CHAPTER I

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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. She nodded, as if she understood. Her

pretense of understanding was a ghastly business. But Anna smiled. Poor

Erik, he was only a boy. If only they were alone! If Eddie and Tesla and

the whole world would go away and leave her with him, to kiss his eyes

and stroke his hair. Sleep, baby, sleep.... What a crazy, wild thing,

thinking that Erik no longer loved her. No longer loved her! Dear God,

she was only a part of him. He must love her.... Must!

The talk kept on--words bubbling from Tesla, Eddie frisking with

laughter.

"You must dance with me, Erik. It's been so long since we danced."

There--she shouldn't have asked. She didn't mean to. Her eyes

apologized. When he answered, "No, I'm tired," there was wine from a

glass that warmed the little coldness his words dropped into her.

Listening to her, answering with words he tried to soften and make

alive, Dorn tried to occupy himself with the details of the scene again.

Could he keep on living as two persons--one of them turning over and

over in a fire that consumed him--and the other making phrases,

gestures, as if there were no fire consuming him? If he kept his eyes

working, perhaps. He hated Anna. But that was because he couldn't bear

the thought of her suffering. He hated her because he must be kind to

her.

Meredith was ordering the dinner. Dorn stared out over the room.

Anna was watching him with her senses. Why didn't he speak to her as

Eddie did? Perhaps he was going mad. His eyes suffered. He looked at

things and seemed to hurt himself with looking. She kept her voice

vibrant with a hope of joyousness. "I mustn't give in to the nightmare.

It's only imagining...."

"Erik, dearest, do eat something. Let me order for you."

Talk, talk! Dorn listened. Anna was saying, "Eddie thinks as you do

about the war, Erik. Isn't that odd?" Yes, that anybody should be able

to think as he did. He was a God. A super-God. If only she hated him. A

moment of hate in her eyes would be heaven.

"A plain case of accepting an evil and making the best of it," laughed

Meredith. "If we go in all I ask is for God's sake let's keep our eyes

open and not slobber around."

Soft remonstrances from Tesla with polite references to Wall Street.

Food on platters. An air of slight excitement with Anna directing the

talk and serving. What made her so vivacious? The sight of an old

friend, Meredith? Meredith ... oh, yes, school days, long ago. A wild

hope unfolded itself in Dorn. He looked at the man anew. Fantastic

notion. But throw them together, day and night. Cafés, dancing, music,

propinquity. He was her type--kindly, unselfish, prosperously elate

over life. He'd help her on with her wraps and be polite over doorways.

Perhaps. He turned to his wife and laughed softly. A way out. Give her

to the man. Give her away. End her love for him--her damned, torturing

love that made him turn over inside and weep at night when she was

asleep; that hounded him like an unclean memory. It was only her love

that made him unclean. He looked at her with his eyes lighted.

"Dancing makes a difference, doesn't it, dear? I'd dance myself, only my

legs are tired."

He smiled as he spoke with the unctuousness of a villain administering

poison in a bouquet of roses. But a way to get rid of her love. He

didn't mind her, but the thing in her. That was the whole of it. Why

hide from it? God, if he could only kill it he'd be free. Otherwise he'd

never be free. Even if he went away there'd be the thought of her

love.... Anna's face bloomed with joy at his words.

"We'll come here another night when you're not tired, honey."

"Yes," he answered, "make a party of it. How about that, Mr. Meredith?"

"Surest thing."

They forgot Tesla.

"Oh, Erik!" She embraced his arm with both her hands. Under the table

she pressed her thigh trembling against him.

The music from the platform had changed. Cornets, banjos, saxophones,

again. The boom and jerk of voices arose as if in greeting. Foreheads

of diners glistening with a fine sweat. Sweat on the backs of women's

necks, on their chins, under their raised arms; gleaming on the cool

intervals of breasts, white and bulbous breasts peeping out of a secret

world.

"If I may, Anna...."

Eddie was taking her away. The plot was working. Dorn's heart warmed

toward the man. A rescuer, a savior. He nodded his head at his wife. He

must make it look as if he were sorry it wasn't he going to dance with

her; smile with proper wistfulness; shake his head sadly.

Anna, suddenly beside herself, laughed, and, leaning over touched his

hair quickly with her lips. Damned idiot, he'd overdone it! No. Perhaps

she was guilty. Apologizing for impulses away from him toward Meredith?

He sat hoping feverishly, caressing a diagnosis as if he could establish

it by repeating it over and over.

Tesla again, this time on art. Art of the proletaire. Damn the

proletaire and Tesla both! He had a plot working out. Would their hands

touch, linger, sigh against each other? Of course. They were human--at

least their hands were. And then, dances every night. What a miserable

banal plot! Another day-dream. Forget. Beyond Tesla's soft voice ... an

opening and shutting of mouths swollen in delicious discomforts. Look at

them. Identify mouths. Tell himself the angles they made. People ...

people ... a wriggling of bodies in a growing satiety of tepid lusts.

"True art, Dorn, is something beyond decoration. Dreams made real. But

the right kind of dreams--things that touch people. The other art was

for sick men. That is--men sickened of life. The new art will be for

healthy men, men reaching out of everything about them. And we must give

them bread, soup, and art."

Yes, that might as well be true as anything else. Anything was truth.

Anything and everything. Here he was in a scene that had no relation to

him. Yet he wasn't detached.

"Speaking of art, Dorn, we've found a new artist, a wonder. She's going

to do some things for _The Cry_. I got her interested. I must tell

Meredith about her. Maybe you know her--Rachel Laskin. One of her things

is coming out in the next issue. I'll send you a copy."

Coolly, amazedly, Dorn thought, "What preposterous thing makes it

possible for this man to talk of Rachel as if she were a reality ...

like the people in the café? To him she's like the people in the café.

He knows her like the people in the café."

He answered carelessly, "Oh, yes; Miss Laskin. I remember her well. That

reminds me: you don't happen to have her address? I've got some things

she left at the office we can't use."

Tesla dug an address out of a soiled stack of papers. His pockets seemed

alive with soiled papers. Rachel's address was a piece of soiled paper

like any other piece of soiled paper. Mumbling silently, Dorn sighed.

Just in time. Anna again, and Meredith. He looked at them, recalling his

plot. Were they in love? Tesla--the blundering idiot--"I was telling

Dorn of a new artist I've found, Eddie. Rachel Laskin, a sort of Blake

and Beardsley and something else. Thin lines, screechy things. You'll

like them."

"Oh, yes, I always like them," Meredith smiled.

And Anna, "Oh, I know Rachel Laskin well. We're old friends. She's a

charming, wonderful girl. I liked her so much. Where is she?"

"In New York."

"I'll have to look at her work," Meredith added. "That's me. Always

looking at other people's work and saying, fine, great, and never

knowing a thing about it. Ye true art collector, eh, Emil?"

Anna went on, "Erik was amused with her. She is rather odd, you know,

and sort of wearing on the nerves. But you can't help liking her."

An amazing description of a face of stars. Dorn smiled.

Tesla said, "I only saw her once. A nervous girl, and she seemed upset."

More from Anna: "I hope she'll come back to Chicago. She was such fun. I

really miss her...."

All mad. Babbling of Rachel. Dorn stared cautiously about him. The

torment in him became a secret swollen beyond its proper dimensions.

They would look at him now and understand that he was not Erik Dorn, but

somebody else huddled up, burning and flopping around inside. Love was a

virulent form of idiocy. It meant nothing to people outside. Everything

inside. Anna talking about Rachel started a panic in him. She was

playing with memories of Rachel. Do you remember this? and that? As if

he, of course, had forgotten her. Yes, there was an "of course" about

it. A gruesome "of course." Gruesome--an excellent word. It meant Anna

petting and laughing over a knife that was to plunge itself into her

heart. When? Soon ... soon. He had an address copied from a soiled piece

of paper.

They bundled out of the café. Waiters, wraps. Eddie helped with the

wraps. Alien streets, dark waiting buildings, lights, and then

good-nights. The moments whirled mysteriously away. What did the moments

matter? He was going to Rachel. Ah! When had he decided that? He didn't

remember reaching any decision in the matter.

They entered a cab alone. The cab rolled away over snow-packed streets.

But he couldn't leave Anna. Yes he could. Why not? No. Impossible. A

faint thought like a storm packed into a nutshell.... "I will."

"You were wonderful to-night, Erik. When I see you with other men I just

thank God for you."

That was the intolerable thing--his wonderfulness, his damned

wonderfulness. It existed in her. He couldn't leave it behind.

Her hand lay warm in his.

"Kiss me, dearest!"

He kissed her and laughed. He was happy, then? Oh, yes, he was going to

Rachel. Simple. Four months of misery, making a weeping idiot out of

himself. And now, a decision had been reached. His head on her shoulder,

she wanted it so, she was whispering caresses to him. This was Anna. But

it would soon be Rachel. What difference did such things make? One

woman, another woman....

"You're like Jimmie was."

Happy tears filled her eyes, to be noted and remembered now that he was

going to Rachel. Jimmie was a baby who had died--his baby. Offspring was

a more humorous word. To be noted and remembered. What a dream!

"I'm so happy, Erik. Everything seems wonderful again when you smile and

laugh like this. Your cheeks make such a nice little curve and your head

on my shoulder, where it belongs ... for always and ever...."

Let her sing. He could stand it. What did it matter? But would she die

when he left. He would have to say something outright. God, what a thing

to say outright. Kill not only her but the wonderful selves of him that

lived in her. That didn't mean anything. Anyway, it was rather silly to

waste time thinking.... To-night, after the ride ... going to Rachel.

He had her address. He would walk up, ring the bell. She would answer

and her face would look in surprise at him.

"My Erik, my own sweet little one!"

Dreaming of Jimmie, of him and Jimmie together.... "I don't ever want to

move. I want us to keep on riding like this forever and ever...."

Quite exquisite tragedy. A bit crude. But reality was always rather

crude. Crude or not, what was more exquisite than happiness laughing

with an unseen knife moving toward its heart? At least he was an

appreciative audience. With his head on her shoulder. Why not? Life

demanded that one be an audience sometimes ... sit back and listen to

the fates whispering. What a ride! Dark waiting houses moving by. Seven

years together, growing closer and more subtly together--yet not

together at all. Anyway, he was sick of living that way. Even without

Rachel ... a mess. Night lies. Passion lies. A dirty business. No, not

that. She was beautiful. Anna, not Rachel. He was the unclean one.

"Are you happy, beloved?"

"Yes."

Lord, what an answer to give her. A prayer! Insufferably exquisite gods

of drama--she was praying. Tears rushing from her eyes.

"Sweet Jesus ... sweet brother Jesus ... thanks for everything. Oh, I've

been so unfaithful. Not to believe. Thanks for my wonderful Erik."

He must kill her, swiftly, before she could know that prayers were vain.

Easier to kill her body than to listen to this. How, though? With his

hands about her throat. Murder was an old business. It would be mercy to

her. But he was too much a coward. A cowardly audience listening to

words ... far away from him.

"Beloved ... darling. Oh, it's so good to have you back again."

"Don't talk." He put his arm tightly around her, his fingers fumbling at

her bare neck. But that was only a pretense, a bit of insipid

melodrama--his fingers. He was an actor frightened by his part.

The taxi driver was demanding $4.50--an outrage.

"That's too much, Erik."

But he paid. Should he tell him to wait? He would need him in a few

minutes. No, too cold-blooded to tell him to wait. And anyway, Anna was

listening. He was still an audience. He would jump on the stage and

begin acting later. Soon.

"Keep the change."

"Thanks, sir."

An insane world ... a polite and jovial taxi-cab driver carrying

lunatics about the streets.

"Oh, dear, look! Father's sitting up." She was disappointed. "And I

wanted to kiss and hug you before we went upstairs."

Dorn unlocked the door of his house. He still had a house and could

unlock its door without its meaning anything. To-morrow he would have no

house. That was the difference between to-day and to-morrow. The old man

would be there. That would make it easier. He shivered. "I'm going to do

something then".... This was alarming.

Anna's arms were around him before he could remove his coat. She clung,

laughing, kissing. Let her.... "The doomed man ate a hearty breakfast of

ham and eggs and seemed in good spirits." Reporters, with a sense of the

dramatic, usually wrote it that way. Ham and eggs were a symbol. Should

he mull around for extenuating epigrams--a fervid rigmarole on the

mysteries and ethics of life? Or strike swift, short?... "Death was

instantaneous. The drop fell at 10:08 A.M. sharp." Always sharp. Damn

his reporters!

"Anna ..."

She bloomed at the sound of her name.

"I want to talk, Anna."

"No, let's not talk. I'm so happy.... Aren't you up rather late,

father?"

Thank God she was getting nervous. One can't kill a smile.

"Anna, come to me."

An old phrase of their love-making. He hadn't meant to use it. But

phrases that have been used for seven years get so they say themselves.

She moved quickly toward him. His father--smiling beyond her shoulder.

Now for the slaughter....

"Do you love me enough to make me happy, Anna?"

"I would give my life for you."

He was deplorably calm--too calm. His eyes were looking at books on

shelves, at chairs, at pictures on the walls, as if everything was of an

identical importance.

"I know, but that isn't it."

"What then, Erik?"

He couldn't say it. Particularly with his father smiling--an irritating

old man who would never die. Should he fall at her feet and whimper? He

couldn't. Her face was his, her eyes his. It wasn't leaving Anna.

Himself, though. Yes, he was confronting himself. Seven years of selves.

All wonderful. Everything he had said and done for seven years lived in

Anna. So he must kill seven years of himself with a phrase. No. Yet he

was talking on. It soothed him, untightened the agony in him.

"Listen, Anna. I can't tell you, but I must. My words circle away from

me. They run away from what I want to tell you. Anna ... I must go

away--leave you."

Tears in his eyes, over his face. His voice, warm, blurring with tears.

He choked, paused.

"Erik...."

A white sound. Something bursting.

"If I stay, I'll go mad."

"No ... no ... Erik ..."

Still white sounds, only whiter. Blank sounds, caused by speechlessness.

Sounds of speechlessness.

"I may come back, if you'll take me back sometime...."

A man was always an imbecile. Imbecility is a trademark. But there were

no sounds now. His eyes tried to turn away from her. A face had ceased

to live and give forth sounds. He remained looking at it. A cold,

emptied face, like a picture frame with a picture recently torn out of

it.

"Anna, for God's sake, hate me. Hate me. Loathe me the rest of

your life. I've lied and lied to you--nothing but lies.... No,

that's not true. But now it is. Think of me as vile when I go

away.... Otherwise..."

Tears blubbered out of him.

... "otherwise I'll die thinking of you. Don't look at me that way. Yell

at me.... You've known it. I can't help it.... It's something. I can't

help it."

Behind this voice he thought: "It's not me alone. Nights of love ...

kisses ... Jimmie ... seven years.... Little things. Oh, God, little

things. We're all leaving her--pulling ourselves out of her."

"Where are you going, my son?"

Could he lie now? Yes, anything that made it easier.

"Nowhere. Anywhere. I must go. Otherwise I'll choke to death. Take care

of her. There's money. All hers. I'll write later about it. Anna ...

don't please."

The thing was a botch. Wrong, all wrong. But that didn't matter. His

coat and hat mattered more than phrases. Looking for a coat and hat when

he should be winding up the scene properly. These were preposterous

banalities that distinguished life, unedited, from melodrama. Where was

his hat? His hat ... hat ... Life, Fate, Tragedy had mislaid his

insufferable hat. Ah ... on the floor.

She was standing staring at him. Would she die on her feet? Quick,

before the shriek. It was coming ... a madness that would frighten him

forever if he heard it. What a scoundrel he was! Why deny it? But in a

few years he would be dead and no longer a scoundrel, and all this so

much forgotten dust.

"Write to us, my son. And come back soon."

He closed the door softly behind him and started to walk. But his legs

ran. It had been easy ... easy. He stumbled, sprawled upon the iced

pavement, bruising his face. He picked himself up unaware that he had

stopped running. Night, houses, streets, what matter? In a few

years--dust. But he had left in time. That was the important thing.

Another minute and he would have heard her. A terrible unheard sound.

He had left it behind. He had left her unfinished. Why was he running?

Oh, yes--Anna.

He paused and held his eyes from staring back at his house. His eyes

would pull him back to the door. Little things--oh, the little things

made hurts. He must turn a corner. Light does not travel around corners.

Gone. The house was gone with all its little things. One jerk and he had

ripped away....

He walked slowly. A coldness suddenly fell into him. Rachel. He had

forgotten about Rachel. Never a thought for Rachel. Disloyal. Where

was she--the mirror of stars? Nowhere. He didn't love her. Was he

insane? He loved Anna, not Rachel. He must go back. The thing was

lopsided--pretense. He'd been pretending he was in love with Rachel.

