But it was not till after Betty had married her cousin Angelo that Hans had much time around the carnival for reading. Thereafter he went through many hundreds of books on history and biography and science. Fortunately he now had the prodigious memory that the Professor had recommended. And he listened to the Professor in the odd hours around the carnival, for the Professor himself was a distillate of thousands of books.
“Learning is much maligned because it is confused with another thing of the same name,” the Professor told him. “Learning seeks answers to the question Why; the grubby thing of the same name seeks answers to the question What. Remember that, if ever you are in doubt. There is a paradox that we must understand something of the ultimate answer before we can correctly phrase a partial question. We of the Faith, of course, are given to understand something of this ultimate answer. Be you not superior to those who seek answer to the question What; but at the same time never be intimidated by them.”
Hans was not likely to be intimidated by the seekers of the secondary knowledge.
“I am glad that you also have been with a carnival, Finnegan, if only for six weeks,” Hans told him as they talked together that summer. “If you hadn't known the carnivals then half the world would have remained closed to you. So many people know only half of the world. But you never have told me what you did with the carnival.”
“Ah, I had certain duties concerning the horses, important though not very highly thought of. I was always a good man with a shovel and a pitchfork.”
Hans himself left the carnvials in either 1935 or 1936, the spring anyhow that Betty had her second child, the spring that the Professor showed clear signs of slowing down and Hans felt himself in grave danger of inheriting the apparatus.
He decided that his Wanderjahr was over, and he left the roads and went to Bohemia.
Not to the land of Bohemia: but to the Bohemia which is above, which is our mother; or, less profanely, that Bohemia which is always downtown, which is our off-uncle.
5.
“He sang the grand old ballads of the people, accompanying himself on the flute.”
This is the story of Li Tai Po
Who played the flute and sang,
Though both at once was a feat to know
In even the Land of Wang.
When Li Tai Po was a man full young
He loved till his throat did smart:
But his hands were burned and his heart was stung,
And he carried the sting in his heart.
And though he mourned for a year or more
That the world could be so wrong,
Like many another who sang before
He turned his grief to song.
He sang of the kings in their golden towers
And the people who live like mice,
And the people who work in the fields of flowers
And the watery fields of rice.
So the world grew sweet and quaint and close
And himself seemed far away,
And he tipped his jug to the cutters’ blows
In the Chinese fields of hay.
When the Spring came down with its freshet rains,
When the sweet black earth was turned,
He traveled him wide o’er the Chinese plains,
And the blue days bloomed and burned.
He piped on his flute, and the pheasants cried,
And the bluebirds soared like darts;
And he sat him down by the river's side
And fashioned a song of hearts.
He piped on his flute, did old Li Tai,
And lo! there's a boat at hand,
And a Chinese girl with a flashing eye
Does bring the boat to land.
“And so you would ride with the fisher maid?
My boat's known many a treat,
But never a sage and a teacher staid,
Not an old old man so sweet.”
Now Li Tai Po was tipsy then,
So he left his flute and wine
And his song of hearts by the plashy fen,
And went with the columbine.
“My father and mother,” the girl did say,
“Would never believe if I told
That I rode with the sage on the watery way
When the day went down in gold.”
The billows heaved on the vessel's side
With a merry click and clug,
And Li Po Tai was weasel-eyed
From the girl and the tippling jug.
“You know,” he said, “it was long ago
That I loved you, I did, I swear,
In another form, in a form of snow,
When the spring of the year was fair.”
“Sit down, Oh do, you sage, you fool,
And ride in the boat and I'll row,
Or yours is a watery death and cool
Where only the fishes know.”
But the tale is short and the tale is spun,
Nor even the Gods of Hin
Can blot it away when once it's done,
So Li Po tumbled in.
“Alas,” said the maid, “Alas, alack,
But the sweet old sage is dead.”
And he lay with the seaweed under his back
And a green stone under his head.”
So this is the ballad of Li Tai Po
Who sang while he played the flute,
And the gold's all gone, and the wine's run low,
And all of his songs are mute.
Unpublished ballads of Hans Schultz
But for the accident of birth in another land and of another race, Heine would have been Chinese, as essentially he was. And it was for this reason that Heine was such a strong factor in what Hans called his Chinese period.
Now all his life Hans had known these ballads, but he had only known them for this period when they would rise up and shake him with a Rhineland sadness that mixed in him gabled German roofs and Chinese straw houses and river junks with an off perfume known as Love in Springtime.
With Hans it wasn't a love for just one person (except a little bit for Trinali Peterson); it was love of everyone.
