Broken Necks/Nocturne
It is easy to think in the streets at night. So I sometimes walk about the city long after the fat world has gone to sleep. I have, like a great many other people whom I do not know, a curious lack of emotion. This thing is called restlessness. In the streets at night my unrest becomes a mild and gentle sorrow, and gives birth to numerous adjectives. I walk on and on and the adjectives form themselves into remarkable thoughts that sometimes startle me and cause me to forget to listen to the castanets of my heels upon the lonely pavement.
The little greedy half-dead are in their beds. The night, like an army, possesses the city, swarms upon the buildings. In my walking I have a habit of likening the night to different things. It is a little game that diverts me, and also causes me to forget to listen to the sound of my heels upon the lonely pavement. Later I try to remember these images that came to me as I was walking, and curse myself for an idiot and a profligate. For the night has a way of making a careless and unselfish lover even of a poet.
On this night I walked with my thoughts full of the grimaces of the little greedy half-dead become now so preposterously silent. Through the empty labyrinths of stone the centuries sighed their desolation. Yellow and lonely advertisements burned here and there above invisible roofs, and I observed that the buildings which were so important by day, the great perforated rectangles of stone, the streets that fulfilled the mighty functions of traffic, lay under the stars like some gloomy, useless toyland. The city was an anachronism in the night. Silence with its dark and enigmatic face stared at the sky. The moon made inanimate blue fireflies of the windows.
What a racket there was in these streets by day. A rumble and a mumble and a bang, bang, bang. The shuffle of feet like the sound of a harsh wind. And I remember having watched the smoke of factories toppling at a precise angle out of chimney mouths and drawn in grey-black awning stripes across a blue sky, and the little greedy half-dead with their endless faces and their innumerable hats and their indomitable complacencies crawling as usual along the treadmill of time and vastly excited about it.
But now the immemorial smear of gestures had gone to bed. The millions had taken off their clothes and lay silent in the immemorial and hairy democracy of their skins. There was something beguiling in the thought that all the countless and unnecessary people I saw during the day were practically naked at that moment. Stretched on their bellies and their backs they lay in fantastic imitation of their sincerer brethren packed away under the earth.
It was night and the world was almost rid of its race. There remained only the figures like myself, the isolate and furtive figures of the night that move here and there in the shadows. What a melodramatic company we are. A few murderers standing like bold merchants on desolate street corners. A few prostitutes with the most practical of intentions. And a little scattered army of the uncatalogued. The fat world sleeps with its window cautiously opened three inches, for it is autumn and chill, the while we move about adventuring on the treadmill.
Perhaps I lied when I said I was a person with a curious lack of emotion, or boasted. For there was in me as I walked this night the knowledge that I had been growing older. My thoughts were such that I stopped to wonder, under the menacing shadow of what had been a great building, why it was that old people were not always weeping. Already I had begun to think of youth, a dreary omen.
I walked on until I came to the climax of architectural detail that is called the heart of the city. Here the night seemed broken into great lumps of shadows. The curious hollow pallor like the light of vacant silver eyes hung about the shafts of stone. It was as if the night had found itself unable to efface the rumble and the mumble and the endless faces of the day. They persisted in this dead and hollow gleam like a shout that has just died, or eyes that have just closed. The streets and their upward spread of fan-like temples, the bleak, glittering windows and the yellow advertisements burning above invisible roofs were lonesome for gestures and grimaces and noise.
We pass each other, we murderers, prostitutes, beggars, wanderers, vagabonds and thieves. We approach each other in the lonely, desolate streets, muscles tense, jaws set. We come up behind each other slowly, maliciously. For we are a different company than stuffs the street by day.
Thus I walked through the heart of the city, noting it to be a place of suspended thunders, a gloomy, useless toyland whose elaborate geometries were almost devoured by the night. Here the great hotels cast patches of light upon the empty sidewalks. A taxicab, behind which trailed the wild laugh of a woman, darted out of gloom and swept around a corner. The all-night restaurants were also lighted.
They made each a little oasis in the night. Within could be seen, through the large, patient and effulgent windows, hunched and inanimate figures drinking coffee. Their faces were pale and they stared at their fingers.