Love ... schoolboy business. Mirror of stars! Something scribbled on a

valentine. That was love. Rachel. No.... There was another face. Cold,

emptied--a circle of deaths. Anna's face. But he must remember Rachel

because he was going to Rachel--remember something about her. Say her

name over and over. But that wasn't Rachel. That was a word like ...

like pocketbook. Something about her....

Ah! yes. Her coat lying in the snow. He sighed with a determined effort

at sadness ... her little coat in the snow!

PART III

WINGS

CHAPTER I

"Boom, boom," said the city of New York, "we have gone to war!"

And all the other cities, big and little, said a boom-boom of their own.

A mighty nation had gone to war.

A time of singing. Songs on the lips of crowds. Lights in their eyes.

High-pitched, garbled words, brass bands, flags, speeches.... Mine eyes

have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord but we don't want the

Bacon, All we Want is a Piece of the Rhine(d).... A brass monkey playing

"Nearer, My God, to Thee" on a red banjo.... _Allons, les enfants_ ...

_le jour de gloire est arrivé!_ You tell 'em, kid! Store fronts,

cabarets, hotel lobbies, sign-boards, office buildings all become

shining citadels of righteousness beleaguered by the powers of darkness.

Newspaper headlines exploding like firecrackers on the corners. A

bonfire of faces in the streets. A bonfire of flags above the streets.

Boom, boom!... societies for the relief of martyred Belgium. Societies

for Rolling Cigarettes, Bandages, Exterminating Hun Spies, Exterminating

Yellow Dogs and Slackers.... Wah, don't let anybody be a slacker! A

slacker is a dirty dog who does what I wanna do but am afraid to do.

Who lies down. Who won't stand up on his hind legs and cheer when he's

supposed to.... Societies for Knitting Sweaters, Giving Bazaars,

Spotting Hun Propaganda. A bonfire of committees, communes, Jabberwocks,

clubs, Green Walruses, False Whiskers, Snickersnees, War Boards, and

Eagles Shrieking from their Mountain Heights with an obligato by the

Avon Comedy Four--I'm a Jazz Baby....

A mighty nation had gone to war. Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare

wheeled out the Home Guards. Said the Débutante to her Soldier Boy in

the moonlight, "To Hell with the chaperone, War is War...." Somebody

lost Eighty Hundred Billion Dollars trying to build aeroplanes out of

Flypaper and a new kind of Cement. And the Press, slapping Fright Wig

No. 7 on its bald head, announced to the Four Winds, " ... once more

glory, common cause, sacrifice, welded peoples of America, invincible

host, lay common blood, altar liberty, sacred principle, government of

the people by the people for the people perish earth" ... And the

Pulpits obliged with an "O God who art in Heaven girthed in shining

armor before Thee Thy cause Liberty Humanity Democracy Thy blessing

inspire light of sacrifice brave women and hero men give us strength O

Lord not falter see way of Righteousness stern hearts bear great burden

Thou has given us carry on till powers of darkness routed virtue again

triumphant. Thy will done on earth as it is in Heaven...."

And the soldiers entraining for the cantonments--clerks and salesmen,

rail-splitters and window-washers with the curve of youth on their

faces--the soldiers said, "Whasamatter with Uncle Sam? Rah ... Wow ...

Good-bye ... We'll treat 'em rough ... ashes to ashes and dust to dust

if the Camels don't get you the Fatimas must...." And in the cantonments

the soldiers said, " ... this lousy son of a badwoman of a shavetail

can't put nothin' over on me ... say ... oh, I hate to get up in the

morning, oh, how I long to remain in bed...." And in France the soldiers

sang " ... there are smiles that make you happy there are smiles that

make you sad.... The Knights of Columbus are all right but the Y. M. C.

A. is a son of a badwoman of a grafting mess...."

"Yanks Land in France ... Yanks in Big Battle ... Yanks Sink Submarines"

... bang banged the headlines. Don't eat meat on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Help the Red Cross buy Doughnuts for the Salvation Army and keep an eye

on Your Austrian Janitor.... Elephants, tom-cats, and chorus-girls; a

hallelujah with a red putty nose, Seventy-six Thousand Press Agents

Walking on their Hands, Jabberwocks, Horned Toads, and Prima Donnas ...

here comes the Liberty Loan Drive ...

A mighty nation had gone to war. Boom! Boom!

And in a moon-lighted room overlooking a fanfare of roofs, Erik Dorn

whispered one night to Rachel,

"You have given me wings!"

CHAPTER II

Time to get up. An oblong of sunlight squeezing through beneath the

drawn blind and slapping itself boldly on the gloomy carpet ... "shame

on all sleepy heads. Here's another day...."

Rachel smiled as she opened her eyes. She lay quietly, smiling. It was

as it was yesterday--as the day before. One opened one's eyes and life

came quickly back with a "Hello, here I am--where you left me." So one

lay, fearful to move, like a cup of wine that is too full and mustn't be

joggled with even a kick at the bed sheets.

One lay and smiled. Thoughts and stockings side by side somewhere on the

floor. Put on stockings in a minute. Put on thoughts in a minute. Dress

oneself up in phrases, hats, skyscrapers, and become somebody.

Rachel's eyes livened slowly. Pleasant to be nobody--a bodyless,

meaningless smile awake in the morning. Opened eyes on a pillow. A deep,

deep sigh on a pillow. An oblong of sunshine on the floor. A happy bed.

A happy ceiling. A happy door. Nothing else. Nobody else.

But a hat, a blue straw hat with a jauntily curved brim, sat on a

candlestick and winked. Which reminded one that one was alive. After

all, one was somebody. Time to get up. All the king's horses and all the

king's men demanded of one to arise and get dressed and go out and be

somebody. Rachel kicked at the sheets. Protest against the Decrees of

Destiny. " ... those are my feet kicking. Hello, here I am."

There was a note on the pillow adjacent. It read: "At eight o'clock

to-night I'll return. Please don't get run over in the streets. ERIK."

Well, why not kiss the note, embrace the pillow and sigh? Why try to be

anything but an idiot?... "Yes, Mr. Erik Dorn, I will be very careful

and not let myself get run over in the streets."

Rachel's head fell on the adjacent pillow and she lay whispering, "I

love you," until the sound of her voice caused her to laugh.... Time to

get up. Dear me! She closed her eyes and rolled herself out of bed....

"Ouch!..." She sat up on the floor, legs extended, and stared at a shoe.

Alas! a shoe is a crestfallen memory. A crestfallen yesterday lurks in

old shoes. Shoes are always crestfallen. Even the shoes of lovers

waiting under the bed weep and snivel all night. But why sit naked on

the floor, stark, idiotically naked on the floor with legs thrust out

like a surprised illustration in _La Vie Parisienne_ and toes curling

philosophically toward a shoe?... "I'll do as I please. Very well."

Sanity demanded clothes. But a sudden memory started her to her feet.

She stood up lightly and hurried toward the large oval mirror.... "Your

breasts are white birds dreaming under the stars. Your body is like the

Queens of China parading through the moon...."

She looked at herself in the mirror. Yes. But why not the Emperors of

Afghanistan Walking on Their Hands? Thus ... "my Body is like the

Presidents of the United States Riding Horseback...."

She placed her hands on her slim hips and tautened her figure. When Erik

was away all one could do was play with the things he had said. Was she

as beautiful as he thought? A joyousness flowed through her. The mirror

gave her back a memory of Erik. She was a memory of Erik.

When she looked at herself in the mirror she saw only something that

lived in the admiring eyes of Erik. Beautiful legs, beautiful body and

"eyes like the courts of Solomon at night, like circles of incense." ...

All were memories of Erik.

She whispered softly to the figure in the mirror, "Erik knows your eyes.

They are the beckoning hands of dreams." Thus Erik spoke of them. "I

mustn't laugh at myself. I am more beautiful than anything or anybody in

the whole world. There is nobody as beautiful as the woman Erik Dorn

loves."

If she were only in a forest now where she could run, jump in the air,

scream at birds, and end by hurling herself into dim, cool water.

Instead, an absurd business of fastening her silk slip.

She seated herself on the bed, her stockings hanging from her hand, and

fell again to listening to Erik. His word made an endless echo in her

head.... "Perins a droll species. A sort of indomitable ass. Refuses to

succumb to his intelligence. If you think he's in love with your Mary

you're a downright imbecile. The man adjusts his passions to his phrases

as neatly as a pretty woman pulling on her stockings...." She didn't

like Erik to refer to pretty women pulling on their stockings. What an

idiot! If Erik wanted to he could go out and help all the pretty women

in New York pull on their stockings. As if that had anything to do with

their love. Somebody else's stockings! A scornful exclamation point. Now

her skirt, waist, shoes, and hat, and she was somebody.

Somebody walking out of a house, in a street, looking, smiling, swinging

along. The beautiful one, the desired one out for a promenade,

embarrassed somehow by the fact that she was alive, that people looked

at her and street-cars made frowning overtures to her. This was not her

world. Yet she must move around in it as if she were a fatuous part of

its grimacings and artifices. Shop windows that snickered into her eyes

... "shoes $8 to-day. Hats, $10.50.... Traveling-cases only $19...." She

must be polite and recognize its existence by composing her features,

wearing a hat, saying "pardon me" when she trod on anyone's feet or

bumped an elbow into a stomach. A stranger's world--gentlemen in straw

hats; gentlemen in proud uniforms marching off to war; a fretwork of

gentlemen, signs, windows, hats, and automobiles and a lot of other

things, all continually tangling themselves up in front of her nose. A

city pouring itself out of the morning sky and landing with a splash and

a leap of windows around her feet. Thus the beautiful one, out for a

promenade and moving excitedly through a superfluous world.

She plunged into a perilous traffic knot and emerged unscathed. But that

was wasting time. Time--another superfluous element, a tick-tock for the

little wingless ones to crawl by. Then she remembered--a moon-lighted

room ... "you have given me wings!" Her thought traced itself excitedly

about the memory. This had happened. That had been said. Yesterday,

to-day and to-morrow--all the same. Memories mixing with dreams. Wings!

Yes, wings that beat, beat on the air and left one moving behind a blue

dress, under a jaunty hat like all other jaunty hats. But something else

moved elsewhere. There were two worlds for her. But not for Erik. One

world for Erik. Where would his wings take him? Beyond life there was

still life. A wall of life that never came to an end or a top. That was

the one world for Erik. Hurl himself against it, higher, higher. Soar

till the superfluous ones became little dots on a ribbon of streets.

Tears came into her eyes. The strange world drifted away--a flutter of

faces. A silence seemed to descend upon the streets as if their roaring

were not a noise but the opened mouth of a dumb man. Erik had come to

her. Arm in arm, smiling tears at him she walked through the spinning

crowd in a path hidden from all snickering windows and revolving faces.

A dream walk. These were her wings.

Consciousness returned. She rubbed her eyes with the knuckles of her

hands and laughed softly. She must not excite herself with hysterical

worries. Wondering about Erik. There had been days when she had moved

like a corpse through the streets, a corpse always finding new and

further deaths. Death days with her heart tearing at empty hours, with

time like a disease in her veins. Days before he had come. Now all life

was in her. Why invent new causes of grief? She must talk sane words to

herself. But the sane words bowed a polite adieu and putting on their

hats walked away and sat down behind the snickering windows.... Other

words arrived quickly, breathlessly.... There was something in his eyes

that frightened, something that did not rest with her but seemed to

reach on further. In the midst of their ecstasies his eyes, burning,

unsatisfied, making her suddenly chill with fear, would whisper to her,

"There is something more." In each other's arms it was she who came to

an ending, not he. His kisses, his "I love you," were the clawing of

fingers high up on the wall. For her they were the obliteration, the

ending beyond life.

The street unraveled itself about her with a bang of crowds and a whirl

of flags, a zigzag of eyes like innumerable little tongues licking at

the air. The tension of her thought relaxed. She remembered that when he

walked in streets he was always making pictures. She thought of his

words.... "It's a part of me that love hasn't changed, except to

increase. A pestiferous sanity keeps demanding of me that I translate

incoherent things into words. The city keeps handing itself to me like a

blank piece of paper to write on. And I scribble away."

She would do as he did, scribble words over faces and buildings as she

walked. The city was a ... a swarm of humanity. Swarm of humanity. My

God, had she lost the power of thought? Imagine telling Erik, "A crowd

of people I saw to-day reminded me of a swarm of humanity." There was no

sanity in her demanding words. Because there was no incoherence outside.

Things weren't incoherent but non-existent. The city was no mystery.

There was nothing to translate. It was an alien, superfluous world. That

was the difference between them. To Erik it was not alien or

superfluous. Even in their ecstasies there was still a world for him,

like some mocking rival laughing at him, saying, "You can embrace

Rachel. But what can you do to me? See if you can embrace me and swallow

me with a kiss...."

That's why he stayed away till eight o'clock, moving among men, writing,

talking, doing work on the magazine. But there was nothing for her to

do. She inhabited a world named Erik Dorn, a perfect world in which

there was no room even for thought.

Erik had written her a note from the office once ... "my heart is a

dancing star above the graves of your absence...." But that was almost a

lie because it was true only for one moment. Things occupied him that

could not occupy her.

Another block. Four more blocks. Noisy aliveness of streets that meant

nothing. She thought, "People look at me and envy me because I'm in a

hurry as if I had somewhere important to go. People envy everybody who

is in a hurry to get somewhere. Because for them there are no

destinations--only halting places for their drifting. Perhaps I should

go home and paint something so as to have it to show him when he comes;

or sit down somewhere and think up words to give him. I won't be able to

talk to-night. I must just be ... without thinking ... of anything but

him. Why doesn't he sometimes mention Anna? Is he afraid it might offend

me to remind me of Anna? Would it? No. Many people live in the world.

Another woman lived in Erik Dorn and he was unaware of her as the sky

is unaware of me. And she died. But she isn't dead. Only her world died.

Her sky fell down...."

Tears came to Rachel's eyes. Her hands clenched.... "Anna, Anna, forgive

me! I'm so happy. You must understand...."

She felt a revulsion. She had thought something weak, silly. "Who is

Anna that I must apologize to her? A woman. A woman Erik never loved. Do

I ask apologies of her for having lived with him--kissed him?"

There was a luncheon appointment with Mary James. Mary would bring a

man. Perrin, maybe. Mary always brought a man. Without a man, Mary was

incomplete. With a man she was even more incomplete. Mary insisted on

lunching. Rachel hurried toward the rendezvous. She thought, "People can

make me do anything now. Mary or anybody else. I was able once to walk

over them. Now they lead me around. Because nothing matters. And people

don't sicken me with their faces and talk. They're like noises in

another room that one hears, sometimes sees, but never listens to or

looks at. They ask questions. And you sit in a secret world beyond them

with your hat and dress, properly attentive."

Here was the hotel for the rendezvous. Mary out of breath,

"Rachel! Hello! Wait a minute. Whee! What do you think you're doing?

Pulling off a track meet or something? Been tryin' to catch up to you

for an hour."

Rachel looked at her. She was a golden-haired monkey full of words.

"Charlie's at the Red Cat." A man. "We're going to lunch there. What in

God's name's the matter with you?" A pause in the thick of the crowd.

"Heavens, Rachel, are you well? I mean...."

Rachel laughed. If you laughed people thought you were making answers.

They arrived at the Red Cat. Small red circular tables. Black walls. A

painstaking non-conformity about the decoration. A sprinkling of diners

saying, "We eat, but not amid normal surroundings. We are emancipated

from normal surroundings. It is extremely important that we eat off

little red circular tables instead of big brown square tables in order

to conform with our mission, which is that of non-conformity."

Mary led the way to a table occupied by a tall, broad-shouldered youth

with a crooked nose and humorously indignant eyes. He resembled a

football player who has gone into the advertising business and remained

a football player. Mary referred to him with a possessive "Charlie."

Charlie said, "Why do you always pick out these joints to eat in, Mary?

Been sittin' here for ten minutes scared to death one of these females

would begin crawlin' around on the walls. There's a waiter here with

long hair and two teeth missin' that I'm goin' to bust in the nose if

he doesn't stop."

"Stop what, Charlie?'

"Oh, lookin' at me...."

The luncheon progressed. Olives, watery soup, delicate sandwiches....

An air of breathlessness about Rachel seemed to discommode her friends.

Charlie, piqued at her inattentiveness, essayed a volubility foreign to

his words. He was not so "nice a young man" as Hazlitt. But he boasted

among friends that girls had had a chance with him. They could stay

decent if they insisted but he let them understand it wouldn't do them

any good so far as marrying them was concerned because he wasn't out for

matrimony. There was too much to see.

