Moloch Read online

  Dion Moloch was a modest, sensitive soul attired in a suit of Bedford whipcord and pale blue shirt, the collars and cuffs of which were disgracefully frayed.

  Though he was in the service of the Great American Telegraph Company he did not suffer from megalomania, dementia praecox, or any of the fashionable nervous and mental disorders of the twentieth century. It was often said of him that he was anti-Semitic, but then this is a prejudice and not a disease.

  At any rate, he was not like a certain character out of Gogol who had to be informed when to blow his nose. He was, in short, an American of three generations. He was definitely not Russian.

  His grandparents had fought in the Civil War—on both sides. He had fought in no wars. In point of fact, he was, or had been, a draft dodger. Not that he was a coward, nor a man of high principles, for that matter, like—shall we say Woodrow Wilson? No, it was rather that he was an enigma (to himself) . . . that everything was an enigma.

  Two years after the war was over he had arrived at the conclusion that the Germans were right, but it was too late then, of course, to enlist in a cause that had already been lost.

  When America entered the war Dion Moloch took it into his head to get married. To be sure, thousands of Americans were similarly moved by the call to arms. This is a phenomenon, however, that chiefly concerns the sociologist.

  Despite the fact that the war had been raging on a dozen fronts for several years, and that millions of his fellow creatures, for the sake of a few empty phrases, were being cheerfully converted into so much cannon fodder, Dion Moloch remained the victim of a habit which had begun at an early age. It may seem extraordinary to mention such a detail in connection with the life of this individual when the entire world was convulsed by a holocaust. Nevertheless, this singular detail, trivial as it may seem beside the annals of a great war, had a most important bearing on Dion Moloch’s future career.

  To put it tersely, our hero could never get up when the alarm went off in the morning.

  During the Argonne Drive he had become enamored of a young pianiste who was giving concerts to help make the world safe for democracy. The young lady had a most unpatriotic desire to play the rhapsodies of Liszt, since she had been brought up on that diet in a finishing school at Montreal, but knowing little of the world, and less of Hungary, she was uncertain of the status of her taste. She therefore contented herself with practicing Liszt etudes on a clavier at home.

  The assassin who hurled the bomb at the Archduke of Austria also brought these two creatures together. It was left to Providence to unite them.

  One morning, when Moloch lay slumbering peacefully, oblivious of the rumble on the Western Front, or all the fronts put together, his mother (for some unknown reason) became unduly incensed by his torpor. Perhaps she had been stirred the night before by some unusual tale of atrocity. At any rate, she had been thinking thus—“If he won’t enlist he can at least get a job.” The more she thought the more irate she became. Finally, actuated by a sudden blind impulse she hastened to the sink and filled a pail of water. A moment later and she had dashed the chill contents over him.

  “Now get up!” she screamed. “You lazy good-for-nothing, you waster . . . you bum!”

  The last epithet required the complete abdication of her maternal affection.

  It would be idle and tortuous to recount the successive steps by which, starting from this simple dramatic scene, our hero finally became enmeshed in the ophidian toils of matrimony. That Rabelaisian escapade forms another volume by itself. Suffice it to relate that immediately upon arising Dion Moloch packed his duds and wiped his feet on the paternal rug for the last time.

  Nor does it seem fair to dwell on the fact, though it forms a somewhat colorful note—a leitmotif, as it were, throughout his future marital career—that on the morning of his hurried wedding he was obliged to borrow the price of a haircut and shave. The bride, as you may suspect, paid the marriage fee, a fact which was never entirely forgotten by her throughout their turbulent wedlock.

  What seems of great importance, looking back upon his sclerotic past, is that this event, premature though it was, made it necessary for Dion Moloch to find a job.

  When we first encounter him among the “apparitions” on the Bowery he has already given three years of his life to a great corporation.

  What errand has brought him to this dismal thoroughfare— the Bowery? Is it to get his soul repaired, amid the rataplan of traffic? Or is it the free lunch that has attracted him?

