged indecency." 
 
 He meditated upon his own relation to this 
 explanation of the belligerent waste of energy 
 around him. 
 
 "I am a better egoist than the people around 
 me," he said. "I will not be forced to display 
 my private organs as often as they. Only an 
 absolute egoist can afford to be calm and more 
 obscurely naked. If I indulge, at rare intervals, 
 a secret grin will gain its reward." 
 
 His thoughts had mounted these conclusions 
 as he sat one night in Clara's studio, with his 
 legs tucked in above a scarlet cushion. She looked 
 
 124 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 at him with a petulant question on her face. 
 
 "Carl, why are you forever arousing the enmity 
 of people?" she asked. 
 
 "Because I detest most of them ; because I like 
 straight lines and angles in conduct while they 
 prefer curves and circles ; and for a variety of rea- 
 sons." 
 
 "But, Carl, you don't need to be so deliberate 
 about antagonizing people." 
 
 "I'm not. I'm simply myself most of the time — 
 a difficult task, but it can be achieved." 
 
 "Well, everybody is sneering at your latest 
 stunt. Why, oh why, did you have to parade down 
 Scott street smoking that long Chinese pipe of 
 yours, with a red ribbon tied to the stem? Carl, 
 sometimes I almost believe that you love to pose !" 
 
 "I ain't guilty, I swear it. When that group of 
 my poems came out in the big eastern magazine 
 I simply felt that the event demanded an un- 
 ashamed celebration. It was like the christening 
 of a healthy child and I wanted something 
 stronger than whiskey or wine. An odd longing 
 that comes to me sometimes. I decided to commit 
 the inexplicable crime of becoming immersed in 
 a new toy of motion. I fitted a rubber mouth- 
 piece over the tip of the pipe and used it half of 
 
 125 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 the time as a cane. I've been told that a crov/d fol- 
 lowed me but I didn't turn my head to investi- 
 gate." 
 
 "Well, everyone has heard about it and they're 
 all calling you a cheap little poseur. And, really, 
 I don't know that they're wrong. I never felt so 
 angry in my life. You love to attract the attention 
 of other people and you'll make every kind of ex- 
 cuse rather than admit this fact!" 
 
 He showed an outburst of surface anger. 
 
 "You can act more impulsively in a camp of 
 lumber-jacks than before a crowd of so-called 
 artists and writers," he said. "The lumber-jacks 
 might regard you with a simple amazement, or an 
 unrestrained laughter, but at least they'd grant 
 you the sincerity of insanity! Since I must 
 choose between stupid people I prefer the more 
 roughly natural ones." 
 
 "I'm tired of hearing you call everybody a hypo- 
 crite," said Clara. "It's just a nice way that you 
 have of defending your own actions !" 
 
 He arose and reached for his cap. 
 
 "I'll leave you to this weariness," he said an- 
 grily. "It may be possible that, as I walk down 
 the street, no one will believe that I'm striding 
 along in a highly deliberate manner. The thought 
 is pleasant." 
 
 126 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "Carl, don't be foolish," she said, half-repen- 
 tantly, but without answering he walked out of 
 the studio. 
 
 This had not been his first quarrel with Clara, 
 and the frequency of their collisions, always fol- 
 lowed by a skirmish of nervous laughter, made 
 him believe that they were both stupidly postpon- 
 ing a sure separation. Clara was, in her entire 
 essence, a deft Puritan industriously beating the 
 back of a frightened Pagan. At certain intervals 
 the Pagan arose and knocked the Puritan uncon- 
 scious but the latter always gradually revived and 
 resumed its dulcet mastership, and Clara liked or 
 disliked Carl whenever her inner situation shifted 
 in these ways. Carl had grown weary of being 
 alternately punched and caressed by her moods. 
 He had long since realized that his relations with 
 her were merely the playthings of a fluctuating 
 emotional response and that neither he nor she 
 had the slightest respect for each other's habits 
 and minds, and on this evening, as he walked 
 down the street after leaving her studio he knew 
 that the uncertain pretence of drama had ended. 
 
 He had slowly discovered that almost all of the 
 people around him, with their different versions 
 of culture and art — those two realities hidden by 
 
 127 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 mincing courtezans of egoism — were distrustful 
 of bluntness and gay impulse in conduct and had 
 made a word known as "unconventional," in order 
 to defend the ordinary fright that governed their 
 actions. A venerable contradiction among these 
 minor people but one that had held new outlines 
 for him. He had also learned that most of these 
 people were so accustomed to masquerades that 
 they could not believe in the reality of a care- 
 lessly naked attitude and usually mistook it for a 
 dazzling and ingenious pose. 
 
 128 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Filled with these gloomy realities he walked 
 down a roughly bright street where the under- 
 world tiptoed furtively between the ranks of semi- 
 respectable working-people — a street of gaping, 
 sleekly sinister saloons, cabarets, small, thickly 
 tawdry shops, and cheap, cofRn-like hotels and 
 apartment houses. The hour was early — nine p. 
 m. — and he walked slowly, engaged in his favorite 
 pastime of watching the shrouded haste of crowds. 
 As he passed a moving-picture theater, dotted 
 with greasy electric lights and plastered with in- 
 anely gaudy posters, he felt a light hand on his 
 shoulder. He turned and saw Lucy standing be- 
 fore him. The sight gave him a friendly shock, 
 for on this evening he was tired of clever hypoc- 
 risies and longed for anything that would be crude 
 and unassuming. 
 
 "Lucy, have you fallen down from some sky?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "No, I just came out of the theater here an' 
 saw you walkin' by. Gee, but I'm glad I did ! It's 
 been a year now since we've seen each other, 
 
 129 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 hasn't it? An' I never, never thought I'd meet 
 you again." 
 
 "Well, what has happened to you, Luce?" he 
 asked as they walked down the street together. 
 
 "I'm married to Fred now. I didn't see any- 
 thing else to do after you left, and all of my folks 
 just pushed me into it. 'Nen besides I was tired of 
 workin' in that darn store. Tired." 
 
 "Are you less tired now ? Happy ?" 
 
 "Mm, Fred's an awful nice man in his way an' 
 I s'pose I oughta be happy. He really loves me, 
 Fred does, an' he don't seem to lose his temper the 
 way some men do. , 'Course, he's a little stingy 
 with money but then I s'pose he's tryin' to look 
 out for the future." 
 
 "Do you love him now. Luce?" 
 
 Her head drooped a little and she was silent for 
 a time. 
 
 "I guess it's terrible of me not to love him, 
 after all he's done for me, but I just don't. I 
 always keep rememberin' all of your funny ways 
 an' all the time we was together an' I feel ashamed 
 of it too 'cause it's kinda like not bein' true to 
 Fred, but I can't help it. There's been times when 
 I've managed to forget about you but they don't 
 last long enough." 
 
 130 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 He tried to make himself feel like a helpless 
 knave as he listened to this simple child of earth 
 who longed for the palely inexplicable god before 
 whom she had once grovelled in rhythmic speech- 
 lessness. He had taken all of her eager silences, 
 pardoned by the damp understanding of flesh, and 
 bestowed upon her in return nothing save the 
 blurred vision of thoughts and emotions which it 
 would have been useless for her to understand, and 
 the tantalizing fantasy of his embraces. If he 
 had stayed with her he would have mutilated, 
 kicked, and evaded every longing and purpose of 
 his life while she would have revelled in happi- 
 ness. Walking down this street were thousands 
 of people, trying to embalm a softly sensual hour 
 with the fluids and devices of bravely stupid lies, 
 and inventing words — "honor," "respectability" — 
 to conceal the grotesquely snickering effect of 
 their lives. Life was, indeed, an insipid mounte- 
 bank! 
 
 "Luce, I ought to feel like a selfish dog, for if I 
 did, then at least I could give you a belated 
 shoulder to cry upon," he said. "We're different 
 persons, that doesn't need to be said, but still I'm 
 sorry at times that we parted. I need your stu- 
 pidity." 
 
 "Do you still care for me, Carl?" 
 131 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "There are times when I want you again. You 
 brought me a delicate dumbness which I could 
 change into any kind of speech, with my fingers 
 and words. Your simplicity doesn't swagger, or 
 point admiringly to itself, and I like that. Just 
 now I am surrounded by people who are not dif- 
 ferent from you except that they have memorized 
 three or four thousand words more, and use them 
 with a moderate degree of cunning. Your silences 
 are much better." 
 
 "I'm not always silent 'cause I don't understand 
 what you say. Sometimes I do understand, but I 
 keep quiet 'cause I don't know how to tell you 
 about it." 
 
 They turned down a side-street and he looked 
 questioningly at her. 
 
 "Aren't you afraid that Fred may see us to- 
 gether?" he asked. 
 
 k"I forgot to tell you. He left this afternoon for 
 Pittsburg, to see his mother, an' he'll be gone for 
 two weeks. I'm all alone now." 
 
 That conversing silence, in which a suggestion 
 is so strongly felt that it need not be heard, was 
 released from both of them and remained until 
 they reached the apartment building in which she 
 lived, and stood in the dark hallway. 
 
 132 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "I don't want to leave you now" — ^her whisper 
 was frightened but stubbornly tender. "I don't 
 want to. For all I know I may never see you again 
 and if I don't I've got to have somethin' that I can 
 hold on to. Somethin' that's not as foolish as just 
 talkin' words. . . I'm a dreadful girl, I s'pose. I 
 must be very wicked. I must be. . . But I don't 
 care. Please don't go away." 
 
 They stood in the hallway like two dizzy, bur- 
 dened children feeling the advancing shadow of 
 an irresistible action and yet waiting for the exact 
 moment when all deliberate words would vanish. 
 Until their minds were quite free of words 
 their limbs could not move. Suddenly they both 
 mounted the stairway, hand in hand, as though a 
 kindly demon had decided to make playthings of 
 their legs. 
 
 When Carl left the apartment building early on 
 the following morning and hurried to the suburban 
 cigar-store where he now worked half of the day 
 as a clerk, his old self-disgust was absent and a 
 cleanly wild lightness took his limbs, as if he had 
 slept upon the plain sturdiness of a hillside and 
 was pacing away with the borrowed vigor. 
 
 "The only time that I dislike earth is when it 
 is dressed in urgent mud, adulterated perfumes, 
 
 133 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 strained lies, and repentant fears," he told him- 
 self as he walked through the bustling shallow- 
 ness of each city street. 
 
 Before leaving Lucy he had promised to return 
 on the following night, and when she had wept 
 and begged him "not to think that she was a ter- 
 ribly bad girl," he had laughed softly and dropped 
 his lips upon her tears. 
 
 "You have been yourself, Luce, and since the 
 world is always conspiring against such an arbi- 
 trary occurrence, you can give yourself a bewil- 
 dered congratulation," he told her, gayly. 
 
 Without understanding his words she had felt 
 the presence of defiant sounds which had cheered 
 her. During the next two weeks, as he remained 
 with her each night, he reflected upon the possible 
 melodrama that lurked just outside of his visits. 
 
 "If her husband suddenly returns and finds me 
 with her he'll want to kill me," he said to himself 
 once, as though he welcomed the idea. "He'll feel 
 that only my death could heal his injured vanity 
 — vermilion medicine! — but, of course, instead of 
 admitting that to himself he'll find an accommo- 
 dating phrase to hide the actual motive, such as 
 'avenging his honor,' 'killing a treacherous 
 hound,' 'defending the family,' etc. The news- 
 
 134 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 papers are full of such charming episodes, well 
 fortified by words, for without words to obliterate 
 his motives man would perish in a day. Melo- 
 drama is the only real sincerity that life holds — 
 the one surprising directness in a world of false 
 and prearranged contortions. Perhaps I could 
 ravish my fears and welcome it. I don't know, and 
 no one can until it actually arrives." 
 