Mary interspersed her eating with quotations from advanced literature,

omitting the quotation marks. A slim, shining-haired girl--men adored

her hair--pretty-faced, silken-ankled, Mary had a mission in life. It

was the utilizing of vivacious arguments on art, God, morals, economics,

as exciting preliminaries for hand-holding and kissing with eyes closed,

lips murmuring, "Ah, what is life?" Technically a virgin, but devoted

exclusively to the satisfying of her sex--a satisfying that did not

demand the completion of intercourse but the stimulus of its suggestion,

Mary utilized the arts among which she dabbled as a bed for artificial

immoralities. In this bed she had managed for several years to remain an

adroitly chaste courtesan. Her pride was almost concentrated in her

chastity. She guarded it with a precocious skill, parading it through

conversation, hinting slyly of it when its existence seemed for the

moment to have become unimportant. Her chastity, in fact, had become

under skillful management the most immoral thing about her. She had

learned the trick of exciting men with her virginity.

The thing had become for her an unconscious business. After several

years of it she evolved into a flushed, nervous victim of her own

technique. She managed, however, to preserve her self-esteem by looking

upon the perversion of her normal sexual instincts into a species of

verbal nymphomania as an indication of a superior soul state. Radical

books excited her mind as ordinarily her body might have been excited by

radical caresses. Amateur theatricals, publicity work for charitable

organizations, an allowance from her home in Des Moines, provided her

with a practical background.

Charlie was her latest catch. Later he would hold her hand, slip an arm

around her, press her breasts gently and with a proper unconsciousness

of what he was doing, and she would let him kiss her ... while music

played somewhere ... preferably on a pier. Then she would murmur as he

paused, out of breath, "Ah, what is life, Charlie?" And if instead of

playing the game decently Charlie abandoned pretense and made an

adventurous sortie, there would ensue the usual dénouement ... "Charlie

... Oh, how could you? I'm ... I'm so disappointed. I thought you were

different and that love to you meant something deeper and finer

than--just that." And she would stand before him, her body alive with a

sexual ardor that seemed to find its satisfaction in the discomfiture of

the man, in his apologetic stammers, in her own virtuous words; and

reach its climax in the contrite embrace which usually followed and the

words, "Forgive me, dearest. I didn't mean.... Oh, will you marry me?"

These were things in store for Charlie. But he must listen first. There

were essential preliminaries--a routine of the chase. Her trimly shod

foot crawled carefully against his ankle. There were really two types of

men. Men who blushed when you touched their ankle under the table, and

men who pretended not to blush. Charlie blushed with a soup-spoon at his

lips. He glanced nervously at Rachel but she seemed breathlessly asleep

with her eyes open--a paradoxical condition which baffled Charlie and

caused him to withdraw disdainfully from further consideration of her.

Rachel, eating without hunger, was remembering an actress in vaudeville

making a preliminary curtain announcement to her "Moments from Great

Plays" ... "Lady Godiva accordingly rode na-aked through the streets of

Coventry, but, howevah, retained her vuhtue...."

"Oh, but Charlie, you're not listening," explained Mary. "I was saying

that chastity in woman is something man has insisted upon in order to

show his capacity for waste. He likes the world to know that all his

possessions are new and that he can command the purchase of new things

because it shows his capacity for waste by which his standard of

respectability is gauged in the eyes of his fellows...."

Charlie lent an ear to the garbled veblenisms and gave it up. The

mutterings and verbal excitements of women in general were mysteries

beyond Charlie's desire to comprehend. They had, for Charlie, nothing to

do with the case. It was pleasing, though, to have her talk of chastity.

Chastity had a connection with the case. It was closely related to

unchastity. He nodded his head vaguely and focused his attention on

questing for the foot under the table that had withdrawn itself. The

long-haired waiter with the missing teeth was an annoyance. He turned

and glowered at him.

"Don't you think so, Rachel?" Mary pursued.

A monkey chattering. Another monkey kicking at her toes under the table.

A room full of monkeys and all the monkeys looking at her, talking to

her, kicking her foot, inspired by the curious hallucination that she

was a part of their monkey world. Rachel laughed and eyes turned to her.

People were always startled by laughter that sounded so sudden. There

must be preliminaries to laughter so as to get the atmosphere prepared

for it.

"Rachel, I'm talking to you, if you please."

Mary, puckering her forehead very importantly, was informing her that

Mary existed and was demanding proof of the fact. That was the secret of

people. They didn't really exist to themselves until somebody recognized

them and proved they were alive--by answering their questions. People

lived only when somebody talked to them--anybody. The rest of the time

they went along with nothing inside them except stomachs that grew

hungry.

She answered Mary, "Oh, there are lots of things you don't know." And

laughed, this time careful of not sounding too sudden. She meant there

was something that lived behind hours, there was a dream world in which

the words and faces of people were ridiculously non-existent. But Mary

was a literal-minded monkey and thought she was referring to quotations

from books superior to the ones she used.

"Oh, is that so?" said Mary.

Charlie, also literal-minded and still after the foot, echoed Rachel,

"You bet your life it is."

"And I suppose you know all about them, Miss Laskin." Very sarcastic. An

inflection that had made her a conversational terror in the Des Moines

High School.

Mary was always conscious of not having read enough and of therefore

being secretly inferior to more omnivorous readers. She did not think

Rachel read much, but Rachel was different. Rachel was an artist and

had ideas. Mary respected artists and was always sarcastic toward them.

It usually made them talk a lot--particularly male artists--and thus

enabled her to find out what their ideas were and use them as her own.

Nevertheless, despite her most careful parrotings the artists always

managed to have other ideas always different from the ones she stole

from them. Fearing some devastating rejoinder from Rachel--Rachel was

the kind of person who could blurt out things that landed on you like a

ton of bricks--she sought to fortify Charlie's opinion of her by

replacing her foot against his ankle.

"Well, what are they, Rachel?"

What were the things Mary knew nothing about? A large order. Rachel's

tongue began to wag in her mind. Stand up and make a speech. Fling her

arms about. High-sailing words. Absurd! A laugh would answer. Laughs

always answered. Rachel laughed. She would suffocate among such people,

exasperating strangers with inquisitive faces and nervous feet.

At the conclusion of the luncheon Charlie had reached a new stage in his

amorous maneuverings. He had paid no further attention to Rachel,

although vividly conscious of her. But Mary offered definite horizons. A

bird in the hand. There was something exciting about Mary not to be

encountered in the Junos and Aphrodites of his cabaret quests. Mary

appeared virtuous--and yet promised otherwise. She used frank

words--lust, chastity, virginity, sexuality. Charlie quivered. The

words sticking out of long, twisted sentences, detached themselves and

came to him like furtively indecent caresses. Mary promised. So he

agreed to go with her to the Players' Studio where she was rehearsing in

some kind of nut show.

"You must come too, Rachel. Frank Brander has done some gorgeous

settings for the next bill."

Long hours before eight o'clock.

"I've got some important things on at the office," Charlie hesitated.

"Yes, I'll go," Rachel answered. This, mysteriously, seemed to decide

Charlie. He would go too.

In the buzzing little auditorium of the Players' Studio, Charlie

endeavored to further his quest. But the atmosphere seemed,

paradoxically enough, a handicap. A free-and-easy atmosphere with men

and women in odd-looking rigs sauntering about. The place was as immoral

as a honky-tonk. Charlie stared at the young women in smocks and bobbed

hair, smoking cigarettes, sitting with their legs showing. They should

have been prostitutes but they weren't. Or maybe they were, only he

wasn't used to that kind. Too damn gabby. Mary had jumped up on the

small stage and was talking with a group of young men and women. He

moved to follow, but hesitated. He didn't have the hang of this kind of

thing. The sick-looking youths loitering around, casually embracing the

gals and rubbing their arms, seemed to know the lingo. Charlie sat down

in disgust and yielded himself to a feeling of stiffly superior virtue.

In a corner Rachel listened to Frank Brander.

"We've got quite a promising outfit here, Miss Laskin. Why don't you

come around and help with the drops or something? The more the merrier.

We're putting on a thing by Chekov next week and a strong thing by

Elvenah Jack. Lives down the street. Know her? Oh, it isn't much." He

smiled good-naturedly at the miniature theater. "But it's fun. I'll show

you around."

Rachel submitted. Brander was a friend of Emil Tesla. He drew things for

_The Cry_. He had a wide mouth and ugly eyes that took things for

granted--that took her for granted. She was a woman and therefore

interested in talking to a man. He held her arm too much and kept saying

in her thought, "We've got to pretend we're decent, but we're not. We're

a man and woman." But what did that matter? Long hours before eight

o'clock.

On the stage Brander became a personality. A group of nondescript faces

deferred to him. A woman with stringy hair and an elocutionist's mouth,

grew dramatic as he passed. They paused before Mary. Brander had stopped

abruptly in his talk. He turned toward Mary and stared at her until she

began to grow pink. Rachel wondered. Mary wanted to run away, but

couldn't. Brander finally said shortly, "Hello, you!" His eyes blazed

for an instant and then grew angry.

"Come on, Miss Laskin." He jerked her and she followed. In the wings

half hidden from the group that crowded the tiny stage Brander said, "Do

you know that girl?"

Rachel nodded.

"She's no good," he grinned. "I like women one thing or the other. She's

both. And no good. I got her number."

Rachel noticed that he had moved his hand up on her arm and was gently

pressing the flesh under her shoulder. He kept saying to her now in her

thought, "I've got a man's body and you've got a woman's body. There's

that difference between us. Why hide it?" His voice became soft and he

said aloud, "Don't you like men to be one kind or the other? And not

both?"

Rachel looked at him blankly. She must pretend she didn't know what he

was talking about. Otherwise she would begin to talk. He was a man to

whom one talked because he demanded it. His face, ugly and boyish,

seemed to have rid itself of many expressions and retained a certainty.

The certainty said, "I'm a man looking for women."

Brander laughed.

"Oh, you're one of the other kind," he said. "Beg pardon. No harm done.

Let's go out front."

Out front in the half-lighted auditorium Brander suddenly left her. She

saw him a few minutes later standing close to a nervous-voiced woman who

was saying, "Oh, dear! Dear me! I'll never get this part. I won't! I

just know it!"

Brander was toying idly with a chain that hung about the woman's neck.

He was looking at her intently. Mary approached, bearing Charlie along.

She began whispering to Rachel, "That man's a beast. I hate him. He

thinks he's an artist, but he's a beast. You'll find out if you're not

careful."

Rachel asked, "Who?"

"Brander," Mary answered.

Charlie interrupted, indignation rumbling in his voice,

"A bunch of freaks, all of them. I don't see why a decent girl wants to

hang around in a dump like this."

He was more grieved than indignant. A woman with dark hair and long

gypsy earrings had suddenly laughed at him when he sat down beside her.

Mary patted his arm.

"I know, Charlie. But you don't understand. My turn in a few minutes,

Rachel. We'll wait here till the Chekov thing comes on. Do you know

Felixson? He's got a wonderful thing for the bill after this. A

religious play. Awfully strong. That's him with the bushy hair. You must

know him."

Charlie grunted.

"You don't mean you act in this damn joint?"

"Oh, I'm just helping out for next week. It's lots of fun, Charlie."

Rachel stood up suddenly from the uncomfortable bench seat.

"I must go," she murmured. "I'm sorry."

Turning quickly she walked out of the place. Behind her Charlie laughed.

"A wild little thing."

Mary with her body pressed closely against him combated an influence

that seemed at work upon Charlie.

"She's changed a great deal, poor girl," said Mary.

"What is she?"

"An artist. She says wonderful things sometimes. Awfully strong things

and just hates people."

"A nut," agreed Charlie.

"Oh, she's sort of strange. Puts on a lot, of course." Mary felt

uncomfortable. Rachel had managed to leave behind a feeling of the

unimportance of everybody but Rachel. She was leaning against Charlie

for vindication. His body, trembling at the contact, provided it; but

his words annoyed her.

"Well, she's different from the gang in here--I'll say that for her."

"Oh, let's forget her," Mary whispered. "I don't like this place.

Really, I ..." She hesitated and thought, "Rachel thinks she's

mysterious and enigmatic and everything, but she's an awful fool. She

can't put it over on me." Yet she sat, despite the vindication of

Charlie's amorous embarrassment, and wondered, parrot fashion, "Ah, what

is life?"

Outside Rachel was walking again. The memory of her meeting with Mary,

of Brander's ugly appealing face that whispered frankly of his sex, was

dead in her. Little toy people playing at games. Erik hated them. Erik

said ... well, it was something too indecent to repeat. She couldn't get

used to Erik's indecent comparisons. But they were like that--the toy

people in the little toy village. She didn't hate them the way Erik did.

Some of them were just playing. But there were others. Why think of

them? Walk, walk. Just be. A perfect circle.... "There's nothing to do.

I don't want anything. To-night he'll talk to me. And I'll make real

answers." Why did she want to be kissed? Kisses were for people like

Mary. "Oh, he'll kiss me and I'll become alive."

It was late afternoon. Still, long hours before eight o'clock. It

pleased Erik when she told him how empty the day had been. But she

mustn't harp too much on that. It would sound as if she were making

demands on him. No demands. He was free. They weren't married. A crowd

was solidifying in 10th Street. She walked slowly, watching the people

gathering at the corner. The office of _The Cry_ was there. She

remembered this and hurried forward.

Something was happening. An excitement was jerking people out of their

silences. Blank, silent faces around her suddenly opened and dropped

masks. Bodies drifting carelessly up and down the street broke into

runnings.

Around the corner people were shouting, pressed into a ball of wild

faces and waving arms. It was in front of the office of _The Cry_ that

something was happening.

"Kill the dirty rascal! Make the son-of-a----kiss the flag!"

Words screeched out of a bay of sound.

"Kill him! Kill the son-of-a---- String him up!"

On the edge of the ball that was growing larger and seeming about to

burst into some wild activity, Rachel stood tip-toed. She could see two

burly-looking men dragging a bloody figure out of a doorway. Blood

dropped from him, leaving stains on the top step. The two men were

twisting his wrists as if they wanted them to come off. Yet they didn't

act as if they were twisting anybody's wrists off. They seemed to be

just waiting.

It was Tesla between them. His face was cut. One of his arms hung limp.

Blood began to spurt from his wrists and drop from his fingers as if he

were writing something on the top step in a foolish way. At the sight of

him the noises increased. The ball of faces grew angrier. Policemen

swung sticks. They yelled, "Back, there! Everybody back!" Runners were

coming from all directions as if the city had suddenly found a place to

go and was pouring itself into 10th Street.

"Hey ... hey ... they've got him!"

Nobody asked who, but came running with a shout.

The street broke over Rachel. Tesla vanished. Roaring in her ears, faces

tumbling, lifting in a wildness about her. A make-believe of horror. Her

thought gasped, "Where am I? What is this?" Her feet were carrying her

into the boiling center of a vat of bodies. Then she saw Tesla again,

standing above them. A blood-smeared man with a broken arm, his head

raised. But he was somebody else.

Caught in the pack she became far away, seeing things move as with an

almost lifeless deliberateness. Tesla's face was the center. His swollen

eyes were trying to open. His paralyzed mouth was trying to form itself

back into a mouth. A mist covered him as if the raging street and the

many voices focused into a film and hid him. Behind this film he was

doing something slowly. Then he became vivid. He was shouting,

"Comrades ... workers ..."

A roar from the street concealed him and his voice. But the vividness of

him lingered and emerged again.

"Comrades!"

A fist struck against his mouth. His head wabbled. Another fist struck

against his eye. The two men holding his wrists were striking into his

uncovered face with their fists. A gleeful, joyous sound went up. Rachel

stared at the wabbling head of Tesla. The street laughed. Fists hammered

at an uncovered face. People were coming on a run to see. A bell

clanged. Beside her a man shrieked, "Make him kiss the flag, the dirty

anarchist!"

Things slowed again. A film was over the scene. Tesla was being dragged

down the steps. His head kept falling back as if he wanted to go to

sleep. Then something happened. A laugh, high like a scream, lit the

air. It made her cold. The men dragging Tesla down the steps paused, and

their fists moving with a leisureliness struck into his face, making no

sound and not doing anything. It was Tesla who had laughed. The fists

kept moving through a film. But he laughed again--a high laugh like a

scream that lit the air with mystery.

When the pack began to sift and sweep her into strange directions she

felt that Tesla was still laughing, though she could no longer hear him.

The street became shapeless. Something had ended. A bell clanged away.

People were again walking. They had dull faces and were quiet. She

caught a glimpse of the step on which Tesla had stood behind a mist and

cried, "Comrades!" She remembered often having stood on the step herself

in coming to the office of _The Cry_. This made her sicken. It was her

wrists that had been twisted, her uncovered face that had been struck

by fists.

The emotion left her as a hand tugged eagerly at her arm. It pulled her

up on the crowded curbing.

"Good God, Rachel, what are you doing here?"

She looked up and saw Hazlitt in uniform. He kept pulling her. Why

should Hazlitt be pulling her out of a crowd in 10th Street? She tried

to jerk away. She must run from Hazlitt before he began talking. He

would make her scream.

Turning to him with a quiet in her voice she said carefully:

"Please let me go. You hurt my arm."