Whether it is possible to have a terrible nostalgia for a thing at the same time it is being lived, that was the case with Hans in a period of leisure and intensity that was both sad and joyful. These were the elements of the complex: Hans who had several thousand dollars saved from his Wanderjahr; and his encounter with Cosmopolis which he had never known before except for short hours at a time; and a half-dozen young persons of talent of whom Trinali Peterson has the greater part; and New York itself which is more than Baghdad and Paris and Heidelberg and Lyonesse.
The Town had already been discovered at the time Hans arrived. There were even persons to whom it was an old thing. But actually it may have blossomed for the first time that spring.
Hans’ first encounter with the young people was in a block of secondhand bookstores downtown. He had often had people ask him for the price of a cup of coffee or a hamburger or a bed for the night. But he had never before had anyone ask him for this.
“Hey, Dutch, give a poor scholar the price of a book, a quarter,” a lad said.
This is a new approach,” Hans told him. “Have you had breakfast?”
“No. Only the rich eat breakfast. Now that it is getting nice enough to read in the parks I always concentrate on bumming my book of the day first. About noon I'll try for coffee and a bun.”
“What is the book?”
“Jaufre and Brunissende. It's in Langue d’oc.”
“I know.”
“You know? How do you know things like that, Dutchman?”
“The same way that you know I'm a Dutchman.” Hans gave the fellow a quarter for the book, and also bought for himself Les Cents Novelles Nouvelles at the same table. He hadn't known that there were bookstores like this. He followed the scholarly panhandler to the park, and like him read for several hours. Then he bought a couple of giant bagels and a quart of
beer which they split.
“Dutchman, you are a prince. Do you have a place to sleep?”
“To sleep? Yes, my rooms,” Hans told him.
“His rooms, he says, as though it were an ordinary thing to have rooms. Only the rich have rooms. Dutchman, my name is James Fitzjames. I sleep in hallways and on the sofas of my friends. I am the most intelligent and least charming of the group We are known for our intelligence and lack of charm. Where do you live?”
“In my hotel. I am looking for an apartment.”
“It just so happens, Dutchman, that I am an expert on these things; where to live and how to live graciously. You do want to live graciously, do you not?”
“I'm not sure that is the word. Just a place to stay while I see the town and look to the future.”
“I wonder how you got along before you met me. Have you the price of a meal?”
“Yes.”
“For three, that is.”
“You count better than I do. Yes, for three then.”
“You don't mind walking a few miles?”
“I walk all day long. I am seeing the town on foot.”
They walked uptown and Jimmy talked. “The others all have talent; they are sure of that. I am not at all sure that I have it myself. I'm only sure that I come closer to it than the rest of them do. But if we don't have it, then it isn't to be had. When we are together in one room, I sometimes think that it would be better for the rest of New York to be destroyed than for that roomful to be destroyed. We have something new that is not anywhere except when we are together. But the rest of the Town, and the World itself which is the same thing, has gone about as far as it can go without it. We are the new leaven.”
“Then maybe you shouldn't ever all be together. It would be dangerous. If something happened to you the loss might be too much for the world to bear.”
“Is irony possible in a Dutchman? I wouldn't have believed it.”
They picked up Trinali Peterson whose mother had named her Mary Jane. She herself had taken Trinali, a Gypsy name. All her poetry was about that name and the person it signified. Ode to Trinali. Trinali at Sundown. To Trinali in a Red Dress. To Trinali at Dawn on March 4th.
“I wrote that on March 4th, last Monday,” she said. “And yet it isn't a poem of limited application. It symbolizes all the March 4ths from the beginning.”
“Does it also symbolize all the Trinalis from the beginning?” Hans asked.
“There are no others. There is only myself. I am meaningless in the plural.”
“Is it possible that you are singularly meaningless?”
They went to a spaghetti house. Both of the Bohemes were hungry and they did well for themselves. They had beer and wine, but they could not drink with Hans. In spite of their being free spirits they were crocked in an hour.
They took a taxi and went down to the Village to find an apartment for Hans. It was during this taxi ride that Trinali wrote her celebrated Ode to Trinali on the Way to the Village:
‘There are new pidgeons this morning with washed red feet,
And new dust for springtime, for the old dust is all worn out.
One cannot cry old tears in a world that was born this morning;
But let us buy a little salt and we will fashion new tears for new woes.
A bird in a tree can perch on but one bough,
And Trinali can ride in only one taxicab at a time.’
Hans, when he first knew them, was never sure whether he was being spoofed. To him, poetry was English or German ballad, or French lyric, or Latin or Greek heroic. These at least scanned, and he said so.
“Scun,” said Trinali. “Skin, scan, scun. I thought you said this Dutchman understood words, Jimmy. No, Trinali can't be scun.”
Trinali had a folder of hundreds of pages of the things.
“This stuff is a little like modern art,” Hans said. “Who is the joke on?”