 But the two weeks died without the blundering 
 interruption of drama, and Lucy and Carl parted 
 on the last morning with a chuckling stoicism — 
 tears and the syllables of laughter are always 
 similar — the madcap protest of a last kiss — lips 
 and tongues intent upon a future compensation — 
 and a final flitting of hands. They had slapped in 
 the face a violent shadow known as life and now 
 it would take a fancifully piercing revenge. They 
 had attained a quality known as bravery — a qual- 
 ity that is only fear rising to a moment and effect- 
 ively sneering at itself. 
 
 135 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 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 who had deserted a 
 strong valley of desire to enter a stilted room 
 filled with imitation orchids, valiantly empty 
 words, and malice dressed in clumsy, velvet cos- 
 tumes. This reaction was still dominating him 
 as he sat, one afternoon, in the office of a magazine 
 called "Art and Life," perched upon a window-sill 
 and looking down at the black and dwarfed con- 
 fusion of a street. 
 
 This office was a gathering place for several 
 young writers, each of whom fondled his pet rebel- 
 lion against conservative standards, and they 
 clustered around the anxiously seraphic face of 
 Martha Apperson, the young editor, and seriously 
 fought for the treason of her smiles. She was a 
 tall, sturdily slender woman with a blithely sym- 
 metrical swerve to her body, and the natural pink- 
 ness of her face parted into the curves of a lightly 
 distressed and virginal doll. Her blue-gray eyes 
 
 136 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 were looking at life with a startled incredulity — 
 the gaze of one who has been tempted to regard 
 a sometimes merry, but more often vaguely sor- 
 rowful picture-puzzle. Life to her was a rapidly 
 taunting mixture of glints, hints, undertones, sur- 
 face blooms, fleeting tints, portentous shadows 
 with little shape to them, broken images, and 
 misty heights, and she was forever trying to lure 
 them all into a cohesive whole by striding from one 
 philosophy and creed to another, adding another 
 stride every three or four months. At such times 
 she would appear at her office and enthusiastically 
 assure her audience that she had finally accomp- 
 lished the almost obscene miracle of penetrating 
 the depths of human existence. She had started 
 her magazine as a strident protest against "the 
 people who live conventionally, steeped in a vicious 
 comfort that binds their imaginations and ruins 
 their legs and arms," and its pages made an awk- 
 wardly weird combination of sophomoric revolts, 
 longings for "beauty and splendor" — those easily 
 bought thrones for the importarice of youth — and 
 enraged yelps against traditions and conventions, 
 with here and there a more satirically detached 
 note from Carl and two other men. Carl knew 
 that he wanted her body because it was the only 
 
 137 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 mystery that she seemed to possess and because 
 he wondered whether it might not be able to make 
 her thoughts less obvious. Her mind was a stumb- 
 ling jest to him and her jerkily volatile pretences 
 of emotion failed to cleave him. 
 
 He began to turn his eyes impatiently toward 
 the office door. Martha had left him in charge, 
 promising to return in an hour, but he knew that 
 her hours were frequently afternoons as she ca- 
 vorted around the city, throwing out miniature 
 whirlwinds of appeals for money and attention. 
 In a corner of the office stood a huge photograph 
 of her latest god — a middle-aged, hawk-faced lec- 
 turer from England — that fertile land from 
 whence all lecturers flow — a man who had recently 
 startled the city by speaking on Oscar Wilde, 
 dressed in a black robe and standing in a chamber 
 dimly disgraced by candles, incense, and muslin 
 poppies. The theatrically savage features of this 
 man rested beneath a framed letter from a promi- 
 nent writer — one of those abortions in which the 
 great man tells a small magazine that he earnestly 
 hopes that it will amount to something and 
 believes that it can accomplish a great purpose if 
 it pursues the ideals which have illuminated his 
 work. Carl's eyes sought this framed joke for the 
 
 138 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 hundredth time, since his mood needed such arti- 
 ficial humor to make it less aware of itself, and at 
 this moment Martha came with the rapid gait 
 of one who is returning to vast and uncompleted 
 tasks, although her day's labors were at an end. 
 This was not a pose but merely a bouncing over- 
 abundance of energy. With her was Helen Wilber, , 
 a young disciple who scarcely ever left her side. 
 Helen had fled from a wealthy family in another 
 city and traded her debutante's excuse for the 
 more fanciful robe of an ecstatic pilgrim starting 
 to ascend from the base of veiled mountains of 
 expression. She darted about on errands and in- 
 terviews and felt the humble fervors of a novice 
 — a tall, heavy girl with a long, soberly undevel- 
 oped face and abruptly turned features that were 
 garlanded with freckles. She had made a fine art 
 of her determination to persuade herself that she 
 was masculine, giving it the intense paraphernalia 
 of stolen words and gestures, but beneath her 
 dubiously mannish attire and desperately swing- 
 ing limbs the desires of an average woman were 
 feebly questioning the validity of her days. She 
 greeted Carl with her usual ringing assumption of 
 boyishness. 
 
 "Hello, old top! Been waiting long?" 
 139 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "Not as long as I expected to wait, considering 
 Martha's superb indifference to the impudence of 
 time. Well, Martha, how have you been insult- 
 ing actualities — with your usual crescendoes of 
 insanity ?" 
 
 Martha reached for the device of quickly slid- 
 ing the tip of her tongue over her upper lip, a 
 movement that always gave its opiate to her em- 
 barrassment or dismay, and then smiled with a 
 softly tragic aloofness. 
 
 "Oh, people weary me so!" she said. "They're so 
 impossible most of the time and so sublimely un- 
 aware of that fact! I've just come from seeing 
 an elderly woman who said that she might be in- 
 terested in helping us. She was fat and expen- 
 sively gowned and she wanted to know whether 
 we wouldn't print a story about the historical old 
 families of this city and how they had founded a 
 great, commercial and romantic fabric. I told her 
 that we were concerned with the restless and 
 flaming present, with the artists and thinkers of 
 our own time, and not with respectable trades- 
 people of the past. Of course I put it as nicely as 
 I could but she flew into a temper and said I was 
 insulting the people who had built up a great and 
 mighty city. . . people are so impossible!" 
 
 140 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Carl envied the excited flow of her words and 
 wished that he could also feverishly felicitate his 
 emptiness at that particular moment. 
 
 "I felt like telling her that men who've made 
 money and put up ugly buildings aren't necessar- 
 ily important enough to talk about," said Helen, 
 with a hollow seriousness, "but of course I didn't 
 for fear of hurting Mart's chances." 
 
 "I get so tired of wasting words on people who 
 lead monotonous lives and can't see the variety 
 and beauty within life," said Martha. "When you 
 talk to them they treat you as though you were 
 a little, misbehaving girl who would soon be 
 spanked and put to bed. '0 you'll soon get over all 
 of this artistic nonsense,' they say." 
 
 "Ah, they can't see that a defiance like yours, 
 Mart, is a fire that only grows stronger when 
 someone tries to put it out," said Helen with a 
 spontaneously rhetorical worship. 
 
 Carl grinned at the dramatic sincerity with 
 which these two women lunged at colossal targets. 
 
 "What's all of this endless stuff about beauty ?" 
 he asked. "Beauty, beauty, I'm tired of the label. 
 No specific description but just a nice, sonorous 
 word. You might exalt your loves and punish 
 your aversions with a little more clarity." 
 
 141 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "0 you can't diagram it as though it were a 
 problem in mathematics !" cried Martha. "It's too 
 big and mysterious for that. You simply know it 
 when you see it. It quickens your breath and 
 drops like music upon your soul. It's the thing 
 that makes you know that you have a soul — the 
 radiant weariness that springs from everything 
 that is strong, and lonely, and delicate, and elus- 
 ive, and tortured." 
 
 "The adjectives are stirring and the fact that 
 they happen to be meaningless is of little impor- 
 tance," said Carl. "I like the way in which you 
 make love to your emotions." 
 
 Martha gave a grimace of exasperation. 
 
 "You're the most insincere man I know," she 
 said. "Some day I'll fall in love with a man who 
 can be sincerely brilliant and beautiful and who 
 doesn't put his words together carefully, as 
 though they were unimportant toys." 
 
 "Such a fate may be exactly what you deserve," 
 said Carl, still grinning. 
 
 "Here we've been tramping around all day, see- 
 ing stupid people, and you waste Mart's time with 
 your old arguments about beauty and words," 
 said Helen with a jocose disgust. "I'm getting 
 famished. Let's go home." 
 
 142 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "I forgot to tell you, Carl — I'm having a party 
 at the apartment this evening," said Martha. 
 "That strange, interesting Russian you met yes- 
 terday is coming — Alfred Kone. And Jarvin who 
 runs the literary page on the Dispatch. You'll 
 come with us now, won't you?" 
 
 "Yes, I'm interested in Kone. He carries a cer- 
 tain revolving electricity around with him. His 
 words and gestures are abruptly flashing like 
 showers of sparks. I'm almost tempted to find out 
 where the sparks come from." 
 
 "He's a natural pagan," said Martha with an ad- 
 miring sigh. "Don't you love that European air 
 about him 1 It's something that you wouldn't like 
 if you could put your finger on it — something 
 elusive and graceful, and sophisticated." 
 
 "Is it possible that you mean that Kone is intri- 
 cately redundant?" said Carl, carelessly. 
 
 "Carl, you always talk in such a careful, un- 
 earthly way," said Helen, with a combat of irrita- 
 tion and wonder in her voice. 
 
 "With most people talk is a weak, thin wine," 
 said Carl. "They drink endless cups of it and at 
 last they become mildly intoxicated. I prefer to 
 achieve drunkenness with less effort." 
 
 The incongruous love-song of the conversation 
 
 143 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 continued as they departed for the Apperson 
 apartment. Carl became morbidly jovial as 
 though striving to goad himself into a mood, but 
 underneath his v^ords he w^as sad as he side- 
 stepped Helen's heavy lunges. "I have never 
 actually had youth — that glistening mixture of 
 blunders, sighs, cruel laughters, and a pleasant 
 sadness that does not cut too deeply," he said to 
 himself as he listened to the obviously proud youth 
 of the two women. 
 
 144 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER Xril. 
 
 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 and his pale 
 brown face cradled a wraith of bitter alertness — 
 a sneer attempting to break through the conceal- 
 ing flesh. He had a short flattened nose, thick 
 lips, and the eyes of a forced and sprightly demon, 
 and the dark abundance of his eyebrows receded 
 into a low forehead, which in turn ended in a mass 
 of black hair brushed backward. He had come 
 to America some six years before this late Au- 
 tumn evening; had first worked as a porter in a 
 department store; had mastered English with a 
 miraculous speed; and was now studying at a 
 neighboring university and earning a living by 
 teaching Russian to classes of children. In place 
 of that violently disguised boredom commonly 
 known as a heart he seemed to have an over- 
 perfect dynamo that made him a mechanical wild- 
 man — there was a sharp, strained persistency in 
 all of his movements and the fact that he never 
 
 145 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 deigned to falter in his words and gestures gave 
 him an aspect of well-maintained artificiality. He 
 threw his vivid grin to Carl. 
 
 "Hah, poet who seems to sleep but is always 
 awake — greetings," he called out, in the crisply 
 dramatic way in which he usually spoke. " 'De- 
 mons lurk in your dimples' — you should have writ- 
 ten that line about yourself." 
 
 "Portraits are merely pretexts — secret portraits 
 of oneself tortuously extracted from the blankness 
 of other people," said Carl. 
 
 "You would like to believe that. The involved 
 egoism of youth!" 
 
 "It might be proving your case to answer you," 
 said Carl, laughing. 
 
 Kone was one of the few men who could make 
 him laugh, since he had the odd habit of laughing 
 only in praise and scarcely ever in derision — a cus- 
 tom bom in the loneliness of his former years. 
 Kone greeted Martha, who came in later, with 
 words in which an adroitly raised respect and 
 daring sensuality were carefully mixed, but, 
 although her surface was flattered by his obei- 
 sance, his attentions failed to penetrate her radi- 
 ant self-immersion. That would have been a feat 
 worthy of century-old preservation. She listened, 
 
 146 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 like a convinced and mysterious referee, while 
 Kone and Carl indulged in the precise uselessness 
 of argument — a discussion on whether Dostoevsky 
 was an insane mystic, drunk with the details of 
 reality, or an emotional search-light stopping at 
 the edge of the world. The talk led to a question 
 of the exact value of originality. 
 
