Moloch

by Henry Miller

  “I should hate to believe you were setting up as another little Gandhi,” Moloch confided. “You’re too amiable to be another tin Jesus. Besides, this country is full of them.”

  Hari’s response was lost in the scuffle attending their exit from the subway. They had only a few blocks to walk from the station. Hari appeared to be fascinated by the variety of churches they passed in review. He craned his neck to gape at the gargoyles which leered at the empty streets. Just before they reached the house he stepped to the gutter and blew his nose with two fingers.

  Moloch was pondering meanwhile on the reception they would receive, praying that his spouse would make a pretense at civility. Devil take her! He meant to enjoy the evening despite her malingering.

  He pushed the button and assumed an air of sangfroid. An extraordinary greeting took place.

  “Good evening!” he brought out blandly. “Mrs. Moloch? This is Mister Moloch . . . friend husband. Dropping in for a little friendly bite. Sorry we’re late. . . . May I introduce my esteemed friend, the late Maharajah of Lahore? Swami—my wife!’

  He made a low bow to smother his hysterical laughter.

  Hari saluted the woman with his usual grace. Blanche grasped the proferred hand stiffly, looked him over as if he were a rare guignol, and stepped back with a tight-lipped expression to admit them.

  “The mansion,” said Moloch, beaming expansively, as if to communicate a moiety of his geniality to that hatchet with the canary-bird mouth. Blanche looked on with undisguised disgust as he prattled away.

  “HOME!!! The sanctuary of repose. A cozy hearth, old friends, old wine. . . .!” He spread his arms in the Shakespearean manner. “And above all, the good wife who awaits with eagerness the husband’s homecoming.” He turned his back on his wife. “Well, Hari, not such great shakes, the place, what? A little untidy ... no servants, you see. Blanche hasn’t had a chance to do any housecleaning this week.” (He said this to intercept her apologies. His manner conveyed the impression that he was rendering her a favor.) ”Believe me, Blanche here is a really excellent hausfrau when she chooses to be. To be or not to be—that’s our great domestic problem, isn’t it, old battle-horse?”

  Blanche, who was neither “an old battle-horse” nor “an excellent hausfrau,” had daggers in her eyes. Her fingers were ten convulsive talons. They were by no means the well-kept digitals of a paramour. The nails were short and tough. Splendid independent finger movement—for the Hungarian rhapsodies.

  “Excuse me,” she said, turning to Hari, “my husband is drunk, I see.” Her voice was bitter as tansy.

  Hari flung both arms up. “Not at all, not at all,” he protested. “I shouldn’t be here if I thought he were drunk.”

  Blanche perceived that she had two monsters to deal with.

  “Well,” she said, “drunk or sober, I suppose you two want something to eat.”

  Moloch was undaunted. He grabbed Hari’s coattail.

  “Now isn’t that thoughtful of Blanche? Didn’t I tell you she was a cherub?” He turned to Blanche. “Of course, my dear . .. of course we want something to eat. We came home expressly to have dinner with you this evening.” He gazed at her ecstatically. Then he lowered his voice, affecting a new tinge of irony, if irony it could be called. “And where is our darling child this evening . . . that jewel of your loins?”

  Hari Das could no longer restrain himself. He had done his best, up to this point, to show discretion, to appear aloof and disinterested, as though this fantastic colioquy were taking place on the planet Neptune. He looked at Moloch helplessly. Moloch answered his appeal with a comical expression that beggars description, and turned the hydrant on Blanche once again.

  “The supper is not ready, you say?”

  She hadn’t said anything of the kind.

  “Too late?” He simpered. “My, my! What difficulties life places in our path! Well, Hari, the maharanee has spoken. It’s bacon and eggs for us, I see. Well, well, our old friend, bacon and eggs. Too bad, too bad!” He wagged his head with gross solemnity.

  The apologies that Blanche endeavored to make for her husband’s conduct gave Hari Das an insight into the private life of his newfound friend. He listened with such grave sympathy, with such a respectful mien, that Blanche soon found herself apologizing for more than she had intended.

