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Erik Dorn

by Ben Hecht · English · Gutenberg #22358 · 517,402 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Erik Dorn

Author: Ben Hecht


        
Release date: August 19, 2007 [eBook #22358]
                Most recently updated: September 17, 2007

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ERIK DORN ***


E-text prepared by Eric Eldred and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



ERIK DORN

by

BEN HECHT







G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1921

Copyright, 1921
by
Ben Hecht

Printed in the United States of America




To

MARIE





CONTENTS

  PAGE

  PART I

  SLEEP                                                         1


  PART II

  DREAM                                                        75


  PART III

  WINGS                                                       173


  PART IV

  ADVENTURE                                                   277


  PART V

  SILENCE                                                     369




ERIK DORN




PART I

SLEEP




CHAPTER I


An old man sat in the shadows of the summer night. From a veranda chair
he looked at the stars. He wore a white beard, and his eyes, grown small
with age, watered continually as if he were weeping. Half-hidden under
his beard his emaciated lips kept the monotonous grimace of a smile on
his face.

He sat in the dark, a patient, trembling figure waiting for bedtime. His
feet, though he rested them all day, grew heavy at night. Of late this
weariness had increased. It reached like a caress into his mind.
Thoughts no longer formed themselves in the silences of his hours.
Instead, a gentle sleep, dreamless and dark, came upon him and left him
sitting with his little eyes, open and moist, fastened without sight
upon familiar objects.

As he sat, the withered body of this old man seemed to grow always more
motionless, except for his hands. Resting on his thighs, his twig-like
hands remained forever awake, their thin contorted fingers crawling
vaguely about like the legs of 8 long-impaled spiders.

The sound of a piano from the room behind him dropped into the old man's
sleep, and he found himself once more looking out of his eyes and
occupying his clothes. His attitude remained unchanged except for a
quickened movement of his fingers. Life returned to him as gently as it
had left. The stars were still high over his head and the night, cool
and murmuring, waited for him.

He lowered his eyes toward the street beyond the lawn. People were
straying by, seeming to drift under the dark trees. He could not see
them distinctly, but he stared at their flowing outlines and at moments
was rewarded by a glimpse of a face--a featureless little glint of white
in the shadows: dark shadows moving within a motionless darkness with
little dying candle-flame faces. "Men and women," he thought, "men and
women, mixed up in the night ... mixed up."

As he stared, thoughts as dim and fluid as the people in the street
moved in his head. But he remembered things best not in words. His
memories were little warmths that dropped into his heart. His cold thin
fingers continued their fluttering. "Mixed up, mixed up," said the
night. "Dark," said the shadows. And the years spoke their memories. "We
have been; we are no more." Memories that had lost the bloom of words.
The emaciated lips of the old man held a smile beneath the white beard.

This was Isaac Dorn, still alive after eighty years.

The music from the house ended and a woman's voice called through an
open window.

"I'm afraid it's chilly outside, father."

He offered no answer. Then he heard Erik, his son, speak in an amused
voice.

"Leave the old man be. He's making love to the stars."

"I'll get him a blanket," said Erik's wife. "I can't bear to think of
him catching cold."

Isaac Dorn arose from his chair, shaking his head. He did not fancy
being covered with a blanket and feeling Anna's kindly hands tucking its
edges around his feet. They were too kindly, too solicitous. Their
little pats and caressings presumed too much. One grew sad under their
ministrations and murmured to oneself, "Poor child, poor child." Better
a half-hour under the cold, amused eyes of his son, Erik. There was
something between Erik and him, something like an unspoken argument. To
Anna he was a pathetic little old man to be nursed, coddled, defended
against chills and indigestions, "poor child, poor child." But Erik
looked at him with cold, amused eyes that offered no quarter to age and
asked for nothing. Good Erik, who asked for nothing, whose eyes smiled
because they were too polite to sneer. Erik knew about the stars and the
mixed-up things, the dim things old senses could feel in the night
though he chose to laugh at them.

But one thing Erik didn't know, and the old man, turning from his chair,
grew sad. What was that? What? His thought mumbled a question. Sitting
motionless in a corner of the room he could smile at Erik and his smile
under the white beard seemed to give an answer to the mumble--an answer
that irritated his son. The answer said, "Wait, wait! it is too early
for you to say you have lived." What a son, what a son! whose eyes made
fun of his father's white hair.

The old man moved slowly as if his infirmities were no more than
meditations, and entered the house.




CHAPTER II


The crowds moving through the streets gave Erik Dorn a picture. It was
morning. Above the heads of the people the great spatula-topped
buildings spread a zigzag of windows, a scribble of rooftops against the
sky. A din as monotonous as a silence tumbled through the streets--an
unvarying noise of which the towering rectangles of buildings tilted
like great reeds out of a narrow bowl, seemed an audible part.

The city alive with signs, smoke, posters, windows; falling, rising,
flinging its chimneys and its streets against the sun, wound itself up
into crowds and burst with an endless bang under the far-away sky.

Moving toward his office Erik Dorn watched the swarming of men and women
of which he was a part. Faces like a flight of paper scraps scattered
about him. Bodies poured suddenly across his eyes as if emptied out of
funnels. The ornamental entrances of buildings pumped figures in and
out. Vague and blurred like the play of gusty rain, the crowds darkened
the pavements.

Dorn saluted the spectacle with smiling eyes. As always, in the aimless
din and multiplicity of streets he felt himself most securely at home.
The smear of gestures, the elastic distortion of crowds winding and
unwinding under the tumult of windows, gave him the feeling of a
geometrical emptiness of life.

Here before him the meanings of faces vanished. The greedy little
purposes of men and women tangled themselves into a generality. It was
thus Dorn was most pleased to look upon the world, to observe it as one
observes a pattern--involved but precise. Life as a whole lay in the
streets--a little human procession that came toiling out of a yesterday
into an interminable to-morrow. It presented itself to him as a
picture--legs moving against the walls of buildings, diagonals of
bodies, syncopating face lines.

Things that made pictures for his eyes alone diverted Dorn. Beyond this
capacity for diversion he remained untouched. He walked smiling into
crowds, oblivious of the lesser destinations of faces, pleased to dream
of his life and the life of others as a movement of legs, a bobbing of
heads.

His appreciation of crowds was typical. In the same manner he held an
appreciation of all things in life and art which filled him with the
emotion of symmetry. He had given himself freely to his tastes. A creed
had resulted. Rhythm that was intricate pleased him more than the
metronomic. In art, the latter was predominant. In life, the former. Out
of these decisions he achieved almost a complete indifference to
literature and especially toward painting. No drawn picture stirred him
to the extent that did the tapestry of a city street. No music aroused
the elation in him that did the curious beat upon his eyes of window
rows, of vari-shaped building walls whose oblongs and squares translated
themselves in his thought into a species of unmelodious but perfect
sound.

The preoccupation with form had developed in him as complement of his
nature. The nature of Erik Dorn was a shallows. Life did not live in
him. He saw it as something eternally outside. To himself he seemed at
times a perfect translation of his country and his day.

"I'm like men will all be years later," he said to his wife, "when their
emotions are finally absorbed by the ingenious surfaces they've
surrounded themselves with, and life lies forever buried behind the
inventions of engineers, scientists, and business men."

Normal outwardly, a shrewd editor and journalist, functioning daily in
his home and work as a cleverly conventional figure, Dorn had lived
since boyhood in an unchanging vacuum. He had in his early youth become
aware of himself. As a young man he had waited half consciously for
something to happen to him. He thought of this something as a species of
contact that would suddenly overtake him. He would step into the street
and find himself a citizen absorbed by responsibilities, ideas,
sympathies, prejudices. But the thing had never happened. At thirty he
had explained to himself, "I am complete. This business of being empty
is all there is to life. Intelligence is a faculty which enables man to
peer through the muddle of ideas and arrive at a nowhere."

Private introspection had become a bore to him. What was the use of
thinking if there was nothing to think about? And there was nothing. His
violences of temper, his emotions, definite and at times compelling, had
always seemed to him as words--pretences to which he loaned himself for
diversion. He was aware that neither ideas nor prejudices--the residues
of emotion--existed in his mind. His thinking, he knew, had been a
shuffle of words which he followed to fantastic and inconsistent
conclusions that left him always without convictions for the morrow.

There was a picture in the street for him on this summer morning. He was
a part of it. Yet between himself and the rest of the picture he felt no
contact.

Into this emptiness of spirit, life had poured its excitements as into a
thing bottomless as a mirror. He gave it back an image of words. He was
proud of his words. They were his experiences and sophistications. Out
of them he achieved his keenest diversion. They were the excuse for his
walking, his wearing a hat and embarking daily for his work, returning
daily to his home. They enabled him to amuse himself with complexities
of thought as one improvising difficult finger exercises on the piano.

At times it seemed to Dorn that he was even incapable of thinking, that
he possessed a plastic vocabulary endowed with a life of its own. He
often contemplated with astonishment his own verbal brilliancies, which
his friends appeared to accept as irrefutable truths of the moment.
Carried away in the heat of some intricate debate he would pause
internally, as his voice continued without interruption, and exclaim to
himself, "What in hell am I talking about?" And a momentary awe would
overcome him--the awe of listening to himself give utterance to
fantastic ideas that he knew had no existence in him--a cynical magician
watching a white rabbit he had never seen before crawl naïvely out of
his own sleeve. Thus his phrases assembled themselves on his tongue and
pirouetted of their own energy about his listeners.

Smiling, garrulous, and impenetrable--garrulous even in his silences, he
daily entered his office and proceeded skillfully about his work. He
was, as always, delighted with himself. He felt himself a man ideally
fitted to enjoy the little spectacle of life his day offered. Emotion in
others invariably roused in him a sense of the ludicrous. His eyes
seemed to travel through the griefs and torments of his fellows and to
fasten helplessly upon their causes. And here lay the ludicrous--the
clownish little mainspring of tragedy and drama. He moved through his
day with a vivid understanding of its excitements. There was no mystery.
One had only to look and see and words fitted themselves. A pattern
twisted itself into precisions--precisions of men loving, hating,
questing. The understanding swayed him between pity and contempt and
left the balance of an amused smile in his eyes.

Intimacy with Erik Dorn had meant different things to different people,
but all had derived from his friendship a fascinated feeling of loss.
His wife, closest to him, had after seven years found herself drained,
hollowed out as by some tenaciously devouring insect. Her mind had
emptied itself of its normal furniture. Erik had eaten the ideas out of
it. Under the continual impact of his irony her faiths and
understandings had slowly deserted her. Her thought had become a shadow
cast by his emptiness. Things were no longer good, no longer bad. People
had become somehow non-existent for her since she could no longer think
of them as symbols incarnate of ideas that she liked or ideas that she
disliked. Thus emptied of its natural furniture, her mind had borrowed
from her heart and become filled, wholly occupied with the emotion of
her love for Erik Dorn. More than lover and husband, he was an
obsession. He had replaced a world for her.

It was of his wife that Dorn was thinking when he arrived this summer
morning at his desk in the editorial room. He had remembered suddenly
that the day was the anniversary of their marriage. Time had passed
rapidly. Seven years! Like seven yesterdays. He seemed able to remember
them in their entirety with a single thought, as one can remember a
column of figures without recalling either their meaning or their sum.




CHAPTER III


The employees of the editorial room--a loft-like chamber crazily crowded
with desks, tables, cabinets, benches, files, typewriters; lighted by a
smoke-darkened sun and the dim glow of electric bulbs--were already
launched upon the nervous routine of their day. An excited jargon filled
the place which, with the air of physical disorder as if the workers
were haphazardly improvising their activities,--gave the room a vivid
though seemingly impermanent life.

On the benches against a peeling wall sleepy-faced boys with precocious
eyes kept up a lazy hair-pulling, surreptitious wrestling bout. They
rose indifferently in response to furiously repeated bellows for their
assistance--a business of carrying typewritten bits of paper between
desks a few feet apart; or of sauntering with eleventh-hour orders to
the perspiring men in the composing room.

In the forward part of the shop a cluster of men stood about the desk of
an editor who in a disinterested voice sat issuing assignments for the
day, forecasting to his innumerable assistants the amount of space
needed for succeeding editions, the possible development in the local
scandals. His eye unconsciously watched the clock over his head, his
ear divided itself between a half-dozen conversations and a tireless
telephone. With his hands he kept fumbling an assortment of clippings,
memoranda, and copy.

Oldish young men and youngish old men gravitated about him, their faces
curiously identical. These were the irresponsible-eyed, casual-mannered
individuals, seemingly neither at work nor at play, who were to visit
the courts, the police, the wrecks, the criminals, conventions,
politicians, reformers, lovers, and haters, and bring back the news of
the city's day. A common almost racial sophistication stamped their
expression. They pawed over telephone books, argued with indifferent,
emotionless profanity among themselves on items of amazing import;
pounded nonchalantly upon typewriters, lolled with their feet upon
desks, their noses buried in the humorous columns of the morning
newspapers.

"Make-up" men and their assistants, everlastingly irritable as if the
victims of pernicious conspiracies, badgered for information that seemed
inevitably non-existent. They desired to know in what mysterious manner
one could get ten columns of type into a page that held only seven and
whether anyone thought the paper could go to press at half-past ten when
the bulk of the copy for the edition arrived in the composing room at
twenty minutes of eleven.

Proof-readers emerged from the bowels of somewhere waving smeared bits
of printed paper and triumphantly demanded explanation of ambiguous
passages.

Re-write men "helloed" indignantly into telephones, repeating with
sudden listlessness the pregnant details of the news pouring in; and
scribbling it down on sheets of paper ... "dead Grant park bullet
unknown 26 yrs silk stockings refinement mystery."

Idlers lounged and discussed loudly against the dusty windows hung with
torn grimy shades.

Copy-readers, concentrated under green eye-shades, sat isolated in a
tiny world of sharpened pencils, paste pots, shears, and emitted sudden
embittered oaths.

Editors from other departments, naïvely excited over items of vast
indifference to their nervous listeners, came and went.

An occasional printer, face and forearms smeared with ink, sauntered in
as if on a vacation, uttering some technical announcement and
precipitating a brief panic.

Toward the center of the room, seated at desks jammed against one
another in defiance of all convenience, telegraph editors, their hands
fumbling cables and despatches from twenty ends of the earth, bellowed
items of interest into the air--assassinations in China, probes,
quizzes, scandals, accusations in far-away places. They varied their
bellows with occasional shrieks of mysterious significance--usually a
misplaced paste pot, a borrowed shears, a vanished copy-boy.

These folk and a sprinkling of apparently unemployed and undisturbed
strangers spread themselves through the shop. Outside the opened windows
in the rear of the room, the elevated trains stuffed with men and women
roared into a station and squealed out again. In the streets below, the
traffic raised an ear-splitting medley of sound which nobody heard.

Against this eternal and internal disorder, a strange pottering,
apparently formless and without beginning or end, was guiding the latest
confusions and intrigues of the human tangle into perfunctory groups of
words called stories. A curious ritual--the scene, spreading through the
four floors of the grimy building with a thousand men and women
shrieking, hammering, cursing, writing, squeezing and juggling the
monotonous convulsions of life into a scribble of words. Out of the
cacophonies of the place issued, sausage fashion, a half-million papers
daily, holding up from hour to hour to the city the blurred mirrors of
the newspaper columns alive with the almost humorous images of an
unending calamity.

"The press," Erik Dorn once remarked, "is a blind old cat yowling on a
treadmill."

It was a quarter to nine when Dorn arrived at his desk. He seated
himself with a complete unconsciousness of the scene. A litter of
correspondence, propaganda, telegrams, and contributions from Constant
Reader lay stuffed into the corners and pigeonholes of his desk. He sat
for a moment thinking of his wife. Call her up ... spend the evening
downtown ... some unusual evidence of affection ... the vaudeville
wouldn't be bad.

The thought left him and his eyes fastened themselves upon a sheaf of
proofs.... Watch out for libel ... look for hunches ... scribble
suggestion for changes ... peer for items of information that might be
expanded humorously or pathetically into Human Interest yarns.... These
were functions he discharged mechanically. A perfect affinity toward his
work characterized his attitude. Yet behind the automatic efficiency of
his thought lay an ironical appreciation of his tasks. The sterile
little chronicles of life still moist from the ink-roller were like
smeared windows upon the grimacings of the world. Through these windows
Dorn saw with a clarity that flattered him.

A tawdry pantomime was life, a pouring of blood, a grappling with
shadows, a digging of graves. "Empty, empty," his intelligence whispered
in its depths, "a make-believe of lusts. What else? Nothing, nothing.
Laws, ambitions, conventions--froth in an empty glass. Tragedies,
comedies--all a swarm of nothings. Dreams in the hearts of men--thin
fever outlines to which they clung in hope. Nothing ... nothing...." His
intelligence continued a murmur as he read--a murmur unconscious of
itself yet coming from the depths of him. Equally unconscious was the
amusement he felt, and that flew a fugitive smile in his eyes.

The perfunctory hysterics of the stories of crime, graft, scandal, with
their garbled sentences and wooden phrases; the delicious sagacities of
the editorial pages like the mumbling of some adenoidal moron in a gulf
of high winds; headlines saying a pompous "amen" to asininity and a
hopeful "My God!" to confusion--these caressed him, and brought the
thought to him, "if there is anything worthy the absurdity of life it's
a newspaper--gibbering, whining, strutting, sprawled in attitudes of
worship before the nine-and-ninety lies of the moment--a caricature of
absurdity itself."

His efficiency aloof from such moralizing moved like a separate
consciousness through the day, as it had for the sixteen years of his
service. His rise in his profession had been comparatively rapid. Thirty
had found him enshrined as an editor. At thirty-four he had acquired the
successful air which distinguishes men who have come to the end of their
rope. He had become an editor and a fixture. The office observed an
intent, gray-eyed man, straight nosed, firm lipped, correctly shaved
down to the triangular trim of his mustache, his dark hair evenly
parted--a normal-seeming, kindly individual who wore his linen and his
features with a certain politely exotic air--the air of an identity.

The day's vacuous items in his life passed quickly, its frantic routine
ebbing into a lull toward mid-afternoon. Returning from a final uproar
in the composing room, Dorn looked good-humoredly about him. He was
ready to go home. Arguments, reprimands, entreaties were over for a
space. He walked leisurely down the length of the shop, pleased as
always by its atmosphere. It was something like the streets, this
newspaper shop, broken up, a bit intricate, haphazard.

A young man named Cross was painstakingly writing poetry on a
typewriter. Another named Gardner was busy on a letter. "My dearest...."
Dorn read over his shoulder as he passed. Promising young men, both,
whose collars would grow slightly soiled as they advanced in their
profession. He remembered one of his early observations: "There are two
kinds of newspapermen--those who try to write poetry and those who try
to drink themselves to death. Fortunately for the world, only one of
them succeeds."

In a corner a young woman, dressed with a certain ease, sat partially
absorbed in a book and partially in a half-devoured apple. "The Brothers
Karamasov," Dorn read as he sauntered by. He thought "an emancipated
creature who prides herself on being able to drink cocktails without
losing caste. She'll marry the first drunken newspaperman who forgets
himself in her presence and spend the rest of her life trying to induce
him to go into the advertising business."

Turning down the room he passed the desk of Crowley, the telegraph
editor. A face flabby and red with ancient drinking raised itself from a
book and a voice spoke,

"Old Egan gets more of a fool every day." Old Egan was the make-up man.
Dorn smiled. "The damned idiot crowded the Nancy story off page one in
the Home. Best story of the day." Crowley ended with a vaguely conceived
oath.

Dorn glimpsed the title of the book on his desk, _L'Oblat_. Crowley had
been educated for the priesthood but emerged from the seminary with a
heightened joy of life in his veins. A riotous twenty years in night
saloons and bawdy houses had left him a kindly, choleric, and respected
newspaper figure. Dorn caught his eye and wondered over his sensitive
infatuation of exotic writing. In the pages of Huysmans, De Gourmont,
Flaubert, Gautier, Symons, and Pater he seemed to have found a subtle
incense for his deadened nerves. Inside the flabby, coarsened body with
its red face munching out monosyllables, lived a recluse. "Too much
living has driven him from life," Dorn thought, "and killed his lusts.
So he sits and reads books--the last debauchery: strange, twisted
phrases like idols, like totem poles, like Polynesian masks. He sits
contemplating them as he once sat drunkenly watching the obscenities of
black, white, and yellow bodied women. Thus, the mania for the rouge of
life, for the grimace that lies beyond satiety, passes in him from
bestiality to asceticism and esthetics. Yesterday a bacchanal of flesh,
to-day a bacchanal of words ... the posturings of courtezans and the
posturings of ornate phrases become the same." He heard Crowley
repeating, "Damned idiot, Egan! No sense of human values. Crowded the
best story of the day off page one." ... Some day he'd have a long talk
with Crowley. But the man was so carefully hidden behind perfunctories
it was hard to get at him. He resented intrusion.

