WINKELBURG[14]

WINKELBURG[14]

BEN HECHT

By BEN HECHT

(From The Smart Set)

I

There was never a man as irritating as Winkelburg. He was an encyclopedia of misfortunes. Everything that can happen to a man had happened to him. He had lost his family, his money and his health. He was, in short, a man completely broken—tall, thin, with a cadaverous face out of which shone two huge lustreless eyes. He walked with an angular crawl that reminded one of the emaciated flies one sees at the beginning of winter. That was Winkelburg to a dot—a creature perversely alive, dragging itself across an illimitable expanse of flypaper.

It was one of Winkelburg’s worst habits to appear at unexpected moments. But, perhaps, any appearances he might have made would have had this irritating quality of unexpectedness. One was never looking forward to him, and thus the sight of his wan, uncomfortable smile, his lustreless eyes, his tenacious crawl was invariably an irritating surprise.

I will be frank. It was Winkelburg’s misfortune which first attracted me. I listened to his story avidly. He talked in slow words and there was intelligence in the man. He was able to perceive himself, not only as a pain-racked, starving human, but he glimpsed with his large, tired eyes his relation to things outside himself.

It appeared that the man had been lying in a hall bedroom for two weeks dying. An embittered landlady to whom he owed three months rent had tended him. I fancy she was torn between a hope that the miserable fool would die and give her a chance to rent the room to a more profitable customer and a more optimistic greed. He might recover, get a job and pay her the three months rent he owed.

Winkelburg wrote to me about it. It was my first knowledge of the man. He offered his experiences as material for one of the daily stories I was writing for the News. His letter was a document. In it he recounted in good English and in a few lines the history of his life.

“I have had hard luck all my life,” he wrote. “I have no friends or relatives. My health is broken and I am without money. I once was somebody, but that doesn’t matter now. I am dying. Lying up here in my room and hearing the noises in the street all day and all night I got to thinking about things. I don’t mind dying, but to die all alone in a cheap bedroom with nobody around is too much. So I got dressed. It took me almost all day to dress on account of the pain. I had twenty cents left. I finally managed to walk out of the house and get on a street car. It was a torture. But I figured if I could reach the County Hospital they would put me in a bed and give me treatment, and, anyway, it would not be so bad to die in a hospital.”

Then he went on to relate his experience. He had arrived at the hospital and been ushered into a receiving room. Here a group of internes stood around cracking jokes. One of them finally advised him to take his clothes off. He retired into one of the booths and stripped. When he came out the room was empty. So Winkelburg crawled up on a dirty table and lay there waiting. He waited for an hour. After an hour an interne popped into the room and looked at him with some surprise and inquired what the devil he was doing lying naked on the table. Winkelburg, more dead than alive, moaned something in reply. Whereupon the interne examined him. Winkelburg wrote:

“He moved my legs up and down and felt over me for a minute and then said, ‘You’re all right. I’ll give you a prescription to fix you up.’ And he wrote out a prescription. I put my clothes on slowly and asked him what I should do. ‘Go home,’ he said. I told him I couldn’t. Then he asked, ‘Well, how did you come here?’ I told him it was a torture. So he grinned and said, ‘Torture back, then.’ I am back in my room now, in bed. I feel worse. I’ve been thinking about all this. It doesn’t make me angry. The world is like that. It has no time for its unfortunates. There are too many healthy ones to take care of. This interne was possibly not a bad fellow. When he talked to me I realized how it was. I was just one of a thousand poor fools, and he was busy with his career and his plans. He didn’t mean to be cruel, but that’s just human nature, don’t you think?”

I wrote the story, adding a few lugubrious details for good measure. I drew a picture of Winkelburg lying on his back, staring at the ceiling and thinking of the busy city whose noises floated in through his window. The next day brought a flood of letters. Philanthropists offered to care for Winkelburg. The hospital authorities denied the incident described by Winkelburg, but offered to make amends and to give him treatment and a bed.

A week later I received a letter of thanks from him. He was in the hospital. Three weeks later another letter came. He had been given a home by an elderly couple. Luck had turned. He had all he wanted. Two more weeks brought another letter. He was living somewhere else now and he would like to hear from me. And then he appeared in person. It was the first time I had ever seen him.

He sat down beside my desk and I looked at him. Death stared out of the man. And I noticed at once the curious kindliness of him. He talked slowly and told me of his experiences. He was courteously brief, and even better than that, he spoke without emotion.