 "So, you are looking for originality," said Kone 
 with a metallic mockery in his voice. "A man may 
 stand on his head without in any way disturbing 
 the universe. Has it not occurred to you that life 
 is only a series of reiterations beneath the trans- 
 parent gowns of egoism?" 
 
 "I prefer the gowns when they are a little less 
 transparent. I might also have to know why a 
 man was standing on his head before I could make 
 any conjecture concerning the agitation of the 
 universe" — an amused respect was in Carl's voice. 
 He liked the stilted lunges of Kone. 
 
 Helen appeared in the doorway. 
 
 "Put your daggers aside for a while and come to 
 dinner," she said, with the most benign of toler- 
 ances. 
 
 After the meal Arthur Jarvin, the critic, arrived 
 with a woman named Edith Colson. Jarvin was 
 almost tall — one of many "almosts" composing 
 
 147 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 his entirety — and the plump old rose oval of his 
 face showed its immense self-satisfaction beneath 
 a fluffy mat of dark brown hair. He wore spec- 
 tacles and his features bore the petulant satisfac- 
 tion of one who has eaten too much for breakfast 
 and has not quite decided whether to regret that 
 fact or not. Since he held a contempt for the mad 
 limitations of time he always fondly lengthened 
 the utterance of his many "howevers" and "not- 
 withstandings." His friend, Edith Colson, was a 
 tall, slender woman who freed a satirical vivacity 
 with each of her words, thus making one regret 
 the fact that she had nothing to say. One felt 
 that to herself she was intrenched upon modest 
 but well-guarded hill-tops of emotion ; that, being 
 thinly perverse, she had purchased her castles in 
 Norway and scorned the more treacherous anima- 
 tions of a warmer climate. Her icy effervescences 
 — whirls of powdered snows — sometimes subsided 
 to a softer note which told you that the dab of 
 warmth left within her was reserved for a select 
 two or three beings, and that her conversation 
 was an elaborate form of repentance. Outwardly 
 she offered the effect of a carefully ornamented 
 self-protection. The greenish brown length of 
 her face accepted the problems of a long straight 
 
 148 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 nose, loosely thin lips, and large black eyes, and 
 was topped by a disciplined wealth of brownish 
 black hair. 
 
 They sat in a circle on the porch and the conver- 
 sation skipped with too much ease between recent 
 books, plays, and local celebrities among writers 
 and artists. Jarvin, full of the books that had 
 come to him for reviewing purposes, compared 
 and dissected them with the air of a professor who 
 boredly but genially lectures to his special class. 
 "This book was passable: of course it couldn't 
 come up to so-and-so's book. This other one — well, 
 not quite as good as his last novel. A little too 
 much of one style, you know. That new French- 
 man? Yes, they're raising quite a fuss over him. 
 Grim, cruel stuff, but well done. Those books lose 
 a lot in the translations, though. That new poet? 
 Mm, he's lyrical enough but he just misses inspir- 
 ation. The new crop will have to go a long way 
 before they can approach Shelley or Wordsworth. 
 Have you seen the new Shaw play at the Olympic ? 
 After all, Shaw is one of the few men who can 
 make you laugh without being vulgar or obvious," 
 etc. 
 
 Carl sat in silence and rearranged, in his head, 
 the difficult line of a new poem, and to his im- 
 
 149 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 mersion the conversation had become a slightly 
 irritating and well-memorized murmur. Endlessly 
 he muttered to himself: "your face is stencilled 
 with a pensiveness. . . . pensiveness . . . but I 
 need another adjective." 
 
 Kone ruffled the dulcet informations of the oth- 
 ers now and then with a polite but ironical jest 
 that was never too obviously at their expense; 
 Martha preserved her eagerly listening silence; 
 and Helen sat like a dazed woman at a verbal ban- 
 quet, scarcely daring to touch the glittering food 
 in front of her. Finally Jarvin found Carl's direc- 
 tion with a question that jerked him back to the 
 gathering although the exact words eluded him. 
 
 "What were you saying? I haven't been listen- 
 ing," said Carl. 
 
 "That's an insulting confession" — Edith Col- 
 son's voice snapped like a succession of breaking 
 wires. "Aren't you interested in books ?" 
 
 "Well, not in the broad and detailed way in 
 which they seem to interest the rest of you," said 
 Carl, with the sleepily candid smile which usually 
 made another person long to investigate the resil- 
 iency of his throat. "Once every five months I 
 read one that should be spoken of with great ve- 
 hemence and then gradually forgotten, but that's 
 a rare occurrence." 
 
 150 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "O come, that's an easy, superior attitude," said 
 Jarvin. "Come down to the valley and join us, 
 Mr. Poet!" 
 
 "All right, I'm down. I've passed your hills of 
 judicial comment and reached the moonlight on 
 the street pavement outside. It suggests a con- 
 test. Suppose we all make up a line describing 
 the moonlight on the street — the moonlight that 
 falls like a quiet silver derision on all philosophies 
 — and we'll see which of us is best acquainted with 
 the penitent promise of words. I'll begin. "The 
 moonlight repressed the grey street, like a phan- 
 tom virtue." Only original lines — nothing from 
 books." 
 
 "Here I am in the midst of a talk on Bergson, 
 and this young poet asks me to make up some 
 pretty lines about the moon," said Jarvin, in a 
 voice of poised scorn. "I read enough about the 
 moon in the flood of mushy poetry that pours into 
 my office." 
 
 "You might try to describe it yourself," said 
 Carl. "In that way you could provide an excel- 
 lent antidote for your disgust. It is, I assure you, 
 an important task to rescue the moon from the 
 rape of trite words." 
 
 "No, I'll leave that to minor poets," said Jarvin. 
 
 151 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Carl gave him the malicious grin of one who is 
 enjoying a sham battle. 
 
 "If the moon doesn't satisfy you, Mr. Jarvin, 
 let's try that whispering prison of trees just out- 
 side of this window, or the people who place their 
 unsearching feet upon streets every day. Any- 
 thing except voluble shop-talk about the latest 
 mediocrities with now and then a philosopher or 
 scientist thrown in for purposes of repentance and 
 caution." 
 
 "Well, our young iconoclast even scorns philos- 
 ophy," said Jarvin. "Perhaps it speaks with too 
 much thought and authority to suit your fancy. 
 It's much easier to let your emotions juggle 
 words." 
 
 "Philosophy is a bottle-faced dwarf drowning 
 with imposing howls in an ocean that does not see 
 him," said Carl, with a languid lack of interest. 
 "But philosophy should be read, if only with a 
 careful indifference." 
 
 Jarvin threw another rock, with haste, and Carl 
 gave him another epigram. Kone, always a res- 
 tive audience, interposed. 
 
 "The anarchist, Pearlman, has just come to 
 town," he said. "Perhaps all of you know that he 
 served twenty years in prison for attempting to 
 kill a millionaire. A cruel penance !" 
 
 152 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "I become rather tired of these anarchists who 
 are forever trying and plotting to blow up the 
 city-hall," said Edith. "They're neither artists 
 nor dull, useful citizens and they serve no purpose 
 that I can see. If they imagine that they can 
 change the present system of things by shrieking 
 and murdering people they ought to be sent to a 
 school for the feeble-minded." 
 
 "I'm not so sure that I'd want to see things 
 radically changed," said Jarvin. "Of course I 
 know that there's a great deal of graft and injus- 
 tice everywhere but I'm not sure that I'd care to 
 live in a Utopia — wickedness and cruelty are far 
 more interesting." 
 
 "The trouble with these anarchists and social- 
 ists is that they miss all the beauty in life," said 
 Martha. "If you show them a painting or a poem 
 they think that you're trying to waste their time, 
 unless it contains a social message." 
 
 "I think that it's cruel and useless to try to take 
 another man's life," said Helen, earnestly. "I hate 
 this fellow, Pearlman!" 
 
 Kone listened to this stagnant symposium of 
 viewpoints, with a patient sneer. 
 
 "In Russia we are more accustomed to murder," 
 he said. "We have not attained the — what shall I 
 
 153 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 say? — the genial and practical compromises of 
 your American democracy. In our country, alas, 
 oppression takes off its mask and swings a red 
 sword! If you will realize that death does not 
 hold for us the mysterious terror that it holds for 
 you it may help you to understand Pearlman. He 
 came to this country — a young Russian — senti- 
 mental, idealistic, crowded with naive longings 
 for martyrdom. He wanted to die for the people — 
 that grand, massive, mysterious, and yet near and 
 real people! When he tried to kill a millionaire, 
 who was stubbornly refusing to arbitrate with his 
 striking men, Pearlman was choked with a poem 
 of liberation that could not be denied. Then the 
 icy reality of his next twenty years — condemned 
 by both society and the strikers whom he had 
 tried to help, surrounded by the rigid leer of iron 
 bars; and squeezed into a niche of futility . . 
 This crucified Russian does not need your sarcasm, 
 my friends." 
 
 The conversation staggered and scampered for 
 another hour, with everyone save Carl animatedly 
 endeavoring to conceal the fact that he was in no 
 way interested in anyone's opinions except his 
 own, and at last the party packed away its come- 
 dies, irritations, and convictions, and arose from 
 
 154 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 the chairs. There were farewells, with just the 
 right compound of gaiety and caution, and the 
 gathering separated. 
 
 Carl and Alfred Kone went to the latter's room 
 in a dormitory at the university and sat until an 
 early hour of the morning, arguing with an in- 
 tensity that made their tobacco smoke seem a 
 cloud of gunpowder. Kone was that tense incon- 
 gruity — an ironical sentimentalist. Within him, 
 emotion cajoled thought to a softer brutality and 
 thought intruded its staccato, exploring note upon 
 the limpid abandon of emotion. A deliberate 
 friendship rose between these men, like a translu- 
 cent wall through which men can see each other 
 without touching, for each one knew that the 
 other held a baffling insincerity of imagination 
 and was afraid that he might be deftly ridiculed 
 if he failed to measure his words. Kone admired 
 the nimble restlessness of Carl, a quahty which he 
 was compelled mechanically to imitate, while Carl 
 liked the explosive way in which Kone evaded him- 
 self. Kone was now almost thirty years old but 
 his machine-like capering made him seem much 
 younger and he bounded through life like a sophis- 
 ticated street-urchin, swindling himself with 
 fiercely endurable makeshifts in place of dead 
 
 155 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 dreams. His tragedy rested in the fact that he 
 was not a creator and the knowledge of this was 
 to him a secret poison from which he had to escape 
 with many a gale of make-believe laughter. 
 
 156 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 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 landscape which he 
 had just finished. Jenesco's eyes lazily flirted 
 with triumph and his small, ruddy face displayed 
 the expression of a child throwing a few last, un- 
 necessary grains upon a sand-hill. 
 
 "Boys, what do you think of it ?" he asked in a 
 tone of confident fatherhood. 
 
 Kone and Carl scanned the painting. It was a 
 mother-goose transfiguration, too quick in its ac- 
 ceptance of violent colors and bearing a blandly 
 forced simplicity. Red, indigo, and orange trees 
 were lining both sides of a road, and the trees 
 were painted in such a manner that they seemed 
 to be kneeling at the roadside. In the distance 
 white mountains, resembling the suggestion of 
 upturned cups, refused the blue wine of sky, and 
 in front of them were fields that looked like 
 wrinkled, green tablecloths spread out to dry. In 
 
 iS7 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 the sky one large pink cloud forlornly squandered 
 its innocence. 
 
 "Pleasant — pleasant," said Kone. "Not realis- 
 tic, and not fantastic. It deceives both of its mis- 
 tresses." 
 
