At the Prophet’s
There are strange places, strange minds, strange regions of the spirit, lofty and poverty-stricken. Along the peripheries of the big cities, where the streetlights grow scarcer and the policemen walk in couples, you must climb the stairs in the houses until you cannot go any higher, climb into the attics under slanting roofs, where pale young geniuses, criminals of dreams, sit brooding with folded arms; climb into cheap and imposingly decorated studios, where lonely, rebel artists, consumed from within, hungry yet proud, contend with their latest and wildest ideals in clouds of cigarette smoke. Here is the end of things, here is ice, purity, and nothingness. Here no contract is valid, no concession, no consideration, no measure, and no value. Here the air has grown so thin, so chaste, that the miasmata of life can no longer thrive. Here stubbornness reigns, the uttermost logical conclusion, the ego upon its desperate throne, freedom, madness, and death.
It was Good Friday, eight o’clock in the evening. Several of the people whom Daniel had invited came at the same time. They had received invitations on quarto sheets, upon which there was an eagle which bore a naked rapier in its claws through the air, and which contained in a singular handwriting a request to participate in a kind of convention on Good Friday evening, when Daniel’s proclamations were to be read. And so now they met at the appointed hour in the desolate and half-dark suburban street in front of the banal block of flats which contained the physical home of the prophet.
A few were acquainted with one another and exchanged greetings. These were a Polish artist and the thin girl who lived with him; a lyric poet, a tall, black-bearded Semite, with his heavy-limbed, pallid wife, who wore clothes like draperies; an individual who looked at once sickly and martial, being a spiritualist who was also a retired cavalry captain; and a young philosopher with the appearance of a kangaroo. Only the short-story writer, a gentleman with a stiff hat and a cultivated moustache, knew no one. He came from another sphere and had come here only accidentally. He had a certain relationship to life and a book of his was much read in middle-class circles. He was determined to behave in a strictly modest fashion, to be appreciative, and on the whole to act like one who is merely tolerated. He followed the others into the house at a short distance.
They mounted the stairs, one after the other, supporting themselves on the cast-iron railing. They were silent, for they were people who knew the value of words and were not accustomed to talk needlessly. In the dim light of the little oil-lamps which stood upon the windowsills at every turn of the stairs, they read the names upon the doorplates of the flats as they went past. They mounted past the care-haunted abodes of an insurance official, a midwife, a laundress, an “agent,” a chiropodist—quietly, without contempt, but estranged. They climbed up this narrow staircase hall as up some half-lighted shaft, full of confidence and without pausing, for from above, far up where one could go no higher, a faint glow greeted them, a soft and fugitive and errant glow from the highest altitudes.
Finally they stood at the goal, under the roof, in the light of six candles, which were burning in different candlesticks upon a little table covered by a faded little altar-cloth at the head of the stairs. On the door, which looked like the entrance to a storeroom, there was a grey oblong of cardboard, on which was to be read the name “Daniel” in Roman letters, done with black chalk. They rang.
A boy with a large head and a friendly expression opened the door. He wore a new suit of blue cloth and polished top-boots, and