  “I never know when he’s coming home,” she rattled on, intoxicated with the variety of her husband’s peccadilloes. “He doesn’t even bother to telephone me. Sometimes he walks in on me like this with a gang . . . yes, a gang. And then he has impudence enough to get angry with me for not waiting on his rowdies hand and foot.” She stamped her foot feelingly. “As though I could ever welcome his queer idiots.”

  “Queer idiots?” Hari repeated after her.

  Moloch spoke up. “I told you Blanche was a gem, didn’t I? That’s just her way of making you welcome. She means to say that you’re a gentleman—you’re not a bit like the other roughnecks.… Why, my dear Blanche, I should say you are entertaining a gentleman. My good friend, the maharajah, has royal blood in his veins. You’ve got to have royal blood to be a maharajah— isn’t that so, Hari? Just the same, he’s not above eating bacon and eggs, are you, Swami? And Im’ not above making them for you, either. Swami, spill a little Hindustani while I prepare the feast. But let the talk be as excellent as the bacon and eggs!”

  He dragged the two of them into the kitchen, shoved his wife into a chair, and commenced rattling the dishes in the pantry. He had forgotten to remove his hat. It was tilted over one eye.

  “Now, Hari,” he bubbled, emerging with a frying pan which he flourished like a short-order book, “you tell friend wife all about the famine and pestilence in India.”

  Blanche made a contemptuous grimace and adjusted her skirt.

  Friend husband started to caper around her with the frying pan.

  “Oh, Moon of My Delight! Gaze upon this jewel of______*

  “Does your husband act this way . .. er ... frequently?” Hari asked. He was at a loss to label Moloch’s conduct without giving offense, but he also wished to absolve himself of all share in this brutal baiting.

  Blanche answered in a subdued voice, “Most of the time I think I’m living with a lunatic.”

  “Poltroon, my dear, poltroon!” Moloch put in.

  “He has no sense of decency, no respect—for me, or for anything. He’s a vulgar, coarse fool.”

  She sat there stolidly, making no further attempt to prolong the conversation. It was the attitude of a dumb brute waiting for the ax to fall on its neck. A sort of grim, pathetic, God-help-me air about her. Even Moloch was touched.

  He made an attempt to kiss her which she frustrated by giving him a vigorous push.

  “You can’t undo your mischief with a kiss,” she hissed. “Leave me in peace, that’s all I ask of you.”

  This outburst pained Moloch beyond words. He was like the criminal who hears the words of the sentence that is being pronounced but is dreaming all the while of the day he went fishing thirty-seven years ago—how beautiful the stream looked in the splashing sunlight, the melody of a bird, his own innocent dreams. . . . What he wanted to say was this:

  “Forgive me, Blanche. I’m a wretch. Christ! I don’t want to go on hurting you, but you make me behave this way . . . with your coldness, your suspicions, your ...”

  Instead, he asked her in a weary voice if there was any mail. “Is there nothing from Burns?”

  She shook her head passively.

  “Nothing?” he repeated.

  “There’s this,” she answered in a dull voice.

  He looked at the envelope incomprehensibly. The handwriting was unfamiliar. He tore it open. Another envelope was inside, folded up within the letter. He looked at it vacantly. There was printing on it:

  SHRINE CHURCH OF OUR LADY OF SOLACE CONEY ISLAND, NEW YORK

  It was about the annual novena to our Lady of Solace in preparation for the feast of her ANNUNCIATION.… “Dear Friend: During thi
s solemn nine days’ prayer, Our Lady of Solace, who is never invoked in vain, will be petitioned for favors including spiritual needs, the sick and infirm, prosperity, positions, success in undertakings, happy marriages, the welfare of expectant mothers, vocations, and whatever else may be desired by those who seek Our Blessed Mother’s help.”

  He flung the letter aside without finishing it. “Somebody’s playing a prank,” he thought. Now he noticed another envelope, much smaller than the others, with four rows of dotted lines:

  KINDLY BURN A VIGIL LIGHT!

  For a Novena.....................$1.00

  “Bah! The dirty rascals!” he muttered. “I wouldn’t give them a nickel, not even if they promised to get me out of Purgatory.”

  No one paid any attention to his mutterings. Blanche tried to make herself inconspicuous by busying herself with the cooking. Hari was rummaging through the books which were heaped on the china closet.