But his hand remained. His eyes, shining and indignant, prodded at

her.... The street was quiet. Nothing had happened. Unconscious

buildings, unconscious traffic, faces wrapped in solitudes--these were

in the streets again. She turned and looked with amazement at her

companion. People do not fall out of the sky and seize you by the arm.

There was something stark about Hazlitt pulling her out of the street

mob and holding her arm. He was an amputation. You pulled yourself out

of a filth of faces and sprawled suddenly into a quiet, cheerful street

holding an arm in your hand, as if it had come loose from the pack. It

seemed part of some arrangement--Tesla, the pack, Hazlitt's arm. Her

amazement died. Hazlitt was saying:

"I knew you'd be in that mob. I thought when I saw them haul that dirty

beggar out ..."

He halted, pained by a memory. Rachel nodded. The curious sense of

having been Tesla came again to her. He had laughed in a way that

reminded her of herself. She would laugh like that if they struck at her

face. Her eyes turned frightenedly toward Hazlitt. What was he going to

do? Arrest her? He was in uniform. But why should he arrest her? His

eyes had the fixed light of somebody performing a duty. He was arresting

her, and Erik would come home and not find her. Her lithe body became

possessed of an astounding strength. With a vicious grimace she tore

herself from his grip and confronted him, her eyes on fire.

"Please, Rachel. Come with me till I can talk. You must ..."

A white-faced Hazlitt, with suffering eyes. Then he was not arresting

her. The street bobbed along indifferently.

"I'm going away in an hour. You'll maybe never see me again. But I can't

go away till I've talked to you. Please."

It didn't matter then. She would be home in time. And it was easier to

obey the desperate whine of his voice then run into the crowd. He would

chase after her, whining louder and louder. They entered a hotel lobby.

Hazlitt picked out a secluded corner as if arranging for some rite. He

was going to do something. Rachel walked after him, annoyed,

indifferent. What did it matter? This was George Hazlitt--a name that

meant nothing and yet could talk to her.

Sitting opposite her the name began, "Now you must promise me you won't

get up and run away till I'm through--no matter what I say."

She promised with a nod. She must be polite. Being polite was part of

the idiotic penalties attached to adventuring outside her real world, in

unreal superfluous streets. What had made Tesla laugh? His laugh had not

been unreal. Almost as if it were a part of her. Blood dropping from his

fingers. A bleeding man.

"I'm leaving for France, Rachel. I couldn't go away without seeing you.

I've spent a week trying to find you and this morning they told me to

inquire at _The Cry_."

Was he apologizing for Tesla? She remembered the faces that had swept by

in 10th Street. His had been one of them. Hazlitt had twisted Tesla's

wrists and struck into his uncovered face.

Rachel slipped to her feet and stared about her. A hand caught at her

arm and pulled her into the chair.

"You promised. You can't leave till you hear me."

She sank back.

"Give me five minutes. I'm unworthy of them. But I've found you and must

talk now. I can't go across without telling you."

She looked up. Tears almost in his eyes. His voice grown low. He seemed

to be whispering something that didn't belong to the sanity of the hotel

lobby and the two large potted palms in the corner.

"I'm unclean. I've been looking for you to ask you to forgive me."

Hazlitt's hands crept over his knees.

"Oh, God, you must listen and forgive me."

This was a mad monkey uttering noises too unintelligible for even an

attentive hat, dress, and pair of shoes to make anything of.

"Rachel, I love you. I don't know how to say it. There's something I've

got to say. Because ... otherwise I can't love you. I can't love you

with the thing unsaid."

He looked bewilderedly about him and gulped, his face red, his eyes

tortured.

"It's about a woman."

"Perhaps," she thought, "he's going to boast. No, he's going to cry.

What does he want?"

The sound of his voice made her ill. If he were going to make love why

didn't he start instead of gulping and covering his face and choking

with tears in a hotel lobby as if he were an actor?

"I was drawn into it. I couldn't help it. One afternoon in my office

after the trial. Then she kept after me. The thought of you has been

like knives in me. I've loved you all through it and hated myself for

thinking of you, dragging you into it. I dragged the thought of you down

with me. But she wouldn't let me go. God, I could kill her now. I broke

away after weeks. She got somebody else. I've been living in hell ever

since--on account of you. I'm unclean and can't love you any more. If it

hadn't been for my going across I'd not have come to you. But the war's

given me my chance. I can't explain it. I went in to--to wipe it out.

But I had to find you and tell you. I didn't want to think of dying and

having insulted you and not ..."

He stopped, overcome. Rachel was nodding her head. She must make an

answer to this. It was a riddle asking an answer.

"For God's sake, Rachel, don't look like that. Oh, you're so clean and

pure. I can't tell you. You're like a star shining and me in the mud.

You've always hated me. But it's different now. I'm going to France to

die. I don't want to live. If you forgive me it'll be easier. That's why

I had to talk, Rachel, forgive me. And then it won't matter what

happens."

She let him take her hand. It was an easy way to make an answer. A

desire to giggle had to be overruled. The words he had spoken became

absurd little manikins of words, bowing at each other, striking idiotic

postures before her. But he had done something and for some astounding

reason wanted her to forgive him for what he had done. He was a fool. An

impossible fool. He sat and looked like a fool. Not even a man.

Hazlitt raised her hand to his face. Tears fell on it. Rachel felt them

crawling warmly over her fingers. They were too intimate.

"You make me feel almost clean again. Your hand's like something clean

and pure. If I come back...."

He stared at her in desperation. He seemed suddenly to have forgotten

his intention to die in France. He recalled Pauline. Was he sorry? No.

It was over. Not his fault. All this to Rachel was a ruse. Clever way to

get her sympathy. Not quite. But he felt better.

He became incomprehensible to Rachel. The things he had said--his

weeping, gulping--all part of an incomprehensible business. She nodded

her head and looked serious. It was something that had to do with a

far-away world.

"Good-bye. Remember, I love you. And I'll come through clean because of

you...."

She held out her hand and said, "Good-bye."

But he didn't go. Now he was completely a fool. Now there was something

so completely foolish about him that she must laugh. The light in his

face detained her laughter.

"You forgive me ... for ..."

She nodded her head again. It seemed to produce a magical effect--this

nodding of her head up and down. His eyes brightened and he appeared to

grow taller.

"Then if I die, I'll go to heaven."

She winced at this. An unbearable stupidity. But Hazlitt stood looking

at her for an instant quite serious, as if he had said something noble.

He saluted her, his hand to his cap, his heels together, and went away.

The memory lingered. Hazlitt had always been incomprehensible. His

stupidity was easy enough to understand. But something under it was a

mess. Now he was a fool. Stiff and idiotic and making her feel ashamed

as if she were sorry for him.... Tesla came back and stood on a step

dropping blood from his fingers. Brander came back and whispered with

his ugly face. Hazlitt, Tesla, Brander--three men that jumped out at her

from the superfluous streets. Like the three men in the park walking

horribly across the white park in the night.... An idiot, a bleeding

man, and an ugly face. But they had passed her and gone. They were

things seen outside a window.

Her eyes looking at a clock said to her, "Two hours more. Oh, in two

hours, in two hours!"

She sat motionless until the clock said, "One hour more, one more hour!"

Then she stood up and walked slowly out of the hotel. Things had changed

since she had left the streets. The strange world full of Marys,

Hazlitts, and Teslas had added further superfluities. A band of music.

Soldiers marching. Buildings waving flags and crying, "Boom, boom! we

have gone to war!..."

She came to her home. A red-brick house like other red-brick houses. But

her home. What a fool she had been to leave it. It would have been

easier waiting here. She walked into the two familiar rooms filled with

the memory of Erik--two rooms that embraced her. Her hat fell on the

bed. She would have to eat. Downstairs in the dining-room. Other

boarders to look at. But Erik would have eaten when he came. He

preferred eating alone.

Rachel took her place at one of the smaller tables and dabbled through a

series of uninteresting dishes. An admiring waitress rebuked her ...

"Dearie, you ain't eating hardly anything."

She smiled at the waitress and watched her later bringing dishes to a

purple-faced fat man at an adjoining table. The fat man was futilely

endeavoring to tell secrets to the waitress by contorting his features

and screwing up his eyes. He reminded Rachel of Brander, only Brander

told secrets without trying. She finished and hurried out. She would be

hungry later, but it didn't matter. Erik would be there then.

In the hallway Mrs. McGuire called, "Oh, Mrs. Dorn!"

Being called Mrs. Dorn always frightened her and made her dizzy. She

paused. Some day Mrs. McGuire would look at her shrewdly and say,

"You're not Mrs. Dorn. I called you Mrs. Dorn but I know better. Don't

think you're fooling anybody. Mrs. Dorn, indeed!"

But Mrs. McGuire held out her hand.

"A letter for your husband. Do you want to sit in the parlor, Mrs. Dorn?

You know I want all my boarders to make themselves entirely at home."

"Thank you," said Rachel. "You're so nice. But I have some work to do

upstairs."

Escaping Mrs. McGuire was one of the difficult things of the day. A

buxom, round-faced woman in black with friendly eyes, Mrs. McGuire had a

son in the army and a sainted husband dead and buried, and a childish

faith in the friendliness and interest of people. Rachel hurried up the

stairs. In her room she looked at the letter. For Erik. Readdressed

twice. From Chicago. She stood holding it. It said to her, "I am from

Anna. I am from Anna. Words of Anna. I am the wife of Erik Dorn."

Anna was a reality. Long ago Anna had been a reality. A background

against which the dream of Erik Dorn raised itself. She remembered

sitting close to Anna and smiling at her the first time she had visited

Erik's home. Why had she gone? If only she had never seen Anna! Her

tired, sad eyes that smiled at Erik. Rachel's fingers tightened over the

envelope. She laughed nervously and tore the letter. He was hers. Anna

couldn't write to him.

A pain came into her heart as the paper separated itself into bits in

her fingers. She felt herself tearing something that was alive. It was

cruel to tear the letter. But it would save Erik pain. ... To read

Anna's words, to hear her cries, see her sad tired eyes staring in

anguish out of the writing--that would hurt Erik.

She dropped the bits into the waste-paper basket and stood wide-eyed

over them. She had dared. As if he had belonged to her. What would he

say? But he wouldn't know. Unless Mrs. McGuire said, "There was a letter

for you, Mr. Dorn." Why hadn't she read the letter before tearing it up?

Perhaps it was important, saying Anna had died. When Anna died Erik

would marry her. She would have children and live in a house of her own.

Mrs. Rachel Dorn, people would call her. This was a dream.... Mrs.

Rachel Dorn. He would laugh if he knew; or worse, be angry. But ... "Oh,

God, I want him. Like that. Complete." Anna had had him like that. The

other thing. Not respectability. But the possession of little things.

She would have to tell him about the letter. She couldn't lie to him,

even silently. The clock on the dresser, ticking as it had always

ticked, said, "In a half-hour ... a half-hour more."

She sprang from the bed and stood listening.

Someone was coming down the hall. Strange hours fell from her. Now Erik

was coming. Now life commenced. The empty circle of the day was over.

Her body grew wild as if she must leap out of herself. Her eyes hung

devouringly upon the blank door--a door opening and Erik standing,

smiling at her. It was still a dream. It would never become real. She

would always feel frightened. Though he came home a hundred thousand

times she would always wait like now for the door to open with a fear

and a dream in her heart. But why did he knock?

She opened the door with a feverish jerk. Not Erik. A messenger-boy

blinking surprised eyes.

"Mrs. Dorn?"

"Yes."

"Sign here, second line."

A blank door again. The message read:

"I'll be home late. Don't worry. ERIK."

CHAPTER III

Warren Lockwood was a man who wrote novels. He had lived in the Middle

West until he was thirty-five and begun his writing at his desk in a

real-estate office of which he had been until then a somewhat bored half

owner.

During the months Erik Dorn had been working on the staff of "the _New

Opinion_--an Organ of Liberal Thought," he had encountered Lockwood

frequently--a dark-haired, rugged-faced man with a drawling,

high-pitched masculine voice. Dorn liked him. He talked in the manner of

a man carefully focusing objects into range. Lockwood was aware he had

gotten under the skin of things. He talked that way.

The change from the newspaper to the magazine continued, after several

months, to irritate Dorn. The leisureliness of his new work aggravated.

There was an intruding sterility about it. The _New Opinion_ was a

weekly. From week to week it offered a growing clientèle finalities.

There were finalities on the war, finalities on the social unrest;

finalities on art, life, religion, the past, present, and future. A

cock-sure magazine, gently, tolerantly elbowing aside the mysteries of

existence and holding up between carefully manicured thumb and

forefinger the Gist of the Thing. The Irrefutable Truth. The Perfect

Deduction.

There were a number of intelligent men engaged in the work of writing

and editing the periodical. They seemed all to have graduated from an

identical strata. Dorn, becoming acquainted with them, found them

intolerable. They appealed to him as a group of carefully tailored

Abstractions bombinating mellifluously in a void. The precision of logic

was in them. The precision of even tempers. The precision of aloof eyes

fastened upon finalities. Theoretical radicals. Theoretical

conservatives. Theoretical philosophers. Any appellation preceded by the

adjective theoretical fitted them snugly. Of contact with the

hurdy-gurdy of existence which he as a journalist felt under the ideas

of the day, there was none. Life in the minds of the intellectual staff

of the _New Opinion_ smoothed itself out into intellectual paragraphs.

And from week to week these paragraphs made their bow to the public.

Mannerly admonitions, courteous disapprovals. A style borrowed from the

memory of the professor informing a backward class in economics what the

exact date of the signing of the Magna Charta really was.

Lockwood was the exception. He wrote occasional fictional sketches for

the magazine. Dorn had been attracted to him at first because of the

curious intonations of his voice. He had not read the man's

novels--there were four of them dealing with the Middle West--but in the

repressed sing-song of his voice Dorn had sensed an unusual character.

"He's a good writer, an artist," he thought, hearing him talking to

Edwards, one of the editors. "He talks like a lover arguing patiently

and gently with his own thoughts."

After that they had walked and eaten together. The idea of Warren

Lockwood being a lover grew upon Dorn. Of little things, of things

seemingly unimportant and impersonal, the novelist talked as he would

have liked to talk to Rachel--with a slow simplicity that caressed his

subjects and said, "These are little things but we must be careful in

handling them, for they're a part of life." And life was important.

People were tremendously existent. Dorn, listening to the novelist,

would watch his eyes that seemed to be always adventuring among secrets.

Once he thought, "A sort of mother love is in him. He keeps trying to

say something that's never in his words. His thoughts are like a lover's

fingers stroking a girl's hair. That's because he's found himself. He

feels strong and lets his strength come out in gentleness. He's found

himself and is trying to shape secrets into words."

In comparing Lockwood with the others on the staff of the magazine he

explained, "There's the difference between a man and an intellect.

Warren's a man. The others are a group of schoolboys reducing life to

lessons."

There grew up in Dorn a curious envy of the novelist. He would think of

him frequently when alone, "The fellow's content to write. I'm not. He's

found his way of saying what's in him, getting rid of his energies and

love. I haven't. He feels toward the world as I do toward Rachel. An

overpowering reality and mystery are always before him; but it gives him

a mental perspective. What does Rachel give me? Desires, ambitions--a

sort of laughing madness that I can't translate into anything but

kisses. I'm cleverer than I was before. I talk and write better. There's

a certain wildness about things as if I were living in a storm. Yes, I

have wings, but there's no place to fly with them. Except into her arms.

There must be something else."

And he would rush through the day, outwardly a man of inexhaustible

energies, stamping himself upon the consciousness of people as a

brilliant, dominating personality. Edwards, with whom he discussed

matter for editorials and articles, had grown to regard him with awe.

"I've never felt genius so keenly before," Edwards explained him to

Lockwood. "The man seems burning up. Did you read his thing on Russia

and Kerensky? Lord, it was absolutely prophetic."

Lockwood shook his head.

"Dorn's too damn clever," he drawled. "Things come too easily to him.

He's got an eye but--I can't put my finger on it. You see a fella's got

to have something inside him. The things Erik says cleverly and

prophetically don't mean anything much, because they don't mean anything

to him. He makes 'em up as he goes along."

Edwards disagreed. He was a younger man than Lockwood, with an

impressionable erudition. Like his co-workers he had been somewhat

stampeded by Dorn's imitative faculties, faculties which enabled the

former journalist to bombinate twice as loud in a void three times as

great as any of his colleagues.

"Well, I've met a lot of writing men since I came East," he said. "And

Dorn's the best of them. He's more than a man of promise. He's opened

up. Look what he's done in the new number. Absolutely revolutionized the

liberal thought of the country. You've got to admit that. He's a man

incapable of fanaticism."

"That's just it," smiled Lockwood. "You've hit it. You've put your

finger on it. He's the kind of man who knows too damn much and don't

believe anything."