Dorn passed on and looked around for Warren--a humorous and didactic
creature who had with considerable effort destroyed his Boston accent
and escaped the fact that he had once earned his living as professor of
sociology in an eastern university. Dorn caught a memory of him sitting
in a congenial saloon before a stein and pouring forth hoarsely oracular
comments upon the activities of men known and unknown. The man had a
gift for caricature--Rabelaisean exaggerations. Dorn was suddenly glad
he had gone for the day. The office oppressed him and the people in it
were too familiar. He walked to his desk thinking of the South Seas and
new faces.

"I tell you what," a voice drawled behind him, "Nietzsche has it on the
whole lot of them." Cochran, the head of the copy desk, was talking--a
shriveled little man with a bald face and shoe-button eyes. "You've got
to admit people are more dishonest in their virtues than in their vices.
Of course, there's a lot of stuff he pulls that's impractical."

Dorn shrugged his shoulders, smiled and lifted his hat out of a locker.
He remembered again to telephone his wife, but instead moved out of the
office. A refreshing warmth in the street pleased his senses and he
turned toward the lake. Walk down Michigan avenue, take a taxi
home--what else was there to do? Nothing, unless talk. But to whom? He
thought of his father. A tenacious old man. Probably hang on forever.
God, the man had been married three times. If it wasn't for his damned
infirmities he'd probably marry again. Looking for something. What was
it the old man had kept looking for? As if there was in existence a
concrete gift to be drawn from life. A blithering, water-eyed optimist
to the end, he'd die with a prayer of thankfulness and gratitude.

Thus innocuously abstract, moving in the doldrum which sometimes
surrounded him after his day's work, he turned into the boulevard along
the lake. The day grew abruptly fresher here. An arc of blue sky rising
from the east flung a great curve over the building tops. Dorn paused
before the window of a Japanese art shop and stared at a bulbous wooden
god stoically contemplating his navel.

During his walks through the streets he sometimes met people he knew.
This time a young woman appeared at the window beside him. He recognized
her with elation. His thought gave him an index of her ... Rachel
Laskin, curious girl ... makes me talk well ... appreciative ... unusual
eyes.




CHAPTER IV


They walked together down the avenue. Dorn felt a return of interest in
himself. Introspection bored him. His insincerity made self thought
meaningless. Listeners, however, revived him. As they walked he caught
occasional glimpses of his companion--vivid eyes, dark lips, a cool,
shadow-tinted face that belonged under exotic trees; a morose little
girl insanely sensitive and with a dream inside her. She admired him; or
at least she admired his words, which amounted to the same thing. Once
before she had said, "You are different." As usual he held his cynicism
in abeyance before flattery. People who thought him different pleased
him. It gave them a certain intellectual status in his eyes.

His thought, as he talked, busied itself with images of her. She gave
him a sense of dark waters hidden from the moon--a tenuous fugitive
figure in the pretty clamor of the bright street.

"You remind me," he was saying, "of a nymph among dowagers and
frightened to death. There's really nothing to be frightened of, unless
you prefer fear to other more tangible emotions."

She nodded her head. He recalled that the gesture had puzzled him at
first. It gave an eager assent to his words that surprised him. It
pretended that she had understood something he had not said, something
that lay beneath his words. Dorn pointed at the women moving by them.

"Poems in shoe craft, tragedies in ankles and melodramas in legs," he
announced. "Look at their clothes! Priestly caricatures of their sex.
You're still drawing?"

"Yes. But you don't like my drawing."

"I saw one of your pictures--an abominable thing--in some needlework
magazine. A woman with a spindly nose, picking flowers."

He glanced at her and caught an eager smile in her eyes. She was someone
to whom he could talk at random. This pleased him; or perhaps it was the
sense of flattery that pleased him. He wondered if she was intelligent.
They had met several times, usually by accident. He had found himself
able to talk at length to her and had come away feeling an intimacy
between them.

"Look at the windows," he continued. "Corsets, stockings, lingerie. Shop
windows remind me of neighbors' bathrooms before breakfast. There's
something odiously impersonal about them. See, all the way down the
street--silks, garments, ruffles, laces. A saturnalia of masks. It's the
only art we've developed in America--over-dressing. Clothes are
peculiarly American--a sort of underhanded female revenge against the
degenerate puritanism of the nation. I've seen them even at revival
meetings clothed in the seven tailored sins and denouncing the devil
with their bustles. Only they don't wear bustles any more. But what's an
anachronism between friends? Why don't you paint pictures of real
Americans?--men hunting for bargains in chastity and triumphantly
marrying a waistline. If that means anything."

He paused, and wondered vaguely what he was talking about. Vivid eyes
and dark lips, a face that belonged elsewhere. He was feeding its
poignancy words. And she admired him. Why? He was saying nothing. There
was a sexlessness about her that inspired vulgarity.

"You remind me of poetry," she answered without looking at him. "I
always can listen to you without thinking, but just understanding. I've
remembered nearly everything you've said to me. I don't know why. But
they always come back when I'm alone, and they always seem unfinished."

Her words jarred. She was too naïve to coquette. Yet it was difficult to
believe this. But she was an unusual creature, modestly asleep. A
fugitive aloofness. Yes, what she said must be true. There was nothing
unreasonable about its being true. She made an impression upon him. He
undoubtedly did upon her. He would have preferred her applause, however,
somewhat less blatant. But she was a child--an uncanny child who cooed
frankly when interested.

"I can imagine the millennium of virtue in America," he went on. "A
crowd of painted women; faces green and lavender, moving like a
procession of bizarre automatons and chanting in Chinese, 'We are pure.
We are chaste and pure.' A parade of psychopathic barbarians dressed in
bells, metals, animal skins, astrologer hats and Scandinavian ornaments.
A combination of Burmese dancer and Babylonian priest. I ask for nothing
more."

He laughed. He had half consciously tried to give words to an image the
girl had stirred in him. She interrupted,

"That's me."

He looked at her face in a momentary surprise.

"I hate people, too," she said. "I would like to be like one of those
women."

"Or else a huntress riding on a black river in the moon. I was trying to
draw a picture of you. And perhaps of myself. You have a faculty of ...
of ... Funny, things I say are usually only reflections of the people I
talk to. You don't mind being a psychopathic barbarian?"

"No," she laughed quietly, "because I understand what you mean."

"I don't mean anything."

"I know. You talk because you have nothing to say. And I like to listen
to you because I understand."

This was somewhat less jarring, though still a bit crude. Her admiration
would be more pleasant were it more difficult to discover. He became
silent and aware of the street. There had been no street for several
minutes--merely vivid eyes and dark lips. Now there were
people--familiar unknowns to be found always in streets, their faces
withholding something, like unfinished sentences. He had lost interest
and felt piqued. His loss of interest in his talk was perhaps merely a
reflection of her own.

"I remember hearing you were a socialist. That's hard to believe."

There was no relation between them now. He would have to work it up
again.

"No, my parents are. I'm not."

"Russians?"

"Yes. Jews."

"I'm curious about your ideals."

"I haven't any."

"Not even art?"

"No."

"A wingless little eagle on a barren tree," he smiled. "I advise you to
complicate life with ideals. The more the better. They are more
serviceable than a conscience, in which I presume you're likewise
lacking, because you don't have to use them. A conscience is an
immediate annoyance, whereas ideals are charming procrastinations. They
excuse the inanity of the present. Good Lord, what do you think about
all day without ideals to guide you?"

Dorn looked at her and felt again delight with himself. It was because
her interest had returned. Her eyes were flatteries. He desired to be
amusing, to cover the eager child face beside him with a caress of
words.

"I don't think," she answered. "Do people ever think? I always imagine
that people have ideas that they look at and that the ideas never move
around."

"Yes," he agreed, "moving ideas around is what you might call thinking.
And people don't do that. They think only of destinations and for
purposes of forgetting something--drugging themselves to uncomfortable
facts. I fancy, however, I'm wrong. It's only after telling a number of
lies that one gets an idea of what might be true. Thus it occurs to me
now that I can't conceive of an intelligent person thinking in silence.
Intelligence is a faculty which enables people to boast. And it's
difficult boasting in silence. And inasmuch as it's necessary to be
intelligent to think, why, that sort of settles it. Ergo, people never
think. Do you mind my chatter?"

"Please ..."

A perfect applause this time. Her sincerity appealed to him as an
exquisite mannerism. She said "Please" as if she were breathless.

"You're an entertaining listener," he smiled. "And very clever. Because
it's ordinarily rather difficult to flatter me. I'm immensely delighted
with your silence, whereas ..." Dorn stumbled. He felt his speech was
degenerating into a compliment.

"Because you tell me things I've known," the girl spoke.

"Yet I tell you nothing."

He stared for an instant at the people in the street. "Nothing" was a
word his thought tripped on. He was used to mumbling it to himself as he
walked alone in streets. And at his desk it often came to him and
repeated itself. Now his thought murmured, "Nothing, nothing," and a
sadness drew itself into his heart. He laughed with a sense of treating
himself to a theatricalism.

"We haven't talked about God," he announced.

"God is one of my beliefs."

She was an idiot for frowning.

"I dislike to think of man as the product of evolution. It throws an
onus on the whole of nature. Whereas with a God to blame the thing is
simple."

She nodded, which was doubly idiotic, inasmuch as there was nothing to
nod to. He went on:

"Life is too short for brevities--for details. I save time by thinking,
if you can call it thinking, _en masse_--in generalities. For instance,
I think of people frequently but always as a species. I wonder about
them. My wonder is concerned chiefly with the manner in which they
adjust themselves to the vision of their futility. Do they shriek aloud
with horror in lonely bedrooms? There's a question there. How do people
who are important to themselves reconcile themselves to their
unimportance to others? And how are they able to forget their
imbecility?"

They were walking idly as if dreamily intent upon the spectacle of the
avenue. The nervous unrest that came to Dorn in streets and fermented
words in his thought seemed to have deserted him. Assured of the
admiration of his companion, he felt a quiet as if his energies had been
turned off and he were coasting. He recognized several faces and saluted
them as if overcome with a desire to relate a jest.

"Notice the men and women together," he resumed easily, almost
unconscious of talking. "Observing married couples is a post-graduate
course in pessimism. There's a pair arm in arm. Corpses grown together.
There's no intimacy like that of cadavers. Yet at this and all other
moments they're unaware of death. They move by us without thought,
emotion, or words in them."

"They look very proud," she interrupted.

"It's the set expression of vacuity. Just as skeletons always seem
mysteriously elate. Their pride is an absence of everything else--a sort
of rigid finery they put on in lieu of a shroud. Never mind staring
after them, please. They are Mr. and Mrs. Jalonick who live across the
street from my home. I dislike staring even after truths. Listen, I have
something more to say about them if you'll not look so serious. Your
emotions are obviously infantile. I can give you a picture of marriage:
two little husks bowing metronomically in a vacuum and anointing each
other with pompous adjectives. Draw them a little flattened in the rear
from sitting down too much and you'll have a masterpiece. It's amusing
to remember that Mr. and Mrs. Jalonick were once in love with each
other!" Dorn laughed good-naturedly. "Fancy them on a June night ten
years ago before their eyes had become cotton, holding hands and trying
to give a meaning to the moon. Are you tired?"

"No, please. Let's walk, if you haven't anything else to do."

"Nothing." It was the seventh anniversary of his marriage. An annoying
thought. "You're an antidote for inertia. I marvel, as always, at my
garrulity. Women usually inspire me with a desire to talk. I suppose
it's a defensive instinct. Talk confuses women and renders them
helpless. But that isn't it. I talk to women because they make the best
sounding-boards. Do you object to being reduced to an acoustic? Yes, sex
is a sort of irritant to the vocabulary. It's amusing to converse
profoundly with a pretty woman whose sole contributions to any dialogue
are a bit of silk hose and an oscillation of the breasts."

"You make me forget I'm a woman and agree with you."

"Because you're another kind of woman. The reflector. Or acoustic. I
prefer them. I sometimes feel that I live only in mirrors and that my
thoughts exist only as they enter the heads of others. As now, I speak
out of a most complete emptiness of emotion or idea; and my words seem
to take body in your silence--and actually give me a character."

"I always think of you as someone hiding from himself," she answered.
Dorn smiled. They were old friends--a union between them.

"There's no place of concealment in me," he said after a pause. He had
been thinking of something else. "But perhaps I hide in others. After
talking like this I come away with a sort of echo of what I've said. As
if someone had told me things that almost impressed me. I talk so damned
much I'm unaware of ever having heard anybody else but myself express an
opinion. And I swear I've never had an opinion in my life." He became
silent and resumed, in a lighter voice, "Look at that man with whiskers.
He's a notorious Don Juan. Whiskers undoubtedly lend mystery to a man.
It's a marvel women haven't cultivated them--instead of corsets. But
tell me why you've disdained art as an ideal. You're curious. It's a
confessional I should think would appeal to you. I'm almost interested
in you, you see. Another hour with you and you would flatter me into a
state of silence."

Dorn paused, somewhat startled. Her dark lips parted, her eyes glowing
toward the end of the street, the girl was walking in a radiant
abstraction. She appeared to be listening to him without hearing what he
said. Dorn contemplated her confusedly. He frowned at the thought of
having bored her, and an impulse to step abruptly from her side and
leave became a part of his anger. He hesitated in his walking and her
fingers, timorous and unconscious of themselves, reached for his arm. He
wondered with a deeper confusion what she was dreaming about. Her hand
as it lay on his forearm gave him a sense of companionship which his
words sought clumsily to understand.

"I was saying something about art when you fell asleep," he smiled.

Rachel threw back her head as if she were shaking a dream out of her
eyes.

"I wasn't asleep," she denied. They moved on in the increasing crowd.

"Men and women," Dorn muttered. "The street's full of men and women
going somewhere."

"Except us," the girl cried. Her eyes, alight, were thrusting against
the cold, amused smile of his face. He would be late. Anna would be
waiting. An anniversary. Anniversaries were somehow important. They
revived interest in events which had died. But it was nice to drift in a
crowd beside a girl who admired him. What did he think of her? Nothing
... nothing. She seemed to warm him into a deeper sleep. It was a relief
to be admired for one's silence. Admired, not loved. Love was a bore.
Anna loved him, bored him. Her love was an applause that did not wait
for him to perform--an unreasonable ovation.

He looked at the girl again. She was walking beside him, vivid eyes,
dark lips--almost unaware of him, as if he had become a part of the
dream that lived within her.




CHAPTER V


When she was a child she used to see a face in the dark as she was
falling asleep. It was crude and misshapen, and leered at her, filling
her heart with fear. Later, people had become like that to her.

When she was eighteen Rachel came to Chicago and studied art at an art
school. She learned nothing and forgot nothing. She read books in
English and in Russian--James, Conrad, Brusov, Tolstoi. Her reading
failed to remove her repugnance to the touch of life. Instead, it lured
her further from realities. She did not like to meet people or to hear
them talk. At twenty she was able to earn her living by drawing posters
for a commercial art firm and making occasional illustrations for
magazines designed for female consumption.

As she matured, the repugnance to life that lay like a disease in her
nerves, developed dangerously. She would sit in her room in the evening
staring out of the window at the darkened city and thinking of people.
There was an endless swathing of people, buildings, faces, words, that
wound itself tightly about her. She would cover her face suddenly and
whisper, "Oh, I must go away. I must."

She hurried through dragging days as if she were running away. But there
were things she could not escape. Men smiled at her and established
themselves as friends. Women were easy to get rid of. One had only to be
frank and women vanished. But this same frankness, she found, had an
opposite effect upon men. Insults likewise served only to interest men.
They would become gradually more and more acquainted with her until it
became impossible to talk to them. Then she would have to ignore them,
turning quickly away when they addressed her and saying, "Good-bye, I
must go."

At times she grew ashamed of her sensitiveness. She would sit alone in
her room surrounded by a whimpering little silence. A melancholy would
darken her heart. It wasn't because she was afraid of people. It was
something else. She would try to think of it and would find herself
whispering suddenly, "Oh, I must go away. I must."

To men, Rachel's beauty seemed always a doubtful quality. Her appeal
itself was doubtful. The Indian symmetry of her face lay as behind a
luminous shadow--an ill-mannered, nervous face that was likely to lure
strangers and irritate familiars. In the streets and restaurants people
looked at her with interest. But people who spoke to her often lost
their interest. There was a silence about her like a night mist. She
seemed in this silence preoccupied with something that did not concern
them. Men found the recollection of her more pleasing than her presence.
Something they remembered of her seemed always to be missing when they
encountered her again. Lonely evening fields and weary peasants moving
toward the distant lights of their homes spoke from her eyes. An exotic
memory of simple things--of earth, sky, and sea--lay in her sudden
gestures. A sense of these things men carried away with them. But when
they came to talk to her they grew conscious only of the fact that she
irritated them. These who persisted in their friendship grew to regard
her solicitously and misunderstand their emotions toward her.

It was evening when Rachel came to her room after her walk with Erik
Dorn. The long stroll had given her an aversion toward work. She glanced
at several unfinished posters and moved to a chair near a window.

A glow of excitement brightened the dusk of her face. Her eyes, usually
asleep in distances, had become alive. They gave themselves to the
night.

Beyond the scratch of houses and the slant of home lights she watched
the darkness lift against the sky. The city had dwindled into a huddle
of streets. Noise had become silence. The great crowds were packed away
in little rooms. Sitting before the window, unconscious of herself, she
laughed softly. Her black hair felt tight and heavy. She shook her head
till its loose coils dropped across her cheeks. She had felt confused
when she entered the room, as if she had grown strange to herself.

"Who am I?" she whispered suddenly. She raised her hand and stared at
it. Something intimate had left her. She remembered herself as in a
dream. There had been another Rachel who used to sit in this chair
looking out of the window. A memory came of people and days. But it was
not her memory, because her mind felt free of the nausea it used to
bring.

She stood up quickly and turned on a light. Her dexterous hands twisted
her hair back into loose coils on her head. Strange, she did not know
herself. That was because things seemed different. Here was her room,
littered with books and canvasses and clothes, and the bed in which she
slept, half hidden by the alcove curtains. But they were different. She
began to hum a song. A tune had come back to her that men sang in Little
Russia trudging home from the wheat fields. That was long ago when the
world was a bad dream that frightened her at night. Now there was no
world outside, but a darkness without faces or streets--a darkness with
a deep meaning. It was something to be breathed in and felt.

She opened the window and stood wondering. She was lonely. Loneliness
caressed her heart and drew dim fingers across her thought. She could
never remember having been lonely before. But now there was a
difference. She smiled. Of course, it was Erik Dorn. He had pleased
her. The things he had said returned to her mind. They seemed very
important, as if she had said them herself. She would go out and walk
again--fast. It was pleasant to be lonely. Her throat shivered as she
breathed. Bewildered in the lighted room she laughed and her lips said
aloud, "I don't know. I don't know!"

     *     *     *     *     *     *

Among the men who had established themselves as friends of Rachel was a
young attorney named George Hazlitt. He had gone to school with her in a
small Wisconsin town. A year ago he had discovered her again in Chicago.
The discovery had excited him. He was a young man with proprietary
instincts. He had at once devoted them to Rachel. After several months
he had begun to dream about her. They were correct and estimable dreams
reflecting credit upon the correct and estimable stock from which he
came.

He fell to courting Rachel tenaciously, torn between a certainty that
she was insane and a conviction that a home, a husband's love, and the
paraphernalia of what he termed clean, healthy living would restore her
to sanity. Their meetings had been affairs of violence. In her presence
he always felt a rage against what he called her neurasthenia--a word he
frequently used in drawing up bills for divorce. He regarded
neurasthenia not as a disease to be condoned like the mumps, but as a
deliberate failing--particularly in Rachel. The neurasthenia of the
defendants he pursued in courts annoyed him only slightly. In Rachel it
outraged him. It was his habit to inform her that her sufferings were
nothing more than affectations and that her moods were shams and that
the whole was a part and parcel of neurasthenia.

This unhappy desire of his to browbeat her into a state which he defined
as normal, Rachel had accepted in numb helplessness. She had given up
commanding him to leave her alone. His presence frequently became a
nausea. Her enfevered senses had come to perceive in the conventionally
clothed and spoken figure of the young attorney, a concentration of the
repugnant things before which she cowered. During his courtship he had
grown familiar to her as a penalty and his visits had become climaxes of
loathsomeness.

But a stability of purpose peculiar to unsensitive and egoistic young
men kept Hazlitt to his quest. His steady rise in his profession, the
growing respect of his fellows for his name, fired him with a sense of
success. Rachel had become the victim of this sense. Of all the men she
knew Hazlitt grew to be the most unnecessary. But his persistence seemed
to increase with her aversion for him. In a sort of mental self-defense
against the nervous disgust he brought her, she forced herself to think
of him and even to argue with him. By thinking of him she was able to
keep the memory of him an impersonal one, and to convert him from an
emotionally unbearable influence into an intellectually insufferable
type. A conversion by which Hazlitt profited, for she tolerated him more
easily as a result of her ruse. She thought of him. His youth was fast
entrenching itself in platitudes and acquiring the vigor and directness
that come as a reward of conformity. Life was nothing to wonder at or
feel. Life shaped itself into definite images and inelastic values
before him. To these images and values he conformed, not submissively,
but with a militant enthusiasm. On summer mornings he saw himself as a
knight of virtue advancing clear-eyed upon a bedeviled world. When he
was among his own kind he summed up the bedevilments in the word "bunk."
The politer word, to be used chivalrously, was "neurasthenia." The
victims of these bedevilments were "nuts." A dreadful species like
herself, given to wrong hair cuts, insanities, outrages upon decency and
above all, common sense.