  Moloch collapsed in the easy chair which had been dragged into the kitchen. Anything he had any use for he kept in the kitchen. It was the only room in the house he cared to live in.

  His thoughts returned to Ronald Burns out in North Dakota. Why the devil was Burns so silent? He missed those huge bundles of mail which used to pass between them. Ten pages of enthusiasm for Dreiser, an essay on The Bomb, reams about Dostoevsky . . . almost a little book on The Idiot alone. . . . What was the matter? Had Blanche come between them? Had she been writing Burns about him . . . spreading calumnies?

  One can bear so many things if only there is one in the world to call a friend.

  He thought of that line in the Egyptian’s letter: “There must be a humanitarian soul in which to deposit your pains and sufferings. . . .” God, that was a scream when he read it. But it was no joke! Ronald Burns had brought him the one friendship that he cared about. And now that was dissolving, apparently.

  Ronald Burns was a musician and a litterateur. For three months he had shared the glories of existence with Dion Moloch and his wife. His return to North Dakota left those two individuals where he had found them—stranded on the mudflats of matrimony. For a time they had bobbed blissfully in the deep swift tide of companionship; then the tide had ebbed and they were left in the mud, stuck like scows.

  Was Blanche in love with Burns? Moloch was ready to believe so. Was Burns in love with Blanche? That was more important. It made no difference to him what happened between the two so long as their friendship was not destroyed. If Burns wanted his wife— excellent! Come and get her! He could think of no happier solution of his difficulties. But if Burns wanted her, why then had he returned to North Dakota? Was he afraid to face the truth? Was it fear of hurting him? Had they no eyes, these two? Couldn’t they see he had stepped out of the way to give them free room?

  The marginal notations, and the long list of words piled up in the back of each book which Hari Das discovered in browsing among Moloch’s slender collection, brought forth a series of critical appreciations that dissipated Moloch’s retrospections.

  Of a sudden Hari Das gave a loud exclamation of joy and astonishment. With reverent fingers he clasped a worn volume and pushed it under Moloch’s nose.

  “Now,” he cried, “now I know you cannot be an utter scoundrel!”

  “So he had already accepted me as a scoundrel?” thought Moloch, somewhat cooled by the other’s effusiveness.

  Hari thumbed the book eagerly, examined Moloch’s penciled notations, smiled, applauded silently. He skimmed through it with such feverishness as to make one believe he expected to find a treasure at the end.

  “You do recognize beauty,” he exclaimed. “I can see that!”

  His words startled Moloch and roused him to a pitch of unbridled enthusiasm.

  “Stop!” he cried, getting up from the easy chair. “We can’t rush on this way. I want to say something to you. I can’t let your words go unchallenged.”

  He was a bundle of excitement now.

  “You were speaking about beauty. Yes, there is a little of it left in me ... a little that my wife never sees.”

  He spoke of himself in a brutally detached way. Blanche, their marriage, the cluttered kitchen in which he paced feverishly (like a tiger whose cage is not only irksome but too small to turn round in)—all this he seemed to dismiss with a wave of the hand as the detritus of another incarnation.

  “Yes, Mukerji . . . Mukerji!” he pronounced ecstatically. (It was a volume of the latter’s that had precipitated this outburst.) “Yes, Hari, there is beauty to ponder on. Great soul-spluttering beauty! There is a man who should have been trumpeted forth ages ago. He makes India vivid, palpable—and yet ethereal, in her holiness. When I put down that book I wept. . . Oh, you may shout and rave about your Mahatma Gandhi squatting on his emaciated legs and mumbling economic profundities larded with Vedanta fiddle-faddle. But I tell you, Gandhi may sit on his carbuncled can for another generation to come and never approach this poetry, this sublime beauty of Mukerji’s that stirs me. ... I don’t know why I mention the man Gandhi at all. He annoys me, that’s the truth of it. A sort of dry, statistical Christ, forever on the verge of departing this life and forever being resuscitated by his ridiculous fasting and praying. With one foot in the belly of the eternal, he lectures the world about putting its house in order. My God! All that damned nonsense about non-cooperation and spinning wheels! No, give me Mukerji every time. Those Indian nightfalls of his—‘descending like an avalanche of soot.’ The Taj Mahal’s ‘sigh fixed in marble.’

