The Land of the Mute Emotions

Where We Meet Our Vanished Aspirations and Unrequited Loves

JOHN SAVAGE

IN a street of Montmartre there is a little house, the shutters of which are never thrown open. If you penetrate into it— and you may have some difficulty in doing so —you will find only gas light in the curious little rooms, brown and uncarpeted and lined with bunks.

It is indeed an unusual house and I am quite certain that you will not enter it unless you can speak the right word to Monsieur Dupaillier. Monsieur Dupaillier wears soft and soundless slippers, and it is always he who answers the doorbell.

One night, in December, 188—, I was sitting on the edge of one of the couches, shaking the wet snow off my feet and puffing at a long pipe which Monsieur Dupaillier had obligingly lighted for me. He stood watching me, his head tilted to one side, evidently fearful lest my pipe should not draw properly. So might a teacher watch a favorite pupil begin a difficult recitation. In his evil old eyes, a real anxiety peered forth. Monsier Dupaillier was proud of me, considering me an aristocratic client.

A HEAVY smell filled the air. To a newcomer there might have been something sinister about the room, with its curtained bunks out of which drooped mysterious arms. That night a pale hand hanging down close to my cheek, from the bunk overhead, suggested to me a quip of the kind that I knew would appeal to the proprietaire.

I pointed upward. "One might think oneself at the undertaker's, Monsieur Jacques."

Monsieur Dupaillier grinned.

"The dead don't talk. It's that poet again. He never keeps quiet."

Overhead, someone had certainly begun a monologue in a monotonous undertone. Accustomed as I was to the noises of this house, to the abrupt ejaculations, the moans, the strange sudden laughter, and the muffled sobbing that arose nightly from behind the curtains, there was yet something in the tone of this voice which aroused my curiosity. It seemed as if an incantation were being said; the speech was rhythmic and declamatory, and the words were articulated with that beauty of enunciation which trained speakers and actors cultivate.

"The poet?"

"Oui, m'sieur."

He pulled away the thin screen overhead. As it clattered back I caught sight of a young man, stretched at full length, his face emaciated and as white as the snow outside. His eyes were wide open.

The noise of the curtain rings evidently startled him. His shattered nerves responded all too quickly; with a spring, he sat up. A glint of intelligence passed like a flame across the blank darkness of his eyeballs. This gleam faded away, and he sat staring straight before him.

Monsieur Dupaillier shrugged.

"Il est malade, celui-là"

Then, with the supreme boredom which was his most marked characteristic, he turned away and shuffled out of the room.

I LOOKED up at the young man. His hair drooped over his forehead like a black plume. His features were chiselled as finely as those of a Greek mask. His mouth, very individual, fell at the corners in a half scornful, half tragic way. There was passion in his dilated nostrils and in the contraction of his brow; but in his eyes a contradictory tiling —the look of a lost child, something spiritual and pure.

I gazed at him a long while. Outside, I could hear the thud of heavy-falling snow against the shutters, and the sound of the winter wind which shrieked and sang across the roofs of Paris and came rushing down the chim ney, through the empty fireplace, into the room.

Abruptly the young man spoke, and as he did so he laid his slender, unconscious hand on my shoulder.

"It is a country of everlasting dawn," he said. He did not glance at me, but slowly began to speak once more.

Continued on page 64

(Continued, from page 44)

"It is a country of everlasting dawn, and wide green plains, and huge trees, where a calm broods and no wind stirs through the leafy thoroughfares. Here and there, between the inky thickets, there are glimpses of lonely shapes, wandering down the avenues of sand which reach in parallels toward the sea. And, on the fields, jewelled over with flowers, soft footsteps fall, and arms stretch up toward the translucid sky. Pebbles drop suddenly from bordering paths into the quiet brooks. Sometimes a hawk arrows up from the forest, as if startled at some commotion on the moss below."

He pointed off into what was to him a vast and immeasurable space.

"Across the giant plain, on the horizon line, there is always a group of figures, caught black against the surrounding whiteness. Their clearly seen movements are fervent and oddly reiterated, but they seem as empty of purpose as the bubbles that rise at dusk to the' surface of a hidden pool. See—" he crouched forward excitedly—"some of the silhouettes are swinging censers, high, low, and high again; the fugitive incense floats up into the,air like a blue veil, carrying no keen scent as it wreathes itself phantom-like about the trunks of the solitary trees in the dunes. Behold —others are clashing soundless cymbals together in a rhythm heard only of themselves, and to which their lifted knees keep time. They gaze curiously over their shoulders, as they cause the golden discs to meet, peering into the distance as if searching for some reverberating answer to their gestures. Three blind men, dressed in white, stand quiet and stretch ungainly arms into the vastness, nor dare step back or forward. By that rusty faun, a group of musicians play on voiceless lutes, with pale quickmoving fingers—such interest stamped upon their tilted heads! Those others, who stand by the balustrade, with necks thrown back, are open-mouthed as if in song, but no sound comes from their lips, and they are breathlessly attitudinized— like the marble boy choristers of Donatello. There, a man with a tall ladder is running up the bars, only to crash to earth as his weight nears the top of it. Poor baffled fool! He sets it on its feet again, and starts to mount once more.