 "You don't see what I'm trying to get at," ans- 
 wered Jenesco. "I'm trying to make reality turn 
 an amiable somersault, as Carl would say. I want 
 to avoid the two extremes of painting the usual 
 photograph on the one hand and making some- 
 thing that no one can understand on the other." 
 
 Carl listened to the seething argument that fol- 
 lowed, with the feelings of one who hears an ex- 
 quisitely worthless routine of sound. He was 
 always amazed at the fact that people could argue 
 about art — a word pilfered from that last desper- 
 ate undulation with which an ego decorates the 
 slavery of mud. Arguments on art to him were 
 like the antics of a sign-painter defending the 
 precious label which he has painted upon certain 
 of the more indiscreet and impossible longings 
 within him — a piece of inflexible nonsense. He 
 felt that works of art so-called could be described 
 and admired with a novel and independently crea- 
 tive bow of words, but never defended and ex- 
 plained. Books on art were to him a futile and 
 
 158 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 microscopical attempt to inject logic into a deco- 
 rative curiosity. As he listened to the wrestling 
 sounds of the present argument, words within him 
 began to flatter his indifference. 
 
 "While Kone is talking, Jenesco sits, trying to 
 frame his reply and paying little heed to Kone's 
 words," he said to himself. "If Jenesco hears a 
 point that he has not previously considered he will 
 make a hasty attempt to shift his answer — a quick 
 sword-thrust at the new opponent — and then pro- 
 ceed to forget about the matter. Serious argu- 
 ments might be of value if they were not windy 
 and elaborate. If men could decide to condense 
 their views into neat typewritten sheets, carried 
 in a coat pocket and distributed among people, 
 they could save a great deal of cheated energy." 
 
 "The poet has been sitting here like an amused 
 statue," said Kone, after the argument had col- 
 lapsed to the usual stand still. "Come, we are 
 waiting for you to flay us." 
 
 "Splendid. Another tense battle. Haven't you 
 had enough?" said Carl. "I would suggest that 
 we hold a debate on whether that spider on the 
 wall will crawl into the sunlight near the window, 
 or whether it will remain in the shade. In this 
 way we can speculate upon how much the laws of 
 
 159 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 chance may alter the spider's conception of the 
 universe." 
 
 "Get away with that satirical pose!" cried 
 Jenesco. 
 
 Carl smiled without answering, while the others 
 derided his self-immersion. Jenesco knew no other 
 weapon save an emotional club. He was a machin- 
 ist who had taken up painting two years before 
 this late winter afternoon and he still kept a little 
 shop where he occasionally sold and repaired ma- 
 chines. This combination of rough mechanic and 
 art-desiring man had given its surface lure to 
 Carl's imagination and he had commenced to spend 
 most of his time at Jenesco 's home. Short, and 
 with the body of a subdued, light-weight prize- 
 fighter, Jenesco was a small hurricane of physical 
 elations. He had the face of a corrupted cherub 
 that had sold its innocence to mental inanities, and 
 his mind was a conceited confusion of naive ideas. 
 He had been attracted to painting because it 
 brought his hands into motion, thus encouraging 
 the habit which they could not forget after their 
 working hours, and because it taught color and 
 flexibility to the hard greys, browns, and blacks 
 of his daily toil. He belonged to that band of men 
 who spend a lifetime in stubbornly walking down 
 
 i6o 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 a road of artistic effort which does not lead them 
 to any distinct surrender. Their imaginations are 
 not weak enough to kneel before the drab regulari- 
 ties of life and not strong enough to escape from 
 the instinctive push of dead men's realities. 
 
 From that afternoon on, Carl began to see more 
 of Jenesco and less of Kone. Kone was not a crea- 
 tor but merely transposed, with a hungry fire, the 
 sentences of other men, and after you solved the 
 snapping tricks with which he did this, his ironies 
 became thin and lamely transparent. Carl pre- 
 ferred the wolfish wit with which Jenesco, an 
 ogling Proletarian, tore silk and satin from the 
 shrinking flesh of obvious hypocrisies in life. It 
 was at least a lurching circus of words — a pulsat- 
 ing buffoonery. He scarcely ever saw Martha now, 
 since their self-immersions tended to create a 
 sterile restraint between them, with words and 
 hands playing the part of irrelevant intruders. 
 Each of them secretly despised life and its people, 
 while giving a pretended attention, but they used 
 different methods. Martha fluttered her emotional 
 veils, with a breathless coercion, while Carl dodged 
 beneath a carnival of grotesquely mated words. 
 
 To amuse the secret loneliness which often be- 
 came a boring acid he formed, with Jenesco, that 
 
 i6i 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 hollow melee known as a debating club; called it 
 "The Questioners" — prodded by a ghost of humor 
 — and exhibited his words in the formal vaude- 
 ville-show. The performances occurred at the 
 studio of a man named Fyodor Murovitch, a young 
 Polish sculptor with a softly melodramatic abund- 
 ance of dark brown hair and the face of a 
 strangely waspish saint — a saint who was tempt- 
 ing himself with malices in order to conquer them. 
 One evening Carl sat in this place, drained by the 
 empty ritual of responding to noisy and firmly 
 convinced people and ogling his nerves with the 
 rhythm of pipe smoke. He looked up and saw 
 a woman — Olga Ramely — standing beside him. 
 His eyes experimented with the eyes of this 
 stranger and suddenly contracted. Her eyes 
 seemed to be two drops of quivering sweat left 
 behind by an emotional crucifixion. They were sen- 
 sitive with essences. Greyish-green, larger than a 
 dwindled sky, lost in a perilous dream of wakeful- 
 ness, holding the phantom glow of incredible tor- 
 tures, friendly to mental recklessness, they were 
 like a ludicrously clever imitation of his own eyes 
 and he trembled in the presence of an inexplicable 
 deception. His imagination was becoming a de- 
 tached devil much in need of correction. Olga 
 Ramely spoke to him. 
 
 162 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "I've been watching you all evening. The light 
 from the candles over your head fell upon your 
 yellow hair and put shadows on your face. The 
 shadows gave your face a soft excuse and you 
 looked half like a sprite and half like a martyr. 
 There was an indelicately impish weariness on 
 your face. Your hair was like light, and in one 
 glistening attempt it tried to reach the weariness, 
 but couldn't. I told myself that you were not the 
 man that people say you are." 
 
 He made his peace with her eyes, moved by a 
 profound embarrassment, and discovered the rest 
 of her face, with an abject and yet faintly skep- 
 tical desire. The surface flattery of her words had 
 been almost without meaning to him, but her voice 
 had given him a problem — deep with an alto 
 scheme, like a trailing memory of pain, and quiv- 
 ering rebelliously under the disciplines of thought. 
 He examined her face for an affirmation of the 
 voice. Short, dark brown curls encumbered her 
 head, like a wig of lost thoughts undulating in an 
 effort to capture reality, and her skin was the 
 smoothly troubled fusion of white and brown. 
 Her nose was of moderate length and curved 
 slightly outward, in a subdued question of flesh; 
 her lips were small and thin — pliant devices of 
 
 163 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 doubt — and a tight survival of plumpness upon 
 her face told of a lucidly cherubic effect that had 
 existed before life dropped its hands heavily upon 
 her. Her body, verging on tallness, was immersed 
 in a last skirmish with youth. 
 
 "What have you heard them say about me?" 
 he asked, craving the evasion of words that would 
 conceal a unique tumult within him. 
 
 "I've heard people say that you were a thief, 
 and a rascal, and a disagreeable idiot, and a 
 poseur, and a liar, and an overwhelming egoist." 
 
 "What did you think of this dime-novel version 
 of iniquity?" 
 
 "I have been, at times, partial to crude mon- 
 sters, but your work was a curious contradiction. 
 Why do they hate you ?" 
 
 "Hatred is, of course, fear — fear wildly attempt- 
 ing to justify its presence. With most people 
 this fear skulks within a harmless parade of 
 adjectives, while others are compelled to fall back 
 upon their hands. And so people commit actual 
 murders while others slay their opponents in con- 
 versation. The former is apt to be a little more 
 convincing than the latter, though." 
 
 Carl spoke slowly, still correcting the turbu- 
 lence of his mind with a plausible display of 
 
 164 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 words, and almost unconscious of what he was 
 saying. 
 
 "You've left out a hatred for hypocrisy," said 
 Olga, with the same abstracted indifference to 
 words and the same instinctive cunning at piecing 
 them together. "Some of the people who have 
 been flaying you alive walked up to you to-night 
 with outstretched hands and congratulations. And 
 I felt the emotion of one too tired to have more 
 than a twinge of disgust." 
 
 "It requires no effort to be stoical to this joke," 
 said Carl, "The masks are too exquisitely futile 
 to become interesting unless, indeed, they attain 
 a moment of dextrous humor." 
 
 Jenesco and Murovitch, who had been disputing 
 in a corner of the studio, walked over and offered 
 a belated introduction. 
 
 "Sorry to interrupt love scene, but maybe you 
 do not know names of each other," said Murovitch 
 in his deliberate, shattered English. "Names tell 
 people how much like nothing they are. But 
 maybe both of you want to be somebody, in which 
 case it is wise to pity you." 
 
 "You have a crudely spontaneous imagination 
 — it spies love scenes and vacuums with a truly 
 lumbering swiftness," said Carl, annoyed at the 
 interruption. 
 
 165 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Murovitch laughed — he had made a rehgion of 
 giving and receiving heavy blows and it made an 
 excellent screen for his inner timidities. 
 
 "I like your frankness. It reminds me of a 
 heavy negro. It's black and excited," said Olga. 
 
 "Felman's complexion is a little dirty itself," 
 said Murovitch, defiling his saint-like face with 
 a prearranged grin. 
 
 As Carl and Olga walked to the studio where 
 she was living with a woman friend, she told him 
 some of the immediate facts of her life, as though 
 clearing away an opaquely intruding rubbish. 
 
 "I'm working now as a waitress in a little cafe- 
 teria on Winthrop street. Eight in the morning 
 to three in the afternoon. Two afternoons a week 
 off. These burns on my hands come from the 
 hot coffee. On the two afternoons I write poetry. 
 My body, you see, passes into a less visible con- 
 duct, and thoughts rattle more effectively than 
 china cups. Then, on the next morning, I am 
 forced to recollect that life is in a continual 
 conspiracy to prevent this transformation of 
 manners. The plates are once more held up. 
 Beans and roast beef refuse to betray the secret." 
 
 They had reached the studio and were seated 
 opposite to each other. 
 
 i66 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "And I work every morning in a tobacco shop," 
 said Carl. "Since life works with ravishing incon- 
 gruities, everything there should be burned except 
 the cigars. Meditating on this, I am able to 
 wait more peacefully on the customers. Cringing 
 sounds slip from my lips. 'Yes, MacLane will 
 win the next fight and the weather is terrible.' 
 Strange, twisted little payments of sound. Life 
 clinks them in his empty purse." 
 
 "Be romantic — make it the brave bow to an 
 indelicate dream," said Olga. 
 
 "A background of colored compensations? 
 They, too, are endurable if you don't turn your 
 head too often." 
 
 The adventure of stealing from a cautious world 
 to an alcove of unguarded expression changed 
 their physical desires into brightly unheeded 
 guests lurking just outside of their longing to 
 talk to each other. When their hands touched at 
 last, they laughed at the minute surprise tendered 
 by their flesh. They became two secret isolations 
 examining a velvet hallucination of fusion. Their 
 bodies touched while investigating this enticing 
 dream. 
 
 167 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 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 dream 
 of perished identities lost in one search. Then 
 Olga left with a theater company that was about 
 to tour the middle west, having managed to 
 secure the small part of a garrulous chambermaid, 
 and Carl glided into a riot of writing, waiting for 
 the telegram that would send him to join her in 
 a far western city where her company would 
 stage its last performances. In the meantime, 
 he resolved to visit a wealthy uncle who lived in 
 the south and wanted to see this "queer nephew 
 of mine, who scribbles poetry and doesn't care 
 about making money." 
 
