Cleveland High School - Legend Yearbook (Portland, OR)

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EjERSER PORTRAIT OF A DREAM George Pohl I. Herr Americaner, I laugh at you. Yesterday I watched you wander through these galleries, your graven face fraught with eager interest, today — the same. This Diana is a beautiful canvas, and I do not wonder at your enthusiasm of the pettiness of life but of more interest to me is not the Diana you see before you, but that it is painted in the curious plane, the same li id, impressionistic tone as the portrait. Will you read me the monogram in the lower corner? As you see my hunched back ridi- cules the desire. The Portrait, sir, the portrait of whom? Of myself, or as the artist names it, Destiny. Sureh ' you knezv the picture. ( I am a fool and blind, not merely a twisted cripple!) But surely you know the black precipices of Destiny, veined with this grey of Diana, monstrous, and sinister, with pinnacled peaks flung recklessly against a sullen sky. The rocks are weighted with the burden of utter hope- lessness; here they have slumped to an indistinguish- able mass of stolid dejection. The blackness of Hell lays his smug hand about while his sister, still blacker white, melts behind his shielding cloak. Tremulous with dizziness the cliffs sway slowly upward, in- accessible to dim sight and terrible in their portend. Gaunt, obscure shadows crawl from ledges; creep from caverns, and go slinking to the void below. A slender summit thrusts out its crow-like head, and clinging to its beak is a whiteness, a foreign speck ; infinitesimal, yet awfully apparent in its unreality. It is horrible! The rocks are strangely still, they smother my thought-outcry. I cannot hold. My fingers bleed on the glazed rocks, and the clotted blood baffles their gnawing hold. I feel the blood trickle down my arm and form a tin - pool in the hollow of my chest, shuddering with the rise of breath. I must fall ! I looked below, an immensity, an eternity hungered for me. A sob of hope forever lost flows down my throat, and chokes me, and blinded by the switch of heavy air I fall — down, and down, and down into the ghastly nothingness — I died. II. ' ou find me incoiierent ? Undoubtedly I abuse your intelligence and credulit - but first you should know, sir, that as a child I was a weakling, victim to a malignant disease, and e tremel - reticent in nature. Stumbling through youth with these hand- icaps, it is not to be wondered that I soon acquired a taste for the morbid, and eccentric in literature, in life ; to console me in my contempt for the man in life mob. This per erted leaning had grown like a fungus on my mind, craving the distorted — and with a fierce indulging laugh, I drank deeply. Sometimes at night I awoke with some repulsixx dream or fancy my confused brain had pitifully evolved from the maze of lives I had lived in the printed word. I watched the dusk deepen with dread, vet awaited it with a ; ' ort of rampant pleasure, knowing well its inevitable horror but enchanted by that horror as one secretly loves best the things that cause him pain and misery. I lived a dissolute dream. I de- spised my own existence and that of the scurrying and aimless rats that forever wore the streets. It is a lie that ' outh loves life! Then one day I came here. I saw Destiny. I saw the portrait of one of my most stubborn dreams painted on the canvas, as I had lived it. It caused my mind to reel, to sicken, to drop down, and down, until the winch-like strain drew me into a faint, but it was a conscious faint. I watched the portrait of my dream. It fascinated me; it repelled me; it embittered fe. It kindled within me a fire; an un- reasoning desire for its possession. I saved my paltry marks and grew into man- hood. My father had died — in debt. I would tell myself, Today, I shall eat only once, and so hasten the day. One night I awoke with a deathly start, feeling a presentiment that the portrait was gone. Perhaps it was stolen ; perhaps someone had pur- chased it. I threw my cloak about me and limped hurriedly to the great museum. All was still and silent as though to torture me with mock serenity. Great woven bars guarded the entrance, but per- haps 1 could creep through? The two stiffened guards threw me into the bare streets. I pleaded Page 25