  “Do you remember, Mari, that description of the humble door of a peasant bathed in the violet light of sunset? Or that unforgettable glimpse of the Ganges when he plunges into the tepid waters to hold discourse with the holy man? Imagine, if you will, two Baptist persons floating down the Mississippi with nothing on but tights. Can you picture them stirring up a wet fervor over the Old Testament?”

  Hari Das broke into a loud guffaw.

  “Unfortunately,” Moloch continued, “for most of us India has no more reality than an opium dream. When the feeble Mahatma sets up his caterwauling with a throatful of statistical disclosures he gives the world a distinct shock. Who wants to know about the millions of Untouchables, the forty-nine warring sects and tongues, the endless scheme of castes and fakirs, of filthy caves and whoring temples? No, the world prefers to believe that India is not only a land, ninety percent of whose population is continually on the verge of starvation, a land ravished with cholera and scurvy, but something more, something beyond and above all the confusion of massacres, vice, legislation, and crass ignorance. When the swollen white bullocks of Siva have vanished, when the drum-tight paunches of the Brahmans have disappeared, together with their learned tracts on the digestive organs, what remains of India will still constitute, I feel, a nickelodeon of mystery, horror, and fanaticism. India will always be the place where religion forms the prime daily constituent of man. The sons of India will never permit religion to become the cheap, fractional thing with which the European is content. In their hands it will remain forever a peculiar, intangible earth-product, a something that will outlast our ‘struggle-buggies’ and ‘wind chariots,’ the loudspeaker and the high forceps. Ten thousand years hence, when the world will have been made sick and safe for democracy, and every Jake has his Annie, the dawn will still come up like thunder out of China ‘cross the bay. And down the virgin flanks of Mount Everest there will stream rivulets of sapphire! In that respect your cosmic loafers prophesy correctly. Then, indeed, shall we be able to dispense with town cars and Grand Opera, with elevators and subways, with concrete factories and Babylonish architecture, with barbershop chords and contraceptives that don’t contracept. . . . Upon my word, there’ll be nothing left of this modern world but a stench. There won’t be left a bottle of ketchup, or a Bromo-Seltzer!”

  How much further Moloch would have pushed his imagination the Lord only knows. Blanche had been signaling him throughout this harangue to sit down and partake of the meal, which was ready at the begin
ning of his speech. Her manner, as she pushed the hasty meal before them, was that of a keeper in a lunatic asylum. She detested these discussions which never got one anywhere and which always ended in the larder being cleaned out. None of these “savants” ever thought of bringing so much as a layer cake along. They came equipped with looking-glass theories, speeches all wool and a yard wide, and—enormous appetites. If they addressed her at all it was only to ridicule her in some sly manner.

  Blanche wondered therefore very justly what manner of individual the swarthy gentleman might be who sucked his bacon and eggs like oysters on the half shell. . . . She had not long to wait.

  Hari Das had listened patiently to Moloch in order to be assured of the same courtesy when he took the notion to flap his wings and “bombinate in the void.” First of all—with what seemed like Oriental suavity—he extracted a calling card from his wallet and laid it gravely on the table. Moloch picked it up and scrutinized it:

  “Dean of the Oriental Academy? Hm! And where is this institution located, if I may ask?”

  Hari stifled his mirth. “The Academy, I am sorry to say, is not yet a physical fact. So far I have only the cards, as you see.”

  “Well, that’s an auspicious start,” said Moloch, with comic gravity.

  Blanche sniggered openly.

  “My friend,” Hari went on, “it is one of my ideals to organize in this Western hemisphere an institution similar in aim and feeling to that universal seat of learning which Tagore has established at Shantiniketan. I wish to break down the stupid prejudices which divide your world from mine. I want to see in America—because, in the last analysis, America is the only place to try such an experiment—a university where every culture, every people, will receive its due. I want to abolish forever that circular hypothesis of Greco-Roman origins. The Chinese must have their share of glory, and the Arabs; we must recognize the great contribution of the Slavs, the Negro races, the Jews, the Malayans ...”

  Moloch wondered especially what it was the Malayans had contributed to the great stream of civilization, but he held his tongue.