 As he sat one morning in an elevated railroad 
 coach, with valises at his side, commencing the 
 journey to the city in which his uncle lived, his 
 mood was glittering and aimless. He danced with 
 outlines of Olga's words ; hummed briskly saccha- 
 rine tunes ; and trifled with the contours of people 
 
 i68 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 seated near him. Across the aisle a fatly rosy 
 man was reading a newspaper and Carl's gaze 
 idly struck the front page and absorbed the head- 
 lines. In a corner of the page he came to the 
 
 words: "Actress Dies in M ." 
 
 His intuition, springing from that complaint 
 vaguely known as metaphysical, changed his skin 
 to a subtle frost and laid its squeezing pressure 
 upon his eyes. The quick and heavy beat of his 
 heart became frantically audible to his ears, like 
 a gauntly terrifying horseman riding over him, 
 and his mind changed to a loud confusion. He 
 jumped across the aisle, tore the paper from the 
 gaping man, and read that the woman whom 
 he loved had instantly died after an accident. 
 Assailed by an oblique rain of black claws, he 
 tottered from the car, leaving his valises in the 
 aisle. The black claws vanished; his heart and 
 mind became extinct; and nothing remained save 
 a body turned to ice and guided by instinct. 
 Slowly, and with a brittle indecision in each step, 
 he walked through the bickering brightness of one 
 street after another, hearing and seeing nothing. 
 He reached the bold flatness of the stone apart- 
 ment building; read the delayed telegram held 
 out by his mother, with the barest shiver of 
 returning life, and dropped upon his bed. 
 
 169 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Sunlight stood within the small room, like an 
 emaciated patriarch entering through grey shades. 
 Sunlight ignored the glossy chastities of furniture 
 and dull yellow walls, and looked intently at the 
 bed standing in one corner of the room. A long 
 human collapse in black clothes stuck to the white 
 bedspread. A blotch of blonde hair rested stilly 
 in the weak light and hinted of a face. The body 
 shook now and then as though an inquisitively 
 alien hand were investigating its lifelessness. 
 Then sobs pushed their way from the hidden face 
 — an irregular orgy of distorted lyricism. It was 
 as though a martyr were licking up the blood 
 on his wounds and spitting it out in long gurgles 
 of lunatic delight. The sobs were separated by 
 rattling pauses that reminded one of a still living 
 skeleton endlessly wrestling with death. The 
 skeleton and the martyr sometimes felicitated each 
 other upon their endurance, and short silences, 
 like uneasy lies, glided from the hidden face. 
 Then the bleeding turmoil once more streamed 
 upon the air of the room, almost extinguishing 
 the dim sunlight. 
 
 A peculiar species of happiness lurked beneath 
 the weeping. Grief, hating itself, found a revenge- 
 ful pleasure in attempting to tear and exhaust 
 
 170 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 itself into death. Sometimes the turmoil sub- 
 sided to a light and sibilant fight for breath. 
 The animal noise departed then and a small soul, 
 much lighter than a phantom sin, plucked unavail- 
 ingly at the mysterious spear that had suddenly 
 coerced its breast. . . . The dark words of 
 twilight finally entered the room, making an 
 opera of the marred lyricism that esca'ped from 
 the hidden face on the bed. Then night pardoned 
 the deficiencies of the room and corrected them 
 with moonlight, creating a tragic and chaste 
 boudoir. Carl Felman felt emptied of all sound, 
 and a mad craving for motion stabbed his limbs. 
 He wanted to rush endlessly into space, barely 
 supported by the breathless consolation of run- 
 ning after something that could never be caught. 
 This would also be of great value to his heart, 
 which was a stiffly smirking acrobat who has 
 broken his legs but still strives to continue the 
 act. 
 
 He leaped from the bed and seized his cap. 
 His mother, who had been entering his room at 
 intervals and vainly questioning him, stopped him 
 at the outer doorway. 
 
 "Carl, where are you going?" she cried, in a 
 sharply fearful voice. 
 
 171 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 With a hugely mechanical effort he managed 
 to twist low sounds from his useless lips. 
 
 "Just — for a — walk — back — soon." 
 
 Without heeding her protests and questions, he 
 fled down to the street. Human beings had disap- 
 peared, but he could see faces indented on the 
 fronts of houses. One had a look of mangled 
 suffering; another was studiously wicked, like a 
 learned burglar; and a third bore the pathetic 
 leer of a venturesome housemaid. He picked up 
 these details, glanced at them a moment, and then 
 threw them aside as though they were scandals 
 from another planet. He passed into a region of 
 three-story rooming-houses — flat wretches holding 
 an air of patient cowardice. People surreptitiously 
 filtered from the houses and walked down the 
 street with Carl — chorus girls with plump, sneaky 
 faces, underworld hoodlums with an air of wanly 
 etched bravado, ponderously rollicking servant 
 girls, clerks with the faces of genial mice, and 
 meekly dazed old men stumping to their dish- 
 washing jobs. To Carl they were also hurrying 
 after something that had vanished and cajoling 
 their mingled emptiness and pain with swift 
 motion. Now and then he waved an arm to them 
 in greeting, while an unearthly smile dug into 
 
 172 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 his face. His gesture, when observed, was taken 
 for an intended blow and he left attitudes of fear 
 and pugnacity behind him. 
 
 He crossed a bridge above a narrowly turbid 
 river. The oily lights and toiling tug-boats were 
 to him an inexplicable affront. Their stillness and 
 slow motion insulted his passion for speed and 
 with the spite of a child he looked down at his 
 feet for a stone to throw at them. Finding a 
 pavement block, he cast it into the river and 
 rushed along, feeling for a second an exquisite 
 relief. He passed into a crowded theater and 
 business section. The strained melee of lights and 
 noises became an intensely sympathetic audience, 
 urging on his race, and the faces and forms of 
 human beings met in an applauding confusion. 
 With the cunning of a blind animal, he darted 
 through their ranks and avoided collisions. 
 Finally he reached another apartment-house 
 region — large brick boxes without a vestige of 
 expression. "The faces are gone!" he cried, with 
 a gasping incredulity, as though inanimate things 
 had alone become real to him. Moonlight, unable 
 to fathom their petty baldness, clung to them 
 with an attitude of limpid disgust. Thickly con- 
 tented families, mild and tightly garnished, issued 
 
 173 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 from the doorways, trundling to some moving- 
 picture show or ice-cream palace. An aspect of 
 well-washed and hollow serenity protested against 
 Carl's direct flight. Wrapped by this time in a 
 warmly merciful daze, he did not detect the drably 
 swaying counterfeit of happiness that would have 
 awakened within him a maniacal response. 
 
 He sped down street after street like an 
 inhuman hunter, and came to rows of wooden 
 houses separated by large fields and blackguarded 
 by the smoke of nearby factories and mills. An 
 attitude of mildewed supplication — a beggar rising 
 from ferns and mud — lifted itself over the scene. 
 Rushing along, he plunged into the open country, 
 where wild flowers, ditches, and fields of corn 
 pungently conversed with moonlight in a language 
 too simple and formless for human ears to catch. 
 But Carl's ears had become inhuman, and he 
 started a loud talk with the growing objects 
 around him, revelling in their sympathy and 
 advice. By this time his long, half -running walk 
 had weakened him and he began to lurch over 
 the soft earth of the road like a crushed and 
 fantastic drunkard. 
 
 The ingenuous brilliance of a cloudless morning 
 174 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 stood hugely over the green fields and yellowish 
 brown roads and an air of alert innocence went 
 exploring between the flowers and ditches. Har- 
 riet Radler walked slowly down the country road 
 on her way to the schoolhouse where she ruled 
 a little band of demons, drudges, minor poets, and 
 clowns. She lingered along the roadside, some- 
 times stooping to tear a tiger lily from the shallow 
 ditch. Slender and short, a pliant virginity twined 
 itself around her body. Her young face, pink and 
 barely whipped, had been marked by a tentative 
 sorrow and was hungering for the actual battle. 
 Her black and white clothes lazily flirted with 
 imps of morning air and were encouraged by her 
 eyes. 
 
 Looking down at the ditch, she saw the half- 
 concealed form of a man lying in the water, with 
 his head and arms resting upon the bank. A trag- 
 edy of dry mud stamped its grey mosaic over his 
 face. His blonde hair drooped with dirt like a 
 trampled sunflower. The Pierrot-like hesitation of 
 his features peeped beneath the dirt — a still and 
 frightened ritual. With the horror of one who 
 believes that she is beholding a dead man, Harriet 
 knelt beside the figure and shook its head, her 
 face turned away and her eyes tightly closed. 
 
 175 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Then she heard a mingled rustle and splash and 
 saw that the man was rising to his feet. He stood 
 with bent knees over the mud of the ditch, his 
 black clothes garlanded with slime, his face twitch- 
 ing into life beneath its stiff mask of earth. With 
 a squeal of fright she scrambled to her feet and 
 ran down the road. The man in the ditch, Carl 
 Felman, felt that something was still evading him 
 and once more experienced the hunter's frenzy 
 that had tumbled him over the night. Gripped by 
 a superhuman agility, he transcended his stiff 
 joints and pursued her down the road. He caught 
 her, his hands dropping upon her shoulders and 
 whirling her around. She faced him with uplifted 
 arms, a turbulence of fright and curiosity swiftly 
 toying with her eyes and mouth. He lowered his 
 hands and stood limply before her. 
 
 "Do you know what grief is?" he asked, in an 
 almost indistinct voice. 
 
 She stared and did not answer. 
 
 "Do you know what grief is?" he asked, in a 
 softly clear voice. 
 
 A look of loose wonder came to her face. 
 
 "Do you know what grief is?" he asked, in an 
 almost loud voice. 
 
 A darkly smiling contemplation revised the lines 
 of her face. 
 
 176 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 "Yes," she whispered. 
 
 Without another word they both walked down 
 the country road together. 
 
 177 
 
PART III 
 INSTIGATION 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 Instillation 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 HE 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 
 underneath the wide foliage of 
 willow and magnolia trees. Most of the cottages 
 were unpainted and grey with the impersonally 
 chaste kiss of time, while the hovels were mere 
 flimsy boxes covered with black tar paper. Sun- 
 flowers and morning glories stood amid the weeds 
 and twined about the slanting fences like gaudy 
 virgins dismayed at their sight of a lewdly dis- 
 ordered room and appealing to the sunlight for 
 protection. Negro women in faded sunbonnets 
 and wrappers could sometimes be seen shuffling 
 down the thickly dusty roads and negro children, 
 in weird incoherences of tattered clothes, tumbled 
 around the humble doorsteps. The children were 
 
 i8i 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 little black madmen unconsciously dodging a huge 
 fist that was concealed beneath the scene. The 
 dust of a late August morning had dropped upon 
 all things, sifting its listless sadness into everj^ 
 crevice and crack, and even the fierce sun could 
 not dispel this invasion. 
 
 Every shade of this scene was an accurately 
 friendly answer to Carl's mood and he squandered 
 the brooding light of his eyes upon all of the 
 visual details outside of the train window. The 
 mask of careless bitterness upon his face said 
 its hello to the cowering and sinister apathy of 
 the houses and people, and viciouslj' he longed to 
 leap out of the window and join the unashamed 
 animal rites w^hich these hovels and human beings 
 were parading. Here an alien race was standing 
 amid clouds of evil-smelling squalor and staring at 
 its broken longings and dreams — staring \\'ith a 
 wild hopelessness. This race had lost its own civil- 
 ization and was clumsilj' imitating that of the 
 white man, not because of any innate desire, but 
 because it had been forced to blend into its sur- 
 roundings or perish, and Carl felt that all of his 
 life had also been an animated lie of flesh and 
 speech, devised to aid him in escaping from the 
 contemptuous eyes that vastly hemmed him in. 
 
