Moloch: Or, This Gentile World (8 page)
Read Moloch: Or, This Gentile World Online
Authors: Henry Miller
Tags: #Literary, #Romance, #Brooklyn (New York; N.Y.), #Fiction, #General
“Do you know what that means?” he asked. “No,” said Dave, “do you?”
“Well, read the
Inferno
and find out. Damn it, Dave, you want to get wised up. You can’t go on being an ignoramus all your life.”
“Aw hell!” grunted Dave, with a deprecating air, and trundled off like Florizel the Fat.
With Dave’s departure the two were left alone. The rest of the staff had disappeared. Moloch had formed the habit of remaining in the office for an hour or two after closing time, waiting for something to happen. His adventures usually began after five o’clock. Generally, one of his cronies dropped in for a chat. Sometimes a gang appeared and swept him out of the office like a cyclone. Frequently this period was taken up by the eccentrics whom he put to work and watched over with a cruel interest. With these he held long consultations in which he dipped freely and morbidly into their private life, gave hygienic advice, regulated their marital conduct, interpreted their dreams, allayed their discontent, studied their phobias and obsessions. Occasionally he borrowed money of them, which he repaid with interest. Or, he might accept their invitation to dine, or go to a show. If he thought there was an opportunity of philandering, he made it his business to call on their wives.... Some of the messengers were females. These he subjected to a rigid scrutiny when they made application for work. The addresses of the good-looking ones he kept in a memorandum book. When things got dull, he looked through these addresses and began calling them up— those with a star after their names first. Usually he was rewarded for his thoroughness.
The results of these observations and experiences he recorded with elaborate, painstaking efforts in a loose-leaf journal which he kept at the office. This journal also contained typewritten excerpts from the works of those authors whom he admired with an almost idolatrous fervor. The job of transcribing this material he entrusted to his secretary. It could hardly be said that he was unaware of the effect which these disclosures produced upon the mind of the clever, prurient virgin who acted as his secretary. She accepted the task with the serenity of a censor. Moloch awarded her the interest that a breeder might spend on a prize heifer.
Anticipations arose of utilizing the notebook as a springboard from which to plunge into a sea of more satisfying vicissitudes.
Meanwhile the loose, heavy yoke of marriage chafed. This fever of activity which consumed him, and drove him from one escapade to another, offering him knowledge, excitement, sexual gratification—what was it but a partially recognized rebellion against the stagnating influences of wedlock? He was unhappy with the woman he had chosen. She too was unhappy. They lacked something (was it vigor or understanding?) to repair the prosaic damages of erosion.
Moloch got out the battered-looking journal and began to scribble in it. Prigozi amused himself by snooping about—examining applications, mulling over the office correspondence— maintaining, as he did so, a running fire of sardonic comments concerning the slipshod practices employed.
Moloch’s grim concentration disturbed him. It was an affront to his ego.
“Humpfh!” he grunted. “What’s the item tonight—
Luther
?’
“No!” said Moloch, hoping to thwart any further inquiries by the inflection of his voice.
“When are you going to write that book? You have sufficient notes there to write
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
....
Hullo!” he chirped, looking up. “Here’s the reason for the decline now.”
Hari Das entered. He was in civilian clothes, and hatless. His glossy jet-black hair rested with luxuriant ease upon his slender shoulders. There was a serene, jubilant air about him. His manner verged on boldness, though it contained no vestige of the brash, aggressive qualities peculiar to Prigozi. Neither was it born of secret arrogance. A lofty indifference to the world—that more nearly approximated it.
This, then, was the “nigger” that Twilliger took exception to … old man Houghton’s “shine” … the self-appointed Redeemer of Mankind in the twentieth century!
Hari Das was lighter in color than most of his Indian confreres, and by all odds the most attractive. Women, who are better judges in these matters than men, declared him to be
astonishingly handsome. Almost unanimously their first exclamation of rapture proclaimed the charm of his perfect, gleaming white teeth. Perhaps that was why he laughed so frequently and so easily. It was a pity that he had ever condescended to don the hideous uniform of our Western garb. In his own regalia, as a member of the warrior caste, he presented a quite different front. One might easily visualize him in the role of member of Parliament, parrying suavely with the constipated intellects of the upper House- -juggling them like so many billiard balls. … In a cheap, ready-made suit a forlorn element creeps into this picture, for which he is not responsible, and which has as little to do with his personality as the frames one sometimes sees about a masterpiece.