"LOOK! Here come uncouth hunchbacks dressed in velvets and silks, quarrelling among themselves and tearing to pieces a golden flower which they have plucked from the heavens. Now I see rebellious, wild-locked men who are swinging great phantom hammers with which they seek to destroy. Over there, a tumbler hurls through the air, twisting and turning, grinning with hot anguished mirth. And see!—a monk is beating himself on the breast as he treads a crucifix underfoot, and a panting hairy man is struggling, half in play, half in earnest, with a four-footed beast whose ivory-set jaws are flecked with foam. And there are many figures wh,o weep, and many who call out, across the emptiness, and many who seem to be searching endlessly for something they have lost. So do they all dance and limp and stumble across the low horizon, and yet do not advance, but are gesticulating forever on one spot beneath a fixed, unchanging star."

The youth stopped suddenly and bent forward, looking eagerly into my eyes. "Listen to me! You understand, of course, who they are? They are the mute emotions—the solitary and wasted emotions who have never found expression or won the name of action, and so are condemned to perpetual ineffectiveness."

He stretched out his arms in a gesture of exaltation.

"They are all the wishes that have remained unfulfilled; they are all our dreams by day, and our insomnias by night. They are the broken resolves. They are the unrealized ambitions of quixotic youth, and the haunting regrets of age. They are the songs of childhood, forgotten; they are memories of past risings of the moon, and of the breaking of waves on foreign shores. They are the agonized nostalgias of sleepless exiles for the sound of horses' feet on asphalt pavements, and the desperate remembrances of lovers concerning delicate white hands. They are the unrequited loves—veiled weeping women who walk alone; and the unequal affections, upon whose faces are finely-drawn lines. They are passionate words never spoken; and vain kisses in the empty air; and secret suicides in praise of careless charm. They are gifts which are longings; they are chance looks which are adventures. They are the shy, perplexed sufferings of little children. They are the frail, half-born pities that flit through overcrowded minds; they are the dumb, unasked forgivenesses of those who have been sinned against. They are the paralyzed farewells of those who realize they will never meet again in life. They are lonely terrors in the night, and strangled cries of drowning men, and the awed solitude of the journeyer in the desert. They are sudden, unbidden tears at the sight of beauty; and long, long kneelings in churches before kind painted images. And some are wrapped about in false splendor, and those—ah, those—are the hopes of those who should be hopeless. They are the glorious hallucinations of drugged men, —yes, and the sweet, too brief slumbers of those swindled ones who long for the sleep of death!"

TIE had risen to a burst of anguished eloquence which had made him forget our drab surroundings. It was obvious that to him both time and place were non-existent. Suddenly breaking the silence, he gripped my shoulder:

"But look!—the specters join hands and reel about in a whirling medley, those who weep and .those who sing alike, the light-footed ones and those who drag after them a heavy weight. See them! It is a saraband of convicts, a minuet of desperadoes. They are dancing because they are tired of their own eternal attitudes, and seek to melt them into a common movement that will bring them each forgetfulness."

His eyes filled with tears.

"Ah, they grow weary; their hands fall apart, and they break away from each other—a little flurried and maddened by this false anodyne of motion. Some fling themselves gasping on the ground. There they lie and stare up at the white heavens, and press their fingers to their hearts, for they feel their familiar pain upon them once again. Others rise and stray off in the waiting forest, to swing themselves up into the trees and peer down into the glassy ponds, where they at last, thoygh dimly, find that echo of themselves for which they so abidingly yearn. And some go and stand, with folded arms, alone on rocky promotories, and watch in silence the unvaried East where hovers a dawn that will never become day."

HE sat immobile for a moment; then, with a catch of the breath, sank back upon his pillow. I pulled the curtain across his bunk.

As I prepared to lie down on mine, the gaslight flickered wanly about me, casting long shadows behind the chairs.

I remember that, before I closed my eyes, the bells of the great church on the hill, where the faithful of Paris bum candles and hang silver hearts, struck eleven full-toned chimes upon the cold night air.