Despair Read Free

force driving me along.
    A clever Lett whom I used to know in Moscow in 1919 said to me once that the clouds of brooding which occasionally and without any reason came over me were a sure sign of my ending in a madhouse. He was exaggerating, of course; during this last year I have thoroughly tested the remarkable qualities of clarity and cohesion exhibited by the logical masonry in which my strongly developed, but perfectly normal mind indulged. Frolics of the intuition, artistic vision, inspiration, all the grand things which have lent my life such beauty, may, I expect, strike the layman, clever though he be, as the preface of mild lunacy. But don’t you worry; my health is perfect, my body both clean within and without, my gaiteasy; I neither drink nor smoke excessively, nor do I live in riot. Thus, in the pink of health, well dressed and young-looking, I roved the countryside described above; and the secret inspiration did not deceive me. I did find the thing that I had been unconsciously tracking. Let me repeat—incredible! I was gazing at a marvel, and its perfection, its lack of cause and object filled me with a strange awe. But perhaps already then, while I gazed, my reason had begun to probe the perfection, to search for the cause, to guess at the object.
    He drew his breath in with a sharp sniff; his face broke into ripples of life—this slightly marred the marvel, but still it was there. He then opened his eyes, blinked at me askance, sat up, and with endless yawns—could not get his fill of them—started scratching his scalp, both hands deep in his brown greasy hair.
    He was a man of my age, lank, dirty, with a three days’ stubble on his chin; there was a narrow glimpse of pink flesh between the lower edge of his collar (soft, with two round slits meant for an absent pin) and the upper end of his shirt. His thin-knitted tie dangled sideways, and there was not a button to his shirt front. A few pale violets were fading in his buttonhole; one of them had got loose and hung head downward. Near him lay a shabby knapsack; an opened flap revealed a pretzel and the greater part of a sausage with the usual connotations of ill-timed lust and brutal amputation. I sat examining the tramp with astonishment; he seemed to have donned that gawky disguise for an old-fashioned slumkin-lumpkin fancy dress ball.
    “I could do with a smoke,” said he in Czech. His voice turned out to be unexpectedly low-tuned, even sedate, and with two forked fingers he made the gesture of holding a cigarette. I thrust toward him my large cigarette case; my eyesdid not once leave his face. He bent a little nearer, pressing his hand against the earth as he did so, and I took the opportunity of inspecting his ear and hollow temple.
    “German ones,” said he and smiled—showed his gums. This disappointed me, but happily his smile vanished immediately. (By this time I was loath to part with the marvel.)
    “German yourself?” he inquired in that language, his fingers twirling and pressing the cigarette. I said Yes and clicked my lighter under his nose. He greedily joined his hands roof-wise above the trembling flame. Blue-black, square fingernails.
    “I’m German, too,” said he, puffing smoke. “That is, my father was German, but my mother was Czech, came from Pilsen.”
    I kept expecting from him an outburst of surprise, great laughter perhaps, but he remained impassive. Only then did I realize what an oaf he was.
    “Slept like a top,” said he to himself in a tone of fatuous complacency, and spat with gusto.
    “Out of work?” I asked.
    Mournfully he nodded several times and spat again. It is always a wonder to me the amount of saliva that simple folk seem to possess.
    “I can walk more than my boots can,” said he looking at his feet. Indeed, he was sadly shod.
    He rolled slowly onto his belly and, as he surveyed the distant gasworks and a skylark that soared up from a furrow, he went on musingly:
    “That was a good job I had