LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ

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ERIK DORN

BY

BEN HECHT

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Gbe Ifcnfcfcerbocfcer press 1921

Copyright, 1921

by Ben Hecht

Printed in the United States of A merica

ff?

To MARIE

SLEEP

DREAM

WINGS

ADVENTURE

SILENCE

CONTENTS

PART I PART II PART III

PART IV

PART V

75

173

277

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 <xmtorted 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

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4 Erik Dorn

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 dis- tinctly, 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 dark- ness 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.

Sleep 5

"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 solici- tous. Their little pats and caressings presumed too much. One grew sad under their ministra- tions and murmured to oneself, "Poor child, poor child. " Better a half -hour under the cold, amused eyes of his son, Erik. There was something be- tween 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 ques- tion. Sitting motionless in a corner of the room

6 Erik Dorn

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

'T'HE 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, win- dows; 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

7

8 Erik Dorn

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 diver- sion 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

Sleep 9

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 van-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 them- selves with, and life lies forever buried behind the inventions of engineers, scientists, and business

men."

Normal outwardly, a shrewd editor and journal- ist, 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 him- self 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

io Erik Dorn

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 be- tween 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

Sleep ii

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. Car- ried 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 naively 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 — garru- lous even in his silences, he daily entered his office and proceeded skillfully about his work. He was, as always, delighted with himself. He felt him- self a man ideally fitted to enjoy the little spec- tacle 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 helpless- ly upon their causes. And here lay the ludi- crous— 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

12 Erik Dorn

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 tena- ciously 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 some- how nonexistent 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

Sleep 13

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 physi- cal 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 disin- terested 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

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Sleep 15

head, his ear divided itself between a half-dozen conversations and a tireless telephone. With his hands he kept fumbling an assortment of clip- pings, memoranda, and copy.

Oldish young men and youngish old men gravi- tated about him, their faces curiously identical. These were the irresponsible-eyed, casual-man- nered 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 indiffer- ent, 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, ever- lastingly irritable as if the victims of pernicious conspiracies, badgered for information that seemed inevitably nonexistent. 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 some- where waving smeared bits of printed paper and

1 6 Erik Dorn

triumphantly demanded explanation of ambiguous passages.

Re-write men "helloed" indignantly into tele- phones, repeating with sudden listlessness the pregnant details of the news pouring in ; and scrib- bling 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, naively ex- cited 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 fum- bling 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.

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These folk and a sprinkling of apparently un- employed and undisturbed strangers spread them- selves 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 with- out beginning or end, was guiding the latest con- fusions 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 un- consciousness of the scene. A litter of correspond- ence, propaganda, telegrams, and contributions from Constant Reader lay stuffed into the corners and pigeon-holes of his desk. He