Hazlitt's attraction to Rachel in the face of her neurasthenia did not
confuse him. Confusion was a quality foreign to Hazlitt. He courted her
as a lover and proselyter. His proselyting consisted of vigorous
denunciations of the things which contributed to the neurasthenia of his
beloved. He declaimed his notions in round, rosy-cheeked sentences.
There was about Hazlitt's wooing of Rachel the pathos which might
distinguish the love affair of a Baptist angel and the hamadryad
daughter of a Babayaga.

Yet, though in her presence he denounced her art, taste, sufferings,
books, friends, affectations, away from her she came to him--beautiful
eyed and fragile--bringing a fear and a longing into his heart. Dreaming
of her over a pipe in his home at night, he saw her as something
bewilderingly clean, different--vividly different from other women, with
a difference that choked and saddened him. There was a virginity about
her that extended beyond her body. This and her fragility haunted him.
His youth had caught the vision of the night mist of her, the lonely
fields of her eyes, the shadow dreams toward whose solitudes she seemed
to be flying. Beside Rachel all other women were to him somehow coarse
and ungainly fibered, and somehow unvirginal.

Out of his dream of her arose his desire to have her as his own,
to come home and find her waiting, to have her known as Mrs.
George Hazlitt. The thought of the Rachel he knew--mysterious, fugitive,
neurasthenic--established normally across a breakfast table, smiling a
normal good-bye at him with her arms normally about his neck, was a
contrast that sharpened his desire. It offered a transformation that
would be a victory not only for his love but for the shining, militant
platitudes behind which Rachel had correctly pointed out to herself, he
lived.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

Bewildered in the lighted room, Rachel turned suddenly to the door.
Someone was knocking--loud. She hurried eagerly forward, wondering at
an unfinished thought ... "perhaps it is...." Hazlitt, smiling with
steady, solicitous eyes confronted her.

"I've been knocking for five minutes," he announced. "I heard you or I'd
have gone away."

Rachel nodded. Of course, it would be Hazlitt. He was always appearing
when least expected. But it would be nice to talk to someone. She
smiled. This was surprising and she shook her head as if she were
carrying on a conversation with herself. George Hazlitt was always
unbearable. But that was a memory. It no longer applied.

"I'm glad you came," she greeted him. "I was lonely."

Hazlitt looked at her in surprise. Visiting Rachel was a matter that
required an extreme of determination. He had come prepared as usual for
the sullen, uncomfortable hour she offered.

"I was going out," she continued, "but I won't now. If you'll sit down
I'll do some work. You won't mind."

She looked at him eagerly as if to tell him he must forget she had
always hated him and that she was different now. At least for the
moment. He understood nothing and remained staring at her. His manner
proclaimed frankly that he was bewildered.

"Yes, certainly," he answered at length, and sat down. She hurried
about, securing her paints and setting up one of the unfinished
posters. Drawing a deep breath Hazlitt lighted a pipe and watched her.
She was beautiful. He admitted it with less belligerency than usual. He
sat thinking, "what the deuce has happened to her. She said she was glad
to see me." He was afraid to start an inquiry. She had never before
smiled at him, let alone voiced pleasure over his presence. It was a
mistake of some sort but he would enjoy it for awhile. But perhaps it
was the beginning of something.

Hazlitt sighed. He smoked, waited, and struggled to avoid the thoughts
that crowded upon him.

"That's rather nice," he said. He would follow her mood, whatever it
was. Rachel's eyes laughed toward him.

"I hope it doesn't bore you. If you hadn't come I would never have
thought of working."

The thing was unbelievable. Yet he contemplated it serenely. He would
talk to her soon and find out what was the matter. There was undoubtedly
something the matter. His eyes stared at her furtively as she returned
to her work. "There's something the matter," his thought cautioned him.
Rachel resumed her talking. A naïveté and freshness were in her voice.
She was letting her tongue speak for her and laughing at the sound of
the curious remarks it made.

"Do you think that women are becoming barbarians? The way they mess up
their hair and go in for savage colors! Sometimes I get to feeling that
they will end up as--as psychopathic barbarians. With astrologer hats."

She regarded Hazlitt carelessly. Hazlitt, with fidgets in his thought,
smiled. His eyes lost their solicitous air. They began to search
shrewdly for some reason. The spectacle of a coquettish Rachel was
beyond him, even as the sound of her laugh was an amazing music to his
senses. But his shrewdness evaporated. It occurred to him that women
were peculiar. Particularly Rachel. A direct and vigorous Hazlitt
concluded that Rachel had succumbed to his superior guidance. There was
nothing else to explain her tolerance. He called it tolerance, for he
was still wary and her eyes shining eagerly, hungrily at him might be no
more than a new kind of neurasthenia. He let her talk on without
interruption. She would like to paint streets, houses, lights in the
dark, city things. Blowing puffs of smoke carelessly toward the ceiling
he answered finally, "If you didn't have to support yourself, perhaps
you could." A fear whirled in his heart with the sentence. He had never
asked her outright to marry him. The thought that he had almost asked
her, now made him feel dizzy.

"There! I guess that can rest now."

Rachel put aside her painting. She sat down near him. Her eyes narrowed
and she listened with a sleepy smile as he began carefully to recite to
her incidents that had happened during his day. But he became silent.
She didn't mind that. She desired to sit as she was, her emotion a
dream that escaped her thought. Hazlitt fumbled with his pipe. It was
out. He dropped it into a pocket. His shrewdness and his weariness had
left him. He felt almost that he was alone.

"You're wonderful," he whispered; and he grew frightened of his voice.
Rachel saw his face light with an unusual expression. He would be kind
now and let her smile.

"I'm glad you came," she sighed. "I don't know why. I feel different
to-night."

She had a habit of short, begrudging sentences delivered in a quick
monotone--a habit of speech against which Hazlitt had often raged. But
now her words--flurried, breathless, begrudging as always--stirred him.
They could be believed. She was a child that way. She spoke quickly
thoughts that were uppermost in her mind.

"I never thought I could be glad to see you. But I am."

Hazlitt felt suddenly weak. Her face before him was something in a
dream. It was turned away and he could watch her breathing. Bewilderedly
he remembered a thousand Rachels, different from this one, who was glad
he had come. But the beauty of her burned away uncomfortable memories.
She was the Rachel of his loneliness. Out of George Hazlitt vanished the
vigor and directness of a young man who knows his own soul. There came a
vision--a thing uncertain and awesome, and he sat humbled before it.

He reached her hand and closed his fingers over it. An awe squeezed at
his throat. Her hand lay without protest within his. He had never
touched her before. She had been a symbol and a dream. Now he felt the
marvel of the fact that she was a woman. Her hand, warm and alive,
astonished him with the news.

Rachel, during his speechlessness, looked at him unbelievingly. The grip
of his fingers was bringing an ache into her heart. It was sad. The
night and the room were sad. She could feel sadness opening little
wounds in her breasts. And before she had been happy. She heard him
whispering, "I can't talk to you. I can't. Oh, you are beautiful!"

His eyes made her think he was suffering. Then he was sad, too. She
stood up because his hand drew her. Why did he want her to stand up? His
body touched her and she heard him gasp. Her heart seemed adrift. She
was unreal. There was another Rachel somewhere else. He was saying, but
he was not talking to her, "Oh, Rachel, I love you. I love you, Rachel!"

Still she waited unbelievingly, the ache in her dragging at her senses.
She had fallen asleep and was dreaming something that was sad. But his
face was suddenly too close. His eyes were too near and bright. They
awakened her.

"Let me go, quick."

His hands clung. For an instant she failed to understand his resistance.
He was saying jerkily, "No ... no!"

She twisted out of his arms and stood breathless, as if she were
choking. Hazlitt looked at her, a bit pensively. His heart lost in a
dream and a rapture could only grimace a child's protest out of his
stare. He hadn't kissed her. But that would come soon. Not everything at
once. He must not be a brute. He smiled. His good-natured face glowed as
if in a light. Then he heard her talking,

"Go away. At once. I never want to see you again. I'll die if I see you
again."

Her hands were in her hair.

"Go away. Please.... Oh, God, I can't stand you. You--horrify me!"

The panic in Rachel's voice seemed to dull his ears to her words. He saw
her for a vivid moment against the opened window and then he found
himself alone, looking into a night that was haunted with an image of
her. He remembered her going, but it seemed to him he still saw her
against the window, his eyes bringing to him a vision of her face as she
had looked.

He had grown white. In the memory of her face, as in an impossible
mirror, he saw a loathsome image of himself. Her eyes had blazed with
it. He sickened and his thought grew faint. Then the night came before
him and the echo of the words Rachel had spoken beat in his head. He
walked with his hat politely in his hand out of the door.

On the stairs his eyes grew weak and warm. Tears rushed from them. He
stumbled and clutched at the banister. She had led him on. She had
looked at him with love. Love ... but he had dreamed that. What was it,
then? Her eyes burning toward him had told him he was loathsome. There
was something wrong with him. He wept. He put his hat on mechanically.
He dried his eyes. There was something wrong.

On her bed Rachel lay mumbling to herself, mumbling as if the words were
a pain to her ears. "Erik Dorn ... Erik Dorn."




CHAPTER VI


The world in which Erik Dorn lived was compounded of many surfaces. Of
them Anna, his wife, was the most familiar. It was a familiarity of
absorption. Weeks of intimacy passed between them, of lover-like
attentiveness during which Dorn remained unconscious of her existence.
Her unending talk of her love for him--words and murmurs that seemed an
inexhaustible overflow of her heart--passed through his mind as a part
of his own thought. Hers was a more definite contribution to the
emptiness of the life through which he moved.

Yet in his unconsciousness of her there lived a shadowy affection. On
occasions in which they had been separated there had always awakened in
him an uneasiness. In his nights alone he lay sleepless, oppressed, a
nostalgia for her presence growing in him. With his eyes opened at the
darkness of a strange room he experienced then an incompleteness as if
he himself were not enough. The emptiness in which he was living became
suddenly real. He would feel a despair. Words unlike the sophisticated
patter of his usual thought would come to him.... "What is there ... I
would like something ... what?..." A sense of life as an unpeopled
vastness would frighten him vaguely. Night sounds ... strange,
shadow-hidden walls. They made him uneasy. Memories then; puzzling,
mixed-up pictures that had lost their outlines. Things that had left no
impression on his thought--sterile little incidents through which he had
moved with automatic gestures--returned like sad little outcasts
pleading with him. Faces he could not remember and that were yet
familiar peered at him in his sleeplessness with poignant eyes that
frightened.

There would come to him the memory of the time he had been a boy and had
lain like this in his mother's home, startled with fears that sat like
insanities in his throat. The memory of his being a boy seemed to
restore him to the fears long forgotten. Words would come ... "I was a
boy ..." and he would lie thinking of how people grew old; of how he had
grown old without seeming to change, and yet changing--as if he had been
gently vanishing from himself and even now was moving slowly away. He
was like a house from which issued a dim procession of guests never
pausing for farewells. He had been a boy, a youth, a man ... each
containing days and thoughts. And they moved slowly away from
him--completed figures fully dressed. Slowly, without farewells, with
faces intensely familiar yet no longer known. Thus he would continue to
vanish from himself, remaining unchanged but diminishing, until there
were no more guests to forsake and he stood alone waiting a last
farewell--a curious, unimaginable good-bye to himself. Nothing ...
nothing. A long wait for a good-bye. And then nothing again. Already he
was half shadow--half a procession of Erik Dorns walking away from him
and growing dimmer.

In the dark of the strange room, his eyes staring and fearful, he would
reach suddenly for Anna, embracing her almost as if she were beside him.
Her smile that forever shone upon him like the light of lilies and
candles from a sad, quiet altar; her words that forever flowed like a
dream from her heart, the warmth of her body that she offered him as if
it no longer existed for herself--to these his loneliness sought vainly
to carry him. And he would find himself tormented by a desire for her,
lying with her name on his lips and her image alone alive in the empty
dread of his thought.

United again in their home, he lapsed into the unconsciousness of her,
sometimes vaguely startled by the tears he felt on her cheeks as they
lay together at night. Out of this unconsciousness he made continual
love to her, giving her back her endearments and caresses. Of this he
never tired. His kisses unaware of her, his tendernesses without meaning
to him, he yet felt in her presence the shadow of a desire. The love
that filled his wife seemed to animate his phrases with an amorous
diction that echoed her own. He would hold her in his arms, bestowing
kisses upon her, and watch as in wonder of some mysterious make-believe,
the radiance that his meaningless gestures brought to her.

There were times, however, when Dorn became aware of his wife, when she
thrust herself before him as a far-away-eyed and beautiful-faced
stranger. He had frequently followed her in the street, watching her
body sway as she walked, observing with quickening surprise her trim,
lyre-like shoes, her silken ankles, the agile sensualism of her
litheness under a stranger's dress. He had noticed that she had coils of
red hair with bronze and gold lights slipping over it, that her face
tilted itself with a hint of determination and her eyes walked proudly
over the heads of the crowd. He watched other men glimpse her and turn
for an instant to follow with their stares the promise of her body and
lighted face. Dorn, walking out of her sight, got a confused sense of
her as if she were speaking to the street, "I am a beautiful woman. In
my head are thoughts. I am a stranger to you. You do not know what my
body looks like or what dreams live in me. I have destinations and
emotions that are mysterious to you. I am somebody different from
yourselves."

On top of this sense of her had come each time a sudden vivid
picture--Anna in their bedroom attaching her garters to the tops of her
stockings; Anna tautening her body as she slipped out of her nightgown
... or a picture of her pressing his head against her breasts and
whispering passionately, "Erik, I adore you." The strangeness then would
leave her and again she was something he had absorbed. When he looked
for her she had vanished in the scribble of the crowd and he walked with
the same curious unconsciousness of her existence as of his own.

There were times too in their home when Anna became a reality before his
eyes--an external that startled him. This was such a time now. Rachel
had come to visit them. She sat silent, fugitive-bodied amid overfed,
perspiring-eyed guests. And he stood looking at Anna and listening to
her.

He wondered why he looked at Anna and not at Rachel. But his wife in
black velvet and silken pumps, like a well-limned character out of some
work of stately fiction, held his attention. He desired to talk to her
as if she were a stranger. She sat without surprise at his unusual
verbal animation in her behalf, listening to his banter with an intent,
almost preoccupied smile in her eyes. While he talked, asking her
questions and pressing for answers, he thought. "She's not paying any
attention to my words, but to me. Her love is like a robe about her,
covering her completely." Yet she seemed strange. Behind this love lived
a person capable of thinking and reasoning. Dorn, as sometimes happened,
grew curious about her thoughts. He increased his efforts to rivet her
attention, as if he were trying to coax a secret out of her. The
easiest way to arouse her was to say things that frightened her, to make
remarks that might give her the feeling he had some underlying idea in
his head hostile to their happiness.

The company of faces in the room emitted laughter, uttered words of
shocked contradiction, pressed themselves eagerly forward upon his
phrases. A red-faced man whose vacuity startled from behind a pair of
owlish glasses exclaimed, "That's all wrong, Dorn. Women don't want war.
Your wife would rather cut off her arm than see you go to war. And mine,
too."

The wife of the red-faced man giggled. A younger, unmarried woman posed
carelessly on the black piano bench in an effort to exaggerate the
charms of her body, spoke with a deliberate sigh.

"No, I don't agree with you, Mr. Harlan. Women are capable of
sacrifice."

She thrust forward a lavender-stockinged leg and contemplated it with a
far-away sacrificial light in her eyes. The red-faced one observed her
with sudden owlish seriousness. His argument seemed routed.

"Of course that's true," he agreed. Mr. Harlan came of a race whose
revolutionary notions expired apologetically before the first platitude
to cross their path. "We must always bear in mind that women are capable
of sacrifice; that women ..." The lavender stocking was withdrawing
itself and Mr. Harlan stammered like an orator witnessing a sudden
exodus of his audience, "that women are really capable of remarkable
things," he concluded.

Dorn was an uncommonly clever fellow, but a bit radical. He'd like to
think of something to say to him just to show him there was another side
to it. Not that he gave a damn. Some other time would do. The red face
turned with a great attentiveness toward the hoarsely oracular Mr.
Warren, his eyes dropping a furtive curtsy in the direction of the
vanished stocking.

"I never agree with Dorn," Warren was remarking, "for fear of
displeasing him."

He gazed belligerently at Anna whose eyes were attracting attention. She
was watching her husband in a manner unbecoming a hostess. A middle-aged
youth toying politely with the blue sash of a girl in a white dress--he
had recently concluded a tense examination of the two antique rings on
her fingers--saw an occasion for laughter and embraced it. The girl
glanced somewhat timidly toward Anna and addressed her softly, as if
desiring to engage in some conversation beyond the superficial
excitement of the moment.

"I'm just mad about blue sashes," she whispered. "I think the sash is
coming back, don't you?"

Anna nodded her head. Erik had resumed his talk, his eyes still on her.

"Women are two things--theory and fact," he was saying. "The theory of
them demands war. If we get into this squabble you'll find them
cheering the loudest and waving the most flags. War is something that
kills men; therefore, it is piquantly desirable to their subconscious
hate of our sex." He smiled openly at Anna. "It's also something that
plays up the valor and superiority of man and therefore offers a
vindication for her submission to him."

"Oh," the lavender stocking was indignantly in evidence, "how awful!"

Dorn waited until the young woman had shifted her hips into a more
protesting outline.

"I agree," the red face chimed in. "It's nonsense. Dorn's full of clever
nonsense. I quite agree with you, Miss Dillingham." Miss Dillingham was
the lavender stocking. The wife of the red face fidgeted, politely
ominous. She announced pertly:

"I agree with what Mr. Dorn says." Which announcement her husband
properly translated into a warning and a threat of future conversation
on the theme, "You never pay any attention to me when there's anybody
else around."

Dorn continued, "And it gives them a sense of generalities. Women live
crowded between the narrow horizons of sex. They don't share in life.
It's very sad, isn't it, Miss Williams?" Miss Williams removed her sash
gently from the hands of the elderly youth and pouted. She was always
indignant when men addressed her seriously. It gave her an
uncomfortable feeling that they were making fun of her.

"Oh, I don't know," she answered. The elderly youth nodded his head
enthusiastically and whispered close to her ear, "Exactly."

"The things that are an entirety to women," pursued Dorn, "milk bottles,
butcher bills, babies, cleaning days, hello and good-bye kisses, are
merely gestures to their husbands. So in a war they find themselves able
to share what is known as the larger horizon of the male. One way is
through sacrifice. They sacrifice their sons, lovers, husbands, uncles,
and fathers with a high, firm spirit, announcing to the press that they
are only sorry their supply of relatives is limited. The sacrificing
brings them in contact with the world in which their males live. That's
the theory of it."

Anna's smile continued to deny itself to his words. It said to him,
"What does it matter what you say? I love you." And yet there was a
thought behind it holding itself aloof.

"But the fact of woman is always denying her theory," he added. "That's
what makes her confusing. The fact of her weeps at departures, shell
shocks, amputations; grows timid and organizes pacifist societies. It's
a case of sex instinct versus the personal complex."

The elderly young man straightened in his chair, removing his eyes from
Miss Williams with the air of one returning to masculine worldliness.

"I don't know about that," he said. "It's all very well to talk about
such things flippantly. But when the time comes, we must admit ..."

"That talk is foolish," interrupted Warren. He looked at Rachel and
laughed. "As a matter of fact, if anybody else but Dorn said it, I'd
believe it. But I never believe Dorn. Do you, Miss Laskin?"

Rachel answered, "Yes."

Dorn, piqued by the continual silence of his wife, felt a sudden
discomfiture at the sound of Rachel's voice. Was Anna aware he was
talking to her so as to avoid talking to Rachel? Perhaps. But Rachel's
presence was diluted by the company. He caught a glimpse of her dark
eyes opened towards him, and for a moment felt his words disintegrate.
He continued hurriedly:

"War, in a way, is a noble business, in that it reduces us to a
biological sanity--much the same as does Miss Dillingham's lavender
stocking!"

The company swallowed this with an abrupt stiffening of necks. Isaac
Dorn, who had been airing himself on the veranda, relieved a tension by
appearing in the doorway and moving quietly toward an unoccupied chair.
Anna reached her hand to the old man's and held it kindly. Miss
Dillingham, surveying the stretch of hose which had been honored in her
host's conversation, raised her eyes and replied quietly:

"Mr. Dorn is too clever to be really insulting."

The red-faced one clung to a sense of outrage. His cheeks had grown
slightly distended, and with the grimace of indignant virtue bristling
on his face, he turned the expression toward his wife for approval. She
nodded her head and tightened the thin line of her lips.

"I only meant," laughed Dorn, "that it reduces us to the sort of sanity
that wipes out the absurd, artificial notions of morality that keep
cluttering up the thought of the race. War reminds us that civilization
and murder are compatible. Lavender stockings, speaking in generalities,
are reminders that good and evil walk on equally comely legs."