 182 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 And now, with the feelings of a man who had 
 neatly murdered himself, he was planning to turn 
 the knives of his thoughts and emotions upon 
 other people, not for revenge, but because the 
 marred ghost of himself harshly desired to con- 
 vince itself that it was still alive. If this ghost 
 had yielded to the subterfuges of kindness and 
 gentleness it would have become too much aware 
 of its own thin remoteness from life, and cruelty 
 alone could induce it to believe that it was still 
 welded to the actualities of existence. 
 
 As Carl sat at the window he could often hear 
 the grotesquely quavering, boldly mellow laughter 
 of negro men trudging to their work, but these 
 sounds did not express humor to him. They held 
 the strong effort of men to flee from tormenting 
 longings and the numbly vicious rebuke of pov- 
 erty, and the sounds which these men released 
 merely symbolized the long strides of their fancied 
 escape. Laughter can be merely the explosive 
 sound with which human beings seek to demolish 
 each other — the indirect weapon of self-hatred. 
 Carl laughed with a strained loudness, throwing 
 a magnified echo to the negroes on the dusty roads 
 outside, and a drowsily plump, middle-aged woman 
 in an opposite seat opened her mouth widely and 
 
 183 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 huddled into a corner, fearing that she might be 
 attacked by a maniac. He gave her a glance and 
 feasted upon her fear, for her shrinking attitude 
 was falsely and deliciously persuading the ghost 
 of himself that it still held a potency over other 
 people. 
 
 Sometimes a song crazily drifted to Carl's ears 
 from one of the negro cottages — a song that was 
 weighted with loosely undulating sadness — and he 
 listened with a stern greediness. Music is a huge, 
 treacherous sound made by thoughts and emotions 
 to console them for their feeling of minute mor- 
 tality, and after it has given them its dream of 
 permanent size it disappears, slaying the illusion 
 with silence. Now it brought a delusion of sub- 
 stantiality to the ghost within the mould of Carl's 
 flesh and he listened in a trance of gratitude. Lost 
 in the obliterations of his grief, he felt infinitely 
 nearer to these abject, musical negroes outside 
 than to the artificially silent, stiffly satisfied white 
 people with whom he was riding. Grief, which 
 is an insane tyrant among emotions, has an effort- 
 less way of crossing all boundaries and walls, but 
 it does not reveal any hidden oneness between 
 human beings. Grief places men and women in a 
 vacuum of renunciation, or shows them that they 
 
 184 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 have little connection with the people around 
 them and that they have been enduring an alien 
 camp. Ruled by this latter discovery, Carl looked 
 with an undisguised hatred at the formal, com- 
 placent white people in the railway coach and 
 felt that he was deeply related to the negroes 
 outside. 
 
 Almost three months had passed since the invis- 
 ible knife had swung into the middle of his being, 
 and since he had staggered across the agitated 
 sincerity of night to the peaceful compassion of 
 the young school teacher. Now and then he 
 remembered their silent walk down the sturdy 
 brightness of the country road — a silence which 
 had been a soft wreath ironically thrown upon 
 the weakness of words — and the troubled way in 
 which she had helped him brush his clothes and 
 wash his face, and the stumbling simplicity of 
 the words with which she had tried to comfort 
 him. Although he had been a stranger to her, she 
 had thrown aside that distrust which is born of 
 sensual pride and a cheaply purchased worldly 
 wisdom, influenced by the helpless directness of 
 his demeanor and by the supple humility which a 
 grief of her own had once left within her. The 
 force of her fearlessness had fallen upon him like 
 
 185 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 the sweeping touch of another world, and in his 
 daze he had actually believed that she had been 
 sent by the woman whom he had lost as an alert 
 messenger striving to teach him how to hold his 
 ghostlike shoulders up beneath a future burden. 
 If she had held a human aspect to him he would 
 have hated and reviled her, for then she would 
 have been merely an atom in the vast, turbid 
 reality that had slowly lured him to an imbecilic 
 torture. He accepted the curves of her body as 
 an unearthly visitation and possessed them as one 
 who passes through a fragile ritual. But after 
 his departure from her, as he once more walked 
 down the shaggy, solid country road, she had 
 tiptoed away from him with a spectral quickness, 
 and the clamor of a world had once more attacked 
 him, like the scattered falsehoods of an idiot. 
 The rustle of trees had become an insignificant 
 whisper of defeat ; the songs of birds had changed 
 to the shrill vacuities with which a monster enter- 
 tained himself; the colored groups of flowers had 
 become the pitiful remains of a violated carnival; 
 the earth beneath his feet had altered to the stolid 
 aloofness of a giant moron; and the sunlight had 
 seemed to be a theatrical accident. 
 
 When he had reached the city, with its orderly 
 
 i86 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 ranks of houses and factories and its dully precise 
 pavements, the scene had been to him a cunning 
 mirage made by dying people to suppress their 
 realization of the advancing destruction. The 
 people on the streets had held the complicated 
 glee and perplexity of an insane slave trying to 
 extract an imaginary importance from his bond- 
 age. He had longed to jump at their throats 
 and silence the feverish lie that was reviling the 
 truthful stare of his eyes and only his physical 
 exhaustion had prevented him from doing this. 
 Grief is a spontaneous welcome sent to the insan- 
 ity that lurks within all human beings, and its 
 invitation greets a responsive strength or a fright- 
 ened weakness of imagination, according to the 
 man or woman who receives it. 
 
 And so he had plodded back to his home, 
 carrying within him a numb confusion that was 
 sometimes disrupted by vicious impulses, and 
 forcing the ghost of himself into a motion which 
 it could not understand. He had tried to answer 
 the angry and uneasy questions of his parents 
 with plausible lies at his own expense. Yes, he 
 had met someone who had given him bad news 
 and in a fit of temper he had rushed from the 
 railroad station and deserted his valises. What 
 
 187 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 was in the telegram? Oh, just a message from 
 a friend. Where had he been for the past two 
 days ? Why, he had gone on a spree and had slept 
 off his drunkenness at the house of a friend. 
 Shouldn't he be locked in an insane asylum ? Yes, 
 but life had already granted him that favor. With 
 a glib tongue he tried to serenade the barren 
 comedy of improbabilities to which he had 
 returned, but he scarcely heard the words that 
 he was uttering, and as he wrung them from the 
 empty ghost that was within him he longed to 
 strike his parents in the face and feed greedily 
 upon their rage and astonishment, in an effort 
 to convince himself that he was still substantially 
 powerful, still able to assert his reality by injuring 
 the people around him. With an act of this kind 
 he could destroy the indifferent fantasy of life 
 and change it to a tangible and active opponent. 
 The man standing before him — his father — was 
 merely an irritating puppet whose lack of under- 
 standing moved jerkily, governed by the hands 
 of an ignorant dream. 
 
 With a cry of hatred, Carl struck his father 
 in the face and watched him reel back against 
 the wall of the dining-room with a feeling of warm 
 triumph. He struck him again and revelled in 
 
 i88 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 the blood that decorated the man's lips. His 
 mother shrieked with fear; his father returned 
 the blows; and the two men fought around the 
 room, overturning chairs and vases. Several 
 neighbors, brought by the cries of his mother, 
 rushed in and overpowered him. Together with 
 his father, they held him down while someone 
 summoned a patrol wagon, and he was taken to 
 a cell in a police station. As he sat in the flatly 
 smelling semi-gloom of the cell he caressed, with 
 an overpowering fondness, the blood that had 
 stiffened upon parts of his face, for it mutely 
 testified that he had conquered the remote lie 
 around him and altered it to a satisfying enemy. 
 He had persuaded himself that he was still alive, 
 and the blows which he had given his father had 
 been the first proof of this illusory emancipation. 
 Throughout the night, as he shifted upon the iron 
 shelf that was his bed, he muttered to himself 
 at regular intervals, "I am alive, I am still alive," 
 as though he were trying to preserve a triumphant 
 dream that would soon disappear, and the grief 
 within him rocked to and fro upon the words, 
 using them as a cradle. 
 
 But when the morning dodged shamefacedly 
 into his cell, bringing with it a faint retinue of 
 
 189 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 city sounds, the annoying fantasy returned with 
 full vigor, and the ghost within him stealthily 
 assumed possession of his flesh. Once more he 
 was a thinly wounded spectator, filled with an 
 impotent hatred at the melee about him and 
 longing for the lusty release of physical motion. 
 Two small boys, lying upon their stomachs, peered 
 through the grating of his cell window, which 
 stood on a level with the sidewalk outside, and 
 jibed at him. He cursed them incessantly, with 
 an anger that was not directed at them, but at 
 the meaningless tensions of their voices, and with 
 the tumult of his own voice he vainly strove to 
 shake the wraith within him to firmer outlines. 
 
 As he stood before the magistrate a few hours 
 later, an incredulous sneer was on his face, as 
 though the man at the desk above him were a 
 pompous, talkative scarecrow, and with a stubborn 
 silence he confronted the questions that were 
 thrown at him. In a low, hesitating voice his 
 father declared that he feared that his son had 
 become insane, and the judge ordered an exami- 
 nation by one of the city physicians. Carl was 
 returned to his cell, after his parents had pelted 
 him with half-angry and half-bewildered sentences 
 in an ante-room of the court, and as he sat again 
 
 190 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 in his cell, surveying the rigid jeer of the iron 
 bars, his hatred began to listen to the advice 
 of cunning — a cunning pilfered from the wilted 
 depths of his despair. He began to see that 
 physical blows and silence were crude and inef- 
 fective weapons in his attack upon the insulting 
 commotion of life and that, if he desired to injure 
 human beings so that both he and they might 
 become real for a moment, he must use more 
 indirect and ingenious methods. 
 
 When the city physician, a tall, briskly-balanced 
 man with no imagination, questioned him in his 
 cell, he became a blandly appealing and submissive 
 actor. 
 
 "Yes, doctor, I had a nervous breakdown from 
 overstudy, you know, and for a time I'm afraid 
 that I lost my reason. They tell me that I struck 
 my father and this has horrified me, as I haven't 
 the slightest recollection of what I did. But I've 
 gathered myself together now and I can promise 
 you that I'll never lose control of myself again — 
 never! And I'm awfully sorry for what I did. I 
 can assure you of the sincerity of my repentance." 
 
 The physician was putty in Carl's adroit hands 
 — this composed young man with an intelligent, 
 
 191 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 contrite speech must, of course, be quite sane. 
 Carl, as he spoke to this man, slowly formed an 
 evil grin beneath the cool mask of his face, and 
 he relished the task of showering upon this man 
 earnest platitudes, smooth imitations of that lim- 
 ited sleep known as "common sense," and words 
 of self-reproach, because this trickery brought 
 back to him his old sense of power over his sur- 
 roundings and offered a subtle outlet for his hatred 
 of life. The physician ended by shaking his hand 
 with a genial respect and when evening came he 
 was given his freedom. 
 
 He returned to his home, repeating the soft 
 treachery of his words while his fists still longed 
 to lunge out at the faces in front of him, but the 
 shrewdness of a ghost determined to regain a 
 semblance of life by cleverly deceiving and pun- 
 ishing the people around it came to his rescue 
 and controlled his body. His parents had felt 
 wrathful at the presence of something which they 
 could only dimly see and which he made no effort 
 to clarify, but life had taught them to make a 
 god of submission, and a heavy tenderness mingled 
 with an alert fear crept into their posture toward 
 him. He trudged back to the loquacious, coarse 
 emptiness of his clerkship at the tobacco shop 
 and shunned the world that he had previously 
 
 192 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 inhabited, for he feared that if he met anyone 
 whom he knew he would feel again the irresistible 
 inclination to interrogate their throats, and he 
 knew that these impulses would only lead to his 
 own destruction. When he accidentally met some 
 acquaintance on the street, he would hurry on 
 like a nervous criminal, ignoring the other's 
 greetings. 
 
