Thus Tompkins Square on that night, as on all nights, was sad and dark and tired and asleep. Just the scraggly, dusty trees, the empty benches, and a shy gleam of the half-veiled moon where it struck the fantastic, twisted angle of a battered municipal waste-paper receptacle, or a bit of broken bottle glass that was trying to drown its despair in a murky puddle.
On the north side of the square stood the tenement house with the lighted window—like a winking eye—directly beneath the roof, high up. The house was gray and pallid; incongruously baroque in spots, distributed irregularly over its warty façade, where the contractor had got rid of some art balconies and carved near-stone struts left over from a bankrupt Bronx job. It towered over the smug red-brick dwellings—remnants of an age when English and German were still spoken thereabouts—with thin, anemic arrogance, like a tubercular giant among a lot of short, stocky, well-fleshed people; sick, yet conscious of his height and the dignity that goes with it.
* * * *
He saw the lighted window as he crossed the square from the south side, and sat down on one of the benches and stared at it.
Steadily he stared, until his eyes smarted and burned and his neck muscles bunched painfully.
For that glimmering light, gilding the fly-specked pane, meant to him the things he hated, the things he had cheated and cursed and ridiculed—and, by the same token, longed for and loved.
It meant, to him, life—and the reasons of life.
It meant to him humanity and the faith of humanity: which is happiness. The right to happiness! The eternal, sacerdotal duty of happiness!
Happiness?
He laughed. Why—damn it!—happiness was a lie. Happiness was hypocrisy. It meant the dieting of man’s smoldering, natural passions into an artificial, pinchneck, thin-blooded Puritanism. It spelled the mumming of the thinking mind—the mind that was trying to think—into the speciosities of childish fairy-tales. It was a sniveling reminder of pap-fed infancy.
The only thing worthwhile in life was success—which is selfishness. Selfishness sprawling stark-contoured and unashamed, sublimely unself-conscious, serenely brutal—a five-plied Nietzscheism on a modern business basis which acknowledged neither codified laws nor principles.
It had been the measure and route of his life, and—he whipped out the thought like something shameful and nasty, like a nauseating drug which his mind refused to swallow—it had cheated him.
Yes, by God! It had cheated him, cheated him!
For, first, it had given him gold and power and the envy of men, which was sweet.
Then, as a jest of Fate’s own black brewing, it had taken everything away from him overnight, in one huge financial crash, and had made of him what he was tonight: gray, middle-aged, bitter, joyless—and a pauper. It had brought him here, to Tompkins Square, and had chucked him, like a worn-out, useless rag, into this dusty, sticky bench whence he was staring at the lighted window, high up.
He wondered what was behind it, and who?
Three days earlier he had come to New York with ten dollars—his last ten dollars—in his pocket. He had taken a room in this tenement-house, and every night he had sat on the bench and had stared at the warty, baroque façade.
Always it had been dark. Always the tenants, the hard-working people who lived there, had turned out their lights around ten o’clock with an almost military regularity that reminded him of barracks and a well-disciplined boarding-school.
He knew most of them. For they had talked to him, on stairs and landings and leaning from windows, with the easy garrulousness of the very poor who can’t be snobs since they are familiar with each other’s incomes and flesh-pots. They had lifted the crude-meshed veils of their hearts and hearths and had bidden him look—and all he had seen had been misery.
He checked the thought.
No! That wasn’t true!
He had also seen love and friendship, and fine, sweet faith—and that was why he hated them—why he pitied and despised them.
Faith—love—friendship! To the devil with the sniveling, weak-kneed lot of ’em! They spelled happiness—and happiness did not exist—and—
Happiness!
The thought, the word, recurred to his brain with maddening persistency. It would not budge.
Happiness.
“Why, happiness is behind that lighted window!” The idea came to him—almost the conviction.
But what happiness? And whose?
He speculated who might be up there, in the garret room squeezed by the flat roof. He tried to picture to himself what might be shimmering behind that golden flash.