The friendship between Lockwood and Dorn matured quickly. The two men,

profoundly dissimilar in their natures, found themselves launched upon a

growing intimacy. To Lockwood, heavy spoken, delicate sensed, naïve

despite the shrewdness of his forty-five years, Erik Dorn appealed as

some exotic mechanical contrivance might for a day fascinate and

bewilder the intelligence of a rustic. And the other, in the midst of

magnificent bombinations that amazed his friend, thought, "If I only

had this man's simplicity. If on top of my ability to unravel mysteries

into words I could feel these mysteries as he does, I might do

something."

At other times, carried away by the strength of his own nature, he would

find himself looking down upon Lockwood. "I'm alive. He's static. I live

above him. There's nothing beyond me. I can't feel the things out of

which he makes his novels, because I'm beyond them."

He would think then of Lockwood as an eagle of a rustic painstakingly

hoeing a field. On such days the disquiet would vanish from Dorn's

thought. He would feel himself propelled through the hours as if by some

irresistible wind of which he had become a part. To live was enough. To

live was to give expression to the clamoring forces in him. To sweep

over Edwards, hurl himself through crowds, pulverize Warren, bang out

astounding fictions on the typewriter, watch the faces of acquaintances

light up with admiration as he spoke--this sufficed. The world

galvanized itself about him. He could do anything. He could give vision

to people, create new life around him. This consciousness sufficed. Then

to rush home from a triumphant day, a glorious contempt for his fellows

lingering like wine in his head--and find Rachel--an eagle waiting in a

nest.

Joy, then, become a mania. Desires feeding upon themselves, devouring

his body and his senses and hurling him into an exhausted sleep as if

death alone could climax the madness of his spirit--these Dorn knew in

the days of his strength.

But the days of disquiet came, confronting him like skeletons in the

midst of his feastings upon life. The ecstasy he felt seemed suddenly to

turn itself inward and demand of him new destinations. On such days he

had fallen into the habit of going upon swift walks through the less

crowded streets of the city. During his walking he would mutter, "What

can I do? What? Nothing. Not a thing." As if secret voices were debating

his destiny.

Restless, vicious spoken, venting his strainings in a skyrocket burst of

phrases upon the inanity and stupidity of his fellow creatures for which

he seemed to possess an almost uncanny vision, he fled through these

days like the victim of some spiritual satyriasis. No longer a wind at

his heels riding him into easy heights, he found himself weighted down

with his love, and strangely inanimate.

The direction in which he was moving loomed sterilely before him. His

love itself seemed a feverishly sterile thing. His work upon the

magazine, his incessant exchange of intolerant adjectives with admiring

strangers--these became absurdly petty gestures, absurdly insufficient.

There was something else to do. As he had longed for Rachel in the black

days before their coming together, he longed now for this something

else. Without name or outline, it haunted him. Another face of stars,

but this time beyond his power to understand. Yet it demanded him, as

Rachel had demanded him, and towards it he turned in his days of

disquiet, inanimate and bewildered.

"I must find something to do," he explained to himself, "that will give

me direction. People must have a monomania as a track for their living,

or else there is no living."

Then, as was his custom, he would begin an unraveling of the notion.

"Men with energies in them wed themselves quickly to some consuming

project, even if it's nothing more than the developing of a fish market.

Rachel isn't a destination. She's a force that fills me with violence

and I have no direction in which to live to use this violence. I don't

know what to do with myself. So I'm compelled to live in the violence

itself. In a storm. A kind of Walkyrie on a broomstick. But, good God,

what else is there? Sit and scribble words about fictitious characters.

Bleat out rhapsodies. Art is something I can spit out in conversation.

If I do anything it's got to be something too difficult for me to do. My

damned cleverness puts me beyond artists who find a destination for

their energies in the struggle to achieve the thing with which I begin.

If not art, then what? War, politics, finance. All surfaces meaning

nothing. If I did them all there'd still be something I hadn't done. I

want something that's not in life. Life's too damned insufficient. I

want something out of it."

Rachel had thought at first that his fits of brooding restlessness came

from a memory of Anna. But phrases he had blurted cut half-consciously

had given her a sense of their causes. The thought of Anna had died in

him. Neither consciousness of her suffering nor memory of the years they

had lived together had yet awakened in him. He had been moving since the

night he had walked out of his home and there had been no looking back.

Undergoing a seeming expansion of his powers, Erik Dorn had become a

startling, fascinating figure in the new world he had entered. The

flattery of men almost as clever as himself, the respect, appreciation

of political, literary, and vaguely social circles, of stolid men and

eccentric acquaintances, were continually visited upon him. He was a

personality, a figure to enliven dinner parties, throw a glamour and a

fever into the enervated routine of sets, cliques, and circles.

He had made occasional journeyings alone and sometimes with Rachel into

the homes of chance acquaintances, and had put in fitful appearances at

the various excitements pursued by the city's more radical

intelligentsia--little-theater premiers, private assemblings of shrewd,

bored men and women, precious concerts, electric discussions of

political unrest. From all such adventurings he came away with a sense

of distaste. Friendships, always foreign to his nature, had become now

almost an impossibility. He felt himself a procession of adjectives

exploding in the ears of strangers.

With Warren Lockwood alone he had been able to achieve a contact. In

the presence of the novelist there was a complement of himself both in

the days of his disquiet and strength. Together they took to frequenting

odd parts of the city, visiting lonely cafés and calling upon strangers

known to the novelist. The man's virile gentleness soothed him. He was

never tired of watching the turns of his naïveté, delighting as much in

his friend's unsophisticated appreciation of the arts as in the vivid

simplicity of his understanding of people and events.

He had finished a stormy conference with the directors of the magazine

on the subject of a new editorial policy toward Russia--new editorial

policies toward Russia had become almost the sole preoccupation of the

_New Opinion_--when Lockwood arrived at the office, resplendent in the

atrocities of a new green hat and lavender necktie.

"There's a fella over on the east side you ought to meet," Lockwood

explained. "I was going over there and thought you'd like to come

along."

He leaned over, seriously confidential.

"If you can lay off a while in this business of revolutionizing the

liberal thought of the whole country, Erik, I'll tell you something.

Between you and me, this man we're going to see is the greatest artist

in America. I know."

Lockwood waved his hand casually as if dismissing once and for all an

avalanche of contradictions. Dorn hesitated. It was one of his days of

disquiet; and he had left a note with Rachel saying he would be home at

eight. It was now six.

"If you've got a date," went on Lockwood, "call it off. Lord, man, you

can't afford missing the greatest artist in the world."

Dorn frowned. He might telephone. But that would mean explanations and

the pleading sound of a voice saying, "Of course, Erik." He would send a

message, and scribbled it on a telegraph blank:

"I'll be home late. Don't worry.

"ERIK."

"We'll make a night of it," he laughed.

Lockwood looked at him, shrewdly affectionate.

"What you need," he spoke, "is a good drink and some fat street woman to

shake you out of it. You look kind of tied up."

"I am," grinned Dorn. "Wound up and ready to bust."

Lockwood nodded his head slowly.

"Uh-huh," he said, as if turning the matter over carefully in his

thought. "Why don't you buy a new hat like I do when I get feeling sort

of upside down? Buying a new hat or tie straightens a man out. Come on!"

He laughed suddenly. "This artist's name is Tony. He's an old

man--seventy years old."

They entered the street, Lockwood watching his companion with dark,

fixed eyes as if he were slowly arriving at some impersonal diagnosis.

"A lot of fools," he announced abruptly, waving his hand at the crowds.

"They don't know that something important's happening in Russia." He

pronounced it Rooshia. Dorn saw his eyes kindle with a kindliness as he

denounced the rabble about them.

"What do you figure is happening in Rooshia?" he inquired of the

novelist.

"I don't figure," smiled Lockwood. "I feel it. Something important that

these newspaper Neds around this town haven't got any conception of.

It's what old Carl calls the rising of the proletaire." He chuckled.

"Old Carl's sure gone daft on this proletaire thing." His face abruptly

hardened, the rugged features becoming set, the swart eyes paying a

far-away homage. "But old Carl's a great poet--the greatest in America.

God, but that old boy can write!"

Dorn nodded. In the presence of the novelist the unrest that had held

him by the throat through the day seemed to ebb. There was companionship

in the figure beside him. They walked in silence for several blocks. The

day was growing dark quickly and despite the crowds in the streets,

there seemed an inactivity in the air--the wait of a storm.

Into a ramshackle building on the corner of a vivaciously ugly street

Lockwood led his friend in quest of the greatest artist. An old man in a

skull cap, woolen shirt, baggy trousers and carpet slippers appeared in

a darkened doorway. With his long white beard he stood bent and

rheumatic before them, making a question mark in the gloom of the hall.

"Hello, Tony," Lockwood greeted him. "I've brought a friend of mine

along to look at your works."

The old man extended thin fingers and nodded his head. Dorn entered a

large room that reminded him of a tombstone factory. Figures in clay,

some broken and cracked, cluttered up its floor and walls. In a corner

partly hidden behind topsy-turvy busts and more figures was a cot with a

blanket over it. Dorn after several minutes of silence, looked

inquiringly at his friend. The works of art, despite an obvious vigor of

execution, were openly banal.

"He's got some more in the basement," announced Lockwood with an air of

triumph. "And there's some stuck away with the family upstairs. The

whole street here's full of his works."

The old man nodded.

"He doesn't talk much English," went on Lockwood. "But I'll tell you

about him. I got the story from him. He's the greatest artist in the

world."

As Dorn moved politely from figure to figure, the old man like a museum

monitor at his heels, Lockwood went on explaining in a caressing

sing-song:

"This old boy came to New York when he was in his twenties. And he's

been living here ever since and making statues. He's working right now

on a statue of some general. Been working for fifty years without

stopping, and there's nobody in this town ever heard of him or come near

him. Get this picture of this old boy, Erik, buried in this hole for

fifty years making statues. Working away day after day without anybody

coming near him. I brought a sculptor friend of mine who kept squinting

at some of the things the old boy did when he first came over and

saying, 'By God, this fella was an artist at one time.' Get the picture

of this smart-aleck sculptor friend of mine saying this old boy was an

artist."

The eyes of Warren Lockwood grew hard and seemed to challenge. He

extended his arm and waved his hand gently in a further challenge.

"The fools in this town let this old boy stay buried," he whispered,

"but he fooled them. He kept right on making statues and giving them

away to the folks that live around here and hiding them in the basement

when there wasn't anybody to take them."

Lockwood grasped the arm of his friend excitedly and his voice became

high-pitched.

"Don't you get this old man?" he argued. "Don't you get the figure of

him as an artist? Lord, man, he's the greatest artist in the world, I

tell you!"

Dorn nodded his head, amused and disturbed by the novelist's excitement.

The old sculptor was standing in the shadow of the figures piled on top

of each other against the wall. He wore the air of a man just awakened

and struggling politely to grasp his surroundings.

"A sort of altruistic carpenter," thought Dorn. "That's what Warren

calls an artist. Works diligently for nothing."

The respect and awe in the eyes of his friend halted him.

"Yes, I get him," he added aloud. "Living with a dream for fifty years."

Lockwood snorted and then with a quiet laugh answered: "No, that isn't

it. You're not an artist yourself so you can't quite get the sense of

it." He seemed petulent and defeated.

They left the old man's studio without further talk. It had started to

rain. Large spaced drops plumbed a gleaming hypotenuse between the

rooftops and the streets. They paused before a basement restaurant.

"It looks dirty," said Lockwood, "but let's go in."

Here they ordered dinner. During their eating the noise of thunder

sounded and the splash of the storm drifted in through the dusty

basement windows. A thick-wristed, red-fingered waitress slopped back

and forth between their table and an odorous kitchen door. Lockwood kept

his eyes fastened steadily upon the nervous features of his friend. He

thought as the silence increased between them: "This man's got something

the matter with him."

Gradually an uneasiness came over the novelist, his sensitive nerves

responding to the disquiet in the smiling eyes opposite.

"You're kind of crazy," he leaned forward and whispered as if confiding

an ominous, impersonal secret. "You've got the eyes of a man kind of

crazy, Erik."

He sat back in his chair, his hands holding the edge of the table, his

chin tucked down, as if he were ruminating, narrow-eyed, upon some

involved business proposition.

"I get you now," he added slowly. "I'll put you in a book--a crazy man

who kept fooling himself by imitating sane people."

Dorn nodded.

"Insanity would be a relief," he answered. "Come on."

He stood up quickly and looked down at his friend.

"Let's keep going. I've got something in me I want to get rid of."

In the doorway the friends halted. The grave, melodious shout of the

rain filled the night. The streets had become dark, attenuated pools.

The rain falling illuminated the hidden faces of the buildings and

silvered the air with whirling lines.

As they stood facing the downpour Dorn thought, "Rachel's waiting for

me. Why don't I go to her? But I'd only make her sad. Better let it get

out of me in the rain."

Holding his friend's arm he stood staring at the storm over the city.

Through the sparkle and fume of the rain-colored night the lights of

café signs burned like golden-lettered banners flung stiffly into the

downpour. About the lights floated patches of yellow mist through which

the rain swarmed in flurries of gleaming moths. There were lights of

doors and windows beneath the burning signs. The remainder of the street

was lost in a wilderness of rain that bubbled and raced over the

pavements in an endless detonation.

He spoke with a sudden softness: "I didn't get your artist, Warren, but

you don't get this storm. It's noise and water to you."

The novelist answered with a sagacious nod.

"There's something alive in a night like this," Dorn went on, "something

that isn't a part of life."

He pulled his friend out of the doorway. They walked swiftly, their

shoes spurting water and the rain dripping from their clothes. Dorn felt

an untightening. His eyes hailed the scene as if in greeting of a

friend. He became aware of its detail. He smiled, remembering the way in

which he had been used to hide his longing for Rachel in the desperate

consciousness of scenes about him. Now it was something else he was

hiding. Beneath his feet he watched the silver-tipped pool of the

pavement. Gleaming in its depths swam reflections of burning lamps, like

the yellow script of another and wraith-like world staring up at him out

of a nowhere. The rest was darkness and billowy stripes of water. People

had vanished. Later a sound of thunder crawled out of the sky. A vein

of lightning opened the night. Against its blue pallor the street and

its buildings etched themselves.

"Stiff, unreal, like a stage scene," murmured Dorn. "Another world."

The rain flung itself for an instant in great ghostly sheets out of the

lighted spaces. He caught a glimpse in the distance of a hunched, moving

figure like some tiny wanderer through tortuous fields. Then darkness

resumed, seizing the street. A wind entered the night outlining itself

in the wild undulations of the rain reaching for the pavements.

Dorn forgot his companion, as they pressed on. Disheveled rain ghosts

crowded around him. The fever that had burned in him during the day

seemed to have become a part of the storm. The leap and hollow blaze of

the lightnings gave him a companionship. His eyes stared into the

inanimate bursts of pale violet outlines in the dark. His breath drank

in the spice of water-laden winds. The stumble of thunder, the lash and

churn of rain were companions. The something else that haunted him was

in the storm. He turned to Lockwood, who seemed to be lagging, and

shouted in his ear:

"Great, eh? Altar fires and the racket of unknown gods."

Lockwood, his face filmed with water, grunted indignantly:

"Let's get out of this."

The night was growing wilder. Dorn's eyes bored into the vapors and

steam of the rain.

"We're in a good street," he cried again. "A nigger street."

A blinding gust of light brought them to a halt. Thunder burst a horror

of sound through its dead glare. Dorn stiffened and stared as in a dream

at a face floating behind the glass of a door. A woman's face contorted

into a stark grimace of rapture. Its teeth stood out white and

skull-like against the red of an open mouth.

Silence and darkness seized the street. Rain poured. The sound of a

laugh like some miniature echo of the tumult that had torn the night

drifted to them. Lockwood had started for the door.

"Come on," he called, "this is crazy."

Dorn followed him. The streaming door opened as they approached and two

figures darted out. They were gone in an instant and in pursuit of them

rushed a rollicking lurch of sound. Dorn caught again the shrill

staccato of the laugh, and the door closed behind them.

Dancing bodies were spinning among the tables. Shouting, swinging noises

and a bray of music spurted unintelligibly against the ears of the

newcomers. A chlorinated mist, acrid to the eye, and burning to the

nose, crawled about the room. Dorn, followed by Lockwood, groped his way

through the confusion toward a small vacant table against a wall. From

here they watched in silence.

A can-can was in progress. The dancers, black and white faces glued

together, arms twined about each other's bodies, tumbled through the

smoke. Waiters balancing black trays laden with colored glasses sifted

through the scene. At the tables men and women with faces out of focus

sat drinking and shouting. Niggers, prostitutes, louts. The slant of red

mouths opened laughters. Hands and throats drifted in violent fragments

through the mist. The reek of wine and steaming clothes, the sting of

perspiring perfumes and the odors of women's bodies fumed over the

tumble of heads. Against the scene a jazz band flung a whine and a

stumble of tinny sounds. Nigger musicians with silver instruments glued

to their lips sat on a platform at the far end of the room. They danced

in their chairs as they played, swinging their instruments in crazy

circles. A broken, lurching music came from them, a nasal melody that

moaned among the laughters.