“There is nobody to blame,” he said. “Not even myself. It is just the way things go. And if I can’t blame myself, how can I blame the world? The city is like that. I’m no good. I’m done. Worn out, useless. People try to take care of the useless ones. There are institutions. Well, I had two good homes and was in two institutions, thanks to the thing you wrote. But they kicked me out. They said I was a faker. Somehow I don’t appeal to charitably inclined people.”

Later I understood why. It was because of the man’s smile—a feeble, tenacious grimace that seemed to be offering a sardonic reproof. It could never have been mistaken for a courageous smile. Philanthropy had taken Winkelburg up and then dropped him. Quickly and definitely. Because of his smile. The secret of its aggravating quality was this: in it Winkelburg accused himself of his uselessness, his feebleness, his poverty. It was as if he were regarding himself continually through the annoyed eyes of others and addressing himself with the words of others—“You, Winkelburg, get out of here. You’re a nuisance. You make me uncomfortable, because you’re poor and diseased and full of gloom. Get out. I don’t want you around. Why the devil don’t you die?”

And the aggravating thing was that people looked at Winkelburg’s smile as into a mirror. They saw in it a shrewd reflection of their own attitude toward the man. They felt that Winkelburg understood what they thought of him. And they didn’t like that. They didn’t like to feel that Winkelburg was aware that deep inside their minds they were always asking, “Why doesn’t this Winkelburg die and have it over with?” Because that made them out as cruel, heartless people, not much different in their attitude toward their fellow-man from predatory animals in their attitude toward fellow predatory animals. And somehow, although they really felt that way toward Winkelburg, they preferred not to believe it. At least, they disliked accusation where there should have been only gratitude.

Not that Winkelburg was ungrateful. He was thankful, obliging and properly humble. But his smile persisted. And his smile was a mirror that would not let his benefactors escape the truth. And eventually Winkelburg’s smile became for them one of those curious mirrors that exaggerate images grotesquely.

Charitably inclined people as well as all other kinds of inclined people prefer their Winkelburgs more egotistic. They prefer that unfortunate ones be engrossed in their misfortunes and not go around wearing sardonic, philosophical smiles.

II

Winkelburg dragged along for six months. He was past fifty-five. Each time I saw him I was certain I would never see him again. I was certain he would die—drop dead while crawling across his flypaper. But he would appear. I would pretend to be vastly busy. He would sit and wait. His consideration was an affront. It said, “Oh, yes, I know you are a very busy man. You are part of the world. But Winkelburg has nothing to do. Nothing but wait. Wait until he dies. So don’t hurry. I have plenty of time.”

He would never ask alms. I would have been relieved if he had. Instead he would sit and smile, and his smile would say:

“Ah, my friend, you are afraid I am going to ask you for money. Don’t worry, please. I would rather die of hunger than ask you. Because it would interfere with our friendship. And I value your friendship more than a bite of food. I won’t ask you for money. I won’t bother you at all. Yes, yes, I agree with you. I ought to be dead. It would be better for everybody.”

We would talk little. He would throw out a hint now and then that perhaps I could use some of his misfortunes for material. For instance, the time his two children had been burned to death. Or the time he had fallen off a street car while in a sick daze and injured his spine for life, and how he settled with the street-car company for five hundred dollars, and how he had been robbed on the way to the bank with the money a month later.

I refused consistently and somewhat curtly his offer of material. This offended Winkelburg. He would pick up the day’s paper and sit reading my story through with a show of critical deliberation. Then he would put it down and look at me as if to say:

“This thing you’ve written about is all right in its way. But it must be obvious to you that, from a purely literary point of view, the material I have to offer is vastly superior.”

I saw that his vanity was piqued. I would not have minded this. In fact it was a bit droll. But there was his smile. Winkelburg’s smile rose above his vanity. When I had returned to the typewriter, feigning industry in the hope that the man would pick himself up and crawl away, I would catch a glimpse of the inevitable wan grimace that came to his lips and the smile would say:

“Yes, yes, I understand. You refuse my material because you don’t want to get involved with me. Because you don’t want me to have any more claims on you than I have. Not that you’re afraid I’ll ask you for money. But if I gave you something you’re afraid that it would establish a closer relationship between us. I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t feel that way.”

