Broken Necks/Jazz

by Ben Hecht

Jazz

I

In the fourth year of her married life Hazel Wombat experienced a desire to be free. She was married to an acute psychologist who specialized in primitive cultures. The fellow's name was Hubert Wombat, and he earned his bread by devoting three hours of each day, barring Sundays and Saturdays, to the enlightening of some two hundred addle-headed, rattle-brained, vaporous numbskulls who, such is the humor of life, were called students.

During these three hours Wombat was never himself. Naturally a quiet, kindly man given to agreeable and erudite pursuits, he became, when confronted with the classes over which he functioned as Professor of Anthropology, a creature disgruntled and embittered. A vast impatience with the ignorance of the world concerning the things which it had taken him twenty years to discover and memorize was the basis of Professor Wombat's metamorphosis in the classroom.

Daily the young men and women who grudgingly exposed themselves to the Professor's wisdom listened with stoical ears to the bizarre expoundings of their instructor. Rising from his desk the Professor would fix them with a violent eye and hold forth:

"The Gorngai and Tungu are afraid to visit the places of the dead for fear the spirits will make them ill. The ground where dead are buried is often regarded as a good conductor of disease. In Tenimber and Timorlaut strangers are not buried for fear that sickness may thus spread over the country. From this idea comes the common objections to burial among early peoples, no less than in modern times, when cremation is becoming fashionable. The Masai do not bury people because, as they say, the body would poison the soil. Exactly the same practice and belief is found in East Central Africa. This idea, combined with the fear of ghosts, has helped to form the relatively late phenomena of ancestral and chthonian hierology."

It was evident even to one of Professor Wombat's preoccupation that such enthralling statistics fell upon brains too inconsequent to be stirred, too trivial in their capacities to be illuminated by great truths. The knowledge of this would cause him to break off suddenly in his discourses, thrust forth his lower lip, tug twice upon his slight and pointed beard, and emit a snort in which were concealed the contempt and despair of a man harassed beyond reason by the fates.

But behind the daily hardship to which the specific stupidities of his students subjected him, lurked an irritation produced by an ignorance more general, a vapidity more colossal. It was the notion of these students that primitive peoples were a debauched and hopeless lot. In vain did Professor Wombat point out the elaborate taboos in Leti, Moa, and Lakor. Useless were his violences of diction concerning the degeneration of the marriage systems in modern life from the custom in Nizhegorod, where the bridegroom's attendant walked thrice around the bridal party, his back against the sun, holding an ikon until, placing himself in front of the participants in the ceremony, he scratched the ground with a knife, cursing evil spirits and evilly disposed persons; in British Guiana, where a young man before marriage undergoes an ordeal, his flesh being wounded and himself sewn into a hammock full of fire ants. Similarly he held forth concerning the practices among the Yezedees, where the bride is covered from head to foot in thick veils and when arrived at her home remains for three weeks in the corner of a darkened room before her husband is permitted to see her. But all in vain. The thousand and one instances of superior rituals among primitive peoples, the thousand and one illustrations of their religious, economic and social conventions which rendered them a more genuinely moral and less promiscuous set than the citizens of more recent civilizations, were received by his audiences as the perfunctory notions common to fuddy-duddies unacquainted with the ways of the real world.

By his ceaseless exhortings concerning the intricate regulations of early societies Professor Wombat achieved in the third year of his efforts at the University of Chicago the nickname of "Tabs" or "Taboo" Wombat. He was regarded by the student body, which in its ignorance fastened upon his course as a Sinecure, to be a ranting, eccentric creature full of sneers and sarcasms and inexplicable angers. A certain respect was paid his tempers, a certain deference was shown to his unquestionable hatred of life in general and of the classroom in particular.

Among his fellow faculty members Wombat found a somewhat more congenial field for mental intercourse. Now and then a faintly diverting evening came about, during which he listened with courtesy to the laments of Molmon, the aged philologist, and during which he, in turn, theorized to his heart's content concerning the researches of his friend Frazer among the Babar Islands. But in the main his leisure was devoted to the pursuit of dim statistics, the assortment of mildewed facts, in anticipation of a volume he had been for five years preparing. The name of the volume was to be "The Psychic and Material Origins of Primitive Conventions."

He had married when he was thirty-six. The act had been attributed by his friends to his absentmindedness, and his utter indifference to matters of contemporary importance. But, as a matter of fact, Wombat had married out of love.