Mr. Harlan, having registered indignation, now struggled vainly against
the preenings of his wit, and finally succumbed.

"In these days you can't tell Judy O'Grady and the Colonel's lady apart
by their stockings, eh?" He hammered his point home with a laugh. Warren
winked at Rachel as if to inform her of the mixed company they were in,
and Mrs. Harlan endeavored to put an end to the isolated merriment of
her husband with a "John, you're impossible!" The elderly youth,
conscious of himself as the escort of a young virgin, lowered his eyes
modestly to her ankles. Dorn, watching his wife's smile deepen, nodded
his head at her. He knew her momentary thought. She labored under the
pleasing conviction that his risqué remarks were invariably inspired by
memories of her.

"Barring, of course, the unembattled stay-at-homes," he continued. "The
sanity of battlefields is in direct ratio to the insanity of the
non-combatants. You can see it already in the press. We who stay at
home endeavor to excuse the crime of war by attaching ludicrous ideals
and purposes to its result. Thus every war is to its non-combatants a
holy war. And we get a swivel-chair collection of nincompoops raving
weirdly, as the casualty lists pour in, of humanity and democracy. It
hasn't come yet, but it will."

"Then you don't believe in war?" said the red face, emerging
triumphantly upon respectable ground.

"As a phenomenon inspired by ideals or resulting in anything more
satisfactory than a wholesale loss of life, war is always a joke," Dorn
answered. He wondered whether Rachel was considering him a pompous ass.
"I have a whole-hearted respect for it, however, as a biological
excitement."

The blue sash winced primly at the word biological, and appealed to her
escort to protect her somehow from the indecencies of life. The elderly
youth answered her appeal with a tightening of his features.

"War isn't biological," he retorted in her behalf.

Dorn, wearying of his talk, waited for some one of the company to
relieve him of the burden. But the elderly youth had subsided, and
fulfilling his functions as host--a business of diverting visitors from
the fact that there was no reason for their presence in his home--Dorn
was forced to continue:

"I can conceive of no better or saner way to die than crawling around
in the mud, shrieking like a savage, and assisting blindly in the
depopulation of an enemy. But unless a man is forced to fight, I can
conceive of nothing more horrible than war. Don't you think that, Anna?"

"You know what I think, Erik," she answered. "I hate it."

He was startled by a sudden similarity between Rachel and Anna. She too
was looking at him with the indignant aloofness of his wife--with a rapt
attention seemingly beyond the sound of his words. He caught the two
women turn and smile to each other with an understanding that left him a
stranger to both. He thought quickly, "Anna is the only one in the room
intelligent enough for Rachel to understand." He felt a momentary pride
in his wife, and wondered.

As the conversation, playing with the theme of war, spread itself in
spasmodic blurs about the room, bursting in little crescendoes of
conviction, pronouncements, suddenly serious and inviolable truths, Dorn
found himself listening excitedly. An unusual energy pumped notions into
his thought. But it was impossible to give vent to ideas before this
collection of comedians. He desired to look at Rachel, but kept his eyes
away. If they were alone, he could talk. He permitted himself the luxury
of an explosive silence.

He sat for a time thinking. "Curious! She knows I have things to say to
her. They are unimportant but I can say them to no one else. She knows
I avoid looking at her. There must be something--an attraction. She's a
fool. I don't know. I should have put an end to our walks long ago."

His vocabulary, marshaling itself under a surprising force, charged with
a rush through his thought. Sentences unrelated, bizarre combinations of
words--a kaleidoscopic procession of astounding ideas--art, life, war,
streets, people--he knew what they were all about. An illumination like
a verbal ecstacy spread itself through him. Under it he continued to
think as if with a separate set of words, "I don't know. She isn't
beautiful. A stupid, nervous little girl. But it hasn't anything to do
with her. It's something in me."

He stood up, his eyes unsmiling, and surveyed the animated faces as from
a distance. Paper faces and paper eyes--fluttering masks suspended
politely above fabrics that lounged in chairs. They were unreal--too
unreal even to talk to. Beyond these figures in the room and the noises
they made, lay something that was not unreal. It pulled at the sleep in
him. He stood as if arrested by his own silence. The night outside the
window came into his eyes, covering the words in his brain and leaving
him alone.

He heard Anna speaking.

"What are you thinking about, Erik?"

Her eyes seemed to him laden with forebodings. Yet she was smiling.
There was something that made her afraid. He turned toward Rachel and
found her standing as if in imitation of himself, her face lifted toward
the window, the taut line of her neck an attitude that brought him the
image of a white bird's wing soaring. He felt himself unable to speak,
as if a hand had been laid threateningly on his throat. Rachel was
indiscreet to stand that way, to look that way. There was no mistaking.
His thought, shaking itself free of words ... "In love with me. In love
with me!" He paused. A bewildering sense of infidelity. But he had done
nothing--only walk with her a few afternoons. And talk. "A stupid,
nervous little girl." It was some sort of game, not serious necessarily.
He stepped abstractedly toward his wife, aware that the conversation had
flattened.

"I wasn't thinking," he answered, searching guiltily for an epigram.
"Won't you play?"

Anna stood up and brought her eyes to a level with his own. Again the
light of foreboding, of unrevealed shadows flashed at him out of her
smile. She understood something not clear in his own head; nor in hers.
He grasped her hand as she passed and with a dolorous grimace of his
heart felt it unresponsive in his fingers.

Anna was playing from a piano score of _Parsifal_. The music dropped a
curtain. Dorn became conscious of himself in an overheated room
surrounded by a group of awed and saccharine faces. Rachel was smiling
at him with a meaning that he seemed to have forgotten. He stared back,
pleasantly aware that a familiar sneer had returned to his eyes. In a
corner his father sat watching Anna and he noticed that the old man's
watery eyes turned in, as if gazing at images in his own thought. His
father's smile, as always, touched Dorn with an irritation, and he
hurried from it.

The others were more amusing. The spectacle of the faces wilting into
maudlin abstractions under the caress of the music brought a grin to
him. The sounds had drugged the polite little masks and left them poised
morosely in a sleepy dream. The lavender stocking crept tenderly into
evidence. The owlish glasses focused with noncommittal stoicism in its
direction. The blue sash looked worried and the raised eyebrows of the
elderly youth asked unhappy questions. Music made people sad and caused
sighs to trickle from their ludicrously inanimate features. Melting
hearts under lacquered skins, dissolving little whimpers under
perfunctory attitudes.

He remembered his own mood of a few moments ago, and explained to
himself. Something had given him a dream. The night shining through the
window, the curve of Rachel's neck. Rachel ... Rachel ... He grew
suddenly sick with the refrain of her name. It said itself longingly in
his thought as if there was a meaning beyond it.

The playing had stopped. The listeners appeared to be lingering
dejectedly among its echoes. Rachel slipped quickly to her feet, her
arms thrust back as if she were poised for running. She passed abruptly
across the room. Her behavior startled him. The faces looked at her
curiously. She was running away.

Anna followed her quietly into the vestibule and the company burst into
an incongruous babble. Dorn listened to their voices, again firm and
self-sufficient, chattering formalities. He watched Rachel adjusting her
hat with over-eager gestures. Her eyes were avoiding him. She seemed
breathless, her head squirming under the necessity of having to remain
for another moment before the eyes of the people in the room.

"I must go," she said suddenly. Her hand extended itself to Anna. A
frightened smile widened her mouth. Dorn felt her eyes center excitedly
on him. A confused desire to speak kept him silent. He stood up and
entered the hall to play his little part as host. But Rachel was gone.
The door had closed behind her and he stared at the panels, feeling that
the house had emptied itself. Things were normal again. Anna was
speaking to her guests, smoothly garrulous. They were putting on hats
and saying good-bye. They would have to hurry to escape the rain. He
assisted with wraps, his eyes furtively watching the door as if he
expected to see it open again, with Rachel returning.

"I've really had a wonderful time," the lavender stocking was shrilling.
He became solicitous and followed her to the door, walking with her
down the housesteps. A moist summer night, promising rain.

But the street was empty of Rachel, and he returned.




CHAPTER VII


They were in their bedroom undressing. Outside, the night rustled with
an approaching storm. On the closed windows the rain began a rattle of
water. A wind filled the darkness.

"What makes you act so strangely to-night, Erik?"

She looked at him as she stood uncovering herself. She desired to speak
with a disarming casualness. Instead, her words came with a sound of
tears in them. He was always strange--always going away from her until
she had to close her eyes and love in the dark without trying to see
him. Now he might go to war and be killed. Something would happen.
"Something ... something ..." kept murmuring itself in her thought.

"I love to hear you play to a crowd," he answered good-humoredly.

"Why?" She could not get the languor out of her voice.

"When people listen to music it always reminds me we are descended from
fish. God, what dolts! Minds like soft-bodied sea growths. I can
actually see them sometimes."

"You always dislike my friends."

She would argue with him, and in his anger his strangeness would go
away.

"Your friends?" He seemed pleased at the chance of growing angry. "Allow
me to point out to you that the assemblage to-night had the distinction
of being my friends. I discovered the collection. I brought them to the
house first."

"They think you're wonderful." She would get him angry that way.

"A virtue, I admit. But it doesn't excuse their other stupidities."

They seemed to have nothing to argue about. Anna loosened her hair. The
sight of it rolling in glistening bronzes and reds from her head
invariably gave her a desire to cover Erik's face in it. With his face
buried in the disordered masses of her hair she would feel an exquisite
fullness of love.

"You don't think Rachel stupid, do you?"

Dorn felt a relief at the sound of her name. His thought was full of
her, but he had been afraid to talk.

"Miss Laskin," he replied, concealing his eagerness for the topic with a
drawl, "is partially insane."

"Yes, you like insane people, though. I can always tell when you like
people. You never pay any attention to them then, but sort of come
hanging around me--as if you were apologizing to yourself for liking
them, and doing penance. Or you call them names."

"Miss Laskin," Dorn answered, delighted to protract the conversation,
"is a vivid sort of imbecile suffering from vacuous complexities. An
hour alone in a room with her would drive even a philosopher to madness.
She's one of the kind of people given to inappropriate silences. She
reminds me of an emotion undergoing a major operation. Good Lord, Anna,
don't tell me you're jealous of her?"

It was immaterial whether he denounced or upheld Rachel. To talk of her
even with indignation was a delight.

Thunder rolled, and he became silent. Anna turned her nakedness to him.
Her eyes, grown dark, beheld a yearning and a sorrow.

"Don't talk about people," she whispered. "I'm glad you hate them--all
of them."

Her nudity always surprised Dorn. Her body seemed always to have grown
more beautiful and impersonal. A shout of rain sounded in the night and
a chill wind burst with a clatter in the darkness. He thought of Rachel
as he darkened the room. There came to him a picture of her walking in
the rain with her head raised and laughing.

Anna lay for a moment, awed by the suddenness of the storm. She turned
quickly, her arms reaching hungrily about her husband.

"I love you," she whispered. "Oh, I love you so much. My own, my
dearest!"

She felt his lips touch hers, and closed her eyes.

"Tell me...."

Dorn murmured back to her, "I adore you."

A little laugh came, and tears reached her cheeks.

"You're so wonderful," she whispered. "Think of it! It's been the same
since the first night. You love me--just as you did."

She paused questioningly--an old question to which he gave an old
answer.

"I love you more."

"I know it. I can feel it. You won't ever get tired of loving me?"

"Never--never as long as I live."

"Oh, you make me so happy!"

A sigh almost like a moan came from her heart.

"Oh, I'm a fool. I get frightened sometimes--when I hear you talk.
Something takes you away. You mustn't ever go away. Promise me. Listen,
Erik." She dropped into a panic. "Promise me you won't go to war."

He laughed.

"That was only talk," he whispered. "You should know my talk by this
time."

"I'll never know you."

"Please, Anna, don't. You hurt me when you say that."

"And when you were silent," she went on softly, "I felt--I felt
something had happened. Erik, darling Erik. Oh, you're my whole life!"

"I adore you, sweetest," he murmured.

"I don't live except in you, Erik. And, oh, I'm a fool. Such a fool!"

"You're wonderful," he interrupted. He was making responses in an old
ritual.

"No, I'm not. I'll make you tired of me. Tell me, please. Tell me you
love me. I feel you've never told me it."

"I love you more than everything else in life. More than everything."

"Oh, do you, Erik?"

She pressed herself closer to him, and he felt her body like the heat of
a flame avidly caress him.

"I don't want you any different, though," she whispered. "When I see
other men I get horrified to think that you might become like them--if
you didn't love me. Dead, creepy things. Oh, men are horrible. Talk to
me, Erik."

"I can't. I love you. What else is there to say?" His voice trembled and
her mouth pressed upon his.

"I don't deserve such happiness," she said. Tears from her eyes fell
like warm wax on his shoulder. Her hands were fumbling distractedly over
him.

"Erik," she gasped, "my Erik! I worship you."

The storm pounded through the night, leaping and bellowing in a halloo
of sounds. Dorn tightened his arms mechanically about her warm flesh.
His lips were murmuring tensely, dramatically, "I love you. I love you."
And a sadness made a little warmth in his heart. He was alone in the
night. His arms and words were engaged in an old make-believe. But this
time he felt himself further away. There was no meaning....

He tried vainly to think of Anna, but an emptiness crowded even her name
out of his mind. His hands were returning her caresses, mimicking the
eager distraction of her own. His mind, removed as if belonging
elsewhere, was thinking aimless little words.

There was a storm outside. Lightning.... The war was taking up too much
space in the paper. Crowding out important local news. The Germans would
probably get to Paris soon and put an end to it.... Why did Rachel run
away? Should he ask her? Sometime. When he saw her. Ask her. Ask her....
His thought drifted into a blank. Then it said ... "The thing is
meaningless. Meaningless. Houses, faces, streets. Nothing, nothing.
There's nothing...."

His wife lay silent, quivering with an ecstasy. Her arms were hungrily
choking him. Dorn closed his eyes as if to hide himself. His lips still
murmured in a monotone, vague as the voice of a stranger in his
ears--responses in an old ritual--"I love you, I love you! Oh, I love
you so much!..."




PART II

DREAM




CHAPTER I


In the evening when women stand washing dishes in the kitchens of the
city, men light their tobacco and open newspapers. Later, the women
gather up the crumpled sheets and read.

The streets of the city spell easy words--poor, rich--neither.

Here in one part live the grimy-faced workers, their sagging, shapeless
women and their litters of children. Their windows open upon broken
little streets and bubbling alleys. Idiot-faced wooden houses sprawl
over one another with their rumps in the mud. The years hammer
away--digesting the paint from houses. The years grind away, yet life
persists. Beneath the grinding of the years, life gropes, shrieks,
sweats. And in the evening men light their tobacco and open newspapers.

Around a corner the boxes commence. One, two, three, four, and on into
thousands stand houses made of stone, and their regimental masonry is
like the ticking of a clock. Unvarying windows, doors identical--a
stereotype of roofs and chimneys--these hold the homes of the crowds.
Here the vague faces of the streets, the hurrying, enigmatic figures
pumping in and out of offices and stores gather to sleep and breed. In
the evening the crowds drift into boxes. The multiple destinations
dwindle suddenly into a monotone. The confusions of the city's traffic;
the winding and unwinding herds that made a picture for the eyes of Erik
Dorn, individualize into little human solitudes. The stone houses stand
ticking away the years, and within them men and women tick. Doors open
and shut, lights go on and off, day and night drop a tick-tock across
miles of roofs. And in the hour of the washing of dishes men kindle
their tobacco and read the newspapers.

Slowly, timidly, the city moves away from the little stone boxes.
Automobiles and trees appear. Here begin the ornaments. Marble, bronze,
carved and painted brick--a filigree and a scrollwork--put forth claims.
The lords of the city stand girthed in ornaments. Knight and satrap have
changed somewhat. Moat and battlement grimace but faintly from behind
their ornaments. The tick-tock sounds through the carouse. Sleek, suave
men and languorous, desirable women sit amid elaborations, sleep and
breed in ornamental beds. Power wears new masks. Leadership has improved
its table manners, its plumbing, and its God.

Beautiful clocks, massive with griffiens and gargoyles, nymphs and
scrollwork--they shelter heroes. But heroes have changed. Destiny no
longer passes in the night--a masked horseman riding a lonely road.
Instead, an old watchmaker winds up clocks, sleek men and desirable
women. In the inner offices of the city the new heroes sit through the
day, watchmakers themselves, winding and unwinding the immemorial crowds
with new devices. But in the evening they too return to their ornamental
boxes, and under Pompeian lamps, amid Renaissance tapestries, open
newspapers.

Alley box and manor, the tick-tock of the city has them all. Paved
streets and window-pitted walls beat out a monotone. Lust and dream turn
sterile eyes to the night. The great multiple tick-tock of the city
waits another hour to pass.

Wait, it reads a newspaper. On the west side of the city a man named
Joseph Pryzalski has murdered a woman he loved, beating her head in with
an ax, and subsequently cut his own throat with a razor. At the inquest
there will be exhibited a note scribbled on a piece of wrapping-paper
still redolent with herring ... "God in heaven, forgive me! She is dead.
It is better. Oh, God, now my turn!" Deplorable incident.

In the next column the exploits of three young men armed with guns.
Entering a bank, the three young men shot and killed Henry J. Sloane,
cashier; held half a dozen other names at bay, loaded their pockets with
money, and escaped in a black automobile. The police are, fortunately,
combing the city for the three young men and the black automobile. Thank
God for the police moving cautiously through the streets with a large,
a magnificent comb that will soon pick the three young men, their three
guns, and their symbolical black automobile out of the city.

Next, the daily report of excitements in Europe. The Austrian army has
been annihilated. A part of the German army, seemingly the most
important part, has also been annihilated. Day by day the armies of the
Allies continue to devour, obliterate, grind into dust the armies of the
Kaiser. Bulletin--black type demanding quick eye--twenty thousand
unsuspecting Prussians walking across a bridge on the Meuse were blown
up and completely annihilated. This occurred on a Monday. In the teeth
of these persistent and vigorous annihilations, the Huns still continue
their atrocities. Shame! In Liége, on a Tuesday, the blood-dripping Huns
added another horror to their list of revolting crimes. Three citizens
of Liége were executed. They died like heroes. There are other items on
this general subject, including a message from the Pope.

Alongside the war, as if in a next room, a woman has shot her lover on
learning he was a married man. "Beauty Slays Soul-Mate; Shoots Self."
... Annihilation on a smaller but more interesting scale, this.

A street-car has crashed into a brewery wagon and at the bottom of the
column a taxi has run over a golden-haired little girl at play.

But why has Raymond S. Cotton, wealthy clubman and financier and
prominent in north-shore society circles, disappeared? Society circles
are agog. Sometimes society circles are merely disturbed. But they are
always active. Society circles are always running around waving
lorgnettes and exclaiming, "Dear me, and what do you think of this? I am
all agog." The police are combing the city for a woman in black last
seen with the prominent Mr. Cotton in a notorious café. But a man is to
be hanged in the County Jail. "The doomed man ate a hearty breakfast of
ham and eggs and seemed in good spirits." Fancy that!

"Flames Destroy Warehouse, Two Firemen Hurt." This, in small apologetic
type like a footnote on a timetable. Inconsiderate firemen who take up
important space on a crowded day!

Apology ceases. Here is something that requires no apology. It is
extremely important. Wilbur Jennings, prominent architect, has defied
the world and departed for a Love Bungalow in Minnesota with another
man's wife. A picture of Wilbur in flowing bow tie and set jaws defying
the world. Also of his inamorata in a ball gown, eyes lowered to a rose
drooping from her hand. Various wives and chubby-faced children, and the
inamorata's Siberian hound, "Jasper." What he said. What she said. What
they said. Opinions of three ministers, roused on the telephone by
inquiring reporters. The three divines are unanimous. But Wilbur's tie
remains defiant.

Arm in arm with Wilbur, his tie and his troubles, his epigrams and his
Love Bungalow, sits an epidemic of clairvoyants. There is an epidemic
of clairvoyants in the city. Five widows have been swindled. The police
are combing the city for ... a prominent professor of sociology on the
faculty of the local university interrupts. The prominent professor has
been captured in a leading Loop hotel whither he had gone to divert
himself with a suitcase, a handbook on sex hygiene, and an admiring
co-ed.

This, waiting for an hour to pass, the city reads. Crimes, scandals,
horrors, holocausts, burglaries, arsons, murders, deceptions. The city
reads with a vague, dull skepticism. Who are these people of the
newspaper columns? Lusting scoundrels, bandits, heroes, wild lovers,
madmen? Not in the streets or the houses that tick-tock through the
night.... Somewhere else. A troupe of mummers wandering unseen behind
the great clock face of the city--an always unknown troupe of rascally
mummers for whom the police are continually combing and setting large
dragnets.

