“Aren’t you having any?” I invited, convivial as a gourmet, for in his dimension this was a spread feast and the hot unsavory tea had eased my pain. The very teenyness of his sweetstuff made it more seductive than a giant Christmas cake. But he shook his head impishly in abnegation. I looked inside the carton. There was nothing left.
In the concentrated one-sided luxuriance of our party he evoked his dazzling future — the work he no longer seemed able to do waxed so sublime in his visions (and also in mine as I watched all possible loveliness evolve from his elemental mists, and the creeping to maturity of the almost invisible herbage left from under the withdrawn tide of his hovering waves).
His fame was to be fabulous, his wealth extravagant — so that at last the great Insel would (with a gleam of furtive cruelty for me) marry, as far as I could make out, so increasingly incorporeal he grew in his grand exaltation, my daughter’s photograph.
“That will be really nice,” I responded genially. “As I come to think of it a son-in-law—.”
“Exactly,” he burst out wildly. “You and I, we could have such a wonderful time together.”
“—a son-in-law with rays—” I brought up short, “—and what would my daughter be doing?” Then hurriedly, thinking to profit him by the occasion, I urged, “You must paint those pictures—otherwise, you will grow to be too old to marry her.”
“Ah, well,” he waived, with that sudden doleful look he had of gazing into an abyss when confronted with whatever imperative of whatever consummation. “No matter! It would suffice me just to know her, to have the joy of watching her evolve. It would be a very wonderful thing indeed to take part in the Entwicklung of a young creature.” And I realized there was nothing, nothing, in all the world elementary enough to serve as object for such simplified observation as his. Everything must henceforth for him drowse in an impotence of arrested development.
This very word, Entwicklung, was so much Insel’s word; its sound seemed to me onomatopoeic of his intellectual graph. For my alien ear it had a turn of the ridiculous as though a vast process had got twisted in a knot of tiny twigs, haply to unravel and root, and branch against the heavens.
21
I REMEMBERED THOSE STACKS OF MANUSCRIPT HE had assured me were at my disposal in the days of “biography.” “You promised to show me your notes,” I reminded him. “May I not see them now?”
He was coy about his literature, sidling alongside himself in a sort of dual fidget impossible to describe, as if doing sentry duty before his own secrecy.
After a long persuasion he brought out a blotter, the kind for écoliers sold in bazaars. Covered in black, stamped with a golden sailing ship, its funereal hue intended for neutralizing ink drops in a kindergarten, this unassuming blotter, the one thing in the place having any tradition, had a decorative air of intruding from a frivolous society. It contained a single sheet of paper which he handed me with great precaution. Very few lines were written upon it. They formed a square block in the center of the page covering little more than the area of a postage stamp.
Hardly had I caught a glimpse, when, “Can you see it?” he inquired suspiciously and snatched it away.
“How could I?” I demurred, “the words are scarcely visible—” Reassured, he gave it back to me.
“You’ve no idea,” he sighed, “the pains I take when I write to you, forcing my hand to form letters big enough for you to read.”
“Liebe Herr Insel,” I cajoled, “You read it to me.”
At last he did so.
It was a beginning.
“ ‘My sister and I walked along the road. Coming to the town gate we gave it a good thump.’
“Do you know what a town gate is?” asked Insel professorially. “It’s like a tower.
“ ‘All the townsfolk came out of the gate, swarming about us to look.’ ”
As ever, with Insel “to look” was a deadlock, he had written no more.
I proffered the necessary compliments. Agog with glee, he shimmered with satisfaction. This communication of an actual transcription of a mental process had reinforced his sociability. His contacts ordinarily depending almost entirely on his Strahlen, for the moment our companionship was complete.
In reading aloud his manuscript he had formed an extra alliance with me — as littérateurs, producing in Insel an enormous self-respect.
Nevertheless, it was a sympathization going on in some sphere to which I had no access.
Anything he perceived sufficiently to accept or that thrust itself upon his attention (as in my case) was instantly distilled in his precious essence. Behind his brow a void wraith, glorified, evaporate, dissociated from its originator, myself, to mix with his gaseous cerebration.
Insel let out a shrill crow. “Es gibt nicht zwei vie Sie—There are not two like you.”
Sparkling, entranced, he sat on his wooden chair as on the throne of the conquistador, for whatever I contributed to his transcendental enjoyment he was loath to let me go.
But I was beginning, myself, to feel unnatural. I distinctly detected my voice in ventriloquial emulation echo the wistful, surf-like swooning singing of his— “Sterben — Man mu-u-uss — Man mu-u-uss”—as, worn out with pain, assuring him I must leave because I was tired, I said, “Ich bin so mü-ü-de.”
Insel, responding to this bemused inflection, or rather, fusing with an ululation so singularly his own it almost obliterated our duality, I witnessed in him an inconceivable reversion of a standard transmutation. The changing of sadism into love. Not gallant love. The indiscriminate love of a savior.
Suffering, I had so gratified him, satiating his sadism — even to extinction, his gratitude refluent to me, enveloped me.
At last with a sacrificial decisiveness Insel consented to let me go. “Ja,” he assented, bending over me in solicitude. “Go,” he stretched out one of his thin branches in benediction, “Go and sleep.” “Schlafen.” His word was drowsy — so long drawn out. It did not cut the air as ordinary words do. Agelessly sailing, it passed across me — oblong and idle — spacious as an airship, its narcotic cargo a dream of a slumber unknown to normal man.
The rays that Insel so busily had been spinning around himself in an immeasurable tenderness released, attained once more to me.
Instantly all pain vanished. I sprang up elasticized. To an identical rhythm Insel and I, on a buoyancy, were danced toward the door bobbing and smiling good-bye in a mutual appreciation which I felt must be glittering off me as it did off him.
When I got to the train it was steaming out of the station; casually I skimmed onto it scarcely noticing this, for me, at other times, impossible achievement — I felt so airy. In the car, whenever I thought of Insel, I was shaken with a helpless laughter — a strange mixture of extreme friendliness and, inexplicably, derision.