He had encountered the woman in the University library, which he had disdainfully visited one evening in quest of Van der Tunk's "Bataksch Woordenboeck," an exhilarating volume concerned with the manners current among the Battas of Sumatra. A familiar tome opened before the lady attracted his eye. She was reading W. Ellis' "Polynesian Researches" and a strange warmth entered the savant's heart. Unaware as he was of the fact that the young woman had plucked the tome haphazardly from the shelves, he stood beside her overcome by an absurd rush of sympathy. With the simplicity common to all great scholars, Wombat sat himself down beside the reader, talked, argued, expounded, and theorized. He left the astonished young woman with an emotion of lightness in his blood. The conversation had endured an hour.

Drawn by the memory of that hour, Professor Wombat sought the library on succeeding nights, wandering lonely about its corridors and through its rooms, his thoughts divided between the exogamous Melanesians and the person with dark hair and a somewhat snubbed nose with whom he felt an imperative desire to renew the happy discourse of the previous meeting.

Vague though his thoughts concerning this person remained, Wombat yet pursued her with the tenacity of a specialist in amours. Locating her on the third evening, he plunged at once into subjects close to his heart. With theories pointing out how the Kei Islanders, the Yumas, the Manyemas, the New Hebrideans, the Fijians, and the Ngurii had anticipated the inoculations of Jenner and Pasteur, he wooed her. In her attentiveness he found evidence of mental communion. In her smile, her frown, her silence he discovered indubitable proofs of the kinship existing between their souls. All his erudite cogitations he poured out to her.

Devoted since childhood to what had almost become his monomania, he had automatically avoided women. He had lived alone with his books. His diversion had been insect-haunted expeditions into plague-ridden lands. His chief social activities had been among the tatooed and disease-marked savages of African and Australian fastnesses. The repressed instincts of the man came now suddenly to the surface, and knowing not the words or gestures with which to clothe his dim yearnings, he exuded desperately his ethnological lore. It was during a discussion of the symbolical trial marriage customs found among the Halmahera, the Loanda, and the Wakuasi tribes that Wombat touched the young woman's hand and experienced the first moment of bewilderment that had come to him in all his anthropological researches.

The remainder of Wombat's courtship was swift and certain. The young woman, whose name was Hazel, whose age was twenty-five, whose occupation was a somewhat bored and aimless study of music at a wealthy uncle's expense, married him for reasons best known to herself.

Wombat was for plunging into a district occupied by the Chiriguanos and the Andamanese for his honeymoon, to obtain the first-hand evidence he needed to confound the preposterous theories of Ploss and Eyre. A tour through Greece with a short and wholly unsatisfactory sojourn in Morocco was effected as a compromise.

After the trip Wombat and his bride returned to the University.

II

II

For the first year Hazel Wombat found a certain piquancy in her life. Being a woman of keen if aimless discernments, she perceived the qualities of the good professor, enjoyed even his violences, found relish most of all in his almost childlike preoccupations. She did not make the mistake of understanding Wombat's erudition. By listening adroitly she managed to acquire a superficial smattering of the worlds in which the savant's thought circulated. By moulding her tastes with equal adroitness she managed to achieve a sympathy for the man's strange and often picturesque career. Their life at home became, after the first year, a placid state in which she kept weird jottings of vast benefit to her mate, and in which she agitated herself vaguely as his assistant in the compilation of " The Psychic and Material Origins of Primitive Conventions."

Gradually, however, an unrest seized upon Hazel Wombat. The memory of the world from which she felt herself effectually cut off returned to her. Originally neither capricious nor lusting after changing gaieties, the suppression of her instincts gave birth to certain violent longing in her. Not till well into the second year of her marriage, though, did she broach the subject with the Professor.

"It would be nice," she said on this occasion, "to go out a bit to the theater or the cafés, Hubert. We really see no one and do so little."

Wombat eyed her with no intelligence.

"Mm, mm," he said. "Mm."

"I mean it," Hazel pursued. "What do you say to going downtown tomorrow night, just the two of us, and having a—spree?"

"A spree?" repeated Professor Wombat, narrowing his brown eyes and gazing up at the top shelf of his open bookcases. "Do you mean getting drunk?"

"No, no," cried Hazel, laughing hurriedly. "I mean just enjoying ourselves."

"Umph," said Wombat. "What more joy than—"

And callously he proceeded to outline to the lady of his bosom the peculiar exhilirations to be found in the study of the Nootka Indians, in the contemplation of the Dieri ceremonies.

A full year passed before the subject was ventured again. This occasion, however, marked a definite change in the life of the Wombats. Smarting under the chagrined rebukings of her husband, Hazel repaired to her room and wept.

Although she had married the man as much out of curiosity and boredom as anything else, she had acquired an affection for him during the three years. His heartlessness therefore injured her. His indifference to her desires therefore lacerated her. She wept and dimly determined upon changing the conduct of her life, on asserting herself. Thereafter she intrigued desperately to uproot Wombat from his archipelagoes and jungles, to stir in him some social sense, some appreciation of modern excitements.

