Groups of dull-faced men drifted aimlessly around, hands in their pockets, eyes blank and empty. Slick-haired Negro girls swayed and minced past. Workmen in jeans, gripping lunch pails and folded newspapers, tramped wearily home. Dirty crumpled cars let tired-faced Irishmen and Italians and Poles off in front of their crowded yellow tenement buildings, stale with the reek of cabbage and urine, narrow hallways of dusty carpets and deformed potted plants.
Stuart Hadley wandered through the thickening night gloom, dully aware of neon signs flickering on here and there, the push and jostle of tired people. He still had an hour to go. His stomach turned over queasily from the potato chips. His head ached. The thought of going home entered his mind. For a time he worried the thought, chewed at it, turned it around; finally he rejected it.
The feeble glimmer of a red neon attracted him. A bar. He plunged into its somber darkness and felt his way by touch, past the bar, to the phone booth in the back. With the door pulled shut after him, he dialed his home.
“Hello,” Ellen said expressionlessly.
Hadley licked his lips. “How—are you?”
“Fine.”
“Still mad at me?”
“I wasn’t mad at you.” She seemed a long way off: remote, detached, tired. “Wait a minute while I go turn down the TV.” The phone was mute for a while. Presently a thump, and Ellen continued: “Where are you calling from?”
“A drugstore,” Hadley answered.
“Have you had anything to eat?”
He explained what he had eaten. “Ellen—if you want, I’ll come home. I won’t go to this thing.”
“Of course I want!” Her voice broke with melancholy. Presently she finished: “Go ahead, go to it. When is it over?”
“I don’t know. Around eleven, I guess.”
“Are you alone?”
“Sure.” He was puzzled. “Who would I be with?”
“I don’t know. Anybody, I suppose.” She seemed to be drifting farther and farther away from the phone. “You always seem to be able to find somebody.”
Hadley was silent. There was little he could say; a continuation of the old argument lay ahead, nothing more. “Well,” he said, “I’ll see you later.”
No answer.
“I mean,” he said awkwardly, “I’ll be home, soon. After the lecture. Is there anything you want? Something I can pick up?”
Ellen laughed metallically, and hung up the phone.
Face flushed scarlet, Hadley left the booth and headed for the bar. He crawled onto a stool, ears red with outrage and shame. His hands were shaking; he clamped them together furiously, bit his lower lip, waited for his blood pressure to drain back to normal. The little bitch—he choked the thoughts off. The big bulging heap of a bitch, hanging up on him. Hatred, fury, flooded over him in waves. Wildly, he wanted to run home and smash her in the face.
Turn her smart, disrespectful features into a pudding of mashed bone and shredded flesh. He wanted to leap on her, up and down, crush her bones like boxwood. He wanted to kick her skull from wall to wall of the apartment.
“What’ll it be, Mac?” the bartender asked.
He roused himself and ordered bourbon and water. There were other men at the bar, most of them dull-eyed workmen. Paying for his drink, he sat sipping it, gripping the glass and gazing straight ahead, aware of the quiver of his mouth and the fog of constriction in his bronchial tubes.
It wasn’t until the bartender came back with his dice cup that he realized he had already gulped down his drink.
“Shake you for the next one,” the bartender said, tensely waving off a fly that crept in the pool of spilled water on the surface of the bar. Dice bounced out and lay on the wet, corroded wood. “Six,” the bartender grated. “Come on, you motherfucker.” His face distorted with furious concentration, he rattled the box and hurled the dice again. “Four!” Flushing beet red, his hands shaking, he collected the dice. “I’ll be dipped in piss!” His voice rose with hysteria. “Come on, you — — — —!”
In spite of himself Hadley roared. A couple of workmen laughed, too. Instantly, the bartender froze, body rigid, and glared up at Hadley with demoniac hostility. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Sorry,” Hadley said. But he was still laughing. “You take it so seriously.”
