— Here he is now.
Sandbach crooked his elbow and pointed at him, pointed with his cigar, the dozen faces turned and looked at him with silent appraisal. They all seemed more than ever small and shabby, ridiculous, unreal, and as he bore down on them with his six feet two, stooping slightly forward, he was aware of playing Gulliver in Lilliput, his shadow was over them like a vast wing.
Sandbach, as always when he was a little frightened, smiled too much and looked cunning, his face seemed to be all width and no height, the eyes and mouth made long insinuating horizontals. Difficult to say where the Asiatic began and the Semitic left off, it was very fawning and subtle, no doubt about that, one could see in him the uneasy fertility which attracted Gerta.
— What do you think, Ammen, what do you say, the meeting is so small, it is a pity, this is our comrade Breault, shake hands with him, we thought as it was so small we wouldn’t try to have any speeches, but just have a little talk together, maybe. We could all go to my room in Allston Street. If you could come along, we were waiting for you.
Mrs. Taber put her skinny little hand on his arm, and cooed.
— Now do come, Mr. Ammen, I’m sure we need a little of your fine young cynicism!
He looked over their heads toward the windows, then round the bare and sordid little room with its air of cheap varnish, he remembered the excitement of his first meeting here, when it had seemed that something real and vigorous was being done, something dangerous and profound. It had suddenly shrunk to the size of his hand.
— No, Sandbach, I told you in my postcard that I was finished, I’m sorry, I just dropped in to tender my formal resignation. I’m afraid I no longer see any use in it.
— I see. He no longer sees any use in it. If he ever did!
— The sneer is gratuitous, but I had foreseen it.
— You had foreseen my sneer? I made no sneer, I think I merely stated a fact.
Mr. Taber began laughing offensively, then turned his back and walked away. Mrs. Hays, dressed in black, and as usual trying to look sibyline, put her head on one side and smiled condescendingly. Beneath their anger and hurt pride, of course, was their disgusting disappointment in losing his money, it was his own money which had paid for Breault. It was as if they were his employees, his servants, and he had dismissed them, their anger and hatred was slavish and cringing, they were clinging together against him.
— I didn’t come here to argue with you, but simply to make a statement. Unfortunately I find that neither your ideas nor your feelings have any reality or importance whatever. I’m afraid I was mistaken in you — or mistaken in myself, which comes to the same thing.
— Aren’t you carrying your subjective idealism pretty far? Now, Breault, you can see what happens when young men read too much Berkeley.
— I can assure Mr. Breault that your concern about my reading doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I think you’re all a little grotesque, it seems to me a little shameful that I ever thought I had anything in common with you.
— Very well, I don’t think we need to say anything further.
— You aren’t dismissing me—I’m dismissing you. I’ll be grateful, but not excessively so, if you’ll take my name off your mailing list, and send back my books. Good night.
He looked at Breault, who was embarrassed and blushing, and felt that he hadn’t yet done full justice to the situation. He laughed and put on his hat, then turned to Sandbach again.
— If you only knew how funny you are!
— Is anything to be gained from bad manners or impudence?
— Manners are of the mob, Sandbach, put that in your pipe and smoke it.
He swung his back to them and walked toward the door, a woman’s voice said why he thinks he’s God Almighty, Sandbach and Breault had begun laughing very loudly, somebody whistled turkey-in-the-straw. From the door he half turned and waved his hand. For a moment all the faces were quite still, it was like a photograph, and his final impression of them was that they were all hungry.
III The Background
The evening had deepened, with the completion of this action, but again it was only as if the evening were a mere projection of himself, and its deepening, or his own deepening, was of course due to the very fact that the action had not been entirely satisfactory. It would have been better if he had made a formal address, a formal and drastic analysis: if he had dissected their pitifulness and futility before their very eyes, shamed them, horrified them. He could have quoted Martin—“I am sick of this oozing democracy. There must be something crystalline and insoluble left in democratic America. Somewhere there must be people with sharp edges that cut when they are pressed too hard, people who are still solid, who have impenetrable depths in them and hard facets which reflect the sunlight. They are the hope of democracy, these infusible ones.” To hell with their crowd-mindedness, their weak and slavish dependence on each other! What had their little anarchism to do with this? It was a contradiction in terms, an absurdity, they were themselves absurdities, and their unfitness was as clear in their sheeplike instinct of banding themselves together as in their sheeplike faces. Yes, this would have been better, he ought to have done it, but as usual his own sense of hurry — was it that? — had impeded him, his anger had produced the usual short circuit. At such moments one’s mere animal disgust became paramount, it was impossible to do anything but turn one’s back, it was a choice between that and killing them.
To kill them, yes: what was necessary was a machine gun.
The beautiful terribleness of the deed!
He stood still in the dark canyon of Beacon Street, between the somber stone walls of his own canyon, at the bottom of his own sky, at the center of his own world, and aimed his pipe stem like a gun across the paving stones toward a small crowd which stood before one of Houghton and Dutton’s windows. The fascinating impulse was already quivering in his index finger. The stupid backs were cut in two by death’s mechanical rattlesnake chatter, the plate glass window was drilled shrilly from side to side, the falling glass made an irregular tinkling and chiming, and then everything was again silent. It was toward a group of dead men that he crossed the street, it was a group of corpses that he joined before the window, and looking over the heads he saw that the window had been turned into a little zoo, it was a cage of monkeys. A dozen little gray monkeys, with long ratlike tails, skipped, sat, or swung, stared sadly, peered out of kennels, or made rapid circuits of the interior, scarcely seeming to touch floor, wall, trapeze or platform in their soundless flight. Close to the window, in the foreground, oblivious of the onlookers, one of them picked with fastidious little black fingers at the posterior of another, and tasted what he found: the crowd laughed obscenely, face turned grinning toward grinning face, their animal blood thickened and darkened. It was Sandbach observing the obscenity of Sandbach, the foulness was irremediable.
Sandbach, speaking of treachery!
He turned away, up the hill, in the deepened evening, the darkened world, felt in every direction and dimension the swift growing and extension of new structure, new thrusts and explorations into the infinite, but all of it a little crazy, perhaps, a little headlong and awry. Why was this? The affair of the meeting had been, certainly, only a partial success, it was in some measure because he had gone there with his plans unformulated, with nothing but his anger and contempt, and therefore it had got beyond his controclass="underline" or at any rate, his control had not been quite perfect. This remained tethered to him, as by threads or eyebeams, as if himself, the puppetteer, had become subtly and dangerously entangled in the threads of his own puppets, could not quite escape from them, found their voices still at his ears, like gnats. The meeting was still there, in Tremont Temple, Sandbach was still breathing thickly down his nose at Breault, Mrs. Taber cooed her professional old-lady’s sweetness, they stood in a group round the varnished platform and chattered about manifestos and propaganda and the founding of a paper or the revival of The Voice of the People, in Saint Louis, or The Anarchist, in Boston, or whether the No Hat Club might be re-established, or they should join the Socialists, secretly, and operate “from within.” Now perhaps they were rustling down the stairs, they were saying his name, Ammen, and again Ammen, laughing angrily, they walked in twos and threes into Pemberton Square and past the dark courthouse, under the dark windows made foul with the piled nests of pigeons. They must be dismissed, they had been dismissed, their path lay now at right angles with his. They had gone to Sandbach’s bleak room in Allston Street, to look adoringly at the portrait of Bakunin which hung above the fireplace of smooth-carven white marble, relic of a capitalist past.