When he returned to his room he applied a match to everything that he had ever written and watched the flaming pile of papers with an emotion in which dread, tenderness, and elation were oddly contending against each other. These bits of paper, with their symbols of shimmering confusion, had been decorated by the sweat of his body, the brittle despair of his heart, and the anger of his soul, and their death brought him a helpless and jumbled sadness; but gradually another reaction began to possess him. The naked quivers of a fighter, crouched in the plan of his first blow, centered around his heart, and all of the thoughts within his mind gave one shout in unison--a meaningless hurrah just before the first leap of a creative battle. During the next two months he wrote with an insane speed, and all of his thoughts and emotions rushed out in an irresistible, nondescript mob scene--a French Revolution swinging its torches and howls against every repression and constraint within him. Good, bad, and mediocre, they rain in the circles of a celebrated revenge, and his main purpose was expressed in these first four lines of one of his poems: You have escaped the comedy Of swift, pretentious praise and blame, And smashed a tavern where they sell The harlot’s wine that men call fame. PART II THE KNIFE The Knife CHAPTER X. With Clara Messenger as his guide, Carl began to discover that another world nestled between the dull apartment houses, raucous markets, and underworld saloons which had confined his body--a world of smoother parlors and studios, in which stood “poets,” painters, sculptors, novelists, critics, Little Theater actors, art patrons, students of the arts, all leading their little squads of camp followers or plodding methodically in the ranks. This world was swaggering and overheated, and within it hosts of minor people were raising their faltering or blissfully insincere prayers to a god with a thousand faces, whom they called Artistic Expression--a god of astigmatic egoism dressed in cautious shades of emotion and thought, and obsessed with a fear of irony and originality. Carl felt like an emancipated hermit suddenly thrown as a sacrifice to an uproar of contending philosophies and artistic creeds. His mind, accustomed to solitary decisions, became bewildered amidst the bloodless, tin-sword battle around him and he wondered how he could possibly make his own voice heard in the egoistic din. Each man assured him that the other man was a fool or a charlatan, and he listened to their conflicting assumptions of wisdom with a naive dismay.