The Mortgaged Heart (20 page)

Of course it must be understood that none of these personal characteristics are told in the didactic manner in which they are set down here. They are implied in one successive scene after another—and it is only at the end, when the sum of these implications is considered, that the real characters are understood in all of their deeper aspects.

Characters and Events

JOHN SINGER

Of all the main characters in the book Singer is the simplest. Because of his deaf-mutism he is isolated from the ordinary human emotions of other people to a psychopathic degree. He is very observant and intuitive. On the surface he is a model of kindness and cooperativeness—but nothing which goes on around him disturbs his inner self. All of his deeper emotions are involved in the only friend to whom he can express himself, Antonapoulos. In the second chapter Biff Brannon thinks of Singer's eyes as being "cold and gentle as a cat's." It is this same remoteness that gives him an air of wisdom and superiority.

Singer is the first character in the book only in the sense that he is the symbol of isolation and thwarted expression and because the story pivots about him. In reality each one of his satellites is of far more importance than himself. The book will take all of its body and strength in the development of the four people who revolve about the mute.

The parts concerning Singer are never treated in a subjective manner. The style is oblique. This is partly because the mute, although he is educated, does not think in words but in visual impressions. That, of course, is a natural outcome of his deafness. Except when he is understood through the eyes of other people the style is for the main part simple and declarative. No attempt will be made to enter intimately into his subconscious. He is a flat character in the sense that from the second chapter on through the rest of the book his essential self does not change.

At his death there is a strange little note from the cousin of Antonapoulos found in his pocket:

D
EAR
M
R.
S
INGER,

No address on corner of letters. They all sent back to me. Spiros Antonapoulos died and was buried with his kidneys last month. Sorry to tell same but no use writing letters to the dead.

Yours truly,
C
HARLES
P
ARKER

When the man is considered in his deepest nature (because of his inner character and peculiar situation) his suicide at the death of Antonapoulos is a necessity.

MICK KELLY

Mick is perhaps the most outstanding character in the book. Because of her age and her temperament her relation with the mute is more accentuated than any other person's. At the beginning of the second part of the work she steps out boldly—and from then on, up until the last section, she commands more space and interest than anyone else. Her story is that of the violent struggle of a gifted child to get what she needs from an unyielding environment. When Mick first appears she is at the age of thirteen, and when the book ends she is fourteen months older. Many things of great importance happen to her during this time. At the beginning she is a crude child on the threshold of a period of quick awakening and development. Her energy and the possibilities before her are without limits. She begins to go forward boldly in the face of all obstacles before her and during the next few months there is great development. In the end, after the finances of her family have completely given way, she has to get a job working ten hours a day in a ten-cent store. Her tragedy does not come in any way from herself—she is robbed of her freedom and energy by an unprincipled and wasteful society.

To Mick music is the symbol of beauty and freedom. She has had no musical background at all and her chances for educating herself are very small. Her family does not have a radio and in the summer she roams around the streets of the town pulling her two baby brothers in a wagon and listening to any music she can hear from other people's houses. She begins reading at the public library and from books she learns some of the things she needs to know. In the fall when she enters the Vocational High School she arranges to have rudimentary lessons on the piano with a girl in her class. In exchange for the lessons she does all the girl's homework in algebra and arithmetic and gives her also fifteen cents a week from her lunch money. During the afternoon Mick can sometimes practice on the piano in the gymnasium—but the place is always noisy and overcrowded and she never knows when she will be interrupted suddenly by a blow on the head from a basketball.

Her love for music is instinctive, and her taste is naturally never pure at this stage. At first there is Mozart. After that she learns about Beethoven. From then on she goes hungrily from one composer to another whenever she gets a chance to hear them on other people's radios—Bach, Brahms, Wagner, Sibelius, etc. Her information is often very garbled but always the feeling is there. Mick's love for music is intensely creative. She is always making up little tunes for herself—and she plans to compose great symphonies and operas. Her plans are always definite in a certain way. She will conduct all of her music herself and her initials will always be written in big red letters on the curtains of the stage. She will conduct her music either in a red satin evening dress or else she will wear a real man's evening suit. Mick is thoroughly egoistic—and the crudely childish side of her nature comes in side by side with the mature.

Mick must always have some person to love and admire. Her childhood was a series of passionate, reasonless admirations for a motley cavalcade of persons, one after another. And now she centers this undirected love on Singer. He gives her a book about Beethoven on her birthday and his room is always quiet and comfortable. In her imagination she makes the mute just the sort of teacher and friend that she needs. He is the only person who seems to show any interest in her at all. She confides in the mute—and when an important crisis occurs at the end of the book it is to him that she wants to turn for help.

This crisis, although on the surface the most striking thing that happens to Mick, is really subordinate to her feeling for Singer and to her struggle against the social forces working against her. In the fall when she enters Vocational High she prefers to take "mechanical shop" with the boys rather than attend the stenographic classes. In this class she meets a fifteen-year-old boy, Harry West, and gradually they become good comrades. They are attracted to each other by a similar intensity of character and by their mutual interest in mechanics. Harry, like Mick, is made restless by an abundance of undirected energy. In the spring they try to construct a glider together in the Kellys' backyard and, although because of inadequate materials they can never get the contraption to fly, they work at it very hard together. All of this time their friendship is blunt and childish.