So Trinali wrote another poem, rapidly and out loud:
‘The world is made of pieces left over from other worlds,
A scattering of granite mountains that were fingers of a statue in the older world,
The fundamental gneiss underlying the continents that was a little building block in another world;
The salt and medicated ocean that was one mouthful of mouthwash of a lesser citizen of the older cosmos,
The fauna of the earth which was as fleas combed out of the coat of one small dog of the older order,
Or possibly combed out of the coat of one small flea on one small dog of the Ancestral sun.
And Hans thinks that this is a joke
But what do you think Hans is?
Has Hans forgotten that he is also Orpheus?’
“Are there any rules for playing this game?” Hans asked them.
“You will learn them as you go along,” Trinali said.
Hans took a three room apartment and paid $45.00 a month. You understand that this was a long time ago. From this Trinali was to receive credit of $5.00 on account from the landlord as a finder's fee, so she would be permitted to live in her own room a while longer.
There were two facing sofas, and Jimmy and Trinali took one each and lay down to sleep off the wine, while Hans went back uptown to complete his move. He hired a pick-up dray for his trunk and suitcases. Then he got groceries and the papers and put on supper and worked around the place while he waited for his friends to waken.
He had been lonesome for his first two days in the city, and now he had found companions of a sort. He opened the folder of Trinali and read more of the stuff:
‘Trinali is a lot like a cat.
She makes a racket and howls on alley fences;
But don't imagine that that is what she wants to do.
She wants to live in a room and lap cream and lie by the fire
And have some one pet her.
But to look at her you would never imagine that that is what she wants.’
Somehow Trinali didn't look like an alley cat as she lay there sleeping. She was very young and had rusty black hair which she insisted was red. She was slight, not at all mature of figure, and was barely saved from beauty by minor irregularities of feature. Hans suspected even then that she had no real depth in her, but she DID glow on the surface.
Hans woke them for supper when he saw that, left to themselves, they would sleep forever. Trinali went to her room for candles and brought them.
“Only barbarians eat by electricity,” she said. “It's vulgar. And besides, the only civilized person in the building had her electricity turned off last Tuesday for non-payment, and she doesn't want anyone else to use it either.
“I get the candles from Lupido. He affects candlelight in his café. But he burns them down only to a certain length. He gives me the stubs, and I steal the larger ones. The ogre here makes me pay my own light bill, so I use candles. He gives me old bread too (Lupido does, not the ogre) and left-over wine. A lot of people come to the Village for the atmosphere when they're courting, and order wine and don't finish the bottle. I pour them all together. And I save the bottles. I make dolls and novelties out of the bottles and the corks and the raffia skirts.”
“What do you make besides dolls?”
“Figures. Dresden figures and marionette regulars, and Mexicans and Donkeys and Clowns and Prize-Fighters. You can make a lot of things out of cork and raffia if you're an artist. But it's a sad commentary on our times that the world's greatest living poetess should have to make figures out of corks for a living, and beg secondhand from an old moustache like Lupido.”
“You sell these things?”
“I sure do try to, Hans, but I don't sell very many of them. And I make lamps and toys. I dye the corks in a dishpan for this. I dye them only eight basic colors. One must standardize. It gives me a nice cork stock but it makes the dishes taste funny.
“I also make things out of driftwood. I did have my room piled nearly to the ceiling with driftwood, but I burned it in the winter when they cut off my
heat to make me move. And, as if that weren't enough, they complained that my chopping wood at night kept the other tenants awake. Why don't they sleep in the daytime like respectable people do? I barricaded myself in so they couldn't evict me. And I would have starved to death except that Lupido fed me with a basket that I let down from my window like St. Paul.”
“Did Lupido feed St. Paul with a basket?”
“Of course not, Hans, they weren't even contemporaries. St. Paul escaped in a basket once. I thought you were educated. I paid a little on my rent now so I can stave off eviction for a while. Hans, are you rich?”
“Ten dollars or more unencumbered. Enough to rent a truck for a day.”
“Yes, I am rich then.”
“To take me to a place, to two places in Jersey. To get driftwood, and to get cypress knees. Oh, how I need cypress knees! You can make so many things with them.”
“Do you make money from these things, Trinali? Are they so distinctive? They all look pretty much alike to me.”
“I know they do, Hans, but believe me they aren't supposed to. It is my failure that they all look alike.”
“I will decorate my flat in the Chinese style,” Hans said. “Have any of you ever experienced a Chinese period? Do you know anything about the Chinese style?”
Of course they did. “We'll hang rugs on the walls, and put a lot of red and black stuff around,” Jimmy said. “And Adam Scanlon has a Mandarin picture that he might sell you for a thousand dollars.”
“That's too much. For a thousand dollars I'd paint it myself.”
“Maybe we could get him down to ten dollars, but I doubt it. He has a sliding scale, but fifteen dollars is usually rock bottom.”
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