He related these things, as I say, in an unnaturally subdued vein, in an almost monotonous tone of voice, except that, now and then, when he came to the end of a sentence, he would raise his voice and end unintentionally on an interrogation point Meanwhile, however, his manner was undergoing a drastic change. He was becoming, as best I can explain it, lynx-like. All that he was narrating seemed directed towards some invisible presence. He was only using me, as a listener, so it seemed, to make known in a sly, insinuating fashion things which this «other» person, present but invisible, might construe in his or her own way. «Sheldon is not a fool,» he was saying in this oblique, glancing language. «Sheldon has not forgotten certain little tricks which were played on him. Sheldon is behaving like a gentleman now, very comme il faut, but he is not asleep… no, Sheldon is always on the qui vive. Sheldon can play the fox when he needs to. Sheldon can wear nice clothes, like everybody else, and behave most courteously. Sheldon is amiable, always ready to be of service. Sheldon is kind to little children, even to Polish children. Sheldon does not ask for anything. Sheldon is very quiet, very calm, very well-behaved… BUT BEWARE!!!» And then to my surprise Sheldon whistled… a long, clear whistle which was intended, I have no doubt, as a warning to the invisible one. Beware the day! It was as clear as that, his whistle. Beware, because Sheldon is preparing something super-diabolical, something which the clumsy brain of a Polak could never imagine or invent. Sheldon has not been idle all these years…
The money lending had come about quite naturally. It began that evening over a cup of coffee. As usual I had only five or ten cents in my pocket and was therefore obliged to let Sheldon take the check. The idea of the employment manager being without spending money was so inconceivable to Sheldon that for a moment I feared he would pawn all his jewels.
«Five dollars will be enough, Sheldon,» said I, «if you insist on lending me something.»
An expression of disgust came over Sheldon’s face. «Oh no, oh no-O-O!» he exclaimed in a shrill, grating voice which rose almost to a whistle, «Sheldon will never give five dollars. No-oo, Mr. Miller, Sheldon will give fifty dollars!»
And by God, with that he did fish out fifty dollars, in fives and singles. Again he put on his lynx-like air, looking beyond me as he doled the money out, and mumbling something between his teeth about showing some one what sort of man he, Sheldon, was.
«But Sheldon, I’ll be broke again tomorrow,» I said, pausing to see what effect this would produce.
Sheldon smiled—a cagey, cunning smile, as if he were sharing some great secret with me.
«Then Sheldon will give you another fifty dollars tomorrow,» he said, bringing the words out with a queer hissing effect.
«I have no idea when you will get the money back,» I then informed him.
In answer to this Sheldon produced three greasy bank books from his inside pocket. The deposits totalled over two thousand dollars. From his vest pockets he extracted a few rings whose stones glittered like the authentic thing.
«This is nothing,» he said. «Sheldon is not telling all.»
This was the beginning of our relationship, a rather strange one for the employment manager of a cosmococcic corporation. I wondered sometimes if other employment managers enjoyed these advantages. When I met with them occasionally at luncheons I felt more like a messenger boy than a personnel manager. I could never muster that dignity and self-importance in which they appeared to be perpetually enshrouded.
They never seemed to look me in the eye when I spoke, but always at my baggy trousers, my run-down shoes, my torn, soiled shirt or the holes in my hat. If I told them an innocent little story they made so much of it that I was embarrassed. They were tremendously impressed, for example, when I told them about a certain messenger in the Broad Street office who, while waiting for his calls, would read Dante, Homer and Thomas Aquinas in the original. They didn’t wait to hear that he had been a professor once in a university in Bologna, that he had tried to commit suicide because he had lost his wife and three children in a railroad accident, that he had lost his memory and had arrived in America with another man’s passport, and that only after he had been working as a messenger for six months had he recovered his identity. That he had found the work agreeable, that he preferred to remain a messenger, that he wished to remain unknown— these things would have sounded too fantastic for their ears. All they could seize and marvel at was the fact that a «messenger», in uniform, was able to read the classics in the original. Now and then I would borrow a ten spot from one of them, after relating one of these amusing incidents, never intending to repay of course. I felt compelled to extract some little token from them—for my services as entertainer. And what hemming and hawing they resorted to before coughing up these trivial sums! What a contrast to the easy touches I made among the «goofy» messengers!
Reflections of this order always excited me to the breaking point. Ten minutes of introspective reverie and I was bursting to write a book. I thought of Mona. If only for her sake I ought to begin. And where would I begin? In this room which was like the lobby of an insane asylum? Begin with Kronski looking over my shoulder? Somewhere I had read recently about an abandoned city of Burma, the ancient capital of a region where, in the compass of a hundred miles, there once flourished eight thousand thriving temples. The whole area was now empty of inhabitants, had been so for a thousand years or more. Only a few lone priests, probably half-crazed, were now to be found among the empty temples. Serpents and bats and owls infested the sacred edifices; at night the jackals howled amidst the ruins.
Why should this picture of desolation cause me such painful depression? Why should eight thousand empty, ruined temples awaken such anguish? People die, races disappear, religions fade away: it is in the order of things. But that something of beauty should remain, and be powerless to affect, powerless to attract us, was an enigma which weighed me down. For I had not even begun to build! In my mind I saw my own temples in ruins, before even one brick had been laid upon another. In some freakish way I and the goofy messengers who were to aid me were prowling about the abandoned places of the spirit like the jackals which howled at night. We wandered amidst the halls of an ethereal edifice, a dream stupa, which would be abandoned before it could take earthly shape. In Burma the invader had been responsible for driving the spirit of man into the ground. It had happened over and over in the history of man and it was explicable. But what prevented us, the dreamers of this continent, from giving form and substance to our fabulous edifices? The race of visionary architects was as good as extinct. The genius of man had been canalized and directed into other channels. So it was said. I could not accept it. I have looked at the separate stones, the girders, the portals, the windows which even in buildings are like the eyes of the soul; I have looked at them as I have looked at separate pages of these books, and I have seen one architecture informing the lives of our people, be it in book, in law, in stone, in custom; I saw that it was created (seen first in the mind) then objectified, given light, air and space, given purpose and significance, given a rhythm which would rise and fall, a growth from seed to flourishing tree, a decline from shrivelled leaf and branch to seed again, and a compost to nourish the seed. I saw this continent as other continents before and after: creations in every sense of the word, including the very catastrophes which would make their existence forgotten…
After Kronski and Ghompal had retired I felt so wide awake, so stimulated by the thoughts which were racing through my head that I felt impelled to go for a long walk. As I was putting on my things I looked at myself in the mirror. I made that whistling grimace of Sheldon’s and felicitated myself on my powers of mimicry. Once upon a time I had thought I might make a good clown. There was a chap in school who passed as my twin brother; we were very close to one another and later, when we had graduated, we formed a club of twelve which we called the Xerxes Society. We two possessed all the initiative—the others were just so much slag and driftwood. In desperation sometimes George Marshall and I would perform for the others, an impromptu clowning which kept the others in stitches. Later I used to think of these moments as-having quite a tragic quality. The dependency of the others was really pathetic: it was a foretaste of the general inertia and apathy which I was to encounter all through life. Thinking of George