In the late spring Mick and Harry begin going out together on Saturday for little trips in the country. Harry has a bicycle and they go out about ten miles from town to a certain creek in the woods. Feelings that neither of them fully understands begin to come about between them. The outcome is very abrupt. They start to the country one Saturday afternoon in great excitement and full of childish animal energy—and before they return they have, without any premeditation at all, experienced each other sexually. It is absolutely necessary that this facet of the book be treated with extreme reticence. What has happened is made plain through a short, halting dialogue between Mick and Harry in which a great deal is implied but very little is actually said.

Although it is plain that this premature experience will affect both of them deeply, there is the feeling that the eventual results will be
more serious for Harry than for Mick. Their actions are rather more mature than would be expected. However, they both decide that they will never want to marry or have the same experience again. They are both stunned by a sense of evil. They decide that they will never see each other again—and that night Harry takes a can of soup from his kitchen shelf, breaks his nickel bank, and hitchhikes from the town to Atlanta where he hopes to find some sort of job.

The restraint with which this scene between Mick and Harry must be told cannot be stressed too strongly.

For a while Mick is greatly oppressed by this that has happened to her. She turns to her music more vehemently than ever. She has always looked on sex with a cold, infantile remoteness—and now the experience she has had seems to be uniquely personal and strange. She tries ruthlessly to forget about it, but the secret weighs on her mind. She feels that if she can just tell some person about it she would be easier. But she is not close enough to her sisters and her mother to confide in them, and she has no especial friends of her own age. She wants to tell Mr. Singer and she tries to imagine how to go about this. She is still taking consolation in the possibility that she might be able to confide in Mr. Singer about this when the mute kills himself.

After the death of Singer, Mick feels very alone and defenseless. She works even harder than ever with her music. But the pressing economic condition of her family which has been growing steadily worse all through the past months is now just about as bad as it can be. The two elder children in the family are barely able to support themselves and can be of no help to their parents. It is essential that Mick get work of some kind. She fights this bitterly, for she wants to go back at least one more year to High School and to have some sort of chance with her music. But nothing can be done and at the beginning of the summer she gets a job working from eight-thirty to six-thirty as a clerk in a ten-cent store. The work is very wearing, but when the manager wants any of the girls to stay overtime he always picks Mick—for she can stand longer and endure more fatigue than any other person in the store.

The essential traits of Mick Kelly are great creative energy and courage. She is defeated by society on all the main issues before she can even begin, but still there is something in her and in those like her that cannot and will not ever be destroyed.

JAKE BLOUNT

Jake's struggle with social conditions is direct and conscious. The spirit of revolution is very strong in him. His deepest motive is to do all that he can to change the predatory, unnatural social conditions existing today. It is his tragedy that his energies can find no channel in which to flow. He is fettered by abstractions and conflicting ideas—and in practical application he can do no more than throw himself against windmills. He feels that the present social tradition is soon to collapse completely, but his dreams of the civilization of the future are alternately full of hope and of distrust.

His attitude toward his fellow man vacillates continually between hate and the most unselfish love. His attitude toward the principles of communism are much the same as his attitude toward man. Deep inside him he is an earnest communist, but he feels that in concrete application all communistic societies up until the present have degenerated into bureaucracies. He is unwilling to compromise and his is the attitude of all or nothing. His inner and outward motives ate so contradictory at times that it is hardly an exaggeration to speak of the man as being deranged. The burden which he has taken on himself is too much for him.

Jake is the product of his peculiar environment. During the time of this book he is twenty-nine years old. He was born in a textile town in South Carolina, a town very similar to the one in which the action of this book takes place. His childhood was passed among conditions of absolute poverty and degradation. At the age of nine years (this was the time of the last World War) he was working fourteen hours a day in a cotton mill. He had to snatch for himself whatever education he could get. At twelve he left home on his own initiative and his self-teachings and wanderings began. At one time or another he has lived and worked in almost every section of this country.

Jake's inner instability reflects markedly on his outer personality. In
physique he suggests a stunted giant. He is nervous and irritable. All of his life he has had difficulty in keeping his lips from betraying his emotions—in order to overcome this he has grown a flourishing mustache which only accentuates this weakness and gives him a comic, jetky look. Because of his nervous whims it is hard for him to get along with his neighbors and people hold aloof from him. This causes him either to drop into self-conscious buffoonery or else to take on an exaggerated misplaced dignity.

If Jake cannot act he has to talk. The mute is an excellent repository for conversation. Singer attracts Jake because of his seeming stability and calm. He is a stranger in the town and the circumstance of his loneliness makes him seek out the mute. Talking to Singer and spending the evening with him becomes a sedative habit with him. At the end, when the mute is dead, he feels as though he had lost a certain inner ballast. He has the vague feeling that he has been tricked, too, and that all of the conclusions and visions that he has told the mute are forever lost.

Jake depends heavily on alcohol—and he can drink in tremendous quantities with no seeming ill effect. Occasionally he will try to break himself of this habit, but he is as unable to discipline himself in this as he is in more important matters.

Jake's stay in the town ends in a fiasco. As usual, he has been trying during these months to do what he can to right social injustice. At the end of the book the growing resentment between the Negroes and the white factory workers who patronize the show is nourished by several trifling quarrels between individuals. Day by day one thing leads to another and then late on Saturday night there is a wild brawl. (This scene occurs during the week after Singer's death.) All the white workers fight bitterly against the Negroes. Jake tries to keep order for a while and then he, too, loses control of himself and goes berserk. The fight grows into an affair in which there is no organization at all and each man is simply fighting for himself. This brawl is finally broken up by the police and several persons are arrested. Jake escapes but the fight seems to him to be a symbol of his own life. Singer is dead and he leaves the town just as he came to it—a stranger.