In the evening men light their tobacco and read the little wooden
phrases of the press that squeal and mumble the sagas of the
lawbreakers. Women come from the washing of dishes and eating of food
and pick up the crumpled pages.... A scavenger digging for the disgusts
and abnormalities of life, is the press. A yellow journal of lies,
idiocies, filth. Ignoring the wholesome, splendid things of life--the
fine, edifying beat of the tick-tock. Yet they read, glancing dully at
headlines, devouring monotonously the luridness beneath headlines. They
read with an irritation and a vague wonder. Tick, say the streets, and
tock, say the houses; and within them men and women tick. To work and
home again. Home again and to work. New shoes grow old. New seasons
vanish. Years grind. Life sinks slowly away with a tick-tock on its
lips.

Yet each evening comes the ragged twopenny minstrel--a blear-eyed,
croaking minstrel, and the good folk give him ear. No pretty words in
rhythms from his tongue. No mystic cadences quaver in his voice. Yet he
comes squealing out his song of an endless "Extra! All about the
mysteries and the torments of life. All about the raptures, lusts, and
adventures that the day has spilled. Read 'em and weep! Read 'em and
laugh! Here's the latest, hot off the presses, from dreamers and
lawbreakers. Extra!"

Thus the city sits, baffled by itself, looking out upon a tick-tock of
windows and reading with a wonder in its thought, "Who are these
people?..."




CHAPTER II


At ten o'clock the courts of the city crowd up. The important gentlemen
who devote themselves to sending people to jail and to preventing them
from being sent to jail, appear with fat books under their arms and
brief-cases in their hands. They have slept well and eaten well and have
arrived at their tasks with clear heads containing arguments. These are
arguments vastly more important than poems that writers make or
histories that dreamers invent. For they are arrangements of words which
function in the absence of God. God is not exactly absent, to be sure,
since the memory of Him lingers in the hearts of men. But it is a vague
memory and at times unreliable. It would appear that He was on earth
only for a short interval and failed to make any decided impression.

Therefore, at ten o'clock, the courts crowd up and the important
gentlemen bristling with substitute arrangements of words, address
themselves to the daily business of demonstrating whether people have
done right or wrong, and proving, or disproving also, how extensive are
the sins which have been committed. Arrangements of words palaver with
arrangements of words. There ensues a vast shuffling of words, a drone
and a gurgle of syllables. The Case of the State of Illinois Versus Man.
Order in the Court Room. "No talking, please...." "If it Please Your
Honor, the Issue involved in this case is identical with the Issue as
explicitly set forth in the Case of Matthews Versus Matthews, Illinois
Sixth, Chapter Eight, Page ninety two, in which in the Third Paragraph
the Supreme Court decided." The Court Instructs the Jury, "You are to be
Guided by the Law as given You in these instructions and by the Facts as
admitted in Evidence of the Case; the court Instructs the jury they are
the judges of the law as well as of the fact but the Court further
instructs the Jury before You decide for Yourselves that the Law is
Otherwise than as given you by the Court, you are to exercise great Care
and Caution in arriving at your decision...." "Gentlemen, have you
arrived at your verdict?" "We have." "Let the clerk be handed the
verdict." "We the Jury find the Defendant...."

Thus the tick-tock of the great city grown stern and audible, grown
verbose and insistent, speaks aloud in the courts. And here huddled on
benches are the little troupes of mummers who have committed crimes. The
mysterious sprinkling of marionettes not wound up by the watchmaker.
Names that solidify for a moment into the ink headlines. Lusts, dreams,
greeds, and manias sitting sad-faced and dolorous-eyed listening to a
drone and a gurgle of words. Alas! The evil-doers and the doers of good
bear a fatuous resemblance to each other. God Himself might well be
confused by this curious fact. But fortunately there are arrangements of
words capable of adjusting themselves to confusion, capable of
tick-tocking in the midst of disorder. Tick, say the words and tock say
the juries. Tick-tock, the cell door and the scaffold drop. Streets and
windows, paintings of the Virgin Mary, beds of the fifty-cent
prostitutes, cannon at Verdun and police whistles on crossings; the Pope
in Rome, the President in Washington, the man hunting the alleys for a
handout, the languorous women breeding in ornamental beds--all say a
tick-tock. Behind the arrangements of words, confusion strikes a posture
of guilt, strikes a posture of innocence. God Himself were a dolt to
interfere. For if the song of the angels is somehow other than the
tick-tock of men, the song of the angels is a music for heaven and the
tick-tock of men is a restful drone in which the city hides the
mysteries non-essential to the progress and pattern of its streets.




CHAPTER III


In and out of the crowded courtrooms of the city George Hazlitt pursued
his career. Buried in the babble of words, his voice sounded from day to
day with a firm, self-conscious vigor. To the thousand and one droners
about him, the law was a remunerative game in which one matched
platitude with bromide, legal precedent of the State of Illinois with
legal precedent of the State of Indiana; in which right and wrong were a
shuffle of words and the wages of sin dependent upon the depth of a
counselor's wits.

There was in Hazlitt, however, a puritanical fervor which withstood the
lure of expediency. He entered the courts not to juggle with words,
fence for loopholes out of which to drag dubious acquittals for his
clients. His profession was a part of his nature. He saw it as a battle
ground on which, under the babbling and droning, good and evil stood at
unending grips. Good always triumphing. Evil always going to jail
despite habeas corpuses, writs, and duces tecums.

To question the nobility of the Hazlitt soul would be a sidestepping.
There were among his friends, men of dubious integrity with elastic
scruples and pliable consciences. But skepticism thrust in vain at the
Hazlitt armor. In him had been authentically born the mania for
conformity. He was a prosecutor by birth. Against that which did not
conform, against all that squirmed for some expression beyond the
tick-tock of life, he was a force--an apostle with a sword. Men
pretending virtues as relentless as his own were often inclined to eye
him askance. Virtue breeds skepticism among the virtuous. But there was
a difference about Hazlitt.

The basis of his philosophy was twofold. It embraced a rage against
dreamers and a rage against lawbreakers. Lawbreakers were men and women
who sacrificed the welfare and safety of the many for the sating of
their individual greeds and lusts. He viewed the activities of
lawbreakers with a sense of personal outrage. He, Hazlitt, was a part of
society--a conscious unit of a state of mind, which state of mind was
carefully written out in text-book editorials, and on tablets handed
down by God from a mountaintop. Men who robbed, cheated, beat their
wives, deserted their families, seduced women, shirked responsibilities,
were enemies on his own threshold. They must be punished, mentally, by
him; physically by the society to which he belonged.

The punishing of evil-doers did more than eliminate them from his
threshold. It vindicated his own virtue. Virtue increases in direct
proportion with its ability to distinguish evil. The denunciation of
evil-doers was the boasting of George Hazlitt, "I am not one of them."
The more vigorous the denunciation, the more vigorous the boast. The
hanging of a man for the crime of murder was a reward paid to George
Hazlitt for his abstinence from bloodshed. The jailing of a seducer
offered a tangible recompense for the self-denial which he, as a
non-seducer, practiced.

Apart from the satisfactions his virtue derived in establishing its
superiority by assisting spiritually in the punishment of the
unvirtuous, his rage against lawbreakers found itself equally on his
devotion to law. He perceived in the orderly streets, in the miles of
houses, in the smoothly functioning commerce and government of his day,
a triumph of man over his baser selves. The baser selves of man were
instincts that yearned for disorder. Of this triumph Hazlitt felt
himself a part.

Disorder he thought not only illegal, but debasing. The same virtue
which prevented him from promenading in his pajamas in the boulevard
stirred with a feeling of outrage against the confusion attending a
street-car strike. His intelligence, clinging like some militant
parasite to the stability of life, resented all agitations, material or
spiritual, all violators who violated the equilibrium to which he was
fastened.

Against dreamers his rage was even deeper and more a part of his fiber.
In the tick-tock of life Hazlitt saw a perfection--an evolution out of
centuries of mania and disorder. The tick-tock was a perfection whose
basic principle was a respect for others. This respect evolved out of
man's fear of man and insuring a mutual protection against his predatory
habits, was to Hazlitt a religion. He denied himself pleasures and
convenient expressions for his impulses in order to spare others
displeasure and inconvenience. And his nature demanded a similar
sacrifice of his fellows--as a reward and a symbol of his own
correctness. Such explanation of his conduct as, it is easier to follow
the desires of others than to give expression to the desires of one's
self, would have been, to Hazlitt, spiritual and legal sacrilege.

In dreamers, the rising young attorney sensed a poorly concealed effort
to evade this primal responsibility toward him and the society of which
he was an inseparable part. Men who walked with their heads in the
clouds were certain to step on one's feet. Dreamers were scoundrels or
lunatics who sought to justify their unfitness for society by ridiculing
it as unworthy and by phantasizing over new values and standards which
would be more amiable to their weaknesses. There were political dreamers
and dreamers in morals and art. Hazlitt bunched them together, branded
them with an identical rage, and spat them out in one word, "nuts."

Dreamers challenged his sense of superiority by hinting at soul states
and social states superior to those he already occupied. Dreamers
disturbed him. For this he perhaps hated them most. Their phantasies
sometimes lifted him into moments of disorder, moments of doubt as
revolting to his spirit as were sores revolting to his skin. Then also,
dreamers had their champions--men and women who applauded their lunatic
writings and cheered their lunatic theories.

The punishment of lawbreakers vindicated his own virtue. But his rage
against dreamers was such that their punishing offered him no sense of
satisfactory vindication. His railing and ridicule against creatures who
yearned, grimaced--neurasthenics, in short--left him with no fine
feeling of the victorious sufficiency of himself. Thus to conceal
himself from doubts always threatening an appearance, it was necessary
for him to assume a viciousness of attitude not entirely sincere. So he
read with unction political speeches and art reviews denouncing the
phantasts of his day, and from them he borrowed elaborate invective. Yet
his invective seemed like a vague defense of himself who should need no
defense and thus again doubt raised a dim triumph in his heart.

"Yes, I'm a reactionary," he would say. "I'm for the good old things of
life. Things that mean something." And even this definition of faith
would leave him unsatisfied.

The paradox of George Hazlitt lay in the fact that he was himself a
dreamer. Champions of order and champions of disorder share somewhat in
a similarity of imaginative impulses.

Six months had passed since Hazlitt had wept on the stairs as he left
Rachel's room. Dry-eyed now and clear-headed, he sat one winter
afternoon against his chosen background--the swarm and clutter of a law
court. His brief-cases were packed. His law books had been bundled back
to his office.

He was waiting beside a vivid-faced young woman who sat twisting a
tear-damp handkerchief in her hands. The jury that had listened for
three weeks to the tale of the young woman's murder of a hospital
interne who had seduced and subsequently refused to marry her, had
sauntered out of the jury-box to determine now whether the young woman
should be hanged, imprisoned, or liberated. The excitements attending
the trial had brought a reaction to Hazlitt. He seemed suddenly to have
lost interest in the business of his defense of the wronged young woman.
This despite that he had for three weeks maintained a high pitch of rage
against the scoundrel who had violated his client and subsequently
driven her insane by even more abominable cruelties.

Hazlitt's concluding remarks to the jury on the subject of dishonored
womanhood and the merciless bestiality of certain male types had been
more than a legal oration. He had expressed himself in it and had spent
two full days lost in admiration of the echoes of his bombast.... "Men
who follow the vile dictates of their lower natures, who sow the
whirlwind and expect to reap the roses thereby; cynical, soulless men
who take a woman as one takes a glove, to wear, admire, and discard;
depraved men who prowl like demons at the heels of virtue, fawning their
ways into the pure heart of innocence and glutting their beastly hungers
upon the finest fruits of life--the beauty and sacrifice of a maiden's
first love--are such creatures men or fiends, gentlemen of the jury?"
And then ... "spurned, taunted by the sneers of one of these vipers, her
pleadings answered with laughter and blows of a fist, the soul of
Pauline Pollard grew suddenly dark. Where had been sanity, innocence,
and love, now came insanity. Her girl's mind--like sweet bells jangled
out of tune--brought no longer the high message of reason into her
heart. We sitting here in this sunny courtroom, gentlemen, can think and
reason. But Pauline Pollard, struggling in the embrace of a leering
savage, listening to his fiendish mockeries of her virtue--the virtue he
had stolen from her--ah! the soul and brain of Pauline Pollard vanished
in a darkness. The law is the law, gentlemen. There is no one respects
it more than I. If this girl killed a man coldly and with reason
functioning in her mind, she is guilty. Hang her, gentlemen of the jury!
But, gentlemen, the law under which we live, you and I and all of us,
also says, and says wisely, that a mind not responsible for its acts, a
soul whose balance has been destroyed by the shrieking voices of mania,
shall not be held guilty...."

The jury that had listened with ill-concealed envy to the recital of the
amorous interne's promiscuous exploits, listened to Hazlitt and
experienced suddenly a fine rage against the deceased. Out of the young
attorney's florid utterings a question fired itself into the minds of
the jurors. The deceased had done what they all desired to do, but dared
not. This grinning, unscrupulous fiend of a hospital interne had
blithely taken what he desired and blithely discarded what he did not
desire. The twelve good men and true bethought them of their wives whom
they did not desire and yet kept. And of the young women and the things
of flesh and spirit they desired with every life-beat in them and yet
did not take. Was this terrible denial which, for reasons beyond their
incomplete brains, they imposed upon themselves, a meaningless,
profitless business? The bland interne was dead and unfortunately beyond
their punishment. Yet the fact that he had lived at all called for a
protest--some definitely framed expression which would throw a halo
about their own submission to women they did not desire, and their own
denial to women they did desire. The law, whose arrangements of words
are omniscient, provided such a halo.

Dr. Hamel, the interne under discussion, was dead and buried, and
therefore, properly speaking, not on trial. Nor yet was Pauline Pollard
on trial. The persons on trial were twelve good men and true who were
being called upon to decide, somewhat dramatically, whether they were
right in living in a manner persistently repugnant to them; whether
somebody else could get away with something which they themselves, not
daring to attempt, bitterly identified as sin.

In thirty minutes the still outraged jury was to file in and utter its
dignified protest. Pauline Pollard would again be free. And twelve men
would return to their homes with a high sense of having meted out
justice, not to Pauline or her amorous interne, but to themselves.

Enticing speculation, the yes or no of these twelve men, three days ago.
But now Hazlitt sat with an odd indifference in his thought. The crowd
waiting avidly for the dramatic moment of the verdict; living
vicariously the suspense of the defendant--depressed him. The newspaper
reporters buzzing around, forming themselves into relays between the
press table and the door, further depressed him. He felt himself
somewhere else, and the scene was a reality which intruded.

There was a dream in Hazlitt which sometimes turned itself on like a
light and revealed the emptiness of life without Rachel, the emptiness
of courtrooms, verdicts, crowds. Yes, even the emptiness of the struggle
between good and evil. He sat thinking of her now, contrasting the
virginal figure of her with the coarseness of the thing in which he had
been engaged. There was something about her ... something ... something.
And the old refrain of his dream like a haunting popular ballad, started
again here in the crowded courtroom.

He remembered the eyes of Rachel, the quick gestures of her full-grown
hands that moved always as in sudden afterthoughts. Virginal was the
word that came most often to his thought. Not the virginity that spells
a piquant preface to sensualism. She would always be virginal, even
after they were married. In his arms she would remain virginal, because
there was something in her, something beyond flesh. His heart choked at
the memory of it, and his face saddened. Something he could not see or
place in a circle of words, that did not exist for his eyes or his
thought, and yet that he must follow. Even after he had won her there
would be this thing he could not see; that trailed a dream song in his
heart and kept him groping toward the far lips of the singer. Yes, they
would marry. She had refused to see him twice since the night he had
wept on the stair, leaving her. But the memories of that night had
adjusted themselves. He had seen love in the eyes of Rachel as he held
her hand. She had laughed love to him, given him for an instant the
vision of beauty-lighted places waiting for him. The rest had been ...
neurasthenia. Thus he had forgotten her words and his tears and the
vivid moment when he had seen himself reflected in her eyes as a horror.
He had tried twice to see her. He would continue trying, and some day
she would again open the door to him, laughing, whispering ... "I'm so
lonely. I'm glad you've come." In the meantime he would continue sending
her letters. Once each week he had been writing her, saying he loved
her. No answers had come. But this, curiously, did not anger him. He
wrote not so much to Rachel as to a dream of her. She remained intact in
her silence ... as he knew her ... an aloof, virginal being whose
presence in the world was its own song.

There was a commotion. Hazlitt looked about him and saw strange faces
light up, strange eyes gleam out of the electric-glowing dusk. Snow was
falling outside. Pauline's hand gripped his forearm. Her fingers burned.
Raps of a gavel for silence. The judge spoke. A sad-faced man, with a
heavy mustache combating his words, stood up in the jury-box and spoke.
In a vast silence a clerk beside the judge's bench cleared his voice,
moistened his lips, and spoke.

So he had won another case. Pauline was free. Snow outside and rows of
lighted windows. She was overwrought. Let her weep for a spell. Snow
outside. Three weeks and one day. Everybody seemed happy with the
verdict. People were good at heart. A triumph for decency cheered them.
People were not revengeful at heart, only decent. Congratulations ...
"Thank you, thank you! No, Miss Pollard has nothing to say now. She is
too overcome. To-morrow...." The persistent press! What did they expect
her to say? Absurd the way they kept interviewing her. The snow would
probably tie up traffic. Eat downtown....

"If you're ready, Miss Pollard."

"Oh, I must thank the jurors."

Handshakes. Twelve good men with relaxed faces. "There, there, little
woman. Start over. We only did our duty and what was right by you."

Everybody stretched his legs. Mrs. Hamel was sobbing. Well, she was his
mother. It would only have satisfied her lower instincts of vengeance to
have jailed Pauline.

"All right, Miss Pollard." He took her arm. Curious, what a difference
the verdict had made in her. She was a woman like any other woman
now.... His overcoat might do for another season.... Pretty girl. Hard
to get used to the idea she wasn't a defendant.

"This way, Miss Pollard".... Take her to a cab and send her home. If
she'd ever get started. What satisfaction did women find in kissing and
hugging each other? "Thank God, Pauline. Oh, I'm so glad".... Girl
friends. Well, she'd be back among them in a few days, and in a month or
so the thing would be over.

At last! Hazlitt blinked. The whirl of snow and crowds emptying out of
buildings gave him a sense for an instant of having stepped into a
strange world. The sharp cold restored his wandering energies and a
realization of his victory in the courtroom brought him a belated glow.
He was young, on an upgrade, able to command success.

Hazlitt felt a sudden lusty kinship toward the swarm of bodies
unwinding itself through the snowfall. A contact with other ... a
pleasant, comforting contact. What more was life, anyway? A warmth in
the heart that came from the knowledge of work well and honestly done.
Look the world squarely in the eyes and say, "You have no secrets and I
have no secrets. We're friends."

"Shall we go to your office, Mr. Hazlitt?"

Why there? Hazlitt smiled at the young woman. She was free. He patted
the gloved hand on his arm and was surprised to see her eyes grow alive
with tears.

"I would like to talk to you--now that it's over. I feel lost. Really."
She returned his smile as one determined to be brave, though lost.

The snow hid the buildings and left their window lights drifting. Faces
passing smiled as if saying, "Hello, we're all together in the same snow
with no secrets from each other.... All friends".... Hazlitt walked with
the girl through the streets. The traffic and the crowds were intimate
friends and he spoke to them by patting Pauline's hand. An
all's-well-with-the-world pat.

"Eighth floor, please...."

The elevator jiggled to a stop and they stepped into the corridor.
Scrawny-faced women were crawling patiently down the floor. They slopped
wet brushes before them, wrung mops out over pails, and crawled an inch
farther down the floor. Hazlitt smiled. This, too, was a part of
life--keeping the floors of the building scrubbed. He won law cases.
Old women scrubbed floors. It fitted into an orderly pattern with a
great meaning to its order. He paused for a moment to admire the
cleanliness of the washed surface. Homage to the work of others--of old
women on their knees scrubbing floors.

"Well, it's all over, Miss Pollard."

She was sitting beside the desk where she had sat the first time they
had discussed her defense. Hazlitt, unloading his brief-case, looked at
her. Uncommonly pretty. Trusting eyes. What a rotten fellow, the
interne!

"I don't know why I wanted to come here." Pauline's eyes stared sadly
about the room. "I'm free, but ..." She covered her face and wept.

"Now, now, Miss Pollard!"

"Oh, it's still awful."

"You'll forget soon."

"I'll go away. Somewhere. Alone." A louder sob.

"Please don't cry."

Hazlitt watched her tenderly. The weeping increased. A lonesomeness and
a vagueness were in the girl's heart. The tick-tock of the city had a
foreign sound. She was a stranger in its streets. There had been
something else, and now it was gone. A wilderness, a tension, the
familiar face of Frankie Hamel telling her to go to hell one night and
stop bothering him with her damned wailing ... and Frankie dying at her
feet whispering, "What the devil, Pauline?" Then the trial. Hot and
cold hours. A roomful of silent, open-mouthed faces listening to her
weep, watching her squirm with proper shame and anguish as she told her
story to the jurors ... the details of the abortion. "And then I
couldn't stand it. I don't remember what happened. Oh, I loved him! I
don't remember. He cursed me. He called me a ... Oh, God, names. Awful
names! I told him I was going to kill myself. I couldn't live, disgraced
... without his love. I'd bought a gun to kill myself. And he laughed. I
don't remember after that; except that somehow he was ... he was dead.
And I wasn't...."