“I came to tell you,” he began, and lapsed therewith into an amusing and wholly spontaneous account of his trials in Chinatown. The spotty, errant emphases he employed, in conjunction with his simple gestures, imparted a peculiar and altogether charming note to his utterances.
It was noticeable that although he had been introduced to Prigozi two days previously, when he first stopped into the employment office (Prigozi having introduced himself), he seemed to be only slightly aware now of the other’s existence. He observed the amenities by a grandiloquent wave of the hand. Whereupon he proceeded to ignore Prigozi completely. Whether this was a sign of contempt, or in line with his royal indifference, it was difficult to tell. Prigozi, of course, was irritated by this jeweled disregard. His blatant self-assurance, his flamboyant insolence, all the muddy arrogance of the fellow was swept off the board, as it were. To his extreme surprise, he eventually found himself listening respectfully and, as the tale proceeded, growing more and more overawed.
Hari Das had dropped in, as he explained to Moloch, simply to pay his respects before going off. He had no apologies to make for his conduct. He saw nothing reprehensible in his tardiness.
Moloch said nothing about the color line. In his most affable manner he alluded to the importance that was attached to death messages.
His remarks made little or no impression upon his listener. “In India one takes his time, and when one is already dead, of what use is it to hurry?” said Hari Das. Brushing swiftly over “this Anglo-Saxon absurdity,” he gave free rein to his impressions of Western energy and futility. What, he asked, was the ultimate value of these extravagant sacrifices in the name of speed?
Prigozi, who had been roughly revising his concepts of the weak-kneed Hindus during the course of this disquisition, thought the moment opportune to introduce a little dynamite. He had been aching to observe the reaction which the word “nigger” would induce. He drew his bow and shot the arrow home.
The two men looked at Hari Das with that absurd air of vacuity which people display when viewing the fragments of a precious vase which has slipped between their fingers. Moloch was furious, but said nothing. Indeed, it was too late to say anything. Prigozi had said everything that was necessary—and a few things that were unnecessary.
A tiny throatful of laughter, that had the chink of broken glass, broke from the disdainful lips of Hari Das.
“In India,” he exclaimed, “I am a problem. In England I am an educated nuisance. If the Americans choose to make a
nigger
of me, very well—let them! I do not care a damn. My difficulty is an economic one, not an ethnologic one.”
“Bully!” cried Prigozi, throwing his restraint to the winds.
A twinkle of amusement, that was also a reproach, flashed in Hari Das’ eyes.
“Let’s get out of here,” suggested Moloch.
Prigozi and Hari had taken to behaving like two statesmen who flatter each other assiduously after a prolonged session of profanity and vituperation. There was nothing to be gained by permitting these two to continue. Besides, he was only too familiar with Prigozi’s views. He knew his opinions on everything— from theories of “magic and religion” to birth control and conditioned reflexes. What he wanted was an intellectual debauch with this Nietzschean Oriental.
“How about going to the Olympic?” said Prigozi. The fact that “Mister Moloch” had the price of a burlesque show in his pocket made him almost certain that this innocent suggestion would be adopted with alacrity.
“No, no burlesque for me tonight,” said Moloch impatiently. “Here—take this, if you need some coin,” and he thrust a five-spot toward Prigozi.
Prigozi refused the money, not from reticence, but because he was unwilling to be shunted off in this manner.
“Come along, then, damn you!” said Moloch, ushering Prigozi out.
Hari Das had gone ahead and was waiting for them in the street.
As they emerged from the office, Prigozi mumbled something in Moloch’s ear which caused the latter to voice a vigorous dissent.
“Well, then,” said Prigozi, unabashed and abandoning his furtive gestures, “how about that secretary of yours? Can’t we manage to seduce
her
?
She looks as if she’s itching for it.”
Again Moloch shook his head. “You forget that I’m a married man,” he said facetiously.