I found myself before the entrance of a theater. Its grimy little facade lighted with innumerable yellow lamps strutted out of the darkness, a dirty and insolent gypsy amid the black tombstones in this funereal street. Gayety and entertainment here for the company that does not sleep at night. Sardonic lights and mocking lithographs, eternal joy and Saturnalian defiance; amid them in a little round office sat a fat-faced, blousy-eyed woman like some imperturbable exile selling tickets for the mysteries of Isis. It had grown chill, and a weariness had come over me. I was tired of my adjectives. Soon the little greedy half-dead would be stirring in their million beds, coming larva-like into these waiting streets. I thought of long brown roads flanked by red leaved trees and of the processional of great white-bellied clouds over the curving stagnant fields. What a strange thing is the city, a hard-faced witch babbling and stinking. And here the mysteries of Isis, the forbidden things before the triangular altar of Astarte. There were two of us, myself and a little man with a watery face, and we moved into the theater. The chill, ferruginous night of the city vanished.
I felt as if I had suddenly thrust my head under the heavy dress of an old beggar woman. A rusty lavender light filled the place, and the uncoiling tinsel of tobacco smoke moved in spectral clouds through the mephitic gloom. There was a sharp fish-like odor that swam before my eyes in a chlorinated mist. Beyond I could make out the glare and sparkle of the black and white shadows, and the click and whirr of the moving picture machine came to my ears. I sat down with a feeling of relief and the theater seemed to grow brighter. Heads of men and women grew out of the shadows and remained motionlessly sprinkled here and there among the rows of seats. On the moving picture screen three horses with furious muscles were galloping at breakneck speed over the crest of a sunlit hill. On the horses bounced three men, their heads stiffened and tucked down, their bodies reaching forward like claws in the wind.
We were quite distinct now in our seats, a silent, brooding, disinterested company of heads sprinkled here and there. The reek and stench of us dragged itself along the walls in ulcerated clouds and circled our heads in violet spirals. These figures sat in their seats as if they had been dropped from a great height. Their faces spotted the gloom with little luminous patches of grey. There were snores and coughs and a curious unceasing shuffling. The darkness continued to lift as if some half-hearted dawn were approaching. Little dog-faced men, old men with faces moulded out of phlegm, women with scarred, drawn skins, a shaggy, lifeless company here, whose heads, as I closed my eyes, remained in my thoughts a handful of little withered nuts gathering mould.
I opened my eyes, and against the wall in my row sat an old man with a long bony face. His ragged hat was pulled down over his forehead and his hair stuck out in wisps from under it. His head rested against the wall and with his mouth open he slept. His body was folded in a strange angularity in the seat. His coat was tied in front with a piece of yellow rope and his trousers were opened. In the lavender gloom his face had an ashen mutilation. It was the sunken, inhuman mask of one long unburied. The hands of this old man moved about as he slept. He was dreaming. His body twitched and his feet crawled with elaborate caution about on the floor. The odor which came from him, embracing me with polite neighborly insistence, was partially explained by the streaks of vomit on his clothes and the color of his hands. A line of Turgenieff entangled itself in my thought.
"How red, how red are the roses."
On the moving screen a man with remarkable eyelashes was pointing a gun at a villain. In one arm this man held a clinging chrysanthemum-eyed girl. The moving picture machine from somewhere behind me whirred and clicked and spurted forth its flickering, glazed moonbeam. I look about me. Across the aisle, a row in front of where I sat, were two figures parted by several seats. The figure on the aisle was that of a woman. Her face seemed to.be crudely carved out of rough red and grey stone. She had a wide mouth and a flat nose. She had decorously removed her hat, and her hair, grey and green under the violet light of the moving picture ray, was visible. A pair of short black cotton gloves were on her hands as she raised them one at a time to scratch at the back of her neck. She stared with round parrot eyes at the pictures in front of her, chewing vigorously, swallowing with great excitement and rubbing her nose with a forefinger as a climax to her enthusiasms. It was evident that the pictures were affecting her. I looked again at the moving picture screen.
The man with the remarkable eyelashes and the stiff cupid’s-bow mouth had come to grief. He lay on a white sunny bed and appeared to be dying. His hair was carefully combed. The chrysanthemum-eyed girl was kneeling at his bedside. I recalled now having seen the fellow shot.
The old woman’s chewing gained vigor and she began to weep. Tears moved unnoticed down her cheeks. Her forefinger remained in position under her nose, moving violently back and forth as the tears lost themselves in the black cotton of her glove. I became aware of a soft, deliberately spaced hiss. It came from the figure that sat several seats to the left of the old woman.