The bartender’s lips worked. “I’ll get it. No goddamn dice are going to beat me.” He slammed the dice down. Seven showed; he was out. Gradually the crimson fury drained away. The man’s face sagged, gray and defeated. With numb fingers he gathered up the dice and aimlessly shoved the box and its contents aside. “What do you want? You want another bourbon?”
Around the bar the workmen grinned, nudged each other. “Hey, Harry,” one said, “want to roll against me?”
“Go on, Harry,” another urged. “We’ll all take you on.”
The bartender’s eyes flashed fire. “Get away from me, you bunch of — — —,” he snarled. “I’m not rolling with anybody.”
Hadley’s bourbon and water came, his free drink. One of the workmen raised his beer, and Hadley tilted his glass toward him.
This time he drank more slowly. Behind the bar, the bartender crouched in a sullen, brooding heap, mulling over his loss, his inability to control the dice. Hadley was still amused; the spectacle of the man taking a trivial thing so seriously was absurd.
It made him wonder about himself. Restlessly, he remembered the lecture. Gradually his thoughts reverted to their usual path. But it was not the same as before: he was sipping a free drink. Something about getting a free drink in a strange bar made him feel comfortable, as if the regular laws of the universe could be suspended. Things weren’t completely bad…not with such exceptions.
He examined his wristwatch. How much longer did he have to wait? Forty-five minutes. He gulped convulsively at his drink, pawed for his cigarettes, and prepared himself to wait it out.
He arrived at the hall early. The lecture hadn’t begun; only a quarter of the seats were filled. Quiet, unmoving shapes sat here and there, murmuring together in low voices.
At the inner entrance a colored woman handed him a square of paper. Like a chunk of dark wood, her rough-cut head turned slightly after him, brown eyes calm and large, liquid curiosity as mild and harmless as a nun’s. When he had gone by a step or two she called after him: “Evening, friend Watcher. You early.”
He didn’t know if she was amused by his distraught, hurried appearance. He didn’t especially care. “Evening,” he answered briefly. With the scrap of crude paper clutched, he disappeared down the aisle, among the empty seats and echoing spaces. At random, he located himself, slid from his coat, and made himself breathlessly comfortable. Already, his heart was beginning to labor heavily, rapidly.
Excitement shivered up and down him: the taut thrill he had felt as a child going to the kiddies’ matinee at the Rivoli Theater, twelve thirty in the afternoon, surrounded by hundreds of reverent replicas of himself. It was too early for the muttering talk to fade to an awed, expectant silence. Around him, vibrant murmurs drifted back and forth; people peered around for friends, some of them half rising to their feet. Every emotion showed; some of the people were solemn, some amused, sheepish, vacant-eyed, aloof, a variety of people and expressions. Tonight, he could see, there was not the same packed crowd. The curious had come and gone. The faithful were numerous but not numerous enough to fill the hall. It was made for the future: it anticipated.
Now he held the square of coarse paper up to the light and studied its black print. A throwaway, the kind handed out on street corners. He assimilated it briefly, then crumpled it and wadded it onto the floor.
ARE YOU READY FOR ARMAGEDDON?
Bible tells end of the world
soon to come. Prophecies to
be fulfilled. Fire and flood
to cleanse world. “For he is
like a refiner’s fire.” .... ....
“For the first heaven and the
first earth were passed away.”
Subscribe to the PEOPLE’S
WATCHMAN two dollars a year
425 Berry Avenue Chicago, Ill.
The cheap, blatant notice filled him with disgust. He looked around; nobody seemed to be reading literature of any kind. The notices had been accepted and then discarded like a commercial announcement. That cheered him, and he lit a cigarette. Gradually people were trickling into the hall. A family, with much noise and scraping of chairs, sat down in front of him. To his right a handful of powerfully built Negroes sat in a stern bunch, eyes fixed directly ahead of them. Old women were scattered here and there, by ones and by twos. Presently a young woman, thin-faced and nervous, plucked for a seat to his left. She set down her purse and quickly shook off her coat.