Prigozi shrieked. “I always told you you were a god-damned hypocrite. Mister Moloch!”
Then, as if inspired, he took to dancing. Moloch wheeled slowly as Prigozi gyrated about him, observing the way the other’s fingers drooped and quivered, ever so delicately. He wondered if Prigozi had ever seen Toscanini, or performed a surgical operation.
A few pedestrians stopped to stare. Hari Das meanwhile leaned against a lamppost and studied the headlines of the
Evening Journal
.
He got a great kick out of the headlines. … He never read what was printed below.
IN THE SUBWAY HARI DAS RECEIVED AS MUCH ATTENTION
as if he were Genghis Khan suddenly come to life. Moloch was as far removed from the usual cares of an employment manager as an igloo from the equator.
They were not intoxicated. In the first place, neither Hari nor Prigozi had touched a drop when they entered the café after closing the office. Moloch had taken only a few glasses of gin, but those “few thimblesful” had produced the illusion of a rutilant Bakst curtain closing slowly over a drab backstage scene whose realism was not of the theater but of life, life as it is known to a Pirandello.
On this warm Crimean screen of velvet a cutback, translated from memory, bathed in vivid stews of color, and aching with promises that had never been fulfilled, projected itself. He became insensible of the clownish behavior of the man Prigozi standing beside him at the bar.
Indeed, Prigozi himself, the brass rails, the rubicund figure in the white apron whose back was revealed in the fantastically soaped mirrors—the entire imminent reality had melted into a snug, superheated bedroom. There was about this room the same befouling disarray, the same vile odors which we associate with the bottom of a birdcage. He saw again the woman called Blanche, before she had gone through the mock solemnities of the conjugal rite; she was lying on a crazy quilt in a crumpled silk dressing sack, green as the troubled Atlantic. Her lips exuded a flavor of burnt coffee and buttered cinammon toast. Her armpits were dark, darker than the deep olive of her neck and shoulders. He buried his head in one of the fragrant hollows with a long, deep kiss that left her quivering under the slow-curving caress of his body. Her long chestnut hair, electric with ardor, perfumed with vitality, enveloped him and tantalized him. He found himself climbing under the counterpane, his tongue sputtering with entreaties.
“I feel so ashamed,” whispers Blanche, as she lies languidly among the heaving pillows, pop-eyed with fright and expectancy. The word “marriage” is on her lips. He erases it with swollen affirmatives, almost stifling under the thick blankets. The distorted red patterns of the wallpaper are swimming in endless vibrations of heat.
In the midst of this reverie Prigozi nudges him. “What’s come over you?” He nods toward the bartender.
Moloch pays, gives Prigozi the change of a five-dollar bill, and dismisses him. He manages it so easily now. Not the slightest embarrassment.
“We’re going home,” he says, grasping Hari’s arm.
In the subway Moloch feels called upon to explain his behavior. “I had to get rid of him, Hari. He gets on my nerves sometimes. He’s like a bad breath. One can stand so much and then. …” He made a moue and looked around as if he wanted to expectorate.
Hari Das thought this frankness commendable. It was so un-Oriental. Moreover, he was beginning to perceive great possibilities in this friendship.
“I must tell you something about Blanche before we arrive,” said Moloch, apropos of nothing. “She may seem like a nightmare at first… somewhat inhospitable, understand? However, you mustn’t let that disturb you. It’s just her way. She’s really a fine woman. A little nervous, perhaps … has a worried look. Probably some glandular disturbance. A splendid musician, though.”
Hari Das tittered. Then he took a broken comb from his pocket and ran it through his greasy black hair.
“You know you’d make a wonderful Messiah, Hari? A veritable strap-hanging Savior, by George!”
Hari threw back his head and yawped.
“Our women adore Saviors, Hari,” Moloch continued. “Particularly when they’re handsome. By the way, you don’t suffer from delusions, do you? You don’t hear voices … or anything like that, you know what I mean?”
Hari accepted this as another one of Moloch’s little jokes. He enjoyed these sallies hugely.
“I should hate to believe you were setting up as another little Gandhi,” Moloch confided. “You’re too amiable to be another tin Jesus. Besides, this country is full of them.”