 He prowled about the city, still in search of a 
 violent dream that could offer its delusion of 
 reckless strength to the mutilated spirit whose 
 complaints drove him on. He ran to the soiled 
 raptures of prostitutes and sensually oppressed, 
 adventurous girls who could be picked up on the 
 streets, and gave them a twisted symphony of 
 blows, curses, whispered insinuations, lies, while 
 he revelled in the illusion of cruelty that was 
 lending a false reality to the thin futilities of 
 his mind and flesh. With a mixture of brutality 
 and delicately simulated caresses, he overawed 
 these women and they felt themselves in the 
 presence of a charming, abstracted fiend, whose 
 kaleidoscopic insincerity only made them long to 
 change it to a gesture of actual love. He sought 
 the company of thieves and hoodlums, and at first 
 they distrusted him because his restrained man- 
 
 193 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 ners and gently removed look were not proper 
 credentials, but when they saw how eager he was 
 for the impact of fists, and how he could take a 
 blow and rise with a grin of stunned delight, they 
 accepted him as an eccentric brother. They did 
 not know that these actions were not born of 
 courage, but were caused by a gigantic longing 
 for physical pain — pain that could shock his numb 
 spirit into a feeling of sharply hideous communion 
 with an actual world. 
 
 But finally this life began to weary him because 
 it could not reach the flimsy loneliness that stood 
 within him. He carried within him at all times 
 an audience of ghostly thoughts and emotions, 
 and they were at last becoming bored with the 
 stolen melodrama. He determined to practice an 
 economy in movements and words, and he walked 
 alone at night and on streets where the possibility 
 of meeting someone who knew him would be 
 distant. He watched the syncopated gliding of 
 people with the irritation of a stranger. The men 
 and women who drifted or bobbed along were 
 cardboard mannikins to him and he vainly tried 
 to give life to their flatness and lack of color. 
 Sometimes he would pause and touch his arm and 
 face, wondering at the odd inadequateness of their 
 
 194 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 presence. Olga had become a living but invisible 
 being who was constantly groping for him, with 
 eyes unused to the outlines of earth, and some- 
 times finding his shoulder in a fleeting and 
 accidental way. When this happened, he would 
 turn around abruptly and berate his inability to 
 extract her form from the concealing air. At such 
 times he would often speak to her. "Olga . . . 
 Olga . . . what is this unsought blindness that has 
 come to both of us?" he would cry into the night 
 air of a street. "A cruel chicanery ... a blurred 
 and simple pause ... a little fantasy within a huge 
 one? Am I a coward rolling in the mud that 
 stretches before a vast gate? Life seems a fan- 
 tastic conspiracy, panting and rattling in its 
 efforts to hide the emptiness beneath it . . . 
 Olga . . . take me to your burnished hermitage 
 ... I am tired." 
 
 He would walk on, trying to imagine what her 
 answer had been, and winning an elusive and 
 deliberately wrought consolation that stayed for 
 an hour and then gradually departed. His life 
 had settled into the recurrence of these reactions, 
 when a second invitation arrived from his wealthy 
 uncle in the southern city, and he had accepted 
 merely because he wanted a new arena for his 
 
 195 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 struggle with a discredited reality — fresher tar- 
 gets and a change in the illusion's surface. 
 
 And now he was seated in the train that slowly- 
 rolled through the outskirts of a southern city 
 and giving his eyes to the squalid negro section 
 that unfurled before him. . . . 
 
 196 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 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 years and he played 
 with dim memories of the man's appearance. 
 When he walked down the station platform he 
 found that his uncle, Doctor Max Edleman, was 
 waiting just outside of the iron gates. Doctor 
 Edleman was a man of sixty years, sturdily 
 rotund, with a tall body that was beginning to 
 be disgraced by its expanding paunch. His head 
 was unusually large and ruled by small blue eyes 
 and the sharply turned breadth of a nose. His 
 great, thick lips were tightly withdrawn to an out- 
 line of benign patience and his florid face ridiculed 
 the trace of wrinkles that had flicked it. His 
 greyish blonde hair was still fairly abundant, and 
 all of him suggested a man who was uniquely 
 intact because he had scarcely ever allowed life 
 to clutch him familiarly. Since he was an Alsatian 
 Jew, he kissed Carl carefully on both cheeks, and 
 
 197 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 this annoyed Carl, not from the usual masculine 
 reasons, but because he felt that this was a jocose 
 insult from a fantasy that despised him, but he 
 submitted with a flitting grimace. 
 
 He took Carl to an automobile and after they 
 had been driven away he smothered him with 
 questions. 
 
 "Your dear mother tells me that you have been 
 acting queerly of late," he said, in the heavily- 
 hieasured way of speaking he had. "You have 
 been refusing to speak to anyone and staying 
 away from home — bringing worry to your dear 
 mother. It seems to me that you have given 
 enough care and trouble to your parents, and 
 that it's about time that you acted like a normal 
 man. I understand that you have been dissipating 
 and going with dissolute people. You are twenty- 
 five now and there is no longer any excuse for 
 this wildness. What have you to say for your- 
 self?" 
 
 "Don't ask me to explain things that you 
 couldn't understand," said Carl, returning to act 
 in the falsely unpleasant play. "I have had a 
 great grief and I'm trying in my own way to 
 make it a friend of mine. If I tell you that your 
 questions bring back wounds, I am sure that you 
 will not desire to hurt me." 
 
 198 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 He gave his uncle words that would appease 
 and disarm him, while at the same time evading 
 his queries, and this game gave him a smooth 
 semblance of life. 
 
 "So-o, so-o, I have no desire to penetrate your 
 secrets," said Dr. Edleman, in a kindly voice that 
 feebly strove to comprehend. "I am simply advis- 
 ing you to pull yourself together. Show some 
 consideration for the people around you." 
 
 He continued to offer the benevolent adultera- 
 tions of his advice, and as Carl listened he 
 suddenly thought of a high-school teacher who 
 had once rebuked him for bringing to class a 
 theme entitled "Women Who Walk the Streets," 
 and with a vaporously swinging amusement in 
 his heart he almost felt human again. This 
 fantasy could hold a blustering smirk now and 
 then — its only extenuation. But the nearness 
 vanished as his uncle's voice became a swindling 
 monotone, angering him with its formal pretense 
 of life. Carefully, and with a ghostlike insincerity 
 that bribed his voice with lightness, he gave 
 words that could hold this man at arm's length. 
 The strain of adapting his words to the intelli- 
 gence of the man beside him brought him a closer 
 relation to the bickering phantasmagoria of men 
 
 199 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 and their motives without in any way summoning 
 his own thoughts and emotions. Dr. Edleman 
 felt that his nephew was skillfully attempting 
 to defend a selfish past and bringing into the 
 service of this motive a graceful keenness of 
 mind, but beyond this point Carl's words were 
 unable to affect him. 
 
 "I have always admired your brilliancy," he 
 said, "and I only wish that you would use it in 
 the right way. A young man must pay some 
 attention to the desires and opinions of older 
 people. It will be a glad day for me when I see 
 that you are using your talents to bring happiness 
 to other people. A glad day." 
 
 Carl gave a sigh to the grave dullness that 
 marched forth in his uncle's voice and meditated 
 upon the curious differences in sound with which 
 people petted their limitations and discretions. 
 These differences were known as words, and when 
 they pleased a great number of people they were 
 hailed as symbols of genius or power, but Carl 
 could see no distinction between any of them. 
 Like a horde of tired servants, they pranced to 
 the prides and hatreds of men and then returned 
 to their common grave, and only their exact 
 
 200 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 arrangement gave them a flitting assumption of 
 life. "What is the difference between this old 
 man and myself? Several keys to false doors of 
 thought and emotion, misplaced or lost in his 
 youth and found in mine." Through reiterating 
 these plausibilities he tried to give bulk and 
 texture to the fantasy of existence. 
 
 The automobile stopped before the Edleman 
 home, which was a large two-story structure — a 
 partial reproduction of the Colonial period modi- 
 fied to conform to the more exuberant inclinations 
 of an Alsatian Jew. Four broad, high wooden 
 pillars, painted white, rose over a wide veranda 
 and ended in a slanting roof of black slate, and 
 the walls were of red brick courted by an abund- 
 ance of vines. A large garden, with tons of fruit 
 trees and brilliant episodes of flowers, surrounded 
 the house and was enclosed by a level hedge of 
 shrubs and a low iron fence. An impression of 
 dreamlessly cluttered luxury, verging in spots 
 upon bland somnolence, proclaimed the emptjr 
 heart of the place, but it was almost a distinct 
 flattery to Carl, who had grown tired of aggressive 
 angles and plain surfaces. Here, at least, the 
 mirage held a sleek flirtation with bunches of 
 color and burdened curves. 
 
 20I 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 His aunt Bertha, a short, stout woman in a 
 gown of brown taffeta and white lace, welcomed 
 him in a babbling and languid fashion and showed 
 him to his room. She was a softly shallow woman 
 whose major interests were card parties and the 
 lingering intricacies of gossip. The flabby round- 
 ness of her face was in the last grip of middle 
 age and her mind was as scanty and precisely 
 glistening as the greyish-brown hair that slanted 
 back from her low forehead. After the dinner, 
 she hurried off to the mildly mercenary rites of 
 a bridge whist party and Carl was left to wander 
 idly around the garden. He sat on the grass 
 beneath a persimmon tree and played with lazy, 
 cruel thoughts in which he slapped a man's face 
 or tortured a woman's cheek, still moved by his 
 old mania to profane the empty dream which 
 life had become to him, forcing it into a vigorous 
 duplicate of reality. 
 
 The bright afternoon, with its myriads of 
 shrilly clear and hissing sounds, was like a 
 troubled falsetto rapture and he weakly fought 
 to bring it nearer to his senses. As he sat beneath 
 the tree he resolved to give his mind some labor 
 with which it could transform the vision to a 
 more solid picture, and he thought of the people 
 
 202 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 who would soon be embarrassing him with their 
 mouths and eyes. They were Jews of a kind that 
 had rapidly spread over the south. The older 
 people among them had migrated to the south 
 some forty years previously and had gradually 
 won large or comfortable fortunes by means of 
 their thriftiness and trading abilities. They were 
 now contented grand- and great-grand-parents, 
 surrounded by two generations of their offspring, 
 and all of them were strangely indifferent to the 
 austere mysticism for which the Jewish race is so 
 verbosely noted. Dreamless, voluble, self-assured, 
 they angled with their religion in a half-hearted 
 way and blackmailed, with money, the occasional 
 flutters of mental curiosity. They had picked up 
 several mannerisms of the south — softly drawling 
 voices and unhurried movements — and the only 
 things that distinguished them as Jews were the 
 curved gusto of their faces and the fact that they 
 mingled only with each other — a last, lukewarm 
 trace of loyalty left by the surge of centuries 
 of past incidents. 
 
 Carl went into the house and returned, with 
 paper and pencil, to his station beneath the per- 
 simmon tree. He strove to write a poem to the 
 woman whom he had lost. It was a torture that, 
 
 203 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 like a starved monster, devoured the softer spaces 
 within his heart. It was as though he were 
 endeavoring to compress the ruins of an entire 
 world, making them narrower and narrower, more 
 and more alive, until at last they formed the body 
 of a woman. The effort brought him an actual 
 physical pain; drops of sweat were born on his 
 forehead, and his spirit reeled like a mesmerized, 
 beaten drunkard. "All of life is a lie unless I 
 make her appear on this paper," he cried aloud 
 to the persimmon-tree leaves, for the lack of better 
 gods. He detested his own futility and sought 
 to avenge himself upon it. When the poem was 
 finished he fell into a troubled, plundered sleep 
 in which his consciousness busily made reports 
 that were unheeded. He could still see the trees 
 and flowers, but they were like the edge of the 
 universe miraculously brought near to his eyes. 
 Finally, with an effort like a straight line thrust- 
 ing aside several worlds, he roused himself and 
 read the poem. It failed to satisfy him; it was 
 a tangle of treacherous promises and pleading 
 fragments — the line of one of her arms, with 
 an ashen delicateness ; the nervously boyish 
 rebuke of her eyes; the tenuous defiance of her 
 heart; the curled merriments of her hair — frag- 
 
 204 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 merits fastened to a slip of white paper and 
 lacking the great surge of breath that could have 
 whirled them into a speaking whole. He had 
 written other poems to her and they had pro- 
 duced the same result ; but still, huddled under the 
 tree, he continued to write, much like a dying man 
 who has no choice save to gasp for breath, only 
 in his case it was a ghost that struggled to avoid 
 a second death. The ghost was seeking to escape 
 a final extinction. He wrote until the lengthened 
 shadow of the tree told him that he must return 
 to the house ; but it took him at least ten minutes 
 before he could censure his face and control his 
 breath. At last, with the thinly passive mask 
 once more adjusted and held by the slenderest of 
 threads, he walked from the garden. 
 