Perhaps it was Fedor Davidoff, the little hunchbacked Russian tailor, with the fat, golden-haired, sloe-eyed wife. He might be celebrating the coming of freedom to his beloved Russia. Or he might be sitting up late to finish some piece of work—to earn extra money. For his wife was expecting a child. He had three already, curly-haired, straight-backed. But he wanted more—
“Children make happiness, eh?” he used to say.
Or—wait! Perhaps it was Peter Macdonald, the artist, dreaming over his lamp and his rank, blackened pipe, and deliberating with himself where he would live—upper West Side or lower Fifth—when the world should have acknowledged his genius and backed up the opinion with solid cash. Peter had lived now for over three months in the tenement-house. “Like the neighborhood—bully atmosphere—marvelous greens and browns,” was the reason he gave. But the other tenants smiled. They knew that Peter lived there because his room cost him only two dollars a week, and because he took his meals with the Leibl Finkelsteins on the first floor for three dollars more.
Perhaps a pair of lovers. Enrique Tassetti, the squat, laughing Sicilian, who had taken to himself a bride of his own people. They would have spent fifty cents for a bottle of Chianti, another fifty for bread and mushrooms and oil and pepper to turn into a dish worthy of a Sicilian—or a king.
Again it might be Donchian, the Armenian, burning the midnight oil over the perfection of the mysterious invention of which he spoke at times, after having worked with needle and thread since six o’clock in the morning; or old Mrs. Sarah Kempinsky, reading and rereading the letter which her soldier son had sent her from France; or—
What did it matter?
Whoever was sitting behind that lighted window was happy—happy—and the man’s imagination choked, his mind became flushed and congested.
He was quite unconscious of his surroundings. The stillness of the streets seemed magical, the loneliness absolute. Only from very far came sounds: the Elevated rattling with a steely, throaty sob; a surface-car clanking and wheezing; a hoarse Klaxon blaring snobbishly; a stammering, alcoholic voice throwing the tail-end of a gutter song to the moist purple veils of the night.
But he did not hear.
He was conscious only of the lighted window, high up. It seemed to glitter nervously, to call to him, to stretch out, as if trying to communicate to him an emotion it had borrowed by contact with something—with somebody.
That was just the trouble. He wondered who that somebody was, what that something might be. Whoever it was, it seemed urgent, clamorous. Silently clamorous. His subconsciousness grew thick with amazement and wonder and doubt. It surged up—crowded, choking, tumultuous.
The lighted window!
What was behind it? What was its riddle?
He knew that he must find out, and so he rose, crossed the street, entered the house, and was up the stairs three steps at the time.
He found the room without any trouble, and opened the door. He did not knock.
He stepped inside; and there, on the bed, he saw a motionless figure, faintly outlined beneath a plain white sheet, a tall candle burning yellow at the foot of the bed, another at the head.
He crossed over, lifted a corner of the sheet, and looked. And he saw the face of a dead man. It was calm and serene and unutterably happy.
Then it dawned upon him:
The man on the bed was himself.
; FEAR
The fact that the man whom he feared had died ten years earlier did not in the least lessen Stuart McGregor’s obsession of horror, of a certain grim expectancy, every time he recalled that final scene, just before Farragut Hutchison disappeared in the African jungle that stood, spectrally motionless as if forged out of some blackish-green metal, in the haggard moonlight.
As he reconstructed it, the whole scene seemed unreal, almost oppressively, ludicrously theatrical. The pall of sodden, stygian darkness all around; the night sounds of soft-winged, obscene things flapping lazily overhead or brushing against the furry trees that held the woolly heat of the tropical day like boiler pipes in a factory; the slimy, swishy things that glided and crawled and wiggled underfoot; the vibrant growl of a hunting lioness that began in a deep basso and peaked to a shrill, high-pitched, ridiculously inadequate treble; a spotted hyena’s vicious, bluffing bark; the chirp and whistle of innumerable monkeys; a warthog breaking through the undergrowth with a clumsy, clownish crash—and somewhere, very far away, the staccato thumping of a signal drum, and more faintly yet the answer from the next in line.