Hari’s response was lost in the scuffle attending their exit from the subway. They had only a few blocks to walk from the station. Hari appeared to be fascinated by the variety of churches they passed in review. He craned his neck to gape at the gargoyles which leered at the empty streets. Just before they reached the house he stepped to the gutter and blew his nose with two fingers.
Moloch was pondering meanwhile on the reception they would receive, praying that his spouse would make a pretense at civility. Devil take her! He meant to enjoy the evening despite her malingering.
He pushed the button and assumed an air of sangfroid. An extraordinary greeting took place.
“Good evening!” he brought out blandly.
“
Mrs. Moloch?
This
is
Mister Moloch
…
friend husband. Dropping in for a little
friendly bite. Sorry we’re late…. May I introduce my esteemed friend, the late Maharajah of Lahore? Swami—
my wife!
”
He made a low bow to smother his hysterical laughter.
Hari saluted the woman with his usual grace. Blanche grasped the proferred hand stiffly, looked him over as if he were a rare guignol, and stepped back with a tight-lipped expression to admit them.
“
The mansion
,”
said Moloch, beaming expansively, as if to communicate a moiety of his geniality to that hatchet with the canary-bird mouth. Blanche looked on with undisguised disgust as he prattled away.
“HOME!!! The sanctuary of repose. A cozy hearth, old friends, old wine….!” He spread his arms in the Shakespearean manner. “And above all, the good wife who awaits with eagerness the husband’s homecoming.” He turned his back on his wife. “Well, Hari, not such great shakes, the place,
what?
A little untidy … no servants, you see. Blanche hasn’t had a chance to do any housecleaning this week.” (He said this to intercept her apologies. His manner conveyed the impression that he was rendering her a favor.) “Believe me, Blanche here is a really excellent hausfrau when she chooses to be. To be or not to be—that’s our great domestic problem, isn’t it, old battle-horse?”
Blanche, who was neither “an old battle-horse” nor “an excellent hausfrau,” had daggers in her eyes. Her fingers were ten convulsive talons. They were by no means the well-kept digitals of a paramour. The nails were short and tough. Splendid independent finger movement—for the Hungarian rhapsodies.
“Excuse me,” she said, turning to Hari, “my husband is drunk, I see.” Her voice was bitter as tansy.
Hari flung both arms up. “Not at all, not at all,” he protested. “I shouldn’t be here if I thought he were drunk.”
Blanche perceived that she had two monsters to deal with.
“Well,” she said, “drunk or sober, I suppose you two want something to eat.”
Moloch was undaunted. He grabbed Hari’s coattail.
“Now isn’t that thoughtful of Blanche? Didn’t I tell you she was a cherub?” He turned to Blanche. “Of course, my dear…
of course
we want something to eat. We came home expressly to have dinner with you this evening.” He gazed at her ecstatically. Then he lowered his voice, affecting a new tinge of irony, if irony it could be called. “And where is our darling child this evening …
that jewel of your loins?
Hari Das could no longer restrain himself. He had done his best, up to this point, to show discretion, to appear aloof and disinterested, as though this fantastic colioquy were taking place on the planet Neptune. He looked at Moloch helplessly. Moloch answered his appeal with a comical expression that beggars description, and turned the hydrant on Blanche once again.
“The supper is not ready, you say?”
She hadn’t said anything of the kind.
“Too late?” He simpered. “My, my! What difficulties life places in our path! Well, Hari, the maharanee has spoken. It’s bacon and eggs for us, I see. Well, well, our old friend, bacon and eggs. Too bad, too bad!” He wagged his head with gross solemnity.
The apologies that Blanche endeavored to make for her husband’s conduct gave Hari Das an insight into the private life of his newfound friend. He listened with such grave sympathy, with such a
respectful
mien, that Blanche soon found herself apologizing for more than she had intended.
“I never know when he’s coming home,” she rattled on, intoxicated with the variety of her husband’s peccadilloes. “He doesn’t even bother to telephone me. Sometimes he walks in on me like this with a gang … yes, a gang. And then he has impudence enough to get angry with me for not waiting on his rowdies hand and foot.” She stamped her foot feelingly. “As though I could ever welcome his queer idiots.”