Toward the end Winkelburg’s visits grew more frequent. I gave instructions that he shouldn’t be admitted, and that whenever he called, “I was out.” Futile. There were three things that the rich man couldn’t keep out with his high fence, says the poet—rain, death and tomorrow. And Winkelburg was gifted with an almost similar aloof tenacity. He crawled past barriers. He melted through walls. And regardless of subterfuges and instructions, I would hear his dragging step in the corridor leading to my desk.

He wished to discuss things. He had become suddenly garrulous. He wished to talk about the city. About its institutions. About politics. About people. About art. This phase of Winkelburg was the most unbearable. He was willing to admit himself an outcast, a thing on a scrap heap. He was reconciled to the fact that he would starve to death, and that everybody who had ever seen him would feel it was a good thing he had finally died.

But he made one plea. He wanted nothing except to talk and to hear words in order to relieve the loneliness of his day. He would like abstract discussions that had nothing to do with Winkelburg and the Winkelburg misfortunes. His smile now said, “I am useless. Worn out and better off dead. But never mind me. Never mind Winkelburg and his troubles. My mind is still alive. It still thinks and works. I wish that it didn’t. I wish it was crippled like Winkelburg is, and that it crawled around like my body. But it doesn’t. So talk to me as if it were a mind belonging to somebody else, as if it were an impersonal machine able to pronounce ideas and to argue and to appreciate what you say. Talk to me as if I weren’t this insufferable Winkelburg, but somebody of whom you have never heard.”

I grew suspicious finally. I began to think there was something vitally spurious about this whole Winkelburg business. And I said to myself, “The man’s a downright fake. If anybody were as pathetic and impossible and useless as this Winkelburg is he would shoot himself. Winkelburg doesn’t shoot himself. So he becomes illogical ... unreal.”

III

A woman I know belongs to the type that becomes charitable around Christmas time. She makes a glowing pretense of aiding the poor. As a matter of fact she probably does aid them, what with the baskets of food, clothing and necessities she showers upon their hovels. But the point is that she regards the poor as a sort of social and spiritual asset. They afford her the opportunity of appearing in the eyes of her neighbors as a magnanimous soul, of doing something which reflects great credit upon her character. It is certain that she would be unhappy if there were no poor, that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the glow of spiritual righteousness and the lift of economic superiority the giving of gifts to deserving inferiors inspires in her. But anyway, she “does good,” and if she panders to her own egoism as much as she improves the physical comfort of her charges—that is a complication it will hurt nobody to ignore.

I told this woman about Winkelburg. I became poignant and moving on the subject of Winkelburg’s misfortunes, his trials, sufferings, and, above all, his Spartan stoicism. It pleased me to do this. I felt that I was making amends and that the thing reflected great credit upon my character—in her eyes.

So she went to the room on the South Side where Winkelburg lived. And they told her there that Winkelburg was dead. He had died a week ago. She was upset when she came back and told me about it. She had come too late. She might have saved him. She accused herself sorrowfully and I listened with politeness. Her accusation was a charmingly involved boast. Her sorrow over the matter was merely her way of telling me all the wonderful things she would have done for Winkelburg. Her regret that he was dead was obviously enough the disappointment she felt at not being able to pander to her egoism by showering poor Winkelburg with largesse.

It was a curious thing—but when she told me that Winkelburg was dead I felt combatively that it was untrue. And now since I know certainly that Winkelburg is dead and buried, I have developed a curious state of mind. I look up from my desk every once in a while expecting to see him. In the streets I sometimes find myself actually thinking:

“I’ll bump into him when I turn this corner.”

I have managed to discover the secret of this feeling. It is Winkelburg’s smile. Winkelburg’s smile was the interpretation of the world’s attitude toward him, including my own, I tell myself. And thus whenever his name comes to my mind or a thought of him occupies me his smile appears as if it were the thought in my head. I have only to think, “He is better off dead,” and at once the image of Winkelburg comes into my eye, repeating the words to me. This may sound involved, but it is really very simple. Instead of thinking of Winkelburg I find that I take the easier way of remembering Winkelburg’s smile, and his smile somehow says for me everything I would have thought.

And this, in a way, is Winkelburg’s revenge, that I am unable to forget him and that I am unable to say “poor Winkelburg” without Winkelburg smiling back at me and saying with a taunting, irritating calm, “Yes, yes, he is better off dead.”