He had seen many such drums, made from fire-hollowed palm trees and covered with tightly-stretched skin—often the skin of a human enemy.
Yes. He remembered it all. He remembered the night jungle creeping in on their camp like a sentient, malign being—and then that ghastly, ironic moon squinting down, just as Farragut Hutchison walked away between the six giant, plumed, ochre-smeared Bakoto warriors, and bringing into crass relief the tattoo mark on the man’s back where the shirt had been torn to tatters by camel thorns and wait-a-bit spikes and saber-shaped palm leaves.
He recalled the occasion when Farragut Hutchison had had himself tattooed after a crimson, drunken spree at Madam Celeste’s place in Port Said, the other side of the Red Sea traders’ bazaar, to please a half-caste Swahili dancing girl who looked like a golden Madonna of evil, familiar with all the seven sins. Doubtless the girl had gone shares with the Levantine craftsman who had done the work—an eagle, in bold red and blue, surmounted by a lop-sided crown, and surrounded by a wavy design. The eagle was in profile, and its single eye had a disconcerting trick of winking sardonically whenever Farragut Hutchison moved his back muscles or twitched his shoulder blades.
Always, in his memory, Stuart McGregor saw that tattoo mark.
Always did he see the wicked, leering squint in the eagle’s eye—and then he would scream, wherever he happened to be, in a theatre, a Broadway restaurant, or across some good friend’s mahogany and beef.
Thinking back, he remembered that, for all their bravado, for all their showing off to each other, both he and Farragut Hutchinson had been afraid since that day, up the hinterland, when, drunk with fermented palm wine, they had insulted the fetish of the Bakotos, while the men were away hunting and none left to guard the village except the women and children and a few feeble old men whose curses and high-pitched maledictions were picturesque, but hardly effectual enough to stop him and his partner from doing a vulgar, intoxicated dance in front of the idol, from grinding burning cigar ends into its squat, repulsive features, and from generally polluting the juju hut—not to mention the thorough and profitable looting of the place.
They had got away with the plunder, gold dust and a handful of splendid canary diamonds, before the Bakoto warriors had returned. But fear had followed them, stalked them, trailed them; a fear different from any they had ever experienced before. And be it mentioned that their path of life had been crimson and twisted and fantastic, that they had followed the little squinting swarth-headed, hunchbacked djinni of adventure wherever man’s primitive lawlessness rules above the law, from Nome to Timbuktu, from Peru to the black felt tents of Outer Mongolia, from the Australian bush to the absinth-sodden apache haunts of Paris. Be it mentioned, furthermore, that thus, often, they had stared death in the face and, not being fools, had found the staring distasteful and shivery.
But what they had felt on that journey, back to the security of the coast and the ragged Union Jack flapping disconsolately above the British governor’s official corrugated iron mansion, had been something worse than mere physical fear; it had been a nameless, brooding, sinister apprehension which had crept through their souls, a harshly discordant note that had pealed through the hidden recesses of their beings.
Everything had seemed to mock them—the crawling, sour-miasmic jungle; the slippery roots and timber falls; the sun of the tropics, brown, decayed, like the sun on the Day of Judgment; the very flowers, spiky, odorous, waxen, unhealthy, lascivious.
At night, when they had rested in some clearing, they had even feared their own campfire—flaring up, twinkling, flickering, then coiling into a ruby ball. It had seemed completely isolated in the purple night.
Isolated!
And they had longed for human companionship—white companionship.
White faces. White slang. White curses. White odors. White obscenities.
Why—they would have welcomed a decent, square, honest white murder; a knife flashing in some yellow-haired Norse sailor’s brawny fist; a belaying pin in the hand of some bullying Liverpool tramp-ship skipper; some Nome gambler’s six-gun splattering leaden death; some apache of the Rue de Venise garroting a passerby.
But here, in the African jungle—and how Stuart McGregor remembered it—the fear of death had seemed pregnant with unmentionable horror. There had been no sounds except the buzzing of the tsetse flies and a faint rubbing of drums, whispering through the desert and jungle like the voices of disembodied souls, astray on the outer rim of creation.