“Queer idiots?” Hari repeated after her.
Moloch spoke up. “I told you Blanche was a gem, didn’t I?
That’s just her way of making you welcome. She means to say
that you’re a gentleman—you’re not a bit like the other rough
necks. Why, my dear Blanche, I should say you
are
entertaining a gentleman. My good friend, the maharajah, has royal blood
in his veins. You’ve got to have royal blood to be a maharajah—isn’t that so, Hari? Just the same, he’s not above eating bacon and eggs, are you, Swami? And Im’ not above making them for you, either. Swami, spill a little Hindustani while I prepare the feast. But let the talk be as excellent as the bacon and eggs!”
He dragged the two of them into the kitchen, shoved his wife into a chair, and commenced rattling the dishes in the pantry. He had forgotten to remove his hat. It was tilted over one eye.
“Now, Hari,” he bubbled, emerging with a frying pan which he flourished like a short-order book, “you tell friend wife all about the famine and pestilence in India.”
Blanche made a contemptuous grimace and adjusted her skirt.
Friend husband started to caper around her with the frying pan.
“Oh, Moon of My Delight! Gaze upon this jewel of ————*
*Editor’s note: A line of text is missing from the only known existing manuscript.
“Does your husband act this way … er… frequently?” Hari asked. He was at a loss to label Moloch’s conduct without giving offense, but he also wished to absolve himself of all share in this brutal baiting.
Blanche answered in a subdued voice, “Most of the time I think I’m living with a lunatic.”
“Poltroon, my dear, poltroon!” Moloch put in.
“He has no sense of decency, no respect—for me, or for anything. He’s a vulgar, coarse fool.”
She sat there stolidly, making no further attempt to prolong the conversation. It was the attitude of a dumb brute waiting for the ax to fall on its neck. A sort of grim, pathetic, God-help-me air about her. Even Moloch was touched.
He made an attempt to kiss her which she frustrated by giving him a vigorous push.
“You can’t undo your mischief with a kiss,” she hissed. “Leave me in peace, that’s all I ask of you.”
This outburst pained Moloch beyond words. He was like the criminal who hears the words of the sentence that is being pronounced but is dreaming all the while of the day he went fishing
thirty-seven years ago—how beautiful the stream looked in the splashing sunlight, the melody of a bird, his own innocent dreams.... What he wanted to say was this:
“Forgive me, Blanche. I’m a wretch. Christ! I don’t want to go on hurting you, but you make me behave this way … with your coldness, your suspicions, your …”
Instead, he asked her in a weary voice if there was any mail. “Is there nothing from Burns?”
She shook her head passively.
“Nothing?” he repeated.
“There’s this,” she answered in a dull voice.
He looked at the envelope incomprehensibly. The handwriting was unfamiliar. He tore it open. Another envelope was inside, folded up within the letter. He looked at it vacantly. There was printing on it:
SHRINE CHURCH OF OUR LADY OF SOLACE CONEY ISLAND, NEW YORK
It was about the annual novena to our Lady of Solace in preparation for the feast of her annunciation “Dear Friend: During
this solemn nine days’ prayer, Our Lady of Solace, who is never invoked in vain, will be petitioned for favors including spiritual needs, the sick and infirm, prosperity, positions, success in undertakings, happy marriages, the welfare of expectant mothers, vocations, and whatever else may be desired by those who seek Our Blessed Mother’s help.”
He flung the letter aside without finishing it. “Somebody’s playing a prank,” he thought. Now he noticed another envelope, much smaller than the others, with four rows of dotted lines:
KINDLY BURN A VIGIL LIGHT!
For a Novena................................................$1.00
“Bah! The dirty rascals!” he muttered. “I wouldn’t give them
a nickel, not even if they promised to get me out of Purgatory.”
No one paid any attention to his mutterings. Blanche tried to
make herself inconspicuous by busying herself with the cooking. Hari was rummaging through the books which were heaped on the china closet.
Moloch collapsed in the easy chair which had been dragged into the kitchen. Anything he had any use for he kept in the kitchen. It was the only room in the house he cared to live in.
