«He was upset to-night,» Kronski volunteered after the doctor had retired. «You see, he’s after that twelve-year old niece of his and his wife is on to him. She’s threatening to turn him over to the district attorney if he doesn’t stop running after the girl. She’s jealous as the devil and I don’t blame her. Besides, she hates to think of the abortions that are pulled off every day, right under her nose, polluting her home, as it were. She swears there’s something wrong with him. There’s something wrong with her too, if you notice. If you ask me, I think she’s afraid he’ll cut her open some night. She looks at his hands all the time, as if he always came to her fresh from a murder.»
He paused a moment to let these observations sink in. «There’s something else preying on her mind,» he resumed. «The daughter is growing up… she’ll be a young woman before long. Well, with a husband like that you can see what’s bothering her. It’s not just the idea of incest—horrible enough—but the further thought, that… that he’ll come to her some night with bloody hands… the hands that murdered the life in her own daughter’s womb… Complicated, what? But not impossible. Not with that guy! such a fine fellow. A sensitive, delicate chap, really. She’s right. And what makes it worse is that he’s Almost Christ-like. You can’t talk to him about the sex mania because he won’t admit a word you say. He pretends to be absolutely innocent. But he’s in deep. Some day the police will come and take him away—there’ll be a hell of a stink, you’ll see…»
That Dr. Onirifick had made it possible for Kronski to pursue his medical studies I knew. And that Kronski had to find some extraordinary way of paying Dr. Onirifick back I was also aware of. Nothing would suit him better than to have his friend disintegrate completely. Then Kronski would come to the rescue in magnificent fashion. He would do something wholly unexpected, something no man had ever done for another. That was how his mind worked. Meanwhile, by spreading rumors, by’ slandering and maligning his friend, by undermining him, he was only hastening a downfall which was inevitable. He was positively itching to get to work on his friend, to rehabilitate him, to repay him superabundantly for the kindness he had shown him in putting him through college. He would pull the house down about his friend’s ears in order to rescue him from the ruins. A curious attitude. A sort of perverted Galahad. A meddler. A super-meddler. Always doing his damndest to make things go from bad to worse so that at the last ditch he, Kronski, might step in and magically transform the situation. Even so, it was not gratitude he desired but recognition, recognition of superior powers, recognition of his uniqueness.
While he was still an interne I used to visit him occasionally at the hospital where he was serving his time. We used to play billiards with the other internes. I only visited the hospital when I was in a desperate mood, when I wanted a meal or the loan of a few dollars. I hated the atmosphere of the place; I loathed his associates, their manners, their conversation, their very aims even. The great healing art meant nothing to them; they were looking for a snug berth, that was all. Most of. them had as little flair for medicine as a politician has for statesmanship. They didn’t even have that fundamental prerequisite of the healer—the love of human kind. They were callous, heartless, utterly self-centered, utterly disinterested in anything but their own advancement. They were worse boors than the butchers in the slaughter-house.
Kronski was thoroughly at home in this environment. He knew more than the others, could out-talk them, out-smart them, out-shout them. He was a better billiard player, a better crap-shooter, a better chess player, a better everything. He knew it all and he loved to spew it forth, parade up and down in his own vomit.
Naturally he was heartily detested. Of a gregarious nature he managed, despite his obnoxious traits, to keep himself surrounded by his kind. Had he been obliged to live alone he would have fallen apart. He knew that he was not wanted: nobody ever sought him out except to ask a favor of him. Alone, the realization of his plight must have caused him bitter moments. It was difficult to know how he really appraised himself because in the presence of others he was all gusto, merriment, bluster, bravado, grandeur and grandiloquence. He behaved as though he were rehearsing a part before an invisible mirror. How he loved himself! Yes, and what loathing there was behind that facade, that amour-propre! «I smell bad!» that’s what he must have said to himself every night when alone in his room. «But I’ll do something magnificent yet… just watch!»
At intervals there came moods of dejection. He was a pitiful object then—something quite inhuman, something not of the animal world but of the vegetable kingdom. He would plop himself down somewhere and let himself rot. In this condition tumors sprouted from him, as from some gigantic mouldy potato left to perish in the dark. Nothing could stir him from his lethargy. Wherever he was put he would stay, inert, brooding incessantly, as though the world were coming to an end.
As far as one could make out he had no personal problems. He was a monster who had emerged from the vegetable kingdom without passing through the animal stage. His body, almost insentient, was invested with a mind which ruled him like a tyrant. His emotional life was a mush which he ladled out like a drunken Cossak. There was something almost anthropophagous about his tenderness; he demanded not the promptings and stirrings of the heart but the heart itself, and with it, if possible, the gizzard, the liver, the pancreas and other tender, edible portions of the human organism. In his exalted moments he seemed not only eager to devour the object of his tenderness but to invite the other to devour him also. His mouth would wreath itself in a veritable mandibular ecstasy; he would work himself up until the very soul of him came forth hi a spongy ectoplasmic substance. It was a horrible state of affection, terrifying because it knew no bounds. It was a depersonalized glut or slop, a hangover from some archaic condition of ecstasy—the residual memory of crabs and snakes, of their prolonged copulations in the protoplasmic slime of ages long forgotten.
And now, in Cockroach Hall, as we called it, there was preparing itself a delicious sexual omelette which we were all to savour, each in his own particular way. There was something intestinal about the atmosphere of the establishment, for it was an establishment more than a home. It was the clinic of love, so to speak, where embryos sprouted like weeds and, like weeds, were pulled up by the roots or chopped down with the scythe.
How the employment manager of the great Cosmo-demonic Telegraph Company had ever allowed himself to be ensnared and trapped in this blood-soaked den of sex surpasses understanding. The moment I got off the train at the elevated station and started descending the stairs into the heart of the Bronx I became a different person. It was a walk of a few blocks to Dr. Onirifick’s establishment, just sufficient to disorient me, to give me time to slip into the role of the sensitive genius, the romantic poet, the happy mystic who had found his true love and who was ready to die for her.
There was a frightful discordance between this new inner state of being and the physical atmosphere of the neighborhood through which I had to plunge each night. Everywhere the grim, monotonous walls loomed up; behind them lived families whose whole life centered about a job. Industrious, patient, ambitious slaves whose one aim was emancipation. In the interim putting up with anything; oblivious of discomfort, immune to ugliness. Heroic little souls whose very obsession to liberate themselves from the thralldom of work served only to magnify the squalor and the misery of their lives.
What proof had I that poverty could bear another face? Only the dim, fuzzy memory of my childhood in the 14th Ward, Brooklyn. The memory of a child who had been sheltered, who had been given every opportunity, who had known nothing but joy and freedom—until he was ten years of age.
Why had I made that blunder in talking to Dr. Onirifick? I had not intended to talk about the Jews that evening—I had intended to talk about The Path to Rome. That was the book of Belloc’s which had really set me on fire. A sensitive man,
