Moloch: Or, This Gentile World (37 page)

The train sped on through the miserable lands of the Pilgrims which he had blotted out. Hands he could not see pawed monotonously over the looms and lasts; women with flaccid
breasts waited in dirty hovels for the whistle to blow that they might pick up the thread of life again; lean-visaged, hard-fisted Yankees were breaking their backs over stony potato patches, their souls as warped and twisted as the barren soil that nourished them; bloodless spinsters licked the spittle from their prattling lips, gooey with gossip, cancerous with hate and envy; village parsons, narrow and limited as their cabin’d confines, raised scrawny pious hands over the wickedness of a sinful people.

Somewhere in the midst of this cultural blight a mother and child were waiting for him. A lover was stretching out her arms, her breasts big with longing. He could see her heart exposed and bleeding, like the religious decoration on a alabaster virgin.... “Dearest boy,” she had written, “you are so thoughtful, so good to me … you mean so much more than you can ever realize. I want so much to make you happy. I do so want to prove to you the depth of feeling which I have for you—but I cannot! I want you always for just my own, but if I cannot have you— well, my happiness will be in seeing
you
happy. You dear, good boy—how I love you!”

The afternoon was pouring through the window of the train, touching his quivering lids with golden wands. The royal emissaries of the Lord were beckoning to his spirit; they bade him open his eyes and greet the pageant of the soil. At that moment he felt himself to be but an infinitestimal particle of a universe wheeling through the trackless space. He opened the volume which lay in his lap. A single paragraph sufficed. It was impossible to go on....

“The prosody of the stars can be explained in a classroom by a diagram but the poetry of the stars is in the silent meeting of soul with soul, at the confluence of the light and dark, where the infinite prints his kiss on the forehead of the finite, where we can hear the music of the ‘Great I Am’ peeling from the grand organ of creation through its countless reeds in endless harmonies.”

The deep, bituminous snorts of the engine were the echoes of a thunderous celestial music that rocked the town and its drowsy inhabitants. He clung ecstatically to the cushioned seat as the
dripping, iron flanks of the monster grazed their way through the edges of the little Massachusetts town. The babble rising up out of the coach sounded to his ears like the frail, bleeding notes of a peaceful oblivion. His muffled flesh dimmed the roar of frantic trumpet calls. His soul was a broken shadow dancing over a precipice....

For three days and nights they celebrated the marriage of the flesh. On the fourth day he could no longer put off his return. He was in jubilant spirits, his soul set free and soaring. Little Edda swayed unsteadily in her tiny bare feet and lisped in a quailing voice, “Goodbye, Daddy.” In his absence Blanche had taught her to say a number of pretty things. The night of his arrival they had stood over her crib together and listened to the precious gurgling sounds issusing from her tired little throat. They were sounds no father could resist. How proud he felt over this tiny bundle of flesh, and a mist came over his eyes. What was there in life to equal this? “Excuse me,” he said to Blanche, and rushed into the bathroom to hide his sobs.

Now he was bidding Blanche farewell, their hearts united in peace and love. She clung to him and drew him back inside the doorway for one final seal of affection. She whispered something in his ear. He blushed. Then the door closed behind him softly, like a curtain descending on an audience hushed and lacrimal. … His fingertips throbbed with the remembrance of her tinglish flesh.

When he had ridden a little way he opened his bag to look for some trifle and discovered to his great surprise a gift from Blanche. It was a small volume of Hamsun’s called
Victoria
.
In the flyleaf Blanche had traced this message;

“I am a grotesque written upon an old oak leaf vomited by a storm in late winter.”

He swallowed this cruelly beautiful tale at one gulp. This berserker, with the heart of Strindberg and the neariness of Dos-toevsky, lacerated his tender heart. He reviewed the closing pages of the book once more. What a monument to frustrated love, that last letter of Victoria’s!

“Dear Johannes,” she wrote, “when you read this letter I shall
be dead O God, if you knew how I have loved you, Johannes.

