Around a lighted doorway on Filbert, halfway between Stockton and Grant, next to the motorcycle shop, he could make out ten or fifteen figures, people, no doubt, conversing unintelligibly and waiting for their turn to ascend a narrow flight of stairs. Those in the yellow light gestured to those in the shapeless dark. When he appeared, way was made for him, as it always was, and he climbed the stairs slowly. He reached the yellow lamp itself and perceived it as some kind of lamp in a fairy tale, with a life of its own and a secret, or as a beacon very far away that only seemed near because of a trick of sorcery or atmospheric anomaly. A small group had formed around this light and in the open doorway. Talkers gestured carelessly with drinks as they worked elaborate rhetorical figures. He entered an apartment in which a common party or reception appeared to be taking place. Noisy and crowded, the room looked as if it had been shaken in the earthquake and neglected since. It appeared to tilt: the lines of the walls, floor, and ceiling seeming neither parallel nor perpendicular. Wallpaper, depicting various scenes from The Odyssey, hung in peeling strips from the walls, and the floorboards were warped and discolored. The place was less sturdy than a stage set, and less convincing. There were newspapers everywhere, scattered as if they’d been caught by a wind, stacked in sloping piles next to anything that might support them, rolled up in people’s fists, spread open on tables.
Turning from the crowd to the wall and the bookshelves against it, he saw many volumes of Balzac, in French, bound in blue. He selected his favorite, Le Père Goriot, opened it, or rather let it fall open to a page upon which it had, clearly, many times before been opened, to where the cynical, worldly wise lodger Vautrin is exposed as a criminal mastermind. He read to himself, translating the French and remembering the English: “Vautrin was at last revealed complete: his past, his present, his future, his ruthless doctrines, his religion of hedonism. his Devil-may-care strength of character. The blood mounted in his cheeks and his eyes gleamed like a wildcat’s. He sprang back with savage energy and let out a roar that drew shrieks of terror from the boarders.” Is Monsieur Vautrin here tonight? he wondered. Is the owner of this building some kind of Vautrin? Is there perhaps not a flaw of Vautrinism in all of our characters?
He picked up a newspaper to cover the swell of this attractive thought: The Tremor, one he’d never seen before. The masthead lettering was drawn as if it stood on shaky ground, little shivering lines suggesting vulnerability, uncertainty, and the front page featured a cartoon of a Pinkerton detective, a tiny but slope-browed and lantern-jawed head atop a huge, grossly muscled body spilling from a shapeless coat, drawn with a heavy but expert hand in dark smears of charcoal. The caption read, “IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ’EM, FRAME ’EM.” He studied the monstrous detective and saw now a little round bomb, spitting sparks, tiny as the fellow’s head, concealed in a meaty fist. Opening the paper, he glanced at one column, “The Fine Print,” and another, “A Fair Shake,” then shuffled and squared the pages, folded the paper neatly, and set it on the shelf next to the Balzac. A pleasant sense of peril overcame him, and he looked around the room with a mixture of furtiveness and mock-furtiveness: Were there in fact bombers here? Real bombers, dressed and speaking like ordinary citizens concerned about culture and the public weal? He remembered a breakfast table talk from a decade earlier: Father’s insistence that ninety-eight known dynamiters in the Bay Area were going to be rounded up, whether they’d done anything or not, whether, he had asked with the sarcasm his father detested, they were dynamiters or not. Might the place be raided by “authorities”? Might there not be people here wearing serious disguises — that is to say, real disguises as opposed to the fake ones they used on the stage? Might not the ratio of disguised to undisguised people be excitingly large?
He thought for a moment of a painting Mother had bought when they were in Paris, an Ensor, a crowd scene in which the difference between a mask and a face was hard to see, as all seem caught up in some kind of knowledge giving way to terror.
The man nearest him, as tall but lighter both in weight and color, whom he thought he might have seen that strange day in the motorcycle shop below, when he’d come to unload his Merkel and the laughable Minerva, began to speak more loudly than he had been, to the man he was not quite hiding. “Dickens,” the man said, “and Dostoyevsky did not write books, they wrote newspapers! Why, a list of passengers sailing on the Kronprinz Wilhelm is more nearly a work of art than a novel by Thomas Hardy!”
He liked all three of the novelists named, and couldn’t begin to understand the speaker’s complaint. Neither could he begin to feel a duty to inquire and comprehend. He had no wish to be caught up in popular criticism, and looked away at a large poster just on the other side of the book-shelves. “The I. W. W. is COMING!” it proclaimed across the top, while at the bottom demanding or suggesting that the observer “Join the ONE BIG UNION!” A handsome, young Wobbly, bare-chested and muscular, appeared to be climbing right up out of the picture and the smoking mills in its background, over a barricade and preparing to hurl himself into the room.
“No, give me Henry James when I want a novel.” The tall, fair man who disliked Hardy and Dostoevsky and Dickens had shifted his stance and was now openly looking at him. He glanced at the poster and again at Charles. “Looks like you!” he shouted with theatrical bonhomie, then resumed his jolly and opinionated conversation with the hidden man, who peered around his friend and smiled at Charles. “We also spoke of the meanings of strange words: flic, gigolette, maquereau, tapette, and rigolo. I bought a naughty silk scarf and a pair of Louis XV candlesticks. I had an omelet at the Café de la Regence, where the actors from the Comedie Francaise have lunch in their makeup!” The hidden man shifted his position and both men now looked at Charles, as if, it seemed, he were an actress in her makeup. He had surely seen the hidden man in the shop that day as well. The tall, fair man then shook his head at the hidden man, who said, “I am preoccupied with thoughts and images of death, most certainly. Let us find actresses.”
Another man, much shorter and skinnier, with fierce, sharp, tiny features, including a moustache of very few but longish hairs, and a shock of blond hair angling off his small head, had drawn up in their lee. A kindly looking, older woman held his arm. Charles recognized him after a hazy swarming pause in which his knowledge overwhelmed his ability to know he knew: Warren Farnsworth.
“Does look like you,” said Farnsworth. “But you’re somebody else entirely, isn’t that so?”
“It’s true, yes, I’m afraid you’re right,” Charles confessed suavely. “I am someone else entirely.”
“Do you,” Farnsworth asked suddenly, without preamble, but slowly and quietly, “think they will bomb the parade?”
“Parade?” asked Charles. “Pardon?”
“The Preparedness Day Parade?” Farnsworth seemed incredulous now, instantly annoyed.