The hall was becoming stuffy and hot. Fans worked creakily in the depths. Smoke from cigarettes drifted laboriously upward; Hadley loosened his collar and took deep, impatient breaths. It was an ordeal, waiting. It seemed as if he had been waiting all his life. More and more people were appearing, sliding down the aisles and into seats, noiselessly finding themselves places, inexorably filling up the hall.
Hadley sat up straight and glared fitfully in all directions, at the many people, at the doors behind him, at the rafters above, at the platform. American flags fluttered heavily at each end of it. Behind, nailed to the wall, was an emblem he didn’t recognize. A sphere, half white and half black: the black curled up into the white at one side and the white groped into the black at the other. The effect was of motion, as if the sphere were a turning wheel. It was dynamic, but complete. There was a certain satisfying quality to it. He gazed at it for a while and some of his tension drained out and vanished.
While he was gazing sleepily at the emblem, Theodore Beckheim came into the hall.
A presence was felt. At first there was no physical sight, only the sudden rush of awareness from the people. Hadley, startled, blinked and looked quickly around. The hall was not yet full; was Beckheim going to begin already? He glanced at his wristwatch and was shocked: it was already eight. A rustle, a murmur, swept from aisle to aisle; he peered everywhere, but still no physical entity was visible. Was Beckheim a bird, a swallow? Was he swooping up in the smoky rafters? Was he a moth, a ghost, a swirl of wind? The hall lights dimmed. An ominous black mist drifted over everything, a chilling cloud from some distant place, beyond the world, beyond the universe itself. The lights turned from yellow to a sickly red and then died entirely.
Hadley fought down a shriek as the vast, gloomy chamber hushed itself around him. He felt lifted by the tongue of a great sea, suspended briefly over an endless, limitless pocket. Alone, floundering by himself, he struggled frantically to touch something in the darkness around him. An electric instant followed, in which nothing happened, in which nothing moved or lived. And then Theodore Beckheim appeared on the platform, and the empty void was broken.
The effect was magical. The terror drained out of Hadley and he was left limp. He trembled from head to foot as the giant figure stepped up to the microphone. All around the hall people were shuddering as Hadley shuddered; a collective gasp, almost a wail, cut through the silence.
Beckheim was huge. He towered over those near him, an immense column of a man who rested his square hands on the edge of the oak podium and leaned forward to examine the rows of people beneath him. His forehead was flat and deeply wrinkled, careworn, a face like ancient metal, deep-set brooding eyes sunk deep in his heavy skull. His lips were full and dark. His skin was a weathered gray-brown. His ears were small and set close to his head. His hair was short and black. His chin jutted, blunt and massive. He was definitely a Negro.
Beckheim surveyed the rows of people with a thoughtful, almost unhappy expression. There was wise understanding in his face, and at the same time an unspoken reprimand. Each person, sitting there in the hall, felt small and a little unclean and strangely uncertain of himself and his habits. As the eyes of the huge man touched on them, the rows of people drew back guiltily, ashamed and suddenly conscious of their imperfections. They were glad when the eyes had passed; but their confidence did not wholly return.
“I am glad,” Theodore Beckheim said, in a low, tense voice, “of the chance to talk to you people. If you will sit quietly and listen, I have some things to tell you that will be of importance in your lives.”
Beckheim had begun without preamble, without any pretense of convention or formality. His voice was low and hard and full of authority. A blunt voice that rumbled through the hall, stern and inflexible; almost monotonous. It jarred Hadley’s bones; something of it got in his brain and ears and danced metallically until he could hardly stand the pressure. He put his hands over his ears but the sound came through anyhow, transmitted by the floor and the chair and the bodies of the people around him. The whole hall and everybody in it were a sounding board on which the ponderous vibrations of the man’s voice played…
“You are living,” he told them, “in a unique time. Often before it was believed this time had come. Again and again perceptive men imagined the time had arrived, but always they were wrong. Finally a sense arose that the time was a myth. It had been predicted, it had failed, it would always fail.