  He has just come from the home of a lunatic—one of those self-imposed missions which his position occasionally created and which he found not entirely disagreeable. Intent upon making his way back to the office his attention has been suddenly arrested by a notice suspended over a flight of stairs leading to a gloomy cellar. The notice, printed in huge ocher letters, read:

  DEATH ON BUGS

  Below these sulphurous words was a canvas whose colors affected the retina as pleasantly as fried eggs. The painter had endeavored, evidently, to reproduce a situation which undoubtedly had poignancy for the denizens of this locality. A recumbent nude with flaxen tresses and flowing hips was shown busily engaged in scratching the tenderer portions of her anatomy. The bed seemed rather to float in the middle air than to rest firmly on the planked flooring. Her consort was depicted stealing about the premises with a squirt-gun. The imbecilic glee he displayed was apparently evoked by the sight of a filthy mattress from which an interminable file of bedbugs issued. (The bedbug is known to scientists as Cimex lectularius. a cosmopolitan blood-sucking wingless depressed bug of reddish brown color and vile odor, infesting houses and especially beds. The cockroach is the natural enemy of the bedbug.) Even the counterpane on which the assassin’s saffron paramour reclined, after the now classic manner of Olympe, was diapered with these cosmopolitan bloodsucking wingless depressed bugs of reddish brown color and vile odor.

  At this point a number of things might have happened. Nothing is further from the truth than that, given a certain impetus (as, for instance, this germicide portrait on the Bowery) the hero forthwith reacts in thus and such a manner. The grand metabolistic dynamics of the laboratory worker, which are so impressive in connection with rats and mental defectives, becomes inoperative when a truly human mind and organism is encountered. . . . Possibly twenty-five different courses of action presented themselves to our character. The one impulse to which he was thoroughly immune was to purchase a sample of this rare insecticide. For him the subway blurbs and the garish posters that stood out like a rash along the countryside had no message. His tastes were simple, his wants easily satisfied. Copywriters might rack their brains for another century to come without ever arousing in him that fundamental curiosity upon which the advertising cult of our day rears its ephemeral philosophy of success.

  Shreds of thought fluttered like the snapped strings of an epiphone banjo in the gray convolutions of his upper register. True, he did not move entirely in an intellectual vortex. Almost instinctively he reached into his breast pocket and exhumed a leather-covered notebook, wherein he wrote with a neat legible hand these words:

  “Read The House of the Dead again.”

  As he turned to elbow his way out of the mass of sweaty flesh that enveloped him like a polyp he was made uncomfortably aware of the odor of sanctity. What that odor is like, someone has remarked, may be imagined from reading the lives of the saints. . . He paused a moment to survey the stinking proletariat of Karl Marx. Visions assailed him . . . visions of a young immigrant on the second floor of a poem by some Ivanovich or other. The young immigrant was tossing about on the bed-springs, dreaming of bedbugs and cockroaches, haunted by the miseries of his wasting, starved life, despairing of all the violent beauty beyond his grasp. Dion Moloch had an irresistible desire to get up on his hind legs and shout: “Let’s all sing goddam!”

  Meanwhile his senses were jangled by a weird cacophony. Boss Tweed’s progeny of thugs and werewolves choked the Bowery’s grimy gullet
like clots of phlegm. Dick Croker’s penny arcade of lice, lungers, lifers, and hallucinations was at noon of this day in the third decade of the twentieth century a maelstrom of frenetic rhythms. Cranes swinging, bells ringing, horns blowing, gongs clanging, gears meshing and scraping. Crazy, jagged rhythms—like the marriage of the brown derby and the slide trombone. The world of the machine in a tempo of glorified planetary abandon. An orgasm of inorganic lust rising to a crescendo of atomic disintegration. A weird, unearthly chant of a Bowery that had severed its affinity with Dick Croker’s dime museum of rotgut and syphilis. A veritable dirge dedicated by Labor to Capital on the ashes of Rosie O’Grady. An amalgamated union of groans supplied by the international workers of the world ... death rattles contributed gratis by the Salvation Army. Visions of Chuck Connors with a cleaver fighting his way through delirium tremens. Shadows of comets swishing through rhomboidal space into Buxtehude. . . .