 At supper he met his cousin. Dr. Joseph Rosen- 
 stein, who was living at the Edleman home and 
 who treated him with a suspecting aifability. 
 The presence of a poet is always a vague challenge 
 to those people who feel that he is somehow at 
 variance with the complacent finalities of their 
 lives, but who cannot draw the difference into a 
 clearer antagonism. For this reason they try to 
 cover their distrust with a nervous and question- 
 ing amiability. After jovially advising Carl to 
 
 205 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 write a sonnet to a doctor, protesting to a great 
 admiration for the prettiness of poetry, and asking 
 Carl whether he didn't think that practical people 
 were also of some use in the world, Rosenstein 
 deserted the farce and began to discuss the tech- 
 nical details of an operation with Dr. Edleman. 
 Bertha Edleman uttered some placid remarks 
 concerning the possibility of Carl's writing short 
 stories that would bring him a great deal of 
 money; inquired after his parents in a detailed 
 but listless way ; and then, with more vigor, com- 
 menced to speak of engagements, marriages and 
 divorces within her immediate circle. Dr. Edle- 
 man, by turns waggish and blunt, presided over 
 the groups of corrupted words. Since Carl was 
 anxious not to provoke these people, he stooped 
 to the task of uttering pleasantly obvious remarks 
 in a timid and deliberate fashion, and since they 
 secretly felt that his work gave him a rank lower 
 than theirs, they liked the subdued and abashed 
 manner in which he spoke. 
 
 206 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 After that evening he managed to protect his 
 loneliness with clever words. He told the Edle- 
 mans that he was looking for material for short 
 stories and that he intended to roam about the 
 city; and, elated at his purpose, they did not 
 object. Since most of his relatives were still 
 displaying their dignity, jewelry, and card-playing 
 abilities at northern summer resorts, he found 
 it easy to be alone. 
 
 In the midst of his restless, empty wanderings 
 he often sat for a while in a little park that 
 rustled and nodded upon the top of a bluff over- 
 looking a broad river. There he would stare out 
 at the wide, yellowish-brown flat of water, and 
 the dull green convolutions of the distant shore, 
 and the water would become an ethereal canvas 
 where he painted fugitive salutes to the woman 
 who had fled from life's semblances. Under the 
 spell of a melting daze he would sit for hours, 
 almost unconscious of the fact that he held a 
 body of slowly breathing flesh. At one end of 
 
 207 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 the park the line of benches turned sharply in 
 toward the city, and this shaded place, guarded 
 by bushes and trees, was known as "Rounder's 
 Corner." It was frequented by thieves, drug 
 peddlers, sly, lacquered women and an occasional 
 vagrant, and they gathered there from twilight 
 on and drained the fierce insincerities of conver- 
 sation and whiskey, with sometimes the lucid 
 edge of cocaine. Since Carl came to this spot 
 only during the afternoons, he did not see these 
 people until, one evening, he managed to absent 
 himself from the Edleman home on the pretense 
 of desiring a trip on a river steamboat, and 
 strolled into the park. 
 
 He sat on a bench and looked around him, trying 
 to become interested in the immediate contortions 
 of the fantasy. One glance told him the identity 
 of the social circle into which he had dropped 
 and he felt a jerk of attention, for the more 
 openly rough and cruel people in life were to him 
 reflections of his ghostly self, spied in a coarsely 
 exaggerated mirror but none the less valid. Fresh 
 from the lazy inanities of the Edleman house, he 
 f felt a little baffled vigor — the ghost lamenting its 
 
 lack of exercise — and he longed to roll once more 
 in that plastic phenomenon which men insist on 
 
 208 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 calling mud. It was only through plastering him- 
 self with the concentrated moistness of earth that 
 he could force himself to believe, for a time, in 
 the reality of life, and he welcomed his chance 
 to repeat this process. He scanned the whisper- 
 ing, laughing, loose-faced people around him and 
 turned over in his mind different ways of 
 approaching them, since he knew how easy it 
 was to heap fuel upon their suspicions. 
 
 A woman dropped down beside him on the 
 bench. She was young in actual years — not more 
 than twenty -three — but her body had been slashed 
 by a premature herald of middle age and her 
 rounded face was too softly plump and wrinkled 
 a little under the eyes and below the chin. Youth 
 and age were stiffly twined about her in lines 
 that protested against each other. Her body was 
 short and held a slenderness that was unnaturally 
 puffed a bit here and there, giving an impression 
 of incongruous inflation rather than of solid flesh. 
 Her black hair was a plentiful mass of artificial 
 curls and pressed against a wide straw hat, fes- 
 tooned with tulips made of gaudy cloth, and she 
 was clad in loosely white muslin with a crimson 
 sash around her waist. The effect was that of a 
 school girl playing the part of a street walker 
 
 209 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 in an amateur theatrical and, if you looked at her 
 clothes alone, the illusion remained. It was only- 
 destroyed by a glance at her face, for the outward 
 costumes of reality are often unconsciously ama- 
 teurish, as though they were striving to obliterate 
 the professional aspect held by the faces of human 
 beings — a psychic confession. Men and women 
 can never quite memorize their parts in life and 
 their clothes sometimes express this absent- 
 mindedness. 
 
 As he looked at this woman Carl noticed that 
 her eyes were not those of the usual flesh 
 trader — shifting and infantile — but were filled 
 with a tense distraction. The mere sullen 
 aftermath of whiskey, or the departure of 
 a man? No, it almost seemed that she was 
 actually brooding over emotions that had removed 
 her leagues from the bench against which her 
 body was pressed. Eyes are often unwitting 
 traitors and they tell the truth more readily than 
 the rest of the face, or words, since human beings 
 are not so conscious of what their eyes are 
 announcing. The two holes in the mask of the 
 face are often transparent or careless admissions, 
 while the remainder of the face is immersed in 
 a more successful deception. Carl was interested 
 
 210 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 by the fact that this woman seemed to ignore 
 his presence and was staring straight ahead of 
 her. He began to believe that her indifference 
 was genuine and he watched her more closely. 
 Finally she tossed her head, with a gesture that 
 expressed the defiant return of consciousness, and 
 glanced at him. Then she threw him the usual 
 "Hello, honey," and with a disgusted grimace he 
 dismissed a certain ghostly audience within him, 
 telling it that the play would not begin. For a 
 while he spoke to her, throwing slang pebbles at 
 her with an oppressed exactitude and brushing 
 aside her lustreless insinuations, a little weary 
 of the unconvincing comedy. Suddenly the stunt 
 nauseated him and he fled back to his own meta- 
 phoric tongue. 
 
 "Do you see that woman passing by ?" he asked. 
 "She has a face half like a twitching mouse and 
 half like a poised cat. I have known such women. 
 They are continually robbing certain men of 
 emotions in order meekly to hand back their 
 thefts to other men. With a mixture of cruelty 
 and weak submission they entertain their own 
 emptiness." 
 
 He looked away from her, expecting a silence 
 or the affront of cracked laughter and preparing 
 
 211 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 to leave. Her answer swung his head toward her. 
 
 "You may be speaking to such a woman. Life 
 has undressed me to all people except myself, and 
 I don't know what I am. I think that I was bom 
 to be a nun, but something kicked me down a 
 dirty hallway and when I woke up there were 
 many hands reaching for me and it didn't seem 
 important to me whether they took me or not. 
 But I think that I was bom to be a nun. . . . 
 Does that interest you?" 
 
 He stared at her with his mouth almost describ- 
 ing a perfect and his eyes opened to a wild 
 uncertainty. For a moment he felt that they 
 were both quite dead and that her spirit had 
 been ravished by waiting words. 
 
 "In God's name, what have you been doing?" 
 he cried. 
 
 "Playing a part, with the assistance of your 
 indifferent slang," she said. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "I started out by talking to you as I do to 
 most men. You broke into a rough speech and I 
 parried as usual. The evening was commencing 
 in its usual convincing manner. Then I began 
 to see that you were acting. There was a strain 
 on your face, and sometimes you stopped in the 
 
 212 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 middle of a delicate simile. ... I knew that I 
 might be wrong, so I kept on talking as you 
 expected me to talk." 
 
 On her face was the smile of a beggar whose 
 tinselled metaphors have been pummeled and 
 disheveled by surface realities. The plump curves 
 of her face seemed to fit less snugly beneath the 
 flat deceit of rouge. 
 
 "I am a fool," he said. "Your eyes told me 
 something, but I spat upon it. I think that you 
 had better leave me." 
 
 "I have no intention of leaving you," she said. 
 
 They sat and stared at each other. 
 
 "Do you give yourself to different men every 
 night?" he asked, as though his sophistication, 
 in an instant curve, had retreated to an anxious 
 child long concealed within him. 
 
 "I give them what they are able to take, and 
 that is little. They want to clutch me for a time, 
 but I don't feel them unless they stop my breath- 
 ing. A man walks into a house, wipes his feet 
 on the mat, spits into one of the cuspidors, and 
 leaves with a vacant smile on his face." 
 
 "Why do you want them to come in?" 
 
 "They give me money for whiskey and leisure 
 time in which I can read. I've never been able 
 
 213 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 to find a simpler way of getting these things." 
 
 The explanation was clear and delicate to him. 
 
 "Of course, the whiskey makes you sneer like 
 a queen, and the books bring you affairs with 
 better men," he said. 
 
 "All that I want to do is to pray to my thoughts 
 with appropriate words, and every night until 
 two in the morning I pay for the granting of 
 this wish. . . . But I think that I was bom to be 
 a nun." 
 
 "I think that I was born to be a monk, covering 
 the walls of his cell with little images, all of 
 them contorting his bright hatred for a world," 
 he said. "I think that something also kicked me 
 into a mob of prattling marionettes, leaving me 
 exposed to the shower of unintended blows. I 
 have often looked behind me and vainly tried to 
 see who this first enemy was, but I am afraid 
 that he does not return until you die." 
 
 With their silence they continued the dialogue 
 for a time. 
 
 "Have you a man who takes your money and 
 kicks you?" he asked. 
 
 "No. Every now and then some dope peddler 
 pays me a visit, but I have a gun and I know 
 how to use it. I sent one of them to a hospital 
 
 214 
 
BLACKGUARD 
 
 once. They call me Crazy Georgie May and 
 they're always afraid of something that they 
 can't understand." 
 
 "I have a proposition to make to you," he said. 
 "We'll live together without touching each other 
 and each of us will be the monk and nun that he 
 should have been. I am a ghost who wants to 
 return to life and you are a living person who 
 wants to go back to the ghost that was kicked 
 into an insincere ritual of flesh. We'll erect a 
 unique monastery of thought and emotion, and 
 pay for it with the slavery of your hands or 
 mine. . . . Will you live with me in this fashion ?" 
 
 "Yes, if only to see whether it can be done," 
 she answered instantly. 
 
 They rose from the bench and walked away 
 together — a noble rascal and an ascetic prostitute. 
 
 215 
 
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