“In the past, the most learned men had ideas which today we recognize as fantastic. To these men, the ideas seemed natural and sound. They believed the world was flat, that it occupied most of the universe, that the sun moved, that hairs left in water became worms, that lead could become gold, that a man could be healed if certain words were said over his injury. One of the wrong things which men believed had to do with time. They were wrong about the size of the world, its shape, its origin, what made it up, and they were wrong about its age. They had no understanding of the immensity of the universe in any direction. These were men of religion and men of rational persuasion. It was part of their way of thinking to believe that there were only a few years behind them and only a few miles around them.
“This failure to understand the vastness of the universe, both spatially and mensurally, caused confusion. They knew the earth would end but they thought it would end in months or years. They knew only two thousand years behind them and they could not conceive that much ahead. To have told them the earth would last another two thousand years would have been to tell them that it would last forever. To them, two thousand years was the largest unity they understood. It was virtually infinity.
“Now we know that two thousand years is nothing, just as two thousand miles is nothing. There are great spaces and great energies in the universe, and therefore great periods of time, because it takes much time for a being the size of the universe to move. Just as we must divide the age of the prophets by twelve, because of a mistaken Hebrew noun, we must multiply the time units of the prophets by several thousand. Just as we know the universe was not made in seven days but in seven vast periods of perhaps billions of years in duration, so we must realize that the days of life anticipated by the prophets are really centuries.
“And the ancients believed in miracles. Among the other nonsense, they believed that when a natural law was suspended, God was revealed. Now we know that suspension of a natural law would be a denial of God, a demonstration that the universe is chaotic, capricious, chance. It would introduce a random element. It would not be a cosmos, and if there is to be a God there must be a cosmos. This confusion between things not explained—and there were many in those days—and things having no explanation led them to imagine that God worked in unnatural ways. That somehow God could create this vast universe and then reach down into it, supersede its laws, ignore its elaborate fabric, push it aside in His impatience.
“Today, we understand that God does not work against His physical manifestation: the universe. He works through the universe, and that means that we will never see a suspension of its laws. We will never see the heavens open and a giant hand burst through. These are images, figures of speech, poetic license. Let us look by all means; but let us understand that the heavens—that is, the sky
itself—are that hand, and no other hand will appear in this life.
“The ancients did not understand that God was always among them, that it is impossible to imagine God not present. They had lived with God all their lives; God is present in every physical object—what they knew as a physical object was a spatial manifestation of Him. In every man, God is present in His actual form: as a moving spirit. The physical object is an expression of God: the mind of man is God—a part, a unit, of the total Spirit.
“Therefore, our forefathers failed to realize that the signs they anticipated would not be thrust magically into the framework of everyday life. The momentum of the universe is itself the process anticipated by the prophets. Not a sudden cessation of this process, but the direction of the process itself is the hand of God at work. And if we examine this so-called natural process, we will see everything that was predicted working itself to completion.
“We will see, from our present vantage point, unmistakable signs that the final events prophesied by the Bible are entering their last and most significant stages.”
Stuart Hadley, listening to the deep, intense voice, realized suddenly that everyone in the hall was as caught up in the tide of sound as he was. Not the words, but the sheer voice had taken them over. And yet, Beckheim was not speaking nonsense. He was speaking wisdom. Or did it only seem like wisdom because Beckheim was speaking it?
Confused, bewildered, Hadley listened to what the great black man was telling him. The others in the hall were onlookers to a conversation between Beckheim and himself…so it seemed. Yet he knew it was an illusion. From this multitude, Beckheim could not possibly have picked him out, become aware of Stuart Hadley’s specific presence. But Beckheim spoke with the low intensity of one man addressing another, an intimate quality that was free of histrionics and dramatic mannerisms. Beckheim was not trying to convince; he was revealing what he knew, what he had been witness to.
Voices From the Street Page 10