Dorn's fingers lay gripped about the arm of his friend. His senses

caught the rhythm of the scene. His eyes stared at the dancing figures,

blond heads riveted against black satin cheeks; bodies gesturing their

lusts to the quick whine and stumble of the music; eyes opening like

mouths.

"God, what an orgie!" he whispered. "Look at the thing. It's insane. A

nigger hammering a scarlet phallus against a cymbal moon."

His words vanished in the din and Lockwood remained with eyes drawn in

and hard. When he turned to his friend he found him excitedly pounding

his fist on the table and bawling for a waiter. A man, seemingly asleep

amid confusions, appeared and took his order.

"There's a woman in here I've got to find," Dorn shouted.

"You're crazy, man."

"I saw her," he persisted, talking close to his friend's ear. "I saw her

face in the door. You wait here."

Lockwood seized his arm and tried to hold him, but he jerked away and

was lost in a pattern of dancing bodies. Lockwood watching him

disappear, frowned. He felt a sudden uncertainty toward his friend, a

fear as if he had launched himself into a dark night with a murderer for

a companion.

"He's crazy," he thought. "I ought to get him out of here before

anything happens."

He sat fumbling nervously with the stem of a wine-glass. Outside, the

rain chattered in the darkness and the alto of the wind came in long

organ notes into the din of the café. He caught sight of Dorn pulling an

unholy-looking woman through the pack of the room.

"Here she is--our lady of pain!"

Dorn thrust the creature viciously into a seat beside Lockwood. She

dropped with a scream of laughter. The music of the nigger orchestra had

stopped and an emptiness flooded the place. Dorn bellowed for another

glass. Lockwood looked slowly at the creature beside him. She was

watching Dorn. In the swarthy depths of her eyes moved threads of

scarlet. Beneath their lashes her skin was darkened as if by bruises. An

odd sultry light glowed over the discolorations. Her mouth had shut and

her cheeks were without curves, following the triangular corpse-like

lines of her skull. Her lips, like bits of vermilion paper, stared as

from an idol's face. She was regarding Dorn with a smile.

He had grown erratic in his gestures. His eyes seemed incapable of

focusing themselves. They darted about the room, running away from him.

The woman's smile persisted and he turned his glance abruptly at her.

The red flesh of her opened mouth and throat confronted him as another

of her screaming laughs burst. The laugh ended and her gleaming eyes

swimming in a gelatinous mist held him.

"A reptilian sorcery," he whispered to Lockwood, and smiled. "The face

of a malignant Pierrette. A diabolic clown. Look at it. I saw it in the

lightning outside. She wears a mask. Do you get her?" He paused

mockingly. Lockwood shifted away from the woman. Erik was drunk. Or

crazy. But the woman, thank God, had eyes only for him. She remained, as

he talked, with her sulphurous eyes unwaveringly upon his face.

"She's not a woman," he went on in a purring voice. "She's a lust. No

brain. No heart. A stark unhuman piece of flesh with a shark's hunger

inside it."

He leaned forward and took one of her hands as Lockwood whispered,

"Christ, man, let's get out of here."

The woman's fingers, dry and quivering, scratched against Dorn's palm.

He felt them as a hot breath in his blood.

"What's the matter, Warren?" he laughed, emptying a wine-glass. "I like

this gal. She suits me. A devourer of men. Look at her!"

He laughed and glared at his friend. Lockwood closed his eyes nervously.

"I've got a headache in this damned place," he muttered.

"Wait a minute." Dorn seized his arm. "I want to talk. I feel gabby. My

lady friend doesn't understand words." The sulphurous eyes glowed

caresses over him. "You remember the thing in Rabelais about

women--insatiable, devouring, hungering in their satieties. The prowling

animal. Well, here it is. Alive. Not in print. She's alive with

something deeper than life. Wheels of flesh grinding her blood into a

hunger for ecstasies. She's a mate for me. Come on, little one."

He sprang from the table, pulling the woman after him.

"Wait here, Warren," he called, moving toward the door. It opened,

letting in a shout and sweep of rain, and they were gone.

"A crazy man," muttered the novelist, and remained fumbling with the

stem of his glass.

Outside Dorn held the body of the woman against him as they hurried

through the storm. Her flesh, like the touch of a third person, struck

through his wet clothes.

"Where we going?" he yelled at her.

She thrust out an arm.

"Up here."

They came breathless up a flight of stairs into a reeking room lighted

by a gas jet.

* * * * * *

In the café, Lockwood waited till the music started again. Then he rose

and, slapping his soggy hat on his head, walked out of the place. The

rain, sweeping steadily against the earth, held him prisoner in the

doorway. He stood muttering to himself of his friend and his craziness.

Gone wild! Crazy wild with a mad woman in the rain. Long ago he might

have done it himself. Yes, he knew the why of it. The rain fuming before

him made him sleepy. He leaned against the place and waited. The storm

faded slowly into a quiet patter. Starting for the pavement, Lockwood

paused. A hatless figure had jumped out of a doorway across the street

and was running toward him.

"It's Erik," he muttered, and hurried to meet him.

Dorn, laughing, his clothes torn and his face smeared with blood under

his eye, drew near. He took his friend's arm and walked him swiftly

away. At the corner Dorn stopped and regarded the novelist.

"I've had a look at hell," he whispered, and with a laugh hurried off

alone. Lockwood watched him moving swiftly down the street, and yawned.

CHAPTER IV

It was near midnight. Rachel's eyes, brightened with tears, watched her

lover bathing his face.

"It seemed so long," she murmured, "till you came."

"That damned Warren Lockwood led me astray," he smiled. He dried his

face and came toward her. She dropped to the floor beside him as he sat

down and pressed her cheeks against his knees. His hands moved tenderly

through her loosened hair.

"You told me to be careful about getting run over," she smiled sadly,

"and you go out and get all cut up in a brawl. Oh, Erik,

please--something might have happened."

"Nothing happened, dearest."

She asked no further questions but remained with her face against his

knees. This was Rachel whose hair he was stroking. Dorn smiled at the

thought. After a silence she resumed, her voice softened with emotion:

"Erik, I've been lying to you--about my love. It's different than I said

it was. I've said always what you've wanted me to say. You've always

wanted me to be something else than a woman--something like a dream.

But I can't. I love you as--as Anna loved you. Oh, I want to be with you

forever and have children. I'm nothing else. You are. I can't be like

you. For me there's only love for you and nothing beyond."

"Dear one," he answered, "there's nothing else for me."

"Now you're telling me lies," she wept. "There is something I can't give

you; and that you must go looking for somewhere else."

"No, Rachel. I love you."

"As you loved Anna--once."

"Don't! I never loved Anna--or anyone. Or anything."

"I can't help it, Erik. Forgive me, please. I love you so. Don't you see

how I love you. I keep trying to be something besides myself and to give

other names to the things I feel. But they're only sentimental things.

My dreams are only sentimental dreams--of your kissing me, holding me,

being my husband. Oh, go way from me, Erik, before I make you hate me!

You thought I was different. And I did too. I _was_ different. But

you've changed me. Women are all the same when they love. Differences go

away."

She looked up at him with tear-running eyes.

"Different than other people! But now I'm the same. I love you as any

other woman would. Only perhaps a little more. With my whole soul and

life."

"Foolish to talk," he whispered back to her. "Words only scratch at

things. I love you as if I had never seen you or kissed you."

"But I'm not a dream, Erik. Oh, it sounds silly. But I want you."

He raised her and held her lithe body close to him. The feeling that he

was unreal, that Rachel was unreal, rested in his thought. There was a

mist about things that clung to them, that clung about the joyousness in

his heart.

"There's nothing else," he whispered. "Love is enough. It burns up

everything else and leaves a mist."

His arms tightened.

"Erik dear, I'm afraid."

His kiss brought a peace over her face. She had waited for it. She

looked up and laughed.

"You love me? Yes, Erik loves me. Loves me. I know."

She watched his eyes as he spoke. The eyes of God. They remained open to

her. She began to tremble and her naked arms moved blindly toward his

shoulders.

"This is my world," she whispered. "I know, Erik. I know everything. You

are too big for love to hold. The sun doesn't fill the whole world.

There are always dark places. I know. Don't hide from me, lover."

She smiled and closed her eyes as her lips reached toward him.

The eyes of Erik Dorn remained open and staring out of the window. There

was still rain in the night.

CHAPTER V

Erik Dorn to Rachel, September, 1918:

" ... and to-night I remember you are beautiful, and I desire you. My

arms are empty and there is nothing for my eyes to look at. Are you

still afraid. Look, more than a year has gone and nothing has changed.

You are the far-away one, the dream figure, and my heart comes on wings

to you.... I write with difficulty. What language is there to talk to

you? How does one converse with a dream? Idiot phrases rant across the

paper like little fat actors flourishing tin swords. I've come to

distrust words. There are too many of them. Yet I keep fermenting with

words. Interlopers. Busybody strangers. I can't think ... because of

them.... Alas! if I could keep my vocabulary out of our love we would

both be better off. Foolish chatter. I thought when I sat down to write

to you that the sadness of your absence would overcome me. Instead, I am

amused. Vaguely joyous. And at the thought of you I have an impulse to

laugh. You are like that. A day like a thousand years has passed.

Dead-born hours that did not end. Chill, empty streets and the memory of

you like a solitude in which I sat mumbling to phantoms. And now in the

darkness my heart sickens with desire for you and the night sharpens

its claws upon my heart. Yet there is laughter. Words laugh in my head.

The torment I feel is somehow a part of joyousness. The claws of the

night bring somehow a caress. Even to weep for you is like some dark

happiness whose lips are too fragile to smile. Dear one, the dream of

you still lives--an old friend now, a familiar star that I watch

endlessly. You see there are even no new words. For once before I told

you that. It was night--snowing. We walked together. I remember you

always as vanishing and leaving the light of your face burning before my

eyes. I shall always love you. Why are you afraid? Why do you write

vague doubts into your letters? I will be with you soon. You are a

world, and the rest of life is a mist that surrounds you.... I have

nothing to write. I discover this as I sit staring at the paper. I

remember that a year has passed, that many years remain to pass. Dear

one, I know only that I love you, and words are strangers between us."

* * * * * *

Rachel to Erik, September end, 1918:

" ... when I went away you were unhappy and restless. Now that I have

gone you are again happy and calm. Oh, you're so cruel! Your love is so

cruel to me. I sit here all day, a foolishly humble exile, waiting for

you. I keep watching the sea and sometimes I try to feel pain. When your

letter comes I spend the day reading it.... I am beautiful and you

desire me. Oh, to think me beautiful and to desire me, suffices. You do

not come where I am. Nothing has changed, you write with a joyous

cruelty. In your lonely nights your dream of me still brings you

torments and I am a star that you watch endlessly. I laugh too, but out

of bitterness. Because what you write is no longer true and we both have

known it for long. I am no longer a dream or a star, but a woman who

loves you. Yes, nothing has changed, except me. And you remedy that by

sending me away. When you send me away I too become unchanged in your

thought. I am again like I was on the night we parted in the white park

and you can love me--a memory of me--that remains like a star....

"But here I am in this lonely little sea village. There is no dream for

me. I am empty without you and I lie at night and weep till my heart

breaks, wondering when you will come. It were better if I were dead. I

whisper to myself, 'you must not write him to come to you, because he is

too busy loving you. He weeps before the ghost of you. He sits beside an

old dream. You must not interrupt him. Oh, my lover, do you find me so

much less than the dream of me, that you must send me away in order to

love me? My doubts? Are they doubts? We have grown apart in the year. On

the night it snowed and I went away from you you said, 'people bury

their love behind lighted windows....' Dearest, dearest, of what do I

complain? Of your ecstasies and torments of which I am not a part, but a

cause? Forgive me. I adore you. I am so lonely and such a nobody without

you. And I want you to write to me that you long for me, to be with me,

to caress me and talk to me. And instead you send phrases analyzing your

joyousness. Oh, things have changed. I am no longer Rachel, but a woman.

I feel so little and helpless when I think of you. Strangers can talk to

you and look at you but I must sit here in exile while you entertain

yourself with memories of me. You are cruel, dear one, and I have become

too cowardly not to mind. This is because I have found happiness--all

the happiness I desire--and hold it tremblingly. And you have not found

happiness but are still in flight toward your far-away one, your dream

figure. I cannot write more. I worship you and my heart is full of

tears. I will sit humbly and look at the sea until you come."

* * * * * *

Rachel to Frank Brander, September:

" ... I answer your letter only because I am afraid you would

misunderstand my silence. I send your letter back because I cannot throw

it away. It would make the sea unclean. As you point out, I am the

mistress of Erik Dorn and he may some day grow tired of me, at which

time you are prepared to be my friend and protect me from the world. I

will put your application on file, Mr. Brander, if there is a part of my

mind filthy enough to remember it."

* * * * * *

Rachel to Emil Tesla:

" ... I was glad to hear from you. But please do not write any more. I

am too happy to read your letters. I never want to draw pictures for

_The Cry_ again. I hope you will be freed soon. I can think of nothing

to write to you."

* * * * * *

Erik Dorn to Rachel, November, 1918:

"DEAREST ONE!

"Beneath my window the gentle Jabberwock has twined colored tissue-paper

about his ears and gone mad. He shrieks, he whistles, he blows a horn.

The war, beloved, appears to have ended this noon and the Jabberwock is

endeavoring to disgorge four and a half years in a single shriek. 'The

war,' says the Jabberwock, in his own way, 'is over. It was a rotten

war, nasty and hateful, as all wars are rotten and hateful, and

everything I've said and done hinting at the contrary has been a lie and

I'm so full of lies I must shriek.'

"Anybody but a Jabberwock, dear one, would have died of apoplexy hours

ago. But the Jabberwock is immortal. Alas! there is something of pathos

in the spectacle. Our gentle friend with tissue-paper around his ears

prostrates himself before another illusion--peace. Says the shriek of

the Jabberwock beneath my window, 'The Hun is destroyed. The menace to

humanity is laid low. The powers of darkness are dispelled by the breath

of God and the machine-guns of our brave soldats. The war that is to end

war is over. Hail, blessed peace!'

"Why do I write such arid absurdities to you? But I feel an impulse to

scribble wordly words, to stand in a silk hat beside the statue of

Liberty and gaze out upon the Atlantic with a Carlylian pensiveness.

Idle political tears flow from my brain. For it is obvious that the war

the Jabberwock has so nobly waged has been a waste of steel and powder.

Standing now on his eight million graves with the tissue-paper of

Victory twined about his ears, the Jabberwock is a somewhat ghastly,

humorous figure. He has, alas! shot the wrong man. To-morrow there will

be an inquest in Paris and the Jabberwock will rub his eyes and discover

that the corpse, God forgive him, is that of a brother and friend and

that the Powers of Darkness threatening humanity are advancing upon him

... out of Moscow. I muse ... yes, it was a good war. War is never

pathetic, never wholly a waste. Maturity no less than childhood must

have its circuses. But the Jabberwock ... Ah! the Jabberwock ... the

soul of man celebrating the immortal triumph of righteousness ... the

good Don Quixote has valiantly slain another windmill and your Sancho

Panza shakes his head in wistful amusement.

"I did not send you this letter yesterday and many things have happened

since I wrote it. I will see you in a few days. It has been decided that

I go to Germany for the magazine. Edwards insists. So do the directors,

trusting gentlemen. I will stop at Washington and try to get two

passports and then come on to you, and we will wait together until the

passports are issued. Another week of imbecile political maneuverings in

behalf of the passports and I will again be your lover,

"ERIK."

CHAPTER VI

"We've been separated almost three months," he thought, looking out of

the train window. "I'll see her soon."

There were four men in the smoking-compartment. They were discussing the

end of the war. Dorn listened inattentively. He was remembering another

ride to Rachel. Looking out of a train window as now. Whirling through

space. A locomotive whistle wailing in the prairies at night like the

sound of winds against his heart.

The memories of the ride drifted through his mind. He saw himself again

with the tumult of another day sweeping toward Rachel. What had he felt

then? Whatever it was, it was gone. For he felt nothing now but a

sadness. He had telegraphed. She would be waiting, her face alight, her

hands trembling. He had started from Washington elatedly enough. But now

in the smoking-compartment where the men were discussing the end of the

war he felt no elation. He was thinking, "It'll be difficult when we see

each other." He became aware that he was actually shrinking from the

meeting. The voices of the men about him began to annoy and he returned

to his seat in the train.

Early evening. Another two hours and the train would stop to let him

off. Dear, dear Rachel! He had wept tormented by a loneliness for her.

Now he was coming to her with sadness. There had been another ride when

he had come to her in a halloo of storms. Things change.

The porter brushed him and removed his grips to the platform. The far

lights of a village sprinkled themselves feebly in the darkness. This

was where Rachel was waiting.

Dorn stepped from the train. It became another world, lighted and human.