Against the calm, determined, lifelong mania of her husband she fought cleverly, creating, however, nothing but discord, and bringing about nothing but a state of bewilderment for the Professor and of unhappiness for herself. Wombat, chagrined by inexplicable tears and mysteriously inspired outbursts, sought futilely to reconcile her by inviting Molmon, the philologist, three consecutive nights to their home.

"I know he is rather old," he explained apologetically, "but the man has really a profound appreciation as well as a profound knowledge of Wachaga vowels."

From which may be seen at a glance this Wombat's complete incompatibility.

Approaching the fourth anniversary of their wedded life, Hazel entered her husband's study one October evening, and sank dejectedly into a large leather chair. She had spent two days in seclusion. She had meditated upon matters as they stood, and as they might stand. She had reached a conclusion.

Strange as it was, a love for Wombat had taken the joy from this conclusion and left her dejected, almost wavering.

"I have concluded," she said in a dry voice to Wombat, who looked up from his parchment at her entrance, "I have concluded, Hubert, to leave you."

"Yes?" said Wombat, smiling agreeably.

"You're not listening, Hubert. Please listen. It's important."

With a sigh, Wombat laid down his pen. He experienced a sense of something unpleasant about to happen. Of late, unpleasant things had grown more and more frequent. He thought of the eighth chapter incomplete before him, and sighed again.

"Hubert," resumed Hazel, "I have concluded to leave you. I can't stand living this way any longer. I'm not married to a man, but to a museum. You devote all your time to your savages. You have neither respect nor love, nor—nor anything for me.”

Staring with droll and bewildered eyes at the woman, Wombat opened his mouth and remained silent.

"I want to be free, Hubert,” she said. "I'm—I'm tired of being tied down as your shadow. I'm— I'm young and I want to enjoy myself.'”

"Good God!" exclaimed Wombat. "Good God!”

"I'm sorry, Hubert," Hazel went on, tears in her eyes. ‘‘I've tried hard. But you simply won't understand. You're so lost in your work that you simply haven't any eyes for me, let alone intelligence. If only—”

Wombat rose weakly from his chair. A sense of shame was uppermost in him. He remembered sorrowfully certain things he should have done, certain things which would have averted this particular scene.

"I presume,” he said huskily, ‘‘I presume I have been quite blind to—to this other."

"You have, Hubert," said Hazel eagerly. "You've just been lost in your own thoughts and never—never—paid any attention to me. I could have gone out myself but I didn't want to. I thought maybe you'd change—but you haven't—I'm going back to my uncle—"

"What," said Wombat dazedly, "can I do?"

The question brought a burst of tears from his wife.

"If there's anything I can do?" Wombat pursued, feeling vaguely that he was heading right. "I'Il do it. Merely tell me. Don't go away, Hazel. It's—it's terrible."

"It is," moaned the woman. "But you won't do it."

Desperately Wombat cried, "I will!"

The evening concluded in a scene of tenderness, in vows exchanged between Hazel and Wombat, in a promise by Wombat to lend himself to the diversions of his wife two nights each week.

"We'll start tomorrow night," cried Hazel, again radiant. "Just we two. We'll go to the theater and to some café."

Wombat returned to Chapter Hight and held his pen over the closely written page.

With the woman and her tears out of the room, however, a lethargy came upon him. Composition no longer lured him. His brain trembled upon thoughts of the future. What had happened? To what impossible things had he sworn himself? How could a creature so happily endowed as Hazel become afflicted with the desire to mingle with the superficial mob? What in God's name had inspired her with a longing to indulge in shallow, empty diversions? Wombat shuddered.

There was in Wombat's attitude a clear premise. All his life he had regarded the vulgar disturbances surrounding him and known by the words Society, Pleasure and Business as the manifestations of an illiterate and colorless state of culture. Barring two concerts and the annual Haresfoot play at the University, which he as a matter of quixotic duty attended, he had never descended to the level of those of his fellow academicians who gave themselves over to the vulgarisms of the day. He had remained aloof, holding in contempt, as he held the vaporous numb-skulls of his classroom, the lures of the city. An excursion into the Greek drama, which he read in its original, a veritable debauch among certain exquisite French archeologists, comprised, outside his scientific travels, his activities beyond his chosen occupation.

Now he had vowed to accompany her to theaters and cafés, to mingle with all manner of witless cattle, to listen to the raspings and guffawings at these stupid rendezvous. There had also been some mention of dancing! By Wilyaru and the seven thousand tapus of Bogota, what malevolent destiny had brought about this thing? Chapter Eight remained as it was, and sinking back in his chair Professor Wombat gave himself over to the contemplation of a tragic future.