“I have not been able to show it to you, so many things have come in my way, and above all my own nature…. If I got well again now I would never be unkind to you anymore, Johannes. How I haVe cried and thought about that! Oh, I would go out and stroke all the stones in the street and stop and thank every step of the stairs as I went by and be good to all…. My life is so unlived, I have not been able to do anything for anybody, and
this failure of a life is to end now And today I was thinking —
how would you take it, I wonder, if I came straight up to you in the street one day when I was nicely dressed, and did not say anything to hurt you as I have done, but gave you a rose which I had bought on purpose? .. . Ah, Johannes, I have loved you, loved only you all my life. It is Victoria who writes this and God is reading it over my shoulder.…”

He thought and thought and thought about this heartrending drama that was being enacted all over the world, wherever man and woman came together and whispered the piteous, tear-laden words that crushed them and raised them up and exalted them before God Almighty. He sat helplessly, blinded with tears, making himself small in a corner of the seat against the window. He wept for himself, for Blanche, for Johannes, for all the world … for all who have or ever will be touched by the insanity of love. The need to say something to Blanche, to call out to her, to get down on his knees and scream out his love, seized him by the throat.

Meanwhile Blanche was sitting in a little room in a squalid Massachusetts town; she was hypnotized by a sheet of blank writing paper soaked with tears. The pen rested in her hand, waiting for the tears to dry. She could not hear him screaming his love … he was so far away now, and the earth was so full of groans and wailing.

That night, when Dion Moloch reached his cheerless lodging, his brain was afire. He was determined to put an end to his vagabond days, to leave off the foolish role he had chosen, and strike out in deeper, unknown waters. He spoke aloud to himself. “What has my life amounted to? What am I living for?” He went
on muttering to himself with clenched fists. “Do something—no matter how mad, no matter how terrible! Say something to the world: answer life with life. Strike out. .. free yourself from the clutches of a comfortable existence. …”

It was imperative to tell his thoughts to someone. With feverish energy he sat down and put his crazy thoughts on paper. He addressed them to his wife.

“Dear Victoria,” he scribbled. “What have you done to me? I am naked and lost in a forest of pines. My heart is an Easter morning. What terrible, beautiful things are happening to me inside! Black rivulets of pain are pouring from the open wounds in my heart which your love cauterized only a few hours ago. This world is my world, my stamping-ground. I must run free, mad-hearted, bellowing with pain and ecstasy, charging with lowered horns, ripping up the barricades that hem me in and stifle me. I must have room to expand … vast, silent spaces to charge in so that my voice may be heard to the outermost limits and shake the unseen walls of this cruel universe. I must do something, dear Blanche, dear
Victoria
....
No longer can I go on as a cog in a wheel. Let me implore you to help, to save me from this daily degradation.

“Only now it has dawned on me what life can hold. I feel all life rising up in me, shouting Hallelujah!

“It is I, your husband, writing this. Not Johannes. Yes, I read your inscription on the flyleaf … “Something vomited by a storm in late winter.” I prefer, however, to think of page 39, on which it is written:

”‘Ah, Love turns the heart of man into a garden of fungus, a luxuriant and shameless garden wherein mysterious and immodest toadstools raise their heads.’“

A GAUNT BARE OAK WITH BLACK-AND-PURPLE BOUGHS
 drew a dojo grotesque shadow on a neighboring wall. Moloch thought of chesspieces he had seen in the museum, rugged Yakut figures with horses like that crazy shadow.

He had returned to his room after posting the letter to his wife and was now gazing idly out of the window wondering how to while away the tedium of the brief interval before bedtime. The profound silence weighed on him and drove his thoughts into strange realms. He thought, for instance, of the austere and vicarious devotions of the monks in the Buddhist lamaseries in the Himalayas, where for centuries it has been the custom of these recluses to get up in the middle of the night and pray for all who sleep so that men and women all over the world, when they awake in the morning, may be purified and begin the day with thoughts that are pure, kind, and brave. He thought, too, of
that ill-fated genius Gauguin, who in the midst of his career had been reduced to the ignominy of pasting advertisements on the walls of the Gare du Nord. Gauguin had once said: “The duty of the artist is to affirm the dignity of life.” Very well, then, was he prepared to go ahead and break his neck in order to affirm the dignity of life.

