Blackguard by Maxwell Bodenheim — Read

Kone had already arrived at the apartment and was waiting on the front porch. His heavy body, of medium height, held the arrogant bulge of muscles beneath his light grey suit and his pale brown face cradled a wraith of bitter alertness -- a sneer attempting to break through the concealing flesh. He had a short flattened nose, thick lips, and the eyes of a forced and sprightly demon, and the dark abundance of his eyebrows receded into a low forehead, which in turn ended in a mass of black hair brushed backward. He had come to America some six years before this late Autumn evening; had first worked as a porter in a department store; had mastered English with a miraculous speed; and was now studying at a neighboring university and earning a living by teaching Russian to classes of children. In place of that violently disguised boredom commonly known as a heart he seemed to have an over-perfect dynamo that made him a mechanical wild-man -- there was a sharp, strained persistency in all of his movements and the fact that he never deigned to falter in his words and gestures gave him an aspect of well-maintained artificiality. He threw his vivid grin to Carl.

"Hah, poet who seems to sleep but is always awake -- greetings," he called out, in the crisply dramatic way in which he usually spoke. "‘Demons lurk in your dimples' -- you should have written that line about yourself."