Moloch: Or, This Gentile World Read Online Free
Author: Henry Miller
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Romance, Brooklyn (New York; N.Y.)
yet, employment manager of the Great American Telegraph Company.
Chapter 02
2
HARI DAS WRIGGLED LIKE A WET DRAKE THROUGH THE festering streets of Chinatown. It was noon hour. His greasy, blue-black hair fell in somber ringlets over the military collar of his drab uniform. He looked about him with the eyes of a Martian. The advertisements, plastered like wallpaper on a house-front here and there, reminded him of the wrappers on firecrackers which he had glimpsed in the cluttered shopwindows of Bombay. Pool parlors filled with grimacing, gesticulating figures in shirt sleeves, glimpsed through tiny rectangles of window-pane clouded with grime and grease. A sweetish, sickening odor of decay emanating from the open doors of meat and vegetable stores, loaded with strange, forbidding viands that made a sophisticated appeal to alien palates. Stiff shellacked carcasses of fowl and pigs, some intact, some mutilated and dismembered, hung in the windows like curios in an antique shop. He stared frankly and unconcerned at the stolid forms behind the windows which blinked with grave insolence at the inquisitive world without: grave, imperturbable figures, their yellow mouths glued to long-stemmed bamboo pipes from whose metal bowls thin wreaths of smoke curled up, saturating the air with reek of camel’s dung.
It was Hari Das’s second day as a telegraph messenger. Removing his visored cap, he examined the batch of telegrams deposited therein. Satisfied that they were properly routed, he sat down on a doorstep and began to munch a banana.
A crowd of ragamuffins quickly gathered. He finished the banana and threw the peels over the heads of the assembled urchins with the cautiousness that Mr. Rockefeller exhibits when, on his birthday, he distributes brand-new dimes.
“Git a haircut!” yelled one youngster.
“Take off that uniform!”
Hari laughed good-naturedly—a rare Burgundian laugh that mocked the famine and pestilence in India. As the self-appointed “Redeemer of Mankind” in this twentieth century he felt that mirth was his most effective weapon. He never hesitated to employ it.
The street gamins swarmed about him like flesh flies. “Get the hell out of here,” he shouted, settling comfortably on his elbow as he sprawled lazily over the doorstep. Still the devils persisted in hanging about him. Their gibes were menacing.
“Go on, beat it!” he screamed in a shrill voice. “Or I’ll give you a kick in the pants.”
Pleased with his ready command of an alien argot, he fished in his inside pocket and commenced the perusal of a pamphlet entitled “An Open Letter to Lloyd George.” The extreme elation which he made no attempt to suppress, as he read this alarming manifesto, may be pardoned when it is understood that the reader of the document was himself the author. He chuckled now and then as he reread a felicitous passage, wholly oblivious of the surrounding spectators. If it were possible for a mere mortal to conceive the glee of our anthropomorphic deity upon that day when his miraculous task of creation was ended, when he settled back upon his celestial throne, and gazing abstractly upon his work, pronounced it good, then one might appreciate the unholy joy of this Aryan messenger gloating over his philippic to Lloyd George, Supreme Satanic Majesty.
Occasionally he paused in his reading to fix with the eye of a mesmerist the ornamental figure of a maroon dragon on a balcony across the street. To Hari Das it could as well have been the sapphire tip of Mount Everest, or the proud, stoical figure of Liberty shimmering in verdigris on Bedloe’s Island. What gave him pause was the sudden reflection of the ironical situation he found himself in at this moment. The proud inheritor of a great culture, a descendant and representative of the Aryan race, sitting on a doorstep in America, in Chinatown no less, dressed as a menial, regarded as “chandala” … an object of curiosity in an alien land.
He reviewed the
Chapter 02
2
HARI DAS WRIGGLED LIKE A WET DRAKE THROUGH THE festering streets of Chinatown. It was noon hour. His greasy, blue-black hair fell in somber ringlets over the military collar of his drab uniform. He looked about him with the eyes of a Martian. The advertisements, plastered like wallpaper on a house-front here and there, reminded him of the wrappers on firecrackers which he had glimpsed in the cluttered shopwindows of Bombay. Pool parlors filled with grimacing, gesticulating figures in shirt sleeves, glimpsed through tiny rectangles of window-pane clouded with grime and grease. A sweetish, sickening odor of decay emanating from the open doors of meat and vegetable stores, loaded with strange, forbidding viands that made a sophisticated appeal to alien palates. Stiff shellacked carcasses of fowl and pigs, some intact, some mutilated and dismembered, hung in the windows like curios in an antique shop. He stared frankly and unconcerned at the stolid forms behind the windows which blinked with grave insolence at the inquisitive world without: grave, imperturbable figures, their yellow mouths glued to long-stemmed bamboo pipes from whose metal bowls thin wreaths of smoke curled up, saturating the air with reek of camel’s dung.
It was Hari Das’s second day as a telegraph messenger. Removing his visored cap, he examined the batch of telegrams deposited therein. Satisfied that they were properly routed, he sat down on a doorstep and began to munch a banana.
A crowd of ragamuffins quickly gathered. He finished the banana and threw the peels over the heads of the assembled urchins with the cautiousness that Mr. Rockefeller exhibits when, on his birthday, he distributes brand-new dimes.
“Git a haircut!” yelled one youngster.
“Take off that uniform!”
Hari laughed good-naturedly—a rare Burgundian laugh that mocked the famine and pestilence in India. As the self-appointed “Redeemer of Mankind” in this twentieth century he felt that mirth was his most effective weapon. He never hesitated to employ it.
The street gamins swarmed about him like flesh flies. “Get the hell out of here,” he shouted, settling comfortably on his elbow as he sprawled lazily over the doorstep. Still the devils persisted in hanging about him. Their gibes were menacing.
“Go on, beat it!” he screamed in a shrill voice. “Or I’ll give you a kick in the pants.”
Pleased with his ready command of an alien argot, he fished in his inside pocket and commenced the perusal of a pamphlet entitled “An Open Letter to Lloyd George.” The extreme elation which he made no attempt to suppress, as he read this alarming manifesto, may be pardoned when it is understood that the reader of the document was himself the author. He chuckled now and then as he reread a felicitous passage, wholly oblivious of the surrounding spectators. If it were possible for a mere mortal to conceive the glee of our anthropomorphic deity upon that day when his miraculous task of creation was ended, when he settled back upon his celestial throne, and gazing abstractly upon his work, pronounced it good, then one might appreciate the unholy joy of this Aryan messenger gloating over his philippic to Lloyd George, Supreme Satanic Majesty.
Occasionally he paused in his reading to fix with the eye of a mesmerist the ornamental figure of a maroon dragon on a balcony across the street. To Hari Das it could as well have been the sapphire tip of Mount Everest, or the proud, stoical figure of Liberty shimmering in verdigris on Bedloe’s Island. What gave him pause was the sudden reflection of the ironical situation he found himself in at this moment. The proud inheritor of a great culture, a descendant and representative of the Aryan race, sitting on a doorstep in America, in Chinatown no less, dressed as a menial, regarded as “chandala” … an object of curiosity in an alien land.
He reviewed the
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