These things were gone. The trial was over and done. Now there was
nothing left but the city with its street-cars and offices.

"Oh, everything's so changed," she murmured. Hazlitt stood behind her
chair, hand on her shoulder. Poor child! The law could not free her from
the remorse for her crime and mistake. Lawlessness carried its own
punishment. Virtue its own rewards, sin its own torments.

"You'll forget," he answered softly. The law sometimes punished. But
after all this was the real punishment ... beyond the power of the law
to mete out. Punishment of sin. Conscience. Poor child! Inexorable fruit
of evil. Despair, remorse....

"You must forget. You're young. You can begin over. Please don't cry."

Thus Hazlitt comforted her who was weeping not with remorse for what had
been, but that it had gone. No word consciousness stirred her grief. An
unintelligible sorrow, it swelled in her heart and filled her with
helplessness. Life had gone from her. She was mourning for it. Mourning
for a murderess and a sinner who had gone, abandoned her and left her a
naked, uninteresting Pauline Pollard again--a nobody surrounded by
nobodies. And once it had been different. Lighted faces listening to her
in a room. Frankie whispering, "What the devil, Pauline?"

A fresh burst of tears brought Hazlitt in front of her. Gently he moved
her hands from her face.

"You mustn't," he began over again.

"Oh, I won't ever be able to...."

"Yes you will, little girl."

"No, no!"

She was standing. Snow outside. Rows of lighted windows drifting.
Thoughts slipped out of his head. Traffic probably tied up.

"Please don't cry."

She dropped her head against his shoulder and wept anew. It was nice to
have somebody asking her not to cry. It made it easier and more
purposeful to weep.

Hazlitt sighed. Tears ... tears ... the live odor of hair. Arms that
felt soft. She was mumbling close to him, "I can't help it. Please
forgive me."

"Yes, yes! There, there!" Of course he would forgive her. Forgiveness
made him glow. But as he spoke his voice depressed him. What should he
do? Could he help her? What was life, anyway? Snow outside and rows of
lighted windows drifting. Her body close, warm, and saddening. The
firmness of his nerves dissolved. He had his sorrow too ... Rachel. Far
away. Drifting like the snow outside. Rachel ... the odor of hair
brought her back. Should he cry? Her knees had touched him once like
this. She had held her arm about his shoulder once, like this. But, oh,
so different!... The girl seemed to come closer to him.

He had been holding a stranger politely. Now the stranger relaxed. Soft,
warm, familiar body. He grew frightened. Somehow the clinging of the
girl's body, the murmur of her tears, brought a sorrow into his heart. I
am not Rachel, but I am like her.... What made him think that? Yes, she
was like her, warm, soft, and woman. Like her--like her. Why had they
kissed? And her hands clasping nervously at his shoulders? She was not
in love? Not Rachel. But she wanted something. And he too. Something
that was a dream song. Here were the lips of the singer, eager, reaching
to his own. Pressing, asking more. How had this happened? Should he
speak? But what? Nothing to say. Had he forgotten Rachel? Remembering
Rachel? Who was this? The questions blurred. Rachel, sang his heart. For
a moment he embraced the warm shadow of a dream. And then a woman was
offering herself to him. No dream now. Her thighs riveted themselves
against him. Under her clothes her body seemed to be moving, coming to
him.

Hazlitt grew dizzy. He had been consoling her. No more. Now what? He
threw his strength into his embrace. Their bodies moved together.

"Oh ..." A moan as if she were still weeping. Her lips parted in
desperate surrender. Her kiss took the breath out of him.

"Dearest!" His voice carried him out of her arms. He knew suddenly that
but for the word and the familiar sound of his voice he would have
possessed her. But the word rang an alarm in his ears. Fright, nausea,
relaxed muscles. A wiliness in his thought.... "Do you feel better now?"

She failed to hear. Her fingers still clutched.

"There ... there, don't cry!" He felt cold. His hands on her arms
pressed them gently away, his fingers patting them with a fatherly
diapason. George Hazlitt, attorney-at-law.

"Better now, Pauline?" An error to have called her Pauline. Look bad in
the record. Committed him to "Pauline."

"Oh, George!"

The thought of Rachel listened in amazement ... George ... Pauline.
Dearest! He must be careful. She had grown numb against him. A numb
woman sewed to his lapels. He lowered her as if she were lifeless and he
fearful of disturbing her. She looked harmless in a chair. Was it
possible to talk now? Not yet. Take her hand; careful not to squeeze it.
Pat it as he'd done in the street. An all's-well-with-the-world pat.

Somebody rattled the doorknob. Hazlitt started eagerly. Relief. But,
good God, no lights in the office. The cleaners would come in and think
things. Her hair in disorder and her face smeared with weeping would
make them think things. An oath disentangled itself from his confusion.
The door opened. Two scrawny-faced women with mops and brooms....

"It's all right. Go ahead. We're just leaving. Are you ready, Miss
Pollard?"

The Miss Pollard was a masterpiece. But did it deceive the mops and
brooms? Damn them! They walked arm in arm down the corridor.

"I think the elevators have stopped. Wouldn't it be a joke if we had to
walk down?"

She refused to answer. Witness remains silent. Why couldn't she be
interested in jokes?... the woman of it. Nothing had happened. She had
nothing to think about. Why not jokes? He frowned at the grilling of the
elevator door. An elevator bobbed up.

In the street, "I'll get a cab, Miss Pollard." Take a firm stand and not
call her Pauline again. But she was silent. Nothing had happened. He
grew frightened. She was trying to bulldoze him by pretending. Bundle
her into a cab and get rid of her.

Suddenly, as if he'd been thinking it out when he hadn't, "You must
forgive me for--that. I didn't mean to, please."

Anything rather than her silence. Even an apology. Nothing had happened,
but he would apologize anyway to be on the safe side. She looked at him
and said, "Oh!"

"Please, Miss Pollard, you make me feel like a cur."

A chauffeur leaned forward from his seat and thrust open the cab door.
Pauline entered without hesitation. She might have the decency to
hesitate when he was apologizing for nothing. Hazlitt stuck his head in
after her. The thing was ludicrously unfinished and he was making an ass
of himself. She should have hesitated.

"Tell your mother I hope she'll be better soon."

"Where to, mister?"

He gave an address and added, "Just a minute, please."

Hazlitt reëntered the cab with his head. The thing was still unfinished.
Wishing good health to her mother made it worse--as if he were trying to
cover up something. He must be frank. Drag everything into the open and
show he wasn't afraid. But she was weeping again. He paused in
consternation. Her hand reached toward him. A voice, vibrant and soft
with tears, whispered in the gloom of the cab. A love voice. "Good-by,
George!"

He watched the tail light dart through the traffic and then began his
defense. Gentleman of the jury ... jury ... he had done nothing. It was
she who had suggested the office. A low, vulgar ruse to trap him. The
evidence was plain on that point. Overruled. But he had attempted only
to console her. Irrelevant and immaterial to the facts at issue in the
case. But she had flung her arms around him. Not he! Never he! The woman
was mad. Yes, a mad woman. Dangerous. She had done the same to the
interne. Overruled. Overruled. What? Frank Hamel, gentleman of the jury,
glutting his beastly hungers on the finest fruit of life--the innocence
and sacrifice of a maiden's first love. No, not Hamel. Hazlitt. Are such
creatures men or fiends? What was he thinking about Oh, yes, the
interne. Dead, buried ... we, the jury, find the defendant not
guilty.... But the dead interne was saying something.

For moments George Hazlitt looked out upon a new world--a miserable
world--vast, blurred, upside down. People were moving in it. Dead
internes. They passed with faces intent upon their own solitudes.
Buildings were in it. They burst a skyrocket of windows into the night.
There was snow. It fell twisting itself out of the darkness. Familiar
faces, buildings, snow. Theater façades making a jangle of light through
the storm. Entrances, exits, cars clanging, figures hurrying, signs
sputtering confusion in the snow. All familiar, all a part of the great
tick-tock of the city.

Hazlitt stopped and stared at the familiar night of the streets. A gleam
and a flurry were sweeping his eyes. Snow. But faces and buildings and
lights were a part of it. They swarmed and danced about him, sending a
shout to his heart. "We're upside down ... we're upside down ... heels
in air.... She made love to the interne as she did to you ... and the
fiend is dead. Lies ... lies ... but who gives a damn?"

The horn of a motor screeched. A woman and a man pattered by on a run,
leaving a trail of laughter. From afar came the sound of voices--of
street evangels singing hymns on a corner. The soul of George Hazlitt
grew sick. Night hands fastened themselves about his throat. Upside down
... heels in air. The things he had said to the jury were lies. Lies and
disorder. Right and wrong. God in heaven, what were they, if not right
and wrong?

The thing came to Hazlitt without words, with a gleam and a flurry as of
snow. He stood blind--a little snow-covered figure shivering and lost in
a lighted, crowded street. All because a woman, warm and clinging, had
kissed him on the mouth and moved her body. But once she had kissed
another man thus--on the mouth, with her body moving, and therein lay a
new world--a world of flying-haired Mænads and growling satyrs that
lived behind the tick-tock of windows. Standing in the snowstorm an
insane notion took possession of Hazlitt. It had to do with Evil. Order
was an accident. Men and women were evil. The tick-tock was a pretense.

The notion passed. Doubt needs thought to feed upon, and Hazlitt gave it
none. Or he would have ended as Hazlitt and become someone else. He
walked again with a silence in his head. Another block, and life had
again focused itself into tableaux. The moment of doubt had shaken him
as if rough hands had reached from an alley and clutched wildly at his
throat. But it had gone, and the memory of it too was gone. Hands that
had nobody behind them; emotion that came without the stabilizing
outline of words. So the world stood again on its feet. Tick-tock, said
the world to George Hazlitt; and his brain gave an answer, "Tick-tock!"

For the paradox of Hazlitt was not that he was a thinker, but a dreamer.
His puritanism had put an end to his brain. Like his fellows for whose
respect and admiration he worked, he had bartered his intelligence for a
thing he proudly called Americanism, and thought for him had become a
placid agitation of platitudes. But he could still dream. His emotions
avenged his stupidity. Walking in the street--he felt a desire to
walk--he shut himself in. It seemed to him now that his love had become
a part of the snow and the far-away dark of the sky. Rachel ... Rachel,
his thought called as if summoning something back.

It came to him slowly--the image of the virginal one--doubly sweet and
beautiful now that he was unclean. How had it happened? She had been
weeping; he comforting her. Two strangers, they had sat in his office.
One a murderess weeping for her sins; the other a kindly hearted,
clean-minded attorney consoling her, pointing to her the way of hope.
And then like two animals they had stood sucking at each other's breath.
God, what could he do? Nothing. He was unclean. He recalled with a dread
the thought that had come to him in the embrace ... was she Rachel? Yes,
she had been Rachel and he had lowered his dream to her lips, as if in
the lust of a strange woman's kiss there lay the image of Rachel, the
virginal mystery of Rachel. If he had been man enough not to drag the
memory of Rachel into it, it would be easy now. But he would look
squarely at the facts, anyway. That must be his punishment and his
penance. Yes, say it ... it was with his love for Rachel he had embraced
and almost possessed the body of a stranger.

Hazlitt quickened his walking. He was confronted with the intricate
business of forgiving himself. He felt shame, but shame was something
that could be walked off. Faster ... with an amorous mumble soothing him
and the hurt. After all, was it so important? Yes ... no. Forgive
himself, but not too quickly. He walked.... Words made circles in his
head--abject and sorrowful circles about the dream of the virginal one.

A man with a curious smile stopped in front of him to light a pipe.
Hazlitt paused and looked at the street. He would take a car. His legs
were tired. The wind and snow put out the match of the man who was
lighting a pipe. Hazlitt looked at him. What was he smiling about? We're
all in the snow ... all without secrets in the snow. Hail fellows of the
street ... Curious, he should feel sad for a man who was smiling on a
street corner. Tiredness. The man was cursing the snow good-humoredly.
Suddenly the pipe was lighted and the man seemed to have forgotten it.
His eyes gleamed for an instant across Hazlitt's face, and with an
abrupt nod of recognition the man passed on. Walking swiftly, bent
forward, vanishing behind a flurry of snow.

Hazlitt peered down the track for his car. He wondered how the man knew
him. It pleased his vanity to be recognized by people he couldn't place.
It showed he was somebody. Yes, George Hazlitt, attorney-at-law. He
recalled ... they had met once in an office. A newspaperman--editor or
something. Probably looking for news. Hazlitt was glad he had been
recognized. The man would think of him as he walked on in the snow--of
his victory in the courtroom and his future. That was part of life, to
be thought of and envied by others.

Beside him a newsboy raised a shout ... "Extra! Pauline Pollard
acquitted!..." People would read about it in their homes. His name.
Wonder who he was. A voice across the street answered, "Extra! Germans
bombard Paris!..." The damned Huns! Why didn't America put an end to
their dirty business by rushing in?

He stepped into the warm street-car and sat staring moodily out
of the window. He was a part of life, but there was something
beyond--a--mystery. "Extra!..." He should have bought a paper. There was
the newspaper fellow again, still walking swiftly, bent forward, staring
into the snow.... Oh, yes, Erik Dorn. He had met him once.... The car
passed on.




CHAPTER IV


Erik Dorn laughed as he walked swiftly through the snow in the street.
It seemed to him he had been laughing incessantly for a week, and that
he would continue to laugh forever. His thought played delightedly with
his emotions ... a precocious child with new fantastic toys. He was in
love. A laughable business!

Five months of uncertainty had preceded the laugh. An irritated,
inexplicable moodiness as if the shadow of a disease had come into his
blood. On top of this moodiness a violence of temper, a stewing,
cursing, fuming about. A five months' quarrel with his wife....

His love-making had been somewhat curious. Walks with Rachel--a
whirligig of streets, faces, words. A dance and a flash of words, as if
he were exploding into phrases. As if his vocabulary desired to empty
itself before Rachel. His garrulity amazed him. Everything had to be
talked about. There was a desperate need for talk. And when there was
nothing to talk about for the moment, his words abhorring idleness, fell
to inventing emotions--a complete set of emotions for himself and for
Rachel. These were discussed, explained, and forgotten.

Finally the strange talk that had ended a week ago--a last desperate
concealment of emotion and desire in a burst of glittering phrases.
Phrases that whirled like the exotic decorations about the wild body of
a dancer, becoming a dance in themselves, deriving a movement and a
meaning beyond themselves. Then the end of concealment. An exhausted
vocabulary sighed, collapsed. A frantic discarding of ornaments and the
nude body of the dancer stood posturing naïvely, timidly. Therewith an
end to mystery. The thing was known.

It had happened during one of their walks. Leaden clouds over day-dark
pavements. Warehouses, railroad tracks, factories--a street toiling
through a dismantled world. Their hands together, they paused and
remained staring as if at a third person. He had reached out rather
impersonally and taken her hand. The contact had shocked him into
silence. It was difficult to breathe.

"Rachel, do you love me?"

She nodded her head and pressed his hand against her cheek. They walked
on in silence. This brought an end to talk. Talk concealed. There was
nothing more to conceal. His vocabulary sighed as if admitting defeat
and uselessness. At a corner grown noisy with wagons and trucks Rachel
stopped. Her eyes opened to him. He looked at her and said, as if he had
fallen asleep "I too am in love." He laughed dreamily. "Yes, I've been
since the beginning. Curious!"

She might laugh at him. It was evident he had avoided making love to her
during the five months in fear of that. The only reason he hadn't
embraced, kissed, and protested affection five months ago was the
possibility that she would laugh--and perhaps go away.

Even now, despite the absence of laughter, a part of the fear he had
still lingered. He was no longer Erik Dorn, man of words and mirror of
nothings. He had said he loved her. Avoiding, of course, the direct
remark. But he had indicated it rather definitely. It would undoubtedly
lessen him to her, make him human. She had admired him because he was
different. Now he was like everybody else saying an "I love you" to a
woman. Perhaps he should unsay it. Again, a dreamy laugh. But it made
him happy. A drifting, childish happiness. He looked at her. Her eyes
struck him as marvelously large and bright. Yet in a curious way he
seemed unaware of her. No excitement came to him. Decidedly there was
something unsensual about his love--if it was love. It might be
something else. It is difficult for an extremely married man to
distinguish offhand. He desired nothing more than to stand still and
close his eyes and permit himself to shine. Vague words traced his
emotions. A fullness. A completion. An end of nothing. Thrills in his
fingers. Remarkable disturbance of the diaphragm. To be likened to the
languorous effects of some almost stimulating drug.

In a great calm he slowly forgot himself, his words, and Rachel.
Standing thus he heard her murmur something and felt his hand once more
against her cheek. A pretty gesture. Then she was walking down the dark
street, running from him. She had said good-bye. He awoke and cursed. A
bewildering sensation of being still at her side as if he had gone out
of himself and were following her. He remained thus watching the figure
of Rachel until it disappeared and the street grew suddenly cold and
empty. A strange scene mocked him. Strange smoke, strange warehouses,
strange railroad tracks. Cupid awaking in a cinder patch.

He walked on, still bewildered. Nothing had happened to him. Instead,
something had happened to the streets. The city had suffered an
amputation. There was something incomplete about its streets and crowds.
His eye felt annoyed by it. He was not thinking of Rachel. He felt as if
she had suddenly ceased to exist and left behind her an unexistence. It
was this emptiness outside that for the moment annoyed and then
frightened him. An emptiness that had something to give him now. His
senses reached eagerly toward the figures of people and buildings and
received nothing. What did he want of them? They were a pattern,
intricate and precise, with nothing to give. Yet he wanted. Good God, he
wanted something out of the streets of the city. Then he remembered, as
if recalling some algebraic formula, "I'm in love." His laughter had
started at that moment.

At home it continued in him. Anna had gone to visit relatives in
Wisconsin. He spent an hour writing her a long amorous letter. He was in
love with Rachel, but a new notion had planted itself in him. Whatever
happened, Anna must not be made unhappy. Love was not a reality. Anna
and her happiness were the realities that must be carefully considered.
This thing that had popped into life in the cinder patch was a
mood--comparable to the mood of a thirsty man taking his first sip of
water.

" ... the memory of you comes before me," he scribbled to his wife, "and
I feel sad. I am incomplete without you. Dear one, I love you. The
streets seem empty and the hours drag...."

In writing to his wife he seemed to recover a sense of virtue. He smiled
as he sealed the envelope. "It must be an old instinct," he thought.
"People are kindest to those they deceive. Thus good and evil balance."

His father, sitting before a grate fire, desired to talk. He would talk
to him in circles that would irritate the old man and make his eyes
water more.

"People don't live," he began. "To live is to have a dream behind the
hours. To have the world offering something."

"Yes, my son. Something ..."

"Then the people outside one take on meaningful outlines. There comes a
contact. One is a part of something--of a force that moves the stars,
eh?"

The old man nodded, and mumbled in his beard. Dorn felt a warmth toward
his father. His stupidity delighted him. He would be able henceforth to
talk to the old man and say, "I love Rachel," and the old man would
think he was coining phrases for a profitless amusement. It would be the
same with Anna. He would be able to make love to Anna differently
hereafter. A rather cynical idea. He laughed and beamed at Isaac Dorn.
Did it matter much whom one kissed as long as one had a desire for
kissing? In fact, his desire for Rachel seemed at an end, now that he
had mentioned it to her. A handclasp, a silence trembling with emotion,
a sudden light in the heart--properly speaking, this was all there was
to love. The rest was undoubtedly a make-believe. As he walked out to
post the letter he tried to recall the emotions or ideas that had
inspired him to marry Anna. There had undoubtedly been something of the
sort then. But it had left no memory. Their honeymoon, of which she was
always speaking, even after seven years, with a mist in her eyes--good
Lord, had there been a honeymoon?

He spent the next afternoon with Rachel. A silence of familiarity had
fallen upon them. There was a totality in silence. Walking through the
streets beside her, Dorn mused, "Undoubtedly the thing is over. It
begins even to bore a bit." He noted curiously that he was unconscious
of the streets. No tracing their pictures with phrases. They were
streets, and that was an end of it. They belonged where they were.

His eyes dropped to his companion. A face with moonlight grown upon it.
Beautiful, yes. Sometime he would tell her. Pour it out in words. There
was a paradox about the situation. He was obviously somewhat bored. Yet
to leave her, to put an end to their strolling through the strange
moments, would hurt. Had he ever lived before? Banal question. "No, I've
never lived before. Living is somewhat of a bore, a beautiful bore."

When they parted she stood looking at him as one transfixed.

"Erik!"

She made his name mean something--a world, a heaven. For an instant his
laughter ended and a sadness engulfed him. Then once more he was alone
and laughing. Rachel was walking away, something rather ridiculously
normal about her step. Yes, he would laugh forever. Lord, what a jest!
Like water coming out of a stone. Laugh at the crowds and buildings that
desired to annoy him by sweeping toward him the memory of Rachel saying
"Erik!" He diverted himself, as he hurried to his home, by staring into
people's eyes and saying, "This one has a dream. That one hasn't. This
one loves. The streets hurt him. That one is dead. The streets bury
him."