He looked about the dingy little station. Rachel was walking toward him.

"She looks strange and out of place," he thought.

They embraced. Her kisses covering his lips delighted him unexpectedly.

He found himself walking close to her in the night and feeling happy.

They entered a darkened wooden house and Rachel led the way upstairs.

"I can't talk, Erik."

She held his hand against her cheek.

"No, don't kiss me. Let me look at you. Sit over here. I must look at

you."

She laughed softly, but her eyes, unsmiling, stared at him. He remained

silent. The sadness that had fallen upon him in the train returned now

like a hurt in his heart. He had expected it to vanish at the sight of

her. But her kisses had only hidden it. She came to his side after a

pause and whispered gently,

"Perhaps it would have been better if you hadn't come, dearest. I've

become almost used to being alone."

He embraced her and for the moment the sadness was hidden again.

Rachel's hands crept avidly to his face, holding his cheeks with hot

fingers.

"Erik, oh, Erik, do you love me? I'm not afraid to hear. Tell me."

"Yes, dear one. You are everything."

"What makes you cry?"

He kissed her lips.

"I don't know," he whispered. "Only it's been so long."

"Oh, you are so sad."

Her voice had grown thin. Her eyes, dry, burning, haunted the dark room.

She removed herself from his arms and stood with her hand in her hair.

She looked at the dark sea that mirrored the night outside the window.

Turning to him after a pause she murmured:

"I had forgotten Erik Dorn was here."

A sudden stride, the gesture of another Rachel, and she had thrown

herself on the bed.

"Oh, God!" she sobbed. "I knew, I knew!"

Dorn, kneeling on the floor, pulled her head toward him. He whispered

her name. Why was he sad, frightened? A thought was murmuring in him,

"You must love her."

"Rachel, I love you. Please. Your tears. Dearest, what has happened?

Tell me."

"Don't ask that." Her tears came anew. "But you come to me sad, as if I

were no longer Rachel to you."

The thought kept murmuring, "You must love her...."

"Beautiful one," he said softly, "you're weeping because something has

happened to you."

The thought murmured, "because something has happened to you, not her."

"No, no, Erik!"

"Then why? If you loved me you would be happy."

Absurd sentences. They would deceive no one.

A belated emotion overcame him. Now he was happy. His arms grew strong

about her. He would say nothing, but lie beside her kissing her until

the tears ended. This was happiness. He watched her lips begin to smile

faintly. Her face touched him as if she had sighed. She whispered after

a long silence, "Oh, I thought you had changed."

He laughed and pulled her to her feet. His head thrown back, his eyes

amused and warm, he asked, "Do I seem changed now?"

He waited while she regarded him. Why was he nervous? Must he answer the

question too?

"No," she said, "you are the same."

Her face shining before him. Her head quickly lifted.

"I was a fool. Look, Erik, I am happy--happier than anybody on earth."

She dropped to her knees, kissing his hand.

"I am so happy, I kneel...."

They stood together in the window and laughed.

"There's a wonderful old woman here. We've talked a great deal, about

everything, and you. You don't mind? To-morrow we'll lie all day on the

shore. Oh, Erik. Erik!"

"We'll never be alone again, Rachel."

"Never!" she echoed.

CHAPTER VII

A calm had fallen upon Erik Dorn, an unconsciousness of self. He

sprawled through the sunny days, staring at the sea with Rachel or

walking alone to the fishing-boats at the other end of the village, or

sitting with Mama Turpin, the old woman in whose cottage they lived.

With Mama Turpin he held interminable talks that rambled on through the

night at times. Religion was Mama Turpin's favored topic. Her round body

in a rocking-chair, her seamed, vigorous face raised toward the sky, the

old woman would fall into a dream and talk quietly of her God. She would

begin, her voice coming out of the dark reminding Dorn of a girl.

"Yes, I have always known this here one thing. Everybody must have a

religion. Because there's something in everybody that's way beyond their

selves to understand. And there's nobody to give it to excepting God.

Some God, anyways...."

Rachel, sitting in the shadows, would listen with her eyes upon Erik.

The fear that he had brought her was growing in her heart, making her

thought heavy and her gestures slow. She would listen, almost asleep, to

his words.

" ... Yes, Mama Turpin, religion comes to all people. But not for long.

We all get a flame in us at some time and it burns until it burns itself

out, and then we sit and forget to wonder about things...."

Talk perhaps for her to understand. But why should he hint when words

outright were easier? Rachel carried questions in her heart.

Among the fishermen Dorn listened sometimes to stories of great catches

and storms. He was usually silent watching them empty their nets on the

shore and remove the catch into basins and pails. The men accepted his

interest in their work with a pleased indifference.

Rachel sometimes walked with him or stretched beside him on the sand.

But he felt an uneasiness in her presence. Her eyes questioned him

silently and seemed to answer their own questions.

Since the evening of his coming there had been no scenes. He was

grateful for this. But the eyes of Rachel sometimes haunted him at night

as she lay asleep beside him. What spoke in her eyes? He felt calm when

alone, at peace with himself. But at night while she slept he would

become sleepless and a sadness would enter him. Thoughts he did not seem

to be thinking would move through his head. "Things pass. Years pass.

The sea and the stars remain the same. But men and women change. Life

eats into men and women--eats things away from them...."

In his sadness there would come to him a memory of Anna. Thoughts of

Anna and Rachel would mingle themselves.... Anna had once lain beside

him like this. He remembered now. Her body was different from

Rachel's--softer, warmer ... a woman named Anna had lived with him. Now

a woman named Rachel. And to-morrow, what? There were yesterdays. These

were not sad. Things already dead were not so sad. But things that are

to die....

His heart would grow weak, seeming to dissolve. Something unspoken in

the night. Tears in his heart. Calm in his thought. He would figure it

out sometime. His words were alert little busy-bodies. They could follow

things into difficult crevices. But was there anything to figure out? He

was growing old and a to-morrow was haunting him. Some day he would

close his eyes slowly and in the slow closing of his eyes the world

would end. Erik Dorn would have ended. Was there such a thing as ending?

Yes, things were always ending. Now he was different than the night he

had lain beside Rachel and whispered, "You have given me wings." But

how? He felt the same. Change came like that. Leaving one the same. He

would write things from Europe that would startle. He could write....

But, something unspoken in the night. He must say it to himself.... "You

must love her...." Then that was it. He no longer loved her.

He lay listening to her breathing. An end to his love. Preposterous

notion! How, since the thought of parting from her wrenched at his

heart? "If I went away from Rachel I would die." Unquestionably

sincere.... "I'd die." Not, of course, die. But feel death. Yet, there

was something changed. But a man doesn't remain an ecstatic lover. There

comes a time. Well, he loved her like this--quietly, happily, and if he

went away from her he would feel an end had come to his life. The other

love had been words flying in his head. Nice to have felt as he had. But

life--practical, material rush of hours. Words had flown in his head

once. He smiled. "Wings, what are they?" He remembered having spoken and

thought a great deal about wings. Now the idea seemed somewhat absurd.

They were not a part of life. Inventions. An invention. A phrase to

explain an unusual state of physical and mental excitement.... Sleep

intruded and the sadness melted out of him. As he closed his eyes his

hand reached dreamily for Rachel and lay upon her shoulder.

A week of silence followed. Dorn talked. Politics, economics, the coming

peace treaty. Rachel listened and made replies. Yet their words seemed

only the part of a silence between them. A letter from Washington

interrupted them. A passport was being issued for Erik Dorn, but the

bureau was not issuing passports for women and would have to deny Mrs.

Rachel Dorn ... "enclosed please find $1 deposit made for Mrs. Dorn at

this office."

"Well, that ends it," he laughed. "Perhaps I shouldn't have lied about

your being Mrs. Dorn. God is a jealous God and punishes liars."

"You must go on," Rachel said. "Perhaps I'll get one later."

"No, we'll both wait. I couldn't go without you."

Rachel regarded him tenderly. They were sitting on Mama Turpin's porch.

"Yes, you will," she said.

He shook his head, pleased at the opportunity for sacrifice. He hoped as

he smiled that Rachel would plead with him to go alone. In her pleading

she would point out all the things he was giving up by not going. She

might even say, "You must go, Erik. You can't sacrifice your career."

Then he could shrug his shoulders, remain silent for a moment as if

weighing his career beside his love for her, and smile suddenly and say,

gently, "No. It's ended. Please, it's ended and forgotten." A laugh, a

bit too casual, would leave the thing on the proper plane. Later there

would be times when he could grow thoughtful and abstract and Rachel,

looking at him, would know that he had sacrificed--his career.

On Mama Turpin's porch Dorn's thoughts rambled in silence. Rachel had

said nothing. He looked at her and grew confused before the straightness

of her eyes, as if she knew the tawdry little plot moving through his

mind. Then an irritation ... why didn't she plead? Did she think it was

nothing to give up his plans? Was it anything? No. He endeavored to

evade his own questioning, but his thoughts mocked him with answers....

"I'm playing a game with her. I want her to feel sorry and grateful for

my not going and to feel that I've made a sacrifice for her. Because I

could cherish it against her ... later. Have something I could pretend

to be sad about. It would give me an excuse to scold her.... Merely by

looking at her I could remind her that she is indebted to me for a

sacrifice. Make-believe sacrifice gives one the unconsciousness of

virtue without any of its discomforts. I'm irritated because she refuses

to play her part in the farce and so makes me seem cheap. She knows I'm

lying but she can't figure out how or what about. So she looks at me and

says to herself, 'Erik has changed. He's different.' She means that I've

become an actor and able to offer her cheap things. But she doesn't know

that in words."

As he sat thinking, an understanding of himself played beneath his

thoughts. He was irritated with her. The passport business was something

he could hang his irritation on. It offered an opportunity to make the

petulant, indefinable aversion he sometimes felt toward her into a

noble, self-laudatory emotion.

He stood up abruptly. Make amends by being truthful and putting an end

to the theatrics.... "Listen, Rachel, it's foolish for us to take this

seriously. I don't give a damn about going, and I never did. It would

bore me. It means nothing to me, and it's no sacrifice or even

inconvenience. Please, I mean it. Put it out of your head."

He leaned over and took her hands.

"I love you...."

Despite himself there was a note of sacrifice. He frowned. His "I love

you" had startled him. He had said it as one pats a woman reassuringly

on the shoulder. More, as one turns the other cheek in a forgiving

Christian spirit. He was not an actor. He had become naturally cheap.

Rachel smiled wanly at him and kissed his hands. He noticed that she

looked thin about the face and that her eyes seemed ill with too much

weeping. He wondered when it was she wept. When she was alone, of

course. For a moment the thought of her flung across the bed and weeping

stirred him sensually. Then ... what made her cry so much? Good God,

what did she want of him? He was giving up.... Again he frowned. "I've

become a cad," he thought. "I can't think honestly any more. Thoughts

act themselves in my head. I've gotten to thinking lies and thinking

them naturally without trying to lie...."

"I'm going for a walk," he announced, and went off toward the shore

where the fishing-boats were drifting in becalmed.

Mama Turpin came out on the porch. Rachel smiled at the old woman.

"It's peaceful here, Mama Turpin."

"Yes, honey. My work's all done for the day now."

"Nothing ever changes here," Rachel murmured. "The sea is just the same

as when I came. I think I'll be leaving soon, Mama Turpin. Mr. Dorn will

stay on for a little while. I have some work I must get back to."

She paused and shaded her eyes from the setting sun.

"It's been wonderful down here. I'll never forget it. Perhaps some day

I'll come back to visit again."

She arose and sighed.

"What's the matter, honey?" the old woman asked, watching her.

Rachel waited till her lips could smile again. Then she said:

"Oh, I hate to leave it here. But I have so much work to do."

She entered the house swiftly. In her room she lay on the bed, her face

in the pillow as if she were waiting for tears. But none came. She lay

in silence until it grew dark and she heard Erik outside asking Mama

Turpin where she was.

CHAPTER VIII

It was dawn when they awoke. Rachel opened her eyes first. A lassitude

filled her. She remained quiet for moments and then sat up and stared at

Erik. His face was flushed and he was sleeping lightly, his eyes almost

open.

"Erik," she whispered. When he looked at her she leaned over and kissed

him.

"Last night was wonderful," she murmured.

He smiled sleepily.

"I want to lie in your arms for just a minute. And then we'll get up,

Erik."

Her head sank against his shoulder and she remained with her eyes

closed. He murmured her name. Over Rachel's face a curious light spread

itself. She sat up and turned her eyes to him.

"My dear one, my lover!"

Dorn regarded her with a sudden confusion. Her eyes and voice were

confusing. Women were strange. Her eyes were large, burning, devouring

... "I will be a shrine to you always. Let me look at you. I have never

looked at you...." Why was he remembering that? He felt himself grow

frightened. Her eyes were saying something that must not be said. His

arms reached out. Crush her to him. Hold her tightly. Sing his love to

her....

She had slipped from the bed and was standing on the floor, shaking her

head at him. Her face seemed blank. Dorn sat up and blinked ludicrously.

She had jumped out of his arms. He laughed. Coquetting. But her eyes had

been strange....

"Listen, Erik, do you mind if I spend the morning alone? I have some

letters to write and things. Then I'll meet you on the beach and we'll

go swimming and lie on the sand together. Will you?"

He nodded cheerfully and swung himself out of bed. His calm had

returned. The memories of the curiously abandoned, shameless Rachel of

the night lingered for a moment questioningly and then left him.

They ate breakfast together and Dorn strode off alone. He felt surprised

at himself. He had forgotten all about his trip to Europe.

"The sun and the rest here are doing me good," he thought. "I'm getting

normal. But a little stupidity won't hurt."

The morning slipped away and he returned to the beach from a walk

through the village. It was early afternoon and the sands were deserted.

The sea lay like a great Easter egg under the hot sun, a vast and

inanimate daub of glittering blue, green, and gold. He seated himself on

the burning sand and stared at it. Years could pass this way and he

could sit dreaming lifeless words, the sea like a painted beetle's back,

the sea like a shell of water resting on a stenciled horizon. A wind was

dying among the clouds. It had blown them into large shapeless virgins.

Puffy white solitudes over his head. He looked down and saw Rachel

coming toward him. She was carrying a woolen blanket over her arms.

She approached and appeared excited. Her face flushed.

"Shall we go in?"

He nodded. Her voice disturbed him. He would have preferred her calm,

gentle. Particularly after last night. She unloosened her clothes

quickly and hurried nude toward the water. Dorn, after an uneasy survey

of the empty beach, watched her. In the glare of the sun and sand her

body seemed insistently unfamiliar. He would have preferred her

familiar. He joined her and they pushed into the water together. Her

excited manner depressed him.

"Let's swim," he called.

A blue, singing moment under the water and they were up, swimming slowly

into the unbroken sheet of the sea. Rachel came nearer to him, the water

sparkling from her moving arms.

"Do you like it, Erik?"

He laughed in answer. Her head was turned toward him and he could see

her dark eyes smiling against the water.

"Wouldn't it be nice," she said softly, "to swim out together like

lovers in a poem? Out and out! And never come back!"

Her voice, slipping across the water, became unfamiliar. They continued

moving.

"Yes," he answered at length, smiling back at her. "It would be easy.

And I'm willing."

They swam in silence. He began to wonder. Were they going out and out

and never coming back? Perhaps they were doing that. One might become

involved in a suicide like that. He closed his eyes and his head moved

through the coldness of the water. What matter? What was there to come

back to? All hours were the same. He might wait until a thousand more

had dragged themselves to an ending. Or swim out and out. When he grew

tired he would kiss her and say, "It is easier to make our own endings

than to wait for them." The sun would be shining and her eyes would sing

to him for an instant over the water.

"We'd better turn now, Erik."

"No," he smiled. "We're lovers in a poem."

She came nearer.

"Come, we must go back, Erik."

"No."

He answered firmly. It pleased him to say "no." He felt a superiority.

He could say "no" and then she would plead with him and perhaps finally

persuade him.

"Not now, Erik. Some other time, maybe...."

"But it would be a proper ending," he argued. "What else is there? You

are unhappy. And perhaps I am too. Come, it will be easy."

For a moment a fright came into him. She was not pleading. She was

silent and looking at him as they drifted. What if she should remain

silent? "I don't want to die," he thought, "but does it matter?" He

wondered at himself. He had spoken of dying. Sincerely? No. But if she

remained silent they would keep swimming until there was nothing left to

do but die. Then he was sincere? No. He would drown as a sort of casual

argument. Good God! Her silence was asking his life. What matter? He

cared neither to live nor to die. He looked at her with an amused smile

in his eyes. His heart had begun to beat violently.

A sudden relief. She had turned and was swimming toward the shore. He

hesitated. Absurd to turn back too hurriedly. He waited till she looked

behind her to see if he were coming. Her looking back was a vindication.

She had believed then that he might go on, out and out.... He could

follow her to the shore now....