And, overhead, the stars. Always, at night, three stars, glittering, leering; and Stuart McGregor, who had gone through college and had once written his college measure of limping, anemic verse, had pointed at them.
“The three stars of Africa!” he had said, “The star of violence! The star of lust! And the little stinking star of greed!”
And he had broken into staccato laughter which had struck Farragut Hutchinson as singularly out of place and had caused him to blurt forth with a wicked curse:
“Shut your trap, you—”
For already they had begun to quarrel, those two pals of a dozen tight, riotous adventures. Already, imperceptibly, gradually, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk, a mutual hatred had grown up between them.
But they had controlled themselves. The diamonds were good, could be sold at a big figure; and, even split in two, would mean a comfortable stake.
Then, quite suddenly, had come the end—the end for them.
And the twisting, gliding skill of Stuart McGregor’s fingers had made sure that Farragut Hutchison should be that one.
Years after, when Africa as a whole had faded to a memory of coiling, unclean shadows, Stuart McGregor used to say, with that rather plaintive, monotonous drawl of his, that the end of this phantasmal African adventure had been different from what he had expected it to be.
In a way, he had found it disappointing.
Not that it had lacked in purely dramatic thrills and blood-curdling trimmings. That wasn’t it. On the contrary, it had had a plethora of thrills.
But, rather, he must have been keyed up to too high a pitch; must have expected too much, feared too much during that journey from the Bakoto village back through the hinterland.
Thus when, one night, the Bakoto warriors had come from nowhere, out of the jungle, hundreds of them, silent, as if the wilderness had spewed them forth, it had seemed quite prosy.
Prosy, too, had been the expectation of death. It had even seemed a welcome relief from the straining fatigues of the jungle pull, the recurrent fits of fever, the flying and crawling pests, the gnawing moroseness which is so typically African.
“An explosion of life and hatred,” Stuart McGregor used to say, “that’s what I had expected, don’t you see? Quick and merciless. And it wasn’t. For the end came—slow and inevitable. Solid. Greek in a way. And so courtly! So polite! That was the worst
of it!”
For the leader of the Bakotos, a tall, broad, frizzy, odorous warrior, with a face like a black Nero with a dash of Manchu emperor, had bowed before them with a great clanking of barbarous ornaments. There had been no marring taint of hatred in his voice as he told them that they must pay for their insults to the fetish. He had not even mentioned the theft of the gold dust and diamonds.
“My heart is heavy at the thought, white chiefs,” he said. “But—you must pay!”
Stuart McGregor had stammered ineffectual, foolish apologies:
“We—we were drunk. We didn’t know what—oh—what we—”
“What you were doing!” the Bakoto had finished the sentence for him, with a little melancholy sigh. “And there is forgiveness in my heart—”
“You—you mean to say—” Farragut Hutchison had jumped up, with extended hand, blurting out hectic thanks.
“Forgiveness in my heart, not the juju’s,” gently continued the negro. “For the juju never forgives. On the other hand, the juju is fair. He wants his just measure of blood. Not an ounce more. Therefore,” the Bakoto had gone on, and his face had been as stony and as passionless as that of the Buddha who meditates in the shade of the cobra’s hood, “the choice will be yours.”
“Choice?” Farragut Hutchison had looked up, a gleam of hope in his eyes.
“Yes. Choice which one of you will die.” The Bakoto had smiled, with the same suave courtliness which had, somehow, increased the utter horror of the scene. “Die—oh—a slow death, befitting the insult to the juju, befitting the juju’s great holiness!”
Suddenly, Stuart McGregor had understood that there would be no arguing, no bargaining whatsoever; and, quickly, had come his hysterical question:
“Who? I—or—”
He had slurred and stopped, somehow ashamed, and the Bakoto had finished the interrupted question with gentle, gliding, inhuman laughter: “Your friend? White chief, that is for you two to decide. I only know that the juju has spoken to the priest, and that he is satisfied with the life of one of you two; the life—and the death. A slow death.”
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 4