On the third day the bombardment of Paris interfered with his plans. He
remained too late in the office to walk with Rachel. As he sauntered
about the shop, assisting and directing at the extras and replates, he
vaguely forgot her. Word had come from the chief to hold the paper open
until nine o'clock. If Paris failed to fall by nine everybody could go
home and spend the rest of the night wrangling with his wife or looking
at a movie. If it fell by nine there would be a final extra.

"I hope the damned town falls five minutes after nine," growled Warren,
"if it's got to fall. Let it fall for the morning papers. What the hell
are they for, anyway? I've got a rotten headache."

Dorn told him to run along. "I'll handle the copy, if there is any. A
history of Paris out of the almanac will answer the purpose, I guess."

Warren folded his newspapers and left. Dorn sat scribbling possible
headlines for the next re-plate: "Germans Bombard Paris ..." and then a
bank in smaller type: "French Capital Silent. Communication Cut Off." He
paused and added with a sudden elation, "Civilization on Its Knees."

The hum and suspense of the night-watch pleased him. He liked the idea
of sitting in a noisy place waiting to flash the news of the fall of
Paris to the city. And the next day the four afternoon papers would
carry a small box on the front page announcing to the public that, as
usual, each of them had been first on the street with the important
announcement. The fall of Paris! His thought mused. Babylon Falls....
Civilization on Its Knees. The City Wall of Jericho Collapses. Carthage
Reduced to Ashes. Rome Sacked by Huns. Yes, there had been magnificent
headlines in the past. Now a new headline--Paris. There would be a
sudden flurry; boys running between desks; Crowley trying to shout and
achieving a frightful whisper; a smeared printer announcing some ghastly
mistake in the composing room; and Paris would be down--fallen. Nothing
left to do except grin at the idea of the morning papers cursing their
luck. He sat, vaguely hoping there might be tidal waves, earthquakes,
cataclysms. On this night his energies seemed to demand more work than
the mere fall of Paris would occasion. "Might as well do the thing up
brown and put an end to the world--all in one extra," he smiled.

A messenger boy brought a telegram. He opened it and read,

"I am going away. RACHEL."

All a part of the night's work. Killing off Paris. Answering telegrams
to vanishing sweethearts. He stuffed the message into his pocket. On
second thought he tore it up. Anna was coming home the next day. "Wife
Finds Tell-tale Telegram...." Another headline.

"Wait a minute, boy."

The messenger lounged into an editor's chair. Dorn scribbled on a
telegraph blank:

"Wait till Friday. I must see you once more. I will call for you at
seven o'clock Thursday. We have never been together in the night. ERIK."

The messenger boy and the telegram disappeared. Still the laughter
persisted. There was a jest in the world. Paris seemed a part of it.
Everything belonged to it.

"I wonder what the writers of Paris are saying," Crowley inquired.

"Enjoying themselves, as usual," Dorn answered. "I'll tell you a secret.
We live in a mad and inspiring world."

There was no final headline that night. Wednesday brought problems of
conduct. It was obvious that Rachel was going away because of Anna. Her
departure was a fact which presented itself with no finality. It
resembled an insincere thought of suicide. Rachel, having gone, would
still remain. The emotional prospects of the farewell closed his thought
to the future. He spent Wednesday waiting for a seven o'clock on
Thursday. An hour had detached itself from hours that went before and
that followed. At home in the evening he endeavored to avoid his wife.
His letters to her during her visit in Wisconsin had brought her back
violently joyous. She desired love-making. He listened to her pour out
ardent phrases and wondered why he felt no sense of betrayal toward her.
"Conscience," he thought, "seems to be a vastly over-advertised
commodity." He sat beside Anna, caressing her hand, smiling back into
her passion-filled eyes, and gently checking an impulse in him to
confide to her that he was in love with Rachel. It would be pleasant to
tell her that, provided she would nod her head understandingly, smile,
and stroke his hair; and answer something like, "You mean Rachel is in
love with you. Well, I can't blame her. I'm horribly jealous, but it
doesn't matter." An incongruous sanity warned him to avoid confessions,
so he contented himself by rolling the situation over on his tongue,
tasting the jealousy of his wife, the drama of the dénouement, and
remaining peacefully smiling in his leather chair.

Thursday arrived. The afternoon dragged. He sat at his desk wondering
whether he was sorrowful or not. The thought of meeting Rachel elated
him. The thought that she was leaving and that he would not see her
again seemed a vague thing. He put it out of his mind with ease and
devoted himself to dreaming what he would say, the manner in which he
would bid farewell.

Walking now swiftly in the street toward Rachel's home his thought still
played with his emotions. It was this that partially caused his
laughter. Also, now that he was going to see her, there was again the
sense of fullness. An unthinking calm, complete and vibrant, wrapped him
in an embrace. The fullness and the calm brought laughter. His thought
amused him with the words, "There's a flaming absurdity about
everything."

He delighted in dressing his emotions in absurd phrases, in words that
grimaced behind the rouge of tawdry ballads. Thinking of Rachel and
feeling the sudden lift of sadness and bewilderment in his blood, he
murmured aloud: "You never know you have a heart till it begins to
break." The words amused him. There were other song titles that seemed
to fit. He tried them all. "I don't know why I love you, but I do-o-o."
Delightful diversion--airing the mystic desires of his soul in the
tattered words of the cabaret yodelers. "Just a smile, a sigh, a
kiss...." A sort of revenge, as if his vocabulary with its intricate
verbal sophistications were avenging itself upon interloping emotions.
And, too, because of a vague shame which inspired him to taunt his
surrender; to combat it with an irony such as lay in the ridiculous
phrases. This irony gave him a sense of being still outside his emotions
and not a submissive part of them. "I am still Erik Dorn, master of my
fate and captain of my soul," he smiled. But perhaps it was most of all
the reaction of a verbal vanity. His love was not yet pumping rhapsodies
into his thought. Instead, the words that came seemed to him somehow
banal and commonplace. "I love you. I want to be with you all the time.
When we are together things grow strange and desirable." Amorous
mediocrities! So he edited them into a further banality and thus
concealed his inability to give lofty utterance to his emotions by
amusing himself with deliberately cheapened insincerities. "Saving my
linguistic face," he thought suddenly, and laughed again.

Rachel was sad. They left her home in silence.

"We'll go toward the park," he announced. It irritated him to utter
matter-of-fact directions. Why when he had had nothing to talk about had
he been able to talk? And now when there was something, there seemed
little to say? Words were obviously the delicate fruit of insincerity.
Silence, the dark flower of emotion.

"I must go away." Rachel slipped her arm into his. He stared at her. She
seemed more sorrowful than tears. This annoyed. It was ungrateful for
her to look like weeping. But she was going from him. He tried to think
of her and himself after they had parted, and succeeded only in
remembering she was at his side. So he laughed quietly.

"Yes, to-morrow the guillotine falls," he answered. "To-night we dance
in each other's arms. Immemorial tableau. Laughter, love, and song
against the perfect background--death. Let's not cheat ourselves by
being sad. To-morrow will be time enough."

He realized he was collapsing into a pluck-ye-the-roses-while-ye-may
strain, and stopped, irritated. There was something he should talk to
her about--the causes of her departure. Plans. Their future. Was there a
future? Undoubtedly something would have to be arranged. But his mind
eluded responsibilities.

"I'm happy," he whispered. "I talk like a fool because I feel like one.
Heedless. Irresponsible. You've given me something and I can only look
at it almost without thought."

"It seems so strange that you should love me," she answered. "Because
I've loved you always and never dreamed of you loving." She had become
melting, as if her sadness were dissolving into caresses. "Let's just
walk and I'll remember we're together and be happy, too."

Thoughts vanished from him. He released her hand and they walked in
silence with their arms together. A sleep descended. Their faces,
tranquil and lighted by the snow, offered solitudes to each other.

It was now snowing heavily. A thick white lattice raised itself from the
streets against the darkness. The little black hectagonals of night
danced between its spaces. Long white curtains painted themselves on the
shadows of the city. The lovers walked unaware of the street. The snow
crowded gently about them, moving patiently like a white and silent
dream over their heads. Phantom houses stared after them. Slanting
rooftops spread wings of silver in the night and drifted toward the
moon. The half-closed leaden eyes of windows watched from another world.

The snow grew heavier, winding itself about the yellow lights of street
lamps and crawling with sudden life through the blur of window rays.
Beneath, the pavements opened like white and narrow fans in a far-away
hand. Black figures leaning forward emerged for an instant from behind
the falling snow and disappeared again.

Still the lovers moved without words--two black figures themselves, arms
together, leaning forward, staring with burning hearts and tranquil
faces out of a dream, as if they did not exist, had never existed; as if
in the snow and night they had become an unreality, walking deeper into
mists--yet never quite vanishing but growing only more unreal. Snow and
two lovers walking together with the world like a dream over their
heads, with life lingering in their eyes like a delicately absent-minded
guest--the thought drifted like a memory through their hearts.

Then slowly consciousness of themselves returned, bringing with it no
relief of words. Their hearts seemed to have grown weak with tears, and
in their minds existed nothing but the dark vagueness of despair--the
despair of things that die with their eyes open and questing. Faces
drifting like circles of light in the storm. At the end of the street a
park. Here they would vanish from each other. The snow would continue
falling gently, patiently, upon an empty world.

The cold of Rachel's fingers pressed upon his hand. Her face turned
itself to him. A moment of happiness halted them both as if they had
been embraced. A wonder--the why and where of her leaving. But an
indifference deprived him of words.

"This is all of life," he muttered. Rachel staring at him nodded her
head in echo. They were standing motionless as if they had forgotten how
to live. Beyond this there were no gestures to make, nowhere to go. They
had come to a horizon--an end. Here was ecstasy. What else? Nothing.
Everything, here. Sky and night and snow had fallen about their heads in
an ending. They stood as if clinging to themselves. Dorn heard a soft
laugh from her.

"I thought I had died," Rachel was murmuring. He nodded his head in
echo.

A lighted window lost in the snow drew their eyes. People sat in a
room--warm, stiff figures. The lovers stood smiling toward it. Words,
soft and mocking, formed themselves in Dorn. A pain was pulling his
heart away. The ecstasy that had raised him beyond his emotions seemed
suddenly to have cast him into the fury of them. He would say mocking
things--absurd phrases to which he might cling. Or else he must weep
because of the pain in him. "Two waifs adrift in a storm, peering into a
bakery window at the cookies." That was the key. A laugh at the dolorous
asininity of life. "Face to face with the Roman Pop U Lace. We who are
about to die salute you." Laugh, a phrase of laughter or he would stand
blubbering like an imbecile.

He struggled for the theatric gesture and found himself shivering at
Rachel's side, his arm clinging about her shoulders. Lord, what a jest!
After the moment they had lived through, to stand round-eyed and
blubbering before the gingerbread vision of joys behind a lighted
window. The whine of a barrel-organ. The sentimental whimpering of a
street-corner _Miserere_. And he must weep because of it--he who had
stood with his head thrust through the sky. His thought, like an
indignant monitor, collapsed with scoldings. Let it come, then! With a
sigh he gave himself to tears, and they stood together weeping.

The little lighted room seemed an enchantment floating in the scurry of
the storm. It reached with warm fingers into their hearts, whispering a
broken barrel-organ lullaby to them. Life shone upon them out of the
lighted window and behind it the world of rocking-chairs and fireplaces,
wall pictures and table lamps, lay like a haven smiling a good-by to
them. Their hearts become tombs, closed slowly and forever upon a
vision.

"The world will be a black sky and the memory of you like a shining star
that I watch endlessly." He listened to his words. They brought a dim
gladness. His phrases had finally capitulated to his love. He could talk
now without the artifice of banality to hide behind. Talk, say the
unsayable, bring his love in misty word lines before his eyes; look and
forget a moment.

Rachel's voice at his side said, "I love you so. Oh, I love you so!"

Yes, he could talk now. His heart wagged a tongue. The pain in him had
found words. The mystic desires and torments--words, words.

"We'll remember, years later, and be grateful we didn't bury our love
behind lighted windows, but left it to wander forever and remain forever
alive. Rachel, my dear one."

"I love you so!" she wept.

More words ... "it would have been always the same. We've lived one
moment and in all of life there's nothing more than what we've had.
Lovers who grow old together live only in their yesterdays. And their
yesterdays are only a moment--till the time comes when their yesterdays
die. Then they become little, half-dead people, who wait in lighted
rooms, empty handed, fumbling greedily with trifles...."

"I love you!" She made a refrain for him. "I don't know the things you
do. I only love you."

"Rachel ..." He had no belief in what he was saying. The things he knew?
What? Nothing but pain and torment. Yet his heart went on wagging out
words: "All life is a parting--a continual and monotonous parting. And
most hideous of all, a parting with dead things. A saying good-by to
things that no longer exist. We part with living things, and so keep
them, somehow. Your face makes life for the moment familiar. Visions
bloom like sad flowers in my heart. Your body against mine brings a
torment even into my words. Oh, your weeping's the sound of my own
heart dying. Rachel, you are more wonderful than life. I love you! I
feel as if I must die when you go away. Crowds, streets, buildings--all
empty outlines. Empty before you came, emptier when you have gone."

He paused. His thought whispered: "I'll remember things I say. I mustn't
say too much. I'm sad. Oh, God, what a mess!"

They walked into the park. A sudden matter-of-factness came into Dorn's
mind. He had sung something from his heart. Yet he remembered with
astonishment it had been a wary song. He had not asked her to stay. Had
he asked her she would have remained. Curious, how he acquiesced in her
going. A sense of drama seemed to demand it. When he had received her
message the night in the office he had agreed at once. Why? Because he
was not in love? This too, a make-believe, more colored, more persuasive
than the others? Wrong. Something else. Anna. Anna was sending her away.
The figure of Anna loomed behind their ecstasies. It stood nodding its
head sorrowfully at a good-by in the snow.

They were deep in the park. Trees made still gestures about them. The
ivory silhouettes of trees haunted the distance. A spectral summer
painted itself upon the barren lilac bushes. Beneath, the lawn slopes
raised moon faces to the night. Deep in the storm the ghost of a bronze
fountain emerged and remained staring at the scene.

It was cold. The wind had died and the snow hung without motion, like a
cloud of ribbons in the air. The white park gleamed as if under the
swinging light of blue and silver lanterns. The night, lost in a dream
wandered away among strange sculptures. In the distance a curtain of
porphyry and bisque drew its shadow across the moon.

Rachel pointed suddenly with her finger.

"Look!" she whispered. She remained as if in terror, pointing.

Three figures were converging toward them--black figures out of the
distant snow. Figures of men, without faces, like three bundles of
clothes, they came toiling across the unbroken white of the park, an air
of intense destinations about them. Above the desolate field of white
the three figures seemed suddenly to loom into heroic sizes. They reared
to a height and zigzagged across a nowhere.

"See, see!" Rachel cried. She was still pointing. Her voice rang
brokenly. "They're coming for me, Erik. Erik, don't you see? People
wandering toward me. Horrible strangers. Oh, I know, I know!" She
laughed. "My grandmother was a gypsy and she's telling my fortune in the
snow. Things that will jump out of space and come at me, after you're
gone."

The three men, puffing with exertion, converged upon the walk and passed
on with a morose stare at the lovers. Dorn sighed, relieved. He had
caught a strange foreboding sense out of the tableau of the white field
and the three converging black figures.... If he loved her why was he
letting her go? If he loved her....

He walked on suddenly wearied, saddened, uncertain. It was no more than
a dream that had touched his senses, a breath of a dream that lingered
for a moment upon his mirror. It would pass, as all things pass. And he
would fall back into the pattern of streets and faces, watching as
before the emptiness of life make geometrical figures of itself. Yes, it
was better to have her go--simpler. Perhaps a desire would remain, a
breath, a moonlit memory of her loveliness to mumble over now and then,
like a line of poetry always unwritten. Let her go. Beautiful ...
wonderful.... These were words. Was he even sad? She was--what? Another
woman.

In the shadow of a snow-covered wall he paused. The snow had ended.

"Come closer," he whispered. She remained silent as he removed her
overcoat. He dropped it in the snow and threw his own beside it.

"We'll be warm for a minute against each other."

She was a flower in his arms. She seemed to vanish and become mist.
Slowly he became aware of her touch, of her arms holding him and her
lips. She was saying:

"I am yours--always--everywhere. I will be a shrine to you. And whenever
you want me I will come crawling on my knees to you."

Dying, dying! She was dying. Another moment and the mist of her would be
gone. "Rachel.... Rachel. I love you. I send you away. Oh, God, why do I
send you away?"

She was out of his arms. Undressed, naked, emptied, he stood unknown to
himself. No words. Her kiss alone lived on his lips. She was looking at
him with burning wild eyes. Expression seemed to have left her. There
was something else in her face.

"I must look at you. To remember, to remember!" she gasped. "Oh, to
remember you! I have never looked at you. I have never seen you. It's a
dream. Who is Erik Dorn? Who am I? Oh, let me look at you...."

The eyes of Rachel grew marvelously bright. Burned ... burned.

Dorn stared into an empty park. Gone! Her coat still in the snow. His
own beside it. He stood smiling, confused. His lips made an apology. He
walked off. Oh, yes, their coats together in the snow. A symbol. He
stumbled and a sudden terror engulfed him. "Her face," he mumbled, "like
a mirror of stars." He felt himself sicken. What had her eyes said? Eyes
that burned and devoured him and vanished. "Rachel," he wept, "forever!"
He wondered why he spoke.

The park, white, gleaming, desolate, gave him back her face. Out of the
empty night, her face. In the trees it drifted, haunting him. The print
of a face was upon the world. He went stumbling toward it in the snow.
He covered his eyes with his hands as he walked.

"Her face," he mumbled, "her face was beautiful...."




CHAPTER V


In a dining-room of the city known as the Blue Inn, Anna Dorn sat
waiting for her husband. Opposite her a laughing-eyed man was talking.
She listened without intelligence. He was part of old memories--crowded
rooms in which lights had been turned off. They had danced together in
their youth. She had worn his fraternity pin and walked with him one
night under a moon and kissed him, saying: "I will always love you. The
other boys are different. You are so nice and kind, Eddie." And Eddie
had gone away east to continue a complacent quest for erudition in a
university. Almost forgotten days and places when there had been no Erik
Dorn, and when one debated which pumps to wear to the dance. Erik had
blotted them out. A whimsical, moody young Mr. Dorn, laughing and
carousing about the city and singling her out one night at a party....
"We must get out of here or we'll choke to death. Come, we'll go down to
the lake and laugh at the stars. They're the only laughable things in
the world."

She looked sadly at the man whose kindly voice sought to rally her out
of a gloom. Before the laughing stars there had been another day--other
stars, another Anna. All part of another world. Eddie Meredith and
another world sat dimly apparent across the white linen of the table.
Anecdotes of old friends they had shared, forgotten names and incidents
reached through the shadows of her thought and stirred an alien memory.
He hadn't changed. Ten years--and he was still Eddie Meredith, with eyes
that looked for simple pleasures and seemed to find them. He had always
found something to laugh about. Not the way Erik laughed. Erik's laugh
was something that had never ceased to hurt. Strange that Eddie's voice
had never grown tired of laughing during the ten years.

The ache in her heart lightened and she listened with almost a
smile--the ghost of another Anna smiling. It was the other Anna who had
walked through youth with a joyous indifference to life, to everything
but youth. Buried now deep under years, Eddie warmed it back. Eddie sat
talking to the ghost that had been Anna Winthrop and that could not
answer him.

He was a poor talker. She was too used to Erik. Simple, threadbare
phrases, yet she had once thought him brilliant. Perhaps he was--a
different kind of brilliance. She noted how his words seemed stimulated
with an enthusiasm beyond their sense. Trifles assumed an importance.
For moments she felt herself looking at the joyousness of an old friend
and forgetting. Then as always through the day and night.... "Erik,
Erik," murmured itself in her mind ... "he doesn't love me. Erik, dear
Erik!" Over and over, weaving itself into all she said and saw.
Sometimes it started a panic in her. She would feel herself grow dark,
wild. Often it seemed to bring death. Things would become vague and she
would move through the hours unaware of them.

The joyousness of Eddie drifted away. She remained smiling
blankly at him. His words slipped past her ear. Inside, she was
wandering--disheveled thoughts were wandering through a darkness. At
night she lay beside him as he slept, with her eyes wide open and her
lips praying, "Dear Jesus, sweet brother Jesus, give Erik back to me!"
... Or she would crawl out of bed and walk into a deserted room to weep.
Here she could mumble his name till the anguish of her tears choked her.
As the cold streets grew gray she would hurry to bathe her face, even
rouging her cheeks, and return to their bed to wait for Erik to awake,
that she might caress him, warm something back in him with her kisses,
and perhaps hear him whisper her name as he used to do. But he drew
himself away, his eyes sometimes filling with tears. "It's nothing,
Anna, nothing. Please don't ask. I don't know what it is. My head or
something. I feel black inside...." And he would hurry to work, not
waiting for her to join him at breakfast.