The swim had exhausted them. Rachel threw herself on the sand, Dorn

covering her with the blanket. They lay together, the whiteness and the

blaze of the sky tearing at their eyes. Her hair had spread itself like

a black fan under her head.

The oven heat of the day dried the burn of the sun into a chalked and

hammering glare--an unremitting roar of light that seemed to beat the

world into a metallic sleep. The sea had stiffened itself into a dead

flame. Molten, staring sweeps of color burst upon their eyes with a

massive intimacy. The etched horizon, the stagnant gleaming arch of the

water, and the acetylene burn of the sand gave the scene the appearance

of a monstrous lithograph.

The figures of the lovers lay without life. Rachel had turned her head

from the glare. Through veiling fingers Dorn remained staring at the

veneer of isolation about them. Waves of heat crept like ghost fires

across the nakedness of the scene. He thought of the sun as a pilgrim

walking over the barren floor of an empty cathedral. Over him the

motionless smoke-bellied clouds hung gleaming in the dead fanfare of the

sky. He thought of them as swollen white blooms stamped upon a board. As

the moments slipped, he became conscious that Rachel was talking. Her

voice made a tiny noise in the grave torpitude of the day.

"It's like listening to singing, Erik. What are you thinking of?"

"Nothing. I like the way the heat tightens my skin and pinches."

"Do you remember," she asked softly, "once you said beauty is an

external emotion?"

He answered drowsily, "Did I? I'm tired, dearest. Let's nap awhile."

"No. I want to hear you talk just a little."

He pressed his face into his arm, drawing his clothes carelessly over

him for protection.

"I can't think of anything to say, Rachel, except that I'm content. The

sun brings a luxurious pain into one's blood...."

"Yes, a luxurious pain," she repeated quietly. "Please let's talk."

"Too damn hot."

"I always expect you to say things. As if you knew things I didn't,

Erik. I've always thought of you as knowing everything."

"Ordinarily I do," he mumbled.

"Wonderful Erik...."

Flattery was annoying. There were times for being wonderful and times

for grunting at the sand.

"My vocabulary," he mumbled again, "has curled up its toes and gone to

sleep."

His eyes grew heavy.

Drowsily, "I'm an old man and need my sleep."

He felt Rachel's hand reaching gently for his head.

A cool gloom squatted on the sand about him when he opened his eyes. The

scene was a stranger. The sea and sand, dark strangers. His body felt

stiffened and his skin hurt. He sat up and stared about with parched

eyes.

The sun had gone down. A hollow light lingered in the sky, an echo of

light. He turned toward the blanket beside him. Rachel was gone. She had

left the blanket in a little heap, unfolded. Why hadn't she wakened him?

She must be on the beach somewhere, waiting.

In the distance he saw the shapeless figures of the fishermen moving

from their grounded boats. Staring about at the deserted scene he felt

unaccountably sad. It would have been pleasant to have wakened and found

Rachel sitting beside him.

A sheet of paper was pinned on the blanket. He noticed it as he slipped

painfully into his shirt. He continued to dress himself, his eyes

regarding the bit of paper. His heart had grown heavy at the sight of

it.

When he was dressed he folded the blanket carefully and removed the

note. A pallor in his thought. Something had happened. He had fallen

asleep under a glaring sun. Rachel stretched beside him. Now the glare

of the sun was gone and the sea and the sand were vaguely unreal, dark,

and unfriendly. The little blanket was empty.

He sat wondering why he didn't read the note. But he was reading it. He

knew what it said. It said Rachel had gone and would never come back. A

very tragic business.... "You do not love me any more as you did. You

have changed. And if I stayed it would mean that in a little while

longer you would forget all about me. Now perhaps you will remember."

Quite true. He had taught her such paradoxes. He would remember. That

was logical ... "to remember how you loved me makes it impossible to

remain with you. Oh, I die when I look at you and see nothing in your

eyes. It is too much pain. I am going away.... Dearest, I have known for

a long time."

His eyes skipped part of the words. Unimportant words. Why read any

further? The thing was over, ended. Rachel gone. More words on the other

side of the paper. His eyes skimmed ... "you have been God to me. I am

not afraid. Oh, I am strong. Good-bye."

Still more words. A postscript. Women always wrote postscripts--the

gesture of femininity immortalized by Lot's wife. Never mind the

postscript. Tear the paper into bits. It offended his fingers. Walk over

to the water's edge and scatter it on the sea.

He had lain too long in the sun. Probably burn like hell to-night. "Here

goes Rachel into the sea." Soft music and a falling curtain.

He read from one of the scraps.... "Erik, you will be grateful

later...." Let the sea take that. And the "good-bye, my dear one...." A

patch of white on the darkened water, too tiny to follow. Would she be

waiting when he came back to the room? No, the room would be empty. A

comb and brush and tray of hairpins would be missing from the

dressing-table.

A smile played over Dorn's face. His movements had grown abstract as if

he were intensely preoccupied with his thoughts. Yet there were no

thoughts. He walked for moments lazily along the water's edge kicking at

the sand, his eyes following the last of the paper bits still afloat.

They vanished and he sighed with relief.... "It's all a make-believe.

The sea, Rachel, the war. Things don't mean anything. Last night there

was someone to kiss. To-night, no one. But where's the difference.

Nothing ... nothing.... Will I cave in or keep on smiling? Probably cave

in. One must be polite to one's emotions. The sea says she's gone," his

thought rambled, "dark empty waters say she's gone. Rachel's gone. Well,

what of it? Like losing a hat. Does anything matter much? An ending.

Leave the theater. Draw a new breath. Remember vaguely what the actors

said or what they should have said. All the same. What was in the

postscript? Not fair to throw it away without reading it. Should have

read carefully. Took her hours to pick the right words. Night ... night.

It'll be night soon."

His words left him and he walked faster. He began to run. She would be

waiting in their room. On the bed ... crying ... "I couldn't leave you,

Erik. Oh, I couldn't." And later they would laugh about it.

Mama Turpin was on the porch. He slowed his run. To rush breathless past

the old woman would make a bad impression, if nothing had happened.

"Good evening, Mr. Dorn."

Of course she was upstairs. Or would Mama Turpin say good-evening?

"Hello," he called back casually, and walked on, his legs jumping ahead

of him.

The room was empty. More than empty, for the comb and brush and tray of

hairpins were missing. His eyes had swept the dressing-table as he came

in. They were gone.

There would be another note. Why didn't she leave it some place where he

could find it at a glance, instead of making him hunt around? Hunt

around. Under the bed. On the chairs. No note. Good God, she was insane!

Going away--why should she go away?... "we'll have a long talk about it

and straighten it out, of course, but ..." The insanity of the thing

remained. Gone!

He stopped and felt his head aching. The sun ... "you won't find me if

you look for me. Please don't try. One good-bye is easier and better

than two. Erik, Erik, something has died for always...."

Then he had read it. That had been in the postscript. He had given it a

glance, not intending to follow the words. Unimportant words.

"Died for always," he mumbled suddenly.

... His head pressed against the pillow in the dark room, he began to

weep. The odor of her hair was still in the pillow. Yes, the dream had

died. And she had run from its corpse, leaving behind the faint odor of

her hair on a pillow. How, died? Better to have her gone.... Tears

burned in his eyes. He repeated aloud, "better...."

An agony was twisting itself about his heart. His face moved as if he

were in pain. With his fists he began to beat the bed. It had gone away.

It had come and smiled at him for a moment, lifted him for a moment, and

then gone away as if it had never been. But it would come back. He

would weep and pound on the bed with his fists and bring it back. The

face of stars, eyes burning, devouring, eyes kindling his soul into

ecstasies.

"Rachel!" he cried aloud.

Silence. His tears had ended. He lay motionless on the bed, his body

suddenly weak, his thought tired. Someone had shouted a name in his

ears. A dead man had shouted the name of Rachel. It was the cry of an

Erik Dorn who was dead. He'd heard it in the dark room. An old, already

forgotten Erik Dorn who had laughed in a halloo of storms, heels up,

head down. Madness and a dream. Wings and a face of stars. They had

vanished with an old and almost forgotten Erik Dorn who had called their

name out of a grave. So things whirled away.

He arose and stood looking out of the window. Night had come ... "dark

rendezvous of sorrows. Silent Madonna of the spaces...." He whispered to

see if there were still phrases in him. His lips smiled against the

window. Phrases ... words ... and the rest was a make-believe once more.

A pattern precise and meaningless. His little flight over. Now it was

time to walk again.

Anna had stood one night staring at him. He remembered. Oh, yes, he'd

run away quickly for fear he might hear her shriek. And then, Rachel.

But these things were passed. It was time to walk. Did he still love

her? Yes. It would have been easier to walk with her--calmly, placidly,

their hands sometimes touching. Forgetting other days and other kisses

together. But he would not lie to himself. An end to that now. Love made

a liar of a man. At the beginning and at the end--lies. The ache now was

one of memory, not of loss. The pain was one of death. Dead things hurt

inside him. Afterward his heart would carry them about unknowingly. The

dead things would end their hurt. But now, leaden heavy, they kept

slipping deeper into him as if seeking graves that did not yet exist.

Standing before the window, Dorn's smile grew cold.

"A make-believe," he whispered, "but not quite the same as it was

before. A loneliness and an emptiness. Ruins in which once there was

feasting. And now, nothing ... nothing...."

PART IV

ADVENTURE

CHAPTER I

Long days. Short days. Outside the window was an ant-hill street. And an

ant-hill of days. In the stores they were already selling calendars for

the next year. Outside the window was a flat roof. By looking at the

flat roof you remembered that Mary James was married. Unexpectedly. You

came out of the ant-hill street, climbed the stairs, and sat down and

looked at the flat roof. Long days, short days turned themselves over on

the flat roof, and turned themselves over in your heart.

Occasionally an event. Events were things that differed from putting on

your shoes or buying butter in the grocery store. There was an event

now. It challenged the importance of the flat roof. Hazlitt was sitting

in the room and talking. Rachel listened.

An eloquent event. But words jumbled into sound. Loud sounds. Soft

sounds. They made her sleepy, as rain pattering on a window made her

sleepy, or snow sinking out of the sky. There were sleepy words in her

mind that had nothing to do with the event. Then the event came and

mingled itself, mixed itself into the words ... "no sorrow. No remorse.

The dead are dead. Oh, most extremely dead! So I'll sit by my sad

little window and listen to this unbearable creature make love. The

idiot'll go 'way in an hour and I'll be able to draw. Funny, my thoughts

keep moving on, despite everything. Like John Brown's soul, or

something. Words get to be separate, like the snickers of dead people.

You think as one adds figures. Thoughts add, and draw pictures the same

way. A line here. A line there. And you have a face. Curve a line up and

the face laughs. Curve it down and the face weeps. You lie dead. Always

dead. You lie dead in the street. The day tears your heart out. The

night tears your eyes out. And when somebody passes, even a banana

peddler, your eyes jump back, your heart jumps back, and you look up and

snicker and say, 'It's all right. I'm just lying here for fun. I'm dead

for fun.... He still loves me. I must answer him.'"

She spoke aloud:

"No, George, I hear you. But I don't love you. I can't say it more

plainly, can I?"

Her thoughts resumed. "Dear me. He talks almost as well as Erik. Lord,

he thinks I'm a virgin. His pure and unfaltering star. Well, well! Why

am I amused? Is life amusing, after all? Am I really happy? Alas! my

heart is broken. I must not forget my heart is broken. You forget

sometimes and begin snickering and somebody rings the bell and hands you

a telegram reading, 'Your heart is broken.' Rachel of the broken heart!

It was all very beautiful. This talk of his somehow brings it back ...

Oh, God. That was a line curved down. What eloquence! There, now, I must

speak. I'll have to tell him again."

Aloud she went on, "You're mistaken in me, George."

A flurry of silent words halted her.... "Ye gods, what a speech; she is

not all his fancy painted him. Indeed! Not mistaken. His heart tells

him. Poor boy! Poor little clowns who pay attention to what their hearts

say! I mustn't be rude."

She interrupted him, "If you'll listen to me, George ..."

Then, "What'll I say? If only he inspired something by his eloquence--a

phrase, at least. But my heart snickers at him. Ah! the dead are

wonderfully dead. I'll tell him I'm not a virgin. That'll be surprising

news. But how? Like a medical report? The woman was found not to be a

virgin. The thing seems to hinge on that. Why in God's name does he keep

virgining?"

"No, George," she answered aloud, "I'm sorry. I don't believe in

love...." Listen to her! "You see, I've been in love myself. Indeed I

have. That's why you find me changed."

He protested and her words followed silently. "My laughing makes him

angry. But I must laugh. Love is something to laugh over, isn't it? Oh,

God, why doesn't he go 'way?" The flat roof vanished. There was a rising

event in the room and the flat roof bowed good-bye and walked away.

"Yes, I was in love for quite a while with a man," she answered him.

"And I'm in love with him yet--in a way. But we've parted. He had to go

to Europe." Nevertheless he still thought she was a virgin. He'd started

another virgining speech. There would have to be a medical report. "We

lived together for over a year. We weren't married, of course, because

he had a wife. You see, you're terribly mistaken." He must be impressed

by her calm. "Because what I really am is a vampire. I lured a man from

his wife, lived with him, and cast him aside."

The event jumped to its feet. No room to talk for a moment, so her

thought resumed, "I'm lying. He thinks I'm lying. I should have

confessed in tears. With a few 'Oh, Gods.' Amusing! Amusing! That was

Erik's favorite word. I'm beginning to understand it now. But there's

nothing to be amused about ... in itself an amusing circumstance ... but

you look at the banana peddler and snicker. Will he hit me? Oh, very

red-faced. Speechless. I'd better talk. If he hit me.... He'll start in

a minute...."

"Yes, you know him, George," she cried suddenly. "And if you doubt me

you can ask a lot of people. Ask Tesla or Mary James or Brander or New

York." She'd make him believe. God, what an idiot! She'd claw his eyes

out with words. Throw roofs on him. But it was a good thing Erik was in

Europe, or he'd be killed.

"Yes. I've told you in order to get rid of you. I'd rather be rid of

you than keep my good name in your estimation. So now, run along and do

your yelling outside. I'm sick of you."

She paused on a high gesture.... "He's going to hit me. Strike a woman.

War has brutalized him. Dear me!" But he asked a question ominously and

she answered,

"Erik Dorn. Yes. Erik Dorn."

This made it worse. It was bad enough without a name. But a name made it

realler. And very ominous. She moved toward a chair.

"I'll sit still and then he won't hit me. If I'm calm, serene like a nun

facing the wrath of God. This is melodrama. He can squeeze my shoulders

all he wants. What good will it do him? If I giggled now he'd kill me.

Sorry? Oh, so I must be sorry. Because I've offended him. Dear God, what

a mess!"

She twisted out of his grasp and cried.

"No, I'm not sorry. You fool! I'm glad I was his woman. I'll always be

glad, as long as I live. Leave me alone. You're a fool. I've always

thought of you as a fool. You make me want to laugh now. You're a clown.

I'll give myself to men. But not to you. I gave myself to Erik Dorn

because I love him. If he wants me again I'll come to him not as a

lover, because he doesn't love me any more--but as a prostitute. Now do

you know me? Well, I want you to. So you'll go way and never bother me

again...."

That was a good speech. She stood dramatically silent as hands seized

her shoulder again. "He hurts me. Why this? Oh, my shoulder! Does he

want to? Oh, God, this is me! He'll let me go in a minute if I don't

move. Very still. Silent ... I don't want him to cry. Can't he see it's

amusing? If he'd only look at me and wink, I'd kiss him. No, he's a

fool. I'll not say anything more. Let him cry! His life is ruined. Dear

me, I have ruined his life. His love. I was his dream. Through the war

... rose of no-man's land. Amusing, amusing! He looks different.

Contempt. He has contempt for me. And horror. Oh, get out, get out, you

fool! You sniveling nincompoop, get out! I want to draw pictures, and

forget. Console him ... for what? I don't know, I don't know. He's

going. Thank God! Oh, I don't know anything. Poor man, he should know

better than to have dreams. Dreams are for devils, not for men or women.

Dreams ... dreams ... I don't know ... I'll draw a picture. But I don't

want to. He'll never come back. I'm sad again. The flat roof says

something. Is it Erik? Dear Erik! Poor Erik! I love you. But I'll begin

crying. Pretty tears, amusing tears. Erik mine, dead for always. But

it's not as bad as it was. Another month, year, ten years. Oh, it chokes

me. I can't help it. Your eyes are the beckoning hands of dream. Whose

eyes? Mine ... mine.... Mine ... I know. I know. I must keep on dying,

keep on dying. But I'm not afraid. Look, I can laugh! Amusing that I

can laugh ... Oh, God ... God...."

Beside her window looking out on the ant-hill street Rachel covered her

face with her hands. When she removed them she caught a glimpse of the

figure of Hazlitt walking as if it were a blind man in zig-zags down the

pavement.