  What the rabble on the sidewalk observed during this farrago which took possession of Moloch’s soul was a modest, sensitive individual of medium height, with the composite features of scholar and faun, wearing a shirt of pale dungaree beneath a suit of Bedford whipcord. A mortal with two legs to his trousers, like any other mortal in the Western hemisphere. Not a pedagogic sadist, like that trapeze artist from the Emerald Isle; not a great Socratic gadfly stinging the thick hide of British philistinism; nor a Slav flirting with eternity in a bath of cockroaches. No, just a man with suit and suspenders . . . and BVDs for perfect crotch comfort. A man whose name is un-Byzantine. An American of three generations, a husband and father, a modest, sensitive soul with unmistakable anti-Semitic leanings . . . And yet, employment manager of the Great American Telegraph Company.

  2

  HARI DAS WRIGGLED LIKE A WET DRAKE THROUGH THE festering streets of Chinatown. It was noon hour. His greasy, blue-black hair fell in somber ringlets over the military collar of his drab uniform. He looked about him with the eyes of a Martian. The advertisements, plastered like wallpaper on a housefront here and there, reminded him of the wrappers on firecrackers which he had glimpsed in the cluttered shopwindows of Bombay. Pool parlors filled with grimacing, gesticulating figures in shirt sleeves, glimpsed through tiny rectangles of windowpane clouded with grime and grease. A sweetish, sickening odor of decay emanating from the open doors of meat and vegetable stores, loaded with strange, forbidding viands that made a sophisticated appeal to alien palates. Stiff shellacked carcasses of fowl and pigs, some intact, some mutilated and dismembered, hung in the windows like curios in an antique shop. He stared frankly and unconcerned at the stolid forms behind the windows which blinked with grave insolence at the inquisitive world without: grave, imperturbable figures., their yellow mouths glued to long-stemmed bamboo pipes from whose metal bowls thin wreaths of smoke curled up, saturating the air with reek of camel’s dung.

  It was Hari Das’s second day as a telegraph messenger. Removing his visored cap, he examined the batch of telegrams deposited therein. Satisfied that they were properly routed, he sat down on a doorstep and began to munch a banana.

  A crowd of ragamuffins quickly gathered. He finished the banana and threw the peels over the heads of the assembled urchins with the cautiousness that Mr. Rockefeller exhibits when, on his birthday, he distributes brand-new dimes.

  “Git a haircut!” yelled one youngster.

  “Take off that uniform!”

  Hari laughed good-naturedly—a rare Burgundian laugh that mocked the famine and pestilence in India. As the self-appointed “Redeemer of Mankind” in this twentieth century he felt that mirth was his most effective weapon. He never hesitated to employ it.

  The street gamins swarmed about him like flesh flies. “Get the hell out of here,” he shouted, settling comfortably on his elbow as he sprawled lazily over the doorstep. Still the devils persisted in hanging about him. Their gibes were menacing.

  “Go on, beat it!” he screamed in a shrill voice. “Or I’ll give you a kick in the pants.”

  Pleased with his ready command of an alien argot, he fished in his inside pocket and commenced the perusal of a pamphlet entitled “An Open Letter to Lloyd George.” The extreme elation which he made no attempt to suppress, as he read this alarming manifesto, may be pardoned when it is understood that the reader of the document was himself the author. He chuckled now and then as he reread a felicitous passage, wholly oblivious of the surrounding spectators. If it were possible for a mere mortal to conceive the glee of our anthropomorphic deity upon that day when his miraculous task of creation was ended, when he settled back upon his celestial throne, and gazing abstractly upon his work, pronounced it good, then one might appreciate the unholy joy of this Aryan messenger gloating over his philippic to Lloyd George, Supreme Satanic Majesty.

  Occasionally he paused in his reading to fix with the eye of a mesmerist the ornamental figure of a maroon dragon on a balcony across the street. To Hari Das it could as well have been the sapphire tip of Mount Everest, or the proud, stoical figure of Liberty shimmering in verdigris on Bedloe’s Island. What gave him pause was the sudden reflection of the ironical situation he found himself in at this moment. The proud inheritor of a great culture, a descendant and representative of the Aryan race, sitting on a doorstep in America, in Chinatown no less, dressed as a menial, regarded as “chandala” ... an object of curiosity in an alien land.