He was a stocky shouldered man with a black-haired leonine head and strong features. His flashing dark eyes were turned upon the old woman. He was hissing to her and making perceptible signals with his chin. There was something eager and amorous about this man, something solid and Rodinesque about his figure. And the old woman, noticing him through her tears, looked at him for several moments and screwed her hard slippery face into a hesitant smile. A strange animation came upon the man. His shoulders twitched, his massive head bobbed weirdly about. His eyes rolled in their sockets and his mouth opened and, shining with teeth, made clucking moist sounds. Twice his body shot forward as if about to crash into the seats and then straightened to remain shaking from side to side like the vibrations of a long rope.
The old woman returned her eyes to the picture, but she appeared to have lost her enthusiasm. Her black gloved forefinger rested in her lap. Through the corners of her eyes she observed the large-headed man at her left. He had, it was evident, changed his tactics. The flash and glitter of his previous emotion were gone from his face. Instead he had become nervous, querulous and pleading. He was making little mouths with his strong, large lips, and pouting like an aggrieved boy. He tossed his leonine head in little coquetries and then suddenly held up a single finger. The old woman staring at this elevated finger shook her head. Whereat two fingers appeared in the gloomy air and remained stiff and shaking like amazing words. The old woman’s little parrot eyes turned full upon him and stared shrewdly and with curious disdain.
There was a violent coughing in my row. The old man with the bony face had awakened. He sneezed, coughed, rubbed his eyes and straightened. His body flopped about, and with a long, twisted finger he began to scratch behind his ear. His face turned dully toward me and his curious, gelatinous eyes rested on me as if I were not present. His face reminded me of the breast of a bird that had been plucked. As I looked at him his eyes moved from me and drifted across the theater. He began suddenly to wag his head and blink with his dead lids and his jaw rose on one side in a grin. The old woman across the aisle was looking at him and smiling. There was a shuffle and clatter in my aisle and the bony-faced one sprawled to his feet, his clothes hanging stiff and shapeless from him, moved by me, and I felt the thin little structure of his body under his loose rags as he shoved between me and the seat backs. An odor of herring and medicinal decay marked his passage. He walked up to the old woman, his feet shuffling along the floor and tapped her on the shoulder. The old woman cast a quick, contemptuous glance at the leonine head to her left, and rising with a chuckle, walked up the aisle after the shuffling, ragged figure. There was left the defeated one.
He sat with a look of wonder on his face that slowly darkened, and bit at the nails of his hands. As his teeth worked in a growing ferocity upon his nails a look of agony came into his eyes. His shoulders began to twitch. He lurched about like a man drunk. Then suddenly he disappeared.
Out of the row of seats came crawling a stump of a man whose body was fastened with straps to a square board on four little wheels. The head of this man, black-haired and leonine, barely reached to the tops of the seats. He propelled himself by swinging two ape-like arms back and forth. In his huge fists he held two flatirons. Slowly he rolled up the aisle and came opposite me, a half-born thing with his thick torso waving snake-like above the floor. He stopped and raised a pair of flashing eyes and glowered at me. His face worked into savage and undecided grimaces. His lips twisted and a drip appeared at their corners. For several instants he eyed me while his fury kept him silent. Then his voice burst forth, coming with a violent incongruity out of this half-man on the floor. It was a huge, gruff voice, that of a man fat and towering.
"Did you see that?" he demanded. His hands remained motionless, holding the flatirons to the floor. "Did you see it? I had her first. I got her eye first. And then that stew butts in. Didn't I have her first?"
The face lifted toward me twitched and the fury passed out of it. In its place came a childlike despair. The legless man began to weep. His shoulders jumped up and down in sobs. His voice when he raised it again had become a whimper. He stared at me as the tears climbed out of his eyes and smeared themselves over his rugged face.
"She beat it with that stew," he said. "Say, honest t'God, didn't I have her first?" He rolled on up, the aisle, swinging long ape-like arms.
Outside the night was vanishing. The chill morning air came like a scent of fresh water to my nose, dried by the odors of the theater. People were moving in the grey streets. At the end of the block they moved in a thin procession across the car tracks, a string of dark figures without faces and shaped like sevens. The city was waking. The rumble and the mumble and the bang, bang, bang had started again. The buildings stretched out of the early mists. From a corner came the shout of a man. I looked over and saw beside a stand heaped with fresh newspapers the heavy, dwarf-like stump of the legless man. He was selling papers. He raised his voice in a shout as we of the little thin procession moved by.
"Extra here . . . all about . . ."
Evidently things had been happening in the night.