Then there had been nights when he held her in his arms thinking she was
asleep, and she felt his tears dropping over her face--tears of
silence. She would lie trembling with a wild joy, yet not daring to open
her eyes or speak, knowing he would move away. These moments, feigning
sleep and listening to Erik weeping softly against her cheek, had been
her only happiness in the four black months since the change had come to
him. He still loved her. Yes.... Oh, God, it was something else. Perhaps
madness. She would drift to sleep as his weeping ceased, long after it
ceased, and half dreams would come to her of nursing him through
terrible darknesses, of warming him with her life, of magically driving
away the things that were tormenting him out of his mind--great black
things. Through the day she hungered for his return from work, that she
might look at him again, even though the sight of him, dark and aloof,
tore at her heart till she grew faint.

She had never thought of questioning him calmly. There had been no
suspicion of "someone else." That was a thing beyond even the wildest
disorder of her imaginings. It was only that Erik was restless, perhaps
tired of his home, of her too much loving and longing to go
somewhere--away. Her awe of his brain, of his strange, always
impenetrable character, adjusted itself to the change in him. There were
mysterious things in Erik--things she couldn't hope to understand. Now
these unknown things had grown too big in him. He was different from
other men, not to be questioned as one might question other men. So she
must wander about blindly, carefully, and drive things away.

She came out of her sorrow reveries and smiled. Eddie was still talking.
The music of a violin, harp, and piano was playing with a rollicking
wistfulness through the clatter and laughter of the café. Eddie was
saying, "There, that's better. That makes you look like Anna. You were
looking like somebody else."

His jolly eyes had a keenness. She must dissemble better. Erik would
come in a moment and Eddie must never think....

"I've heard about your husband, the lucky dog!" Eddie beamed at her
impudently. "Think," he exploded, "of meeting you accidentally after ten
years. Wow! Ten years! They say themselves quickly, don't they? By the
way, there's a curious fellow coming to meet me here. I'll drag him in.
If your Erik don't like it I'll sit on him till he does. His name's
Tesla--Emil Tesla. Bomb-thrower or something. I don't know exactly. He's
helped me with my collection. Oh, I forgot. You don't know about that. I
keep thinking that you know me. You see nothing has changed in me. I'm
still the same Eddie--richer, balder, foolisher, perhaps. It seems you
ought to know all about the ten years without being told. But I'll tell
you. I'm an art collector on the sly. Pictures--horrible things that
don't look like anything. I don't know why I collect them, honestly.
Pictures mean nothing to me. Never did. Particularly the kind I pick
up. But it's a habit that keeps me cheerful. Better than collecting
stamps. Cubist, futurist, expressionist. Ever see the damn things? I
gobble them up. I guess because they're cheap. Here he is--the young
fellow with the soft face."

Meredith rose and jubilantly waved a napkin. A stocky man in loose
clothes nodded at him and approached.

"Not Mrs. Erik Dorn," he repeated. Anna nodded. The sound of her
husband's name on others' lips always elated her, even now. She lost for
a moment the aversion she felt at the touch of Tesla's hand. It seemed
boneless.... They would all eat together. Anna was an old school friend.
Years ago, ah! many years.

Tesla fastened a repugnantly appreciative eye upon her, as if he were
becoming privy to an exclusive secret. She frowned inwardly. An ugly man
with something bubbly about him.

"I was telling Mrs. Dorn you were a bomb-thrower or something," Meredith
announced. His good spirits frisked about the table like a troupe of
frolicsome puppies.

"Only an apprentice," Tesla's soft voice--a voice like his
hands--answered. "But why talk of such things in the presence of a
beautiful lady." He bowed his head at her. She thought, "An unbearable
man, completely out of place. How in the world could Eddie...."

The music had changed. Muted cornets, banjos and saxophones were
wailing out a tom-tom adagio. People were rising from tables and moving
toward a dancing space. Eddie stood beside her bowing with elaborate
stiffness.

"My next dance, Miss Winthrop."

Anna looked up blankly.

"Good Lord, have you forgotten your own name? Come on. You know Dorn,
don't you, Emil? Well, throw a fork at him when he shows up. Come, we
haven't danced together for ten years. The last time was...."

"The last time was the senior prom," Anna interrupted quickly. "You see
I haven't forgotten." She stood mechanically.

As they walked between tables and diners, he said, "I sure feel like a
boy again seeing you."

"I'm afraid I've almost forgotten how to dance, Eddie. My husband
doesn't dance much."

"Here we are! Like old days, eh? Remember Jimmie Goodland, my deadly
rival for your hand?"

They were dancing.

"Well, he's married. Three kids."

"And how many children have you, Eddie?"

"Me?" He laughed. "Have I forgotten to tell you that? Well, I'm still at
large, untrammeled, free. There've been women, but not _the_ woman."

His voice put on a pleasing facetiousness.

"Mustn't mind an old friend getting sentimental. But after you they had
to measure up to something--and didn't."

Since the night Erik had singled her out at the party no man had spoken
to her that way. She listened slightly amazed. It confused her. His
eyes, as they danced, were jolly and polite. But they watched her too
keenly. Erik might misunderstand. Her love somehow resented being looked
at and spoken to like that. She hurried back to their first topic.

"What became of Millie Pugh, Eddie?"

"Married. A Spaniard or something. Two kids and an automobile. Saw them
in Brazil somewhere."

"And Arthur Stearns?"

"Fatter than an alderman. Runs a gas works or something in Detroit.
Married. One kid."

Anna laughed. "You sound like an almanac of dooms."

"Well, all married but me--little Eddie, the boy bachelor, faithful unto
death to the memories of his childhood. Do you remember the night we ran
Mazurine's out of ice-cream?"

This was another world, another Anna. She closed her eyes dreamily to
the movement of the dance and music--delicious drugs.

"Faster," she whispered.

They broke into quicker steps. "Erik.... Erik.... my own. Love me again.
Come back to me...." Still in her thought, but fainter, deeper down.
Not words but a sigh that moved to the rhythm of the music.

"And how may children have you?"

She answered without emotion, as if she were talking with a distant part
of herself. "There was a little boy. He died as a baby. We haven't any."

Deep, kindly eyes looking at her as they danced. "I'm so sorry, Anna."

She whispered again, "Faster!" A shadow over his face. She must be
careful of his eyes--eyes that laughed, but keen, almost as keen as
Erik's. "My Erik ... my own...." It was all a dream, a nightmare of her
own inventing. Nothing had happened. Imaginings. Erik loved her. Why
else should he weep and kiss her when he thought her asleep? He loved
her, he loved her!

Her face grew bright. Faster. Always to dance and dream of Erik. She
must tell Eddie....

"Erik is wonderful. I'm dying to have you meet him. Oh, Eddie, he's
wonderful!"

Now she could laugh and enjoy herself. Something had emptied out of her
breasts--cold iron, warm lead. She was lighter, easy to bend and glide
to the music. Everything was easy. Her face lighted by something deeper
than a smile, she danced in silence. Eddie was far away--ten years away.
His eyes that were smiling at her were no eyes at all. They were part of
the music and movement that caressed her with the sweetness of life, of
being loved by Erik....

Tesla watched his friend lead the red-haired lady away to dance. For a
while there lingered about him the air of unctious submission that had
revolted Anna. Then it vanished. His face as he sat alone seemed to
tighten. The flabbiness of his eyes became something else. Diners at
other tables caught glimpses of him while they ate. A commanding figure,
rugged, youthful-faced. Features that made definite lines, compelling
lines, in the blur of other features. A man of certainties, yet with
something weak about him. His eyes were like a child's. They did not
quite belong in his face. There, eyes should have gleamed, stared with
intensities. Instead, eyes purred--abstract, tender eyes; the kind that
attracted women sometimes because they were almost like a women's eyes
dreaming of lovers.

"Hello, Tesla!"

Again the fawning lights, smiles, bowings. This was Dorn--a Somebody.
Somebodies always changed Tesla. There was a thing in him that smirked
before Somebodies, as if he were a timorous puppy wagging its tail and
leaping about on flabby legs.

"Mrs. Dorn is sitting here with a friend. They're dancing. We're all at
this table, Mr. Dorn."

Dorn caught the eager innuendo of his voice. He knew Tesla vaguely as a
radical, an author of pamphlets. Tesla continued to talk, a sycophantic
purr in his words.... The war was financed by international bankers.
Didn't he think so? America was being drawn in by Wall Street--to make
the loans to the Allies stand up. But something was going to happen. The
eyes of the workers were opening slowly all over the world. In Russia
already a beginning of realities. Ah, think of the millions dying for
nothing, advancing or improving nothing by their death. Soldiers,
heroes, workingmen, all blind acrobats in another man's circus. But
something was happening. Revolution. This grewsome horseplay in Europe's
front yard would start it. And then--watch out!

The voice of Emil Tesla, eager, fawning, had yet another quality in it.
It promised, as if it could not do justice to the things it was saying
and must be careful, soft, polite. Dorn felt the man and his power. Not
a puppy on flabby legs but a brute mastiff with a wild bay that must
come out in little whines, because the music was playing, because he was
talking to Somebody. A man physically beaten by life, his body scraping,
bowing; his words mumbling confusedly in the presence of other words.
Yet a powerful man with a tremendous urge that might some day hurl him
against the stars. He had something....

To Tesla's sentences Dorn dropped a yes or no. Tesla needed no replies.
He purred on eagerly before his listener, seeming to whine for his
appreciation and good will, yet unconscious of him. A waiter brought
wine. Dorn stared at the topaz tint in his glass. His eyes had changed.
They no longer smiled. A heaviness gleamed from them. The thing in his
heart would not go. Heavy hands turning him over and over, as if life
were tearing him, crowds and streets pulling at him. There had been no
rest since Rachel had gone.

He sat almost oblivious of Tesla. In the back of his brain the city
tumbled--an elephantine grimace, a wilderness of angles, a swarm of
gestures that beat at his thought. But before his eyes there were no
longer the precise patterns of another day. He was no longer outside. He
had been sucked into something, the something that he had been used to
refer to condescendingly as life. People sitting in a room like this had
been furniture that amused him. Now they were alive, repulsive, with a
meaning to them that sickened him. Streets had once been stone and
gesture. Now they, too, were meanings that sickened. A sanity in which
he alone was insane, surrounded him; a completion in which he alone
seemed incomplete. Men and women together--tired faces, lighted
faces--all with destinations that satisfied them. And he wandering,
knocked from place to place by heavy hands, pushed through crowds,
dropped into chairs. Time itself a torment into which he kept thrusting
himself deeper.

The change in Erik Dorn had come to him with a cynicism of its own. It
laughed with its own laughter. A mind foreign to him spoke to him
through the day.... "You would smile at life, Erik; well, here it is.
Easy for a sleeper to smile. But smile now. Life is a surface, eh?
shifting about into designs for the delectation of your eyes. Watch it
shifting then. Darkness and emptiness in a can-can. Watch the tumbling
streets that have no meanings. No meanings? Yet there's a torment in
them that can hoist you up by your placid little heels and swing you
round ... round, and send you flying. A witch's flight with the scream
of stars whistling through it. Flight that has no ending and no
direction ... no face of Rachel at its ending. Burning eyes, devouring
eyes ... face like a mirror of stars. There's a face in the world and
you go after it, heels in air, tongue frozen, breathing always an
emptiness that chokes. Easy for sleepers to dawdle with words and say
carelessly life is this, life is that. What the hell's the difference
what life is? It means nothing to me. People and their posturings mean
nothing. But what about now? A contact, a tying up with posturings, and
the streets and crowds tearing you into gestures not your own...."

Aloud he would say, "My love for her has given me a soul and I've become
a fool along with other fools."

He did not think of Rachel in words. There were moments of dream when he
made plans--a fantastic amorous rigmarole of Rachel and himself walking
together over the heads of the world; child dreams that substituted
themselves for the realities he demanded. But these were infrequent. He
was learning to avoid them as one avoids a drug that soothes and then
doubles the hunger of the nerves.

As now in the café, listening to Tesla, watching with dark eyes the
scene, there was a turning of heavy hands in him to which he must not
give thought. Watch the café, listen to Tesla, talk, eat and spit out a
disgust for the things of which he was a part--things from which he
demanded Rachel and a surcease to the pain in him. And that only stifled
with the emptiness of her.

Out of the wretchedness of garbled emotions that had become the whole of
Erik Dorn, his vocabulary arose with a facile paint brush and painted
upon his thought. His phrases wandered about looking for subjects as if
he must taunt himself with details that forever brought him loathing.

Before he had seen pictures complete, rhythmic pictures of streets and
crowds, pleasantly blurred and in motion. Now he saw them as if life was
in a state of continual pause--an arrested cinematograph; grotesquely
detailed and with the meaning of motion out of it. A picture waiting
something to set it moving. This something he could not give it.
Helplessly his words continued to trace themselves over the outlines of
scenes about him, as if trying to stir them into a life.

This scene consciousness had become almost a mania in the four months.
But in the mechanical, phraseological movement of his thought he was
able to hide himself. Thus he listened to Tesla and looked at the café.
The inn was filled with people--elaborately dressed women and shiningly
groomed men--grouped about white-linened, silver-laden tables; an
ornamental grimacing little multitude come to the café as to some grave
rite, moving to the tables with an unctious nonchalance. Women dressed
in effulgent silks, their flesh gleaming among the spaces of exotic
plumage, gleaming through the flares of luxurious satin distortions. A
company that gestured, grimaced with the charm of lustful marionettes.
Flesh reduced to secrecy. Lust, dream in hiding. From the secret world
they inhabited, moist bodies beckoned with a luscious, perverse denial
of artifice.

The picture of it shot into his eyes, arousing a hate in his thought. He
heard Tesla ... "life has changed with the industrialization of society.
It is no longer a question of who shall run the court. The court is an
atrophied institution, a circus surviving in the backyard of history.
It's a question of who shall run the factory. Democracy is a thing that
touches only politicians. The factory touches people. Democracy cleared
the way but it's not a way in itself. It's still the court idea of
government. Steam, gas, and electricity made the French revolution
obsolete even before it was ended. This war ... good God, Dorn, blood
pouring over toys we've outgrown!..."

Still fawning voiced, but with a bay underneath. Dorn listened and
remained elsewhere--among a turning of heavy hands. Yet he thought of
Tesla, "He makes an impression on me. I'll remember his words. A man of
power, rooted in visions." He replied suddenly, "I'm convinced the weak
will rule some day, if that's what you're driving at. The race can
survive only as long as its weakest survive. Christianity started it.
Socialism will carry it a step further. The fight against the
individual. What else is any institutionalism? A struggle to circumvent
the biological destiny of man, which is the same as the biological
destiny of fish--extinction. That's what we're primarily engaged in. The
race must protect its weak, so it invents laws to curb the instincts and
power of its strong. And we obey the laws--a matter of adjusting
ourselves ludicrously to our weaknesses and endowing these adjustments
with high names. Bolshevism will be the law of to-morrow and wear even a
higher name than Christianity. Yesterday it was, 'only the poor shall
inherit heaven, only crippled brains and weaker visions shall see God.'
To-morrow the slogan will have been brought down to earth. Yes, they'll
run the factories--your masses. There's the strength in them of
logic--a logic opposed to evolution. They'll run the factories as they
now run heaven--an Institution nicely accommodated to their fears and
weaknesses."

Dorn paused. He was not thinking. People said things. An automatic box
of phrases in him released answers. Tesla was replying, not so
fawningly, the bay beneath his soft words mastering his sycophantic
tones. Let him talk. He had something to talk about. He saw something.
There was a new tableau in Tesla's brain. Let him keep murmuring things
about it--suavely, unctuously letting off steam.

Like a man returning drearily to his game of solitaire, Dorn fastened
his eyes again upon the scene. Looking at things would keep him from
thinking. To think was to cry out. He had learned this. His eyes, dark
and heavy, fastened themselves upon the walls of the inn lost in
shadows, painted with nymphs and satyrs sprawling over tapestried
landscapes. He devoured their details, his heart searching in them for
the mystery of Rachel and finding only a deeper emptiness--insistently
naked bodies of nymphs lying like newly bathed housemaids amid stiff
park sceneries. Miracles of photographic lechery. Would people about him
look like that naked? Thank God they were dressed! An ankle in silk was
better than a thigh in sunlight. An old saw ... beauty lay in the
imagination. Women removed their beauty with their clothes. The nymphs
on the wall reminded one chiefly that they were careful to scrub their
legs all the way up.

He sighed and watched the eyes of diners look at the walls. Her face--a
mirror of stars. What else was there but her face? Other faces, of
course. A revulsion of other strange faces. Men studying the naked
figures on the walls with profound but aloof interest, eyeing the women
near them shrewdly as they turned away. Women with serious,
unconcentrated eyes upon the paintings, turning tenderly towards their
escorts. He would die of looking at faces that were not hers. A
love-sick schoolboy. God, what an ass! Tesla was becoming an
insufferable bore. What in God's name did he have to do with masses
raising their skinny arms from a smoking field and crying aloud,
"Bread!" Tesla had a lot to do with it. The skinny arms, the smoking
field, and the balloon with the word "bread" in it were Tesla's soul.
But his soul was different--heavy hands turning.

Dorn drank wine from his glass. Anna, dancing with a plump, laughing
stranger, flitted through the distance. A deeper turning over of iron in
his heart at the glimpse of her. The scene no longer could divert him.
The thought of Anna dropped like a curtain upon a picture. What could he
do? What? At night he grew sick lying beside her. It wasn't conscience.
There was nothing wrong about loving someone else. But there was an
uncanniness about it. Lying beside a woman who didn't know what was in
his mind. He would lie thinking, "Oh, Rachel, I love Rachel," repeating
almost idiotic love words for Rachel in his mind. And Anna would smile
patiently at him, unaware. That was the most intolerable thing. The fact
she didn't know. And also the fact that he must remain inarticulate. He
must sit with his heart choking him and his head in a blaze, and keep
stuffing words back down his throat. Through the day he tormented
himself with the thought, "I must tell her. I can't keep this thing up
any longer." But when he saw her it was impossible to tell her. A single
phrase would end it. He held the phrase on his lips--as if it were a
knife balanced over Anna's heart. "I love Rachel." That would end it.
But it was impossible. He couldn't say it. Why? He sat, trying to get a
glimpse of her dancing again and tried to avoid answering himself. It
was something he mustn't answer. He must get away from his damned
thought. His eyes fastened themselves upon the fountain in the center of
the room. It was Anna that tormented him, not Rachel. Anna ... Anna....
The tension broke. He was looking at the fountain surmounted by a marble
nude crouched in a posture of surprise; probably disturbed by her
nudity. It was necessary for nudity to be disturbed by itself. Did
virgins eyeing themselves in mirrors blush with shame? Unquestionably.
The nude peered into the water of a large tiled basin. A gush of water
over her managed to veil her unsuccessfully in an endless spray. Water
filled the air with an odorless spice.

" ... the first blow will come out of Russia, Dorn. The Russians have
not been side-tracked into the phantasms of democracy. They still think
straight. Civilization hasn't crippled them with phrases. They are still
what you would call biological. And dreams live in them. Yes, I know
what you'll say ... heavy dreams. But here in America there are no
dreams--yet. Nothing but paper. Paper thoughts. Paper morals. Everything
paper. Russia will send out fire to burn up this paper. Destroy it.
Leave nothing behind--not even ashes."

True enough. Why answer it? But what difference did it make if paper
burned? Was man after all a creature consecrated to institutions, doomed
to expend himself upon institutions? A hundred million nervous systems,
each capable of ecstasies and torments, devoting themselves to the
business of political brick-laying. Always yowling about new bricks.
Politics--a deformity of the imagination; a game of tiddledy-winks
played with guns and souls.

He breathed with relief. Abstractions were a drug. But his thinking
ended. Blue electric lights cast an amorous glow--an artificial
moonlight--upon tables surrounding the fountain. Beneath the cobalt
water of the basin, colored fish gliding like a weaving procession of
little fat Mandarins. The remainder of the room also blue from shaded
lights. That was why they dubbed it the Blue Inn. Blue lights made the
Blue Inn. The air was heavy with the uncoiling lavender tinsel of
tobacco smoke. A luxurious suppression as about some priapic altar ...
artificial shadows, painted lights, forlorn fountain ripplings.

"Oh, Erik, I've been dancing. This is Mr. Meredith. I once told you
about him. The music is simply wonderful here."

Tesla, flabby-eyed and almost maliciously polite, as if he would expose
the innate absurdity of politeness, tipped over a water glass in his
floppings. Anna, still alive with the joyousness that had come to her,
seated herself beside her husband. Her hand rested eagerly on his arm.
He must love her ... must. Must. It had been only a nightmare she'd
invented. Oh, God, did anything matter as long as they loved each other?

"Tired, dearest?"

He looked at her and tried to lighten his eyes.

"Yes, a little. The damned war."

"I'm so sorry."

She mustn't ask him to dance. He was tired. She would coddle him. He was
only a baby--tired, sleepy, sad. She must ask no questions. Only love.
Before her love the darkness of his face would clear away as before
sunshine.

"I'm so happy, Erik darling!"

Her fingers quivered on his arm. He looked at her and smiled out of
misty eyes. Of all the unbearable things in an unbearable world her
happiness was the most unbearable. S

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