  He reviewed the fruits of his first two months in America: a new slant on sex, a strong sympathy for the Negro, contempt for Nordic supremacy, increasing fears of acquiring a venereal infection (to say nothing of pyorrhea and hemorrhoids), pride in his growing familiarity with the native idiom, with slang and profanity. He thought of his intended studies at Columbia. They seemed far away, and about as useful as a totem pole. What could he do, in America, with a degree of “Doctor of Philosophy”? Get married with it and become a streetcar conductor? Vague, unfinished thoughts of the life he had abandoned occupied him. He wondered listlessly if he would ever go back to India and settle down to the business of driving out the British fleas.

  “Hey, you,” he chirped pleasantly, “what time is it?”

  This query was drowned in an ocean of sneers and guffaws.

  Hari grinned, not knowing how else to meet this Gentile world, and stretched leisurely in full view of the public.

  Cried a voice: “Say, mutt, what are you? Where do you come from?”

  The term “mutt,” connoting in its restricted sense “telegraph messenger,” was unknown to him. But he accepted with fiery exclusiveness the challenge of his origin. Proudly, taut as a bronze statue of Demosthenes, he drew himself up. His black eyes glittered with the keenest amusement as he prepared to “repeat” his maiden speech to the American public. He felt like that great French sot who, in his eloquence, exclaimed: “Take elegance and wring its neck.”

  “Young roughnecks,” he commenced, “you see before you this noon, in this glorious land of equality and fraternity, a representative of the greatest culture the world has ever known. I consider it a privilege, a rare privilege”—his “rare” is impossible to reproduce—“to be permitted to answer the question which the young lout before me has just propounded. I am a son of India, you joyous vagabonds ... a son of that vast empire which stretches from the Himalayas to the coral tip of Ceylon. A nation of three hundred million souls, speaking a hundred different tongues, worshiping a thousand unknown gods. . . . The most precious jewel in the wallet of that predatory monster, the British government.”

  A few young Chinamen in American dress swelled the ranks of his audience. Toward these Hari flung his ropes of pearls.

  “Men of the Orient, I greet you! Followers of Confucius, disciples of the Great Gautama, I have a message for you ... a message for all mankind, black or white, red or yellow.” His teeth gleamed white and strong in the bright sunlight. “Men of Cathay, behold in me the Promised Redeemer... the new Savior of the World! O men, nothing surprises me more than the vague, diverse, often contradictory popular conceptions of
the coming of Christ. Do you expect the man from the moon to descend on earth and be your ruler? Men of the twentieth century, I think you will have sense enough to recognize this fact: scattered far and wide are the genuine credentials in the Bible, entitling me to the role I aspire to play—‘the scroll and the book written within and without, speaking a foreign language, lisping and smattering, publishing peace, and so on and so on. . . .’ Even a cursory review of the Bible, with a view to establishing my identity with the Promised One, will convince the skeptic of the force of my claims.... The very stupendousness of my task, that is, evolving order out of the present chaos, is its simplicity. If I appear to be paradoxical, I am none the less truthful. I do not know how far I shall be able to satisfy the cravings of the world.” (Sic!) “The world has thoroughly disappointed me. . . . However, the modern Christ does not claim to be infallible. You smile.” (A mere oratorical gesture ... no one understood what he was talking about.) “I am human, all too human. These petty human weaknesses are, however, overshadowed and eclipsed by human greatness, human loftiness inherent in this frail body. . . . Either I am crazy or the world is crazy.”

  This mellifluous exordium was cut short by the approach of Officer Mulligan. That scion of the law grabbed Hari’s emaciated arm and squeezed it viciously.

  “What’s all the fuss?” he inquired savagely.

  “He’s a nut!” yelled someone.

  A swarm of Chinamen in blue and black silk vestments suddenly appeared and pressed close about Officer Mulligan. They seemed whimsically pleased over the prospect of an arrest.

  Officer Mulligan brandished his club. “Back up, you slit-faced buggers!”

  The sea of yellow faces remained calm and tranquil. No one budged.

  “Whaddayagotta say?” A still more vicious squeeze apprised Hari Das that Officer Mulligan was not jesting.