III

The air was chill and the night above the vanishing buildings tinged with the jaundice of many blazing lights when Professor Wombat and his wife stepped from the crowded street into the gilded and mawkishly festooned interior of the Madison Inn.

Hazel, her eyes alight, her face glowing, followed elatedly the pilot who had appeared at the entrance. Conscious of her new clothes, the fetching tilt of her hat, the effective flare of her long, velvet coat, she walked with the air of one given to conquests. Behind her trailed the Professor. His eyes swung nervously from table to table, some occupied with laughing, chattering eaters, others empty and offering immediate refuge. Vainly he sought to concentrate upon the Zafimanelos of Madagascar, the subject of his ninth chapter, but his thought darted to the Niamniam and the King of Monbutto appeared grotesquely in his vision to further his confusion.

After an unhappy interval Wombat found himself seated at one of the tables facing his wife, whom he was barely able to recognize. An unusual air was about the woman.

"Hubert," she murmured, laughing, "do look at the menu. We must order."

"You order," said Wombat, and relapsed forthwith into a state of disordered lethargy. For this he had married! Regret consumed him. The Wombat that the two hundred unfortunates of the classroom knew came to the surface. Dishes appeared containing pale foods.

"Aren't you hungry?" appealed the woman opposite him.

He raised his glowering eyes and transfixed her.

A look of fear and pain spread over her face.

"Oh, Hubert!" she murmured.

Suddenly from a far end of the room Morey Stein's Original Dixie Jazz Band struck up "The Livery Stable Blues." Wombat's mouth remained open and without speech, a habit of his when under the stress of surprise. To his ears came the guttural wailings of the saxophone, the monotonous clanging of the cymbals, the sob and blare of brasses. A strange expression came into Wombat's brown eyes. Leaning forward in his chair he watched several couples arise from their tables and walk toward a clear space in the center of the Inn. The table of the Wombats bordered upon this clear space. His eyes opened wide and remained fixed upon the swaying bodies, the leaping shoulders, the abdominal gesturings which suddenly filled this space before him.

Women with bared shoulders and bared arms, with violent feet and wonderful contortions swept by him. Men bending, bowing, undulating, clung to them and wrestled with them. The movements grew wilder. The music remained hammering and wailing. Something familiar crept into Wombat's blood.

"Good Lord!" he muttered.

As the tumult of the band increased and the dancing waxed more furious Wombat's muscles quivered. Unconsciously his fingers sought his notation pad.

"In the Luang-Sermata Islands," he murmured, "and Makiser_"

He became silent, and a film seemed to come over his eyes. For the moment Wombat thought of the ngadhungi dances of the Busy-busynans, For the moment his brain raced back to a month amongst the Kurnai of Gippsland, a month spent in mastering each and every detail of the strange quicksteps per- formed there at the ceremonies of the ililika tabu. The wailings and snortings from the band across the room contributed an obbligato to his thoughts and memories. The crude staccato beat of the music, the brazen thumpings of the brasses kindled in his thought memories of the Perak drums of Malay and the Dyak tympani that beat among the hills to the whine and shiver of strange reeds.

"Hubert," cried Hazel in alarm, "what is it?"

A moment later the diners at the Madison Inn witnessed a strange spectacle. They observed Hubert Wombat, Professor of Anthropology, clasping the figure of his wife in his arms, leaping about upon the polished space set off by the deserted tables, leaping with a certain curious rhythm, a striking curious grace in his leaps. Louder the music wailed, echoes of Jungle Land, echoes of blood-drinking villages beyond the Congo. Overcome with joy and pride, Hazel clung to the body of her husband. There was in his dancing something she had never felt before in the days when she had danced before their marriage, a peculiar exaggeration of the steps she had once learned, an almost fantastic amendment to the twistings she had mastered four years ago. Watching the admiring eyes that followed them about on the floor, Hazel spoke in her husband's ear, gasping and delirious:

"Hubert—I didn't know—you could dance—oh, I'm so glad—you dance wonderfully——"

And Wombat, with the beating and wailing of the music stirring into life vivid memories, unfastening grimly mastered anthropological data in his brain, nodded his head and panted:

"Yes—remarkable. Chapter Ten will be simple—and novel—a carefully traced theory on survivals—the survival of the Malekula ritual of—the eight naraks—in the modern dance—as well as music—we shall have to come often—I can trace directly——"

The music ceased and Wombat's words were lost in a clatter of applause from the dancers. Standing suddenly inanimate upon the floor Wombat moved his hands violently against each other. Mrs. Wombat clung ecstatically to his arm.

"I'll have to bring Molmon here," he cried enthusiastically in her ear. "We were talking of this very thing only eight years ago."