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s E.ERBER. Nemmin ' why. He stahted somethin ' he didn ' t finish, said Danny with utter truthfulness and with a peek at the future. I sho ain ' t no evil tiding ' s gal. Yo never gave that gen ' men a chance. No, ain ' t yo? He disregarded the last re- mark as insignificant. In fack, onless yo proves yo good ' tentions, I will — and she made a gesture in air that he knew meant his abrupt finish unless he strengthened her wavering affections. Purloining chickens was his only art. With a portion of his savings withdrawn from the bank, he bought a ranch on the outskirts of town, considerably out so to speak. A week he passed at a mysterious work. People complained of the losses they were suffering. As Ellie ' s heart attack decreased, his grew more violent with determination. Although his inky fea- tures seemed as composed as the river Styx, he felt like a shrinking violet in her presence. Don ' t reckon yo is cravin ' to inspec ' mah ranch today, Ellie? he said pleadingly. She had intended to snub him when she saw that he was going to speak to her, but at his words she looked interested. Yo learnt me a lesson, Danny. I mean to be yore best frien ' from herever after. Meanin ' what? I ' ll go! As they sped along in a hired machine, Danny glibly lied that his car awaited repairs at the garage, but Ellie seemed to be contented as she snuggled down beside him. The ' came to a stop at a sleepy little farmhouse which bore no sign of activity ex- cept that of the greatest variety of chickens in as- sorted shades. Ellie could not conceal her surprise. Wheah ' s the population? What yo mean? Hired help. Oh they. Picnicin ' . I alius lets them picnic on Sundays, prevaricated Danny without realizing that it was only Saturday. Gizzard was in a state of mental agony. He lacked the courage to tell the old, old lie and Ellie gave him no opportunity to do so, for she insisted upon leaving immediately for home. People were astonished to find that all of their fowls had returned to their nest apparently cleansed of the affliction of wanderlust. Into Danny ' s appreciative ear Ellie bewailed the fact that she had no funds. Why, cream puff, sho I can help yo. Didn ' t yo knowah I sold mah fahm las ' -week? Oh, I ' ll be so ' bliged if yo will. Such usual words were disappointing, but he reached into the recesses of his pocket and pain- fully extracted a roll of bills which he had wrapped around a handkerchief to increase the size of the roll. The slip that cost him his pocketbook was, How much yo want, Ellie? Five hun ' ded dollahs is what I rightly need. Yo reckon yo could ' ford it ontil I gets back mah posi- tion ? He sighed to himself. He had been saving his six hundred dollars for a rainy day, and this cloud- burst was more than he could comprehend. I he next day Ellie was accompanied to the sta- tion by a bouquet of American Beauty roses and by Washington, still fervid. A wisp of lavender hand- kerchief fluttered a moment to the disillusioned Danny standing on the platform. The puff-puff of the train as it started on its long journey to New ork ca used a lump of self-pity to rise in the throat of the dusky Romeo. He pulled out his wallet. It contained what was left of his savings. One hundred dollars was just enough to pay the bet. Of the two aches, Danny didn ' t know which hurt the most; his broken heart or his broken pocketbook. I ' age 24

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UE.IXSSUI my dream, and wept for anger at their immobility. I cursed their black souls, and swore to avenge the wrong they did me. For twenty-three years I lived thus. I lacked one hundred marks. I gloated in the knowledge of Destiny at my finger-ends, and borrowed the gold from a dealer in usury lest someone cheat me of my supreme goal as I thrust out my hand to receive it. The director laughed at me when I demanded the portrait. He laughed at me, — my shoes were worn. Trembling with passion I thrust the money in his hands and gave him a wrinkled letter ( reply to an inquiry I had addressed seventeen years before to the trustees of the institution — whether the canvas was for sale and the price?) He smiled now, at the money for which I had bled twenty-three years, but he sold Destiny to me. Nursing the tears of eagerness I ran to my sorry rooms in the West Quarter and wept, unconfined. The portrait was mine, mine! It was the happiest moment of my life. The grey of Diana was lovely, alluring, fascinating; the blended colors were in- describably beautiful ! I could feel the numbing influence of the colors creep upon my consciousness, binding slowly and carefully my senses in a mesh of tangled twines — and infuriating me! Destiny laughed at me and called me fool. Were I — I to yield myself to this bit of rag and smirch of color? Were I to permit this profanity of reason to persuade me, and to beat me into insensibility? It taunts me with hypocrisy! I seized the portrait and hurled it into the open fire and heaped a pyre of raw wood about it vhile I shook with vicious rage and spattered the oil about the grate. The fire leaped up in straining anxiety with the fire within me as I crouched in the blue glare and watched my dream shrivel into the nothingness from which it sprang. To a Dead Sparrow Siegfried Rosen How small you lie upon the sidewalk there, I ' ll make you a place with my slight bare hands ' ou, with your sudden bankrupt wealth of song. Under this cherry tree; While your fellows fling their trifle lyrics through And its life shall take you to foreign lands the air ; But you shall not be cold nor lonely long. Come, come; I ' ll build you a nest, Deep in the sweet warm earth ; And you shall lie on your broken breast, And pause till your other birth. As the seasons come and flee. And you shall sing. And you shall sing Brave lyrics from your pretty mouth. When sparrows make the April meadows ring With songs they purchased in the South. To One Lost Carlotta Mitchell I wonder if forever I must dream Of valleys where the blue smoke idly drifts; Must all my dreams be mingled with a theme Of mountain — kisses, splendid fleeting gifts? And must each flower nod and point the way, That I shall follow in my tired quest; Must I in dreams relive the sun-fill ed day She left that quiet valley of the west? O, city windows with flowers on the sill, I know she comes at morn to one of you. O, tell me do her brown eyes ever fill. As she looks westward when the sky is blue? Page 26