His thoughts returned to Ronald Burns out in North Dakota. Why the devil was Burns so silent? He missed those huge bundles of mail which used to pass between them. Ten pages of enthusiasm for Dreiser, an essay on
The Bomb
,
reams about Dostoevsky … almost a little book on
The Idiot
alone.... What
was
the matter? Had Blanche come between them? Had she been writing Burns about him … spreading calumnies?
One can bear so many things if only there is one in the world to call a friend.
He thought of that line in the Egyptian’s letter: “There must be a humanitarian soul in which to deposit your pains and sufferings. …” God, that was a scream when he read it. But it was no joke! Ronald Burns had brought him the one friendship that he cared about. And now that was dissolving, apparently.
Ronald Burns was a musician and a litterateur. For three months he had shared the glories of existence with Dion Moloch and his wife. His return to North Dakota left those two individuals where he had found them—stranded on the mudflats of matrimony. For a time they had bobbed blissfully in the deep swift tide of companionship; then the tide had ebbed and they were left in the mud, stuck like scows.
Was Blanche in love with Burns? Moloch was ready to believe so. Was Burns in love with Blanche? That was more important. It made no difference to him what happened between the two so long as their friendship was not destroyed. If Burns wanted his wife— excellent! Come and get her! He could think of no happier solution of his difficulties. But if Burns wanted her, why then had he returned to North Dakota? Was he afraid to face the truth? Was it fear of hurting
him
?
Had they no eyes, these two? Couldn’t they see he had stepped out of the way to give them free room?
The marginal notations, and the long list of words piled up in
the back of each book which Hari Das discovered in browsing among Moloch’s slender collection, brought forth a series of critical appreciations that dissipated Moloch’s retrospections.
Of a sudden Hari Das gave a loud exclamation of joy and astonishment. With reverent fingers he clasped a worn volume and pushed it under Moloch’s nose.
“Now,” he cried, “now I know you cannot be an utter scoundrel!”
“So he had already accepted me as a scoundrel?” thought Moloch, somewhat cooled by the other’s effusiveness.
Hari thumbed the book eagerly, examined Moloch’s penciled notations, smiled, applauded silently. He skimmed through it with such feverishness as to make one believe he expected to find a treasure at the end.
“You do recognize beauty,” he exclaimed. “I can see that!”
His words startled Moloch and roused him to a pitch of unbridled enthusiasm.
“Stop!” he cried, getting up from the easy chair. “We can’t rush on this way. I want to say something to you. I can’t let your words go unchallenged.”
He was a bundle of excitement now.
“You were speaking about beauty. Yes, there is a little of it left in me … a little that my wife never sees.”
He spoke of himself in a brutally detached way. Blanche, their marriage, the cluttered kitchen in which he paced feverishly (like a tiger whose cage is not only irksome but too small to turn round in)—all this he seemed to dismiss with a wave of the hand as the detritus of another incarnation.
“Yes, Mukerji … Mukerji!” he pronounced ecstatically. (It was a volume of the latter’s that had precipitated this outburst.) “Yes, Hari,
there
is beauty to ponder on. Great soul-spluttering beauty! There is a man who should have been trumpeted forth ages ago. He makes India vivid, palpable—and yet ethereal, in her holiness. When I put down that book I wept…. Oh, you may shout and rave about your Mahatma Gandhi squatting on his emaciated legs and mumbling economic profundities larded with Vedanta fiddle-faddle. But I tell you, Gandhi may sit on his
carbuncled can for another generation to come and never approach this poetry, this sublime beauty of Mukerji’s that stirs me…. I don’t know why I mention the man Gandhi at all. He annoys me, that’s the truth of it. A sort of dry, statistical Christ, forever on the verge of departing this life and forever being resuscitated by his ridiculous fasting and praying. With one foot in the belly of the eternal, he lectures the world about putting its house in order. My God! All that damned nonsense about non-cooperation and spinning wheels! No, give me Mukerji every time. Those Indian nightfalls of his—’descending like an avalanche of soot.’ The Taj Mahal’s ‘sigh fixed in marble.’
“Do you remember, Mari, that description of the humble door of a peasant bathed in the violet light of sunset? Or that unforgettable glimpse of the Ganges when he plunges into the tepid waters to hold discourse with the holy man? Imagine, if you will, two Baptist persons floating down the Mississippi with nothing on but tights. Can you picture them stirring up a wet fervor over the Old Testament?”