The dignity of life! The majesty of the phrase invoked a consciousness of suggestions forever denied the vehicle of words. The words were like a filament separating the palpable from the impalpable. They created the image of a sensuous world, a world beyond all expression or analysis, neither of the intellect wholly, nor of the senses.

He was seized with an inexplicable and overwhelming desire to rush down to the waterfront, to get down on his knees under the dilapidated elevator structure whose splintered limbs dangled and groped for the cold waters of the river. He wanted that very instant to be translated to the spot so that he might look above him, in dazzled awe, at the somber fretwork of the Brooklyn Bridge, that airy Titan’s span over which a profilerous cortege shuttles with muffled scraping and the sizzling drone of an ocean of Vichy. He wanted to see the bridge lights flaring with cold luminosity, shedding fantastic naphtha gleams on the swollen tidewater deep below.

Time and again, in midnight mood, he had stolen down to the water’s edge to throw open his nerves and arteries to the brutal splendid of this shadowy nocturne. Now, in his mind’s eye, for a transient, fractional interval (during which a world may be born and die again), it loomed before him, bulk and shadow, a serrated cardboard megalith floating in eerie phantasmal configuration. Towers of steel and masonry arose—sea-forms glistering in moonfire and spume, shaking off through crest and spire their sea-trove of chrysoprase, chalcedony, sardonyx. A torpid, myriad-shaped dream demon wriggling in sea-foam and star-shimmer, spouting twisted gouts of blood and mud up into the blue-black vault above.

And in the midst of this seizure his mind suddenly raced back and presented him with the image of Hari Das lying on the
freight siding, his beautiful brown body cold and stiff, pumped full of embalming fluid. The cold immobile lips had once boasted: “My highest pride consists in not-standing-on-solid-earth; the principle of my philosophy is the ultimate principle of the universe, which is NO-Principle. … I boast of my system being fluid, gaseous, capable of evaporating.”

Golly, how Hari once could laugh! What ever made it possible for a man to laugh so heartily? He recalled a story he had told Hari once—it was about a corpse. It seems the undertaker had undressed the corpse, but forgot to remove the socks. Fancy shoveling a man under with a dirty pair of socks! Perhaps they had laid Hari out—he was only a nigger—without placing a clean silk hankerchief in his breast pocket....

Midnight. The last act of
The Cherry Orchard
for Fulton Ferry. Battered hulks snoozing in velvet slips. Done with the sea, inviting corruption. The ferryhouse, crumbling in the shadows, more grim, more ghastly than Caesar’s gutted corpse.

Farther on, up the quay, the
Troubador
lolls. She is just in from Curaçao, ten thousand bags of coffee in her hold. Her bottom is painted crimson, and about her tremulous white belly is an azure band. Hawsers and cables fix her gleaming prow to coppered stanchions that dot the pier and quay. Whirling constellations of stevedores transporting the odorous freight to the belching maws of warehouses a stone’s throw away. Perched eerily above the vomit-hold, checkers are busily engaged working out the arithmetic of commerce. Queues of abbreviated motor trucks straggle through the blue calcium light over slithery, splintered planks. The wharf is alive with cranes, hand winches, bales, stumbling figures in blue denim, fat-bellied tuns, derricks, masts, and yardarms. A swirling, gurgling, full-crested tide leaves the mossy flanks of the wharves with glistering plashes of cabbage-green water. Bracing odors of tar and seaweed iodize the lungs. The
Troubador
squeals and grunts as she rubs the dock-timber like a boar in rut. Impervious and aloof, defaming the screaming
silence of midnight flaps the Union Jack, wharf rat’s symbol of power and greed.