Hari Das broke into a loud guffaw.
“Unfortunately,” Moloch continued, “for most of us India has no more reality than an opium dream. When the feeble Mahatma sets up his caterwauling with a throatful of statistical disclosures he gives the world a distinct shock. Who wants to know about the millions of Untouchables, the forty-nine warring sects and tongues, the endless scheme of castes and fakirs, of filthy caves and whoring temples? No, the world prefers to believe that India is not only a land, ninety percent of whose population is continually on the verge of starvation, a land ravished with cholera and scurvy, but something more, something beyond and above all the confusion of massacres, vice, legislation, and crass ignorance. When the swollen white bullocks of Siva have vanished, when the drum-tight paunches of the Brah-mans have disappeared, together with their learned tracts on the digestive organs, what remains of India will still constitute, I feel, a nickelodeon of mystery, horror, and fanaticism. India will always be the place where religion forms the prime daily constituent of man. The sons of India will never permit religion to become the cheap, fractional thing with which the European is content. In their hands it will remain forever a peculiar, intangible earth-product, a something that will outlast our ‘struggle-buggies’ and ‘wind chariots,’ the loudspeaker and the high forceps. Ten thousand years hence, when the world will have been made sick and safe for democracy, and every Jake has his Annie, the dawn will still come up like thunder out of China ‘cross the bay.
And down the virgin flanks of Mount Everest there will stream rivulets of sapphire!
In that respect your cosmic loafers prophesy correctly. Then, indeed, shall we be able to dispense with town cars and Grand Opera, with elevators and subways, with concrete factories and Babylonish architecture, with barbershop chords and contraceptives that don’t contracept…. Upon my word, there’ll be nothing left of this modern world but a stench. There won’t be left a bottle of ketchup, or a Bromo-Seltzer!”
How much further Moloch would have pushed his imagination the Lord only knows. Blanche had been signaling him throughout this harangue to sit down and partake of the meal, which was ready at the beginning of his speech. Her manner, as she pushed the hasty meal before them, was that of a keeper in a lunatic asylum. She detested these discussions which never got one anywhere and which always ended in the larder being cleaned out. None of these “savants” ever thought of bringing so much as a layer cake along. They came equipped with looking-glass theories, speeches all wool and a yard wide, and—enormous appetites. If they addressed her at all it was only to ridicule her in some sly manner.
Blanche wondered therefore very justly what manner of individual the swarthy gentleman might be who sucked his bacon and eggs like oysters on the half shell.... She had not long to wait.
Hari Das had listened patiently to Moloch in order to be assured of the same courtesy when he took the notion to flap his wings and “bombinate in the void.” First of all—with what seemed like Oriental suavity—he extracted a calling card from his wallet and laid it gravely on the table. Moloch picked it up and scrutinized it:
“Dean of the Oriental Academy? Hm! And where is this institution located, if I may ask?”
Hari stifled his mirth. “The Academy, I am sorry to say, is not yet a physical fact. So far I have only the cards, as you see.”
“Well, that’s an auspicious start,” said Moloch, with comic gravity.
Blanche sniggered openly.
“My friend,” Hari went on, “it is one of my ideals to organize in this Western hemisphere an institution similar in aim and feeling to that universal seat of learning which Tagore has established at Shantiniketan. I wish to break down the stupid prejudices which divide your world from mine. I want to see in America—because, in the last analysis, America is the only place to try such an experiment—a university where every culture, every people, will receive its due. I want to abolish forever that circular hypothesis of Greco-Roman origins. The Chinese must have their share of glory, and the Arabs; we must recognize the great contribution of the Slavs, the Negro races, the Jews, the Malayans …”
Moloch wondered especially what it was the Malayans had contributed to the great stream of civilization, but he held his tongue.
In estimating the task which confronted the founder of such an institution never once did Hari Das touch upon such prosaic requisites as money, advertising, football teams, or such perquisites. Did he expect this eclectic institution to flourish without an Alumni Association? What would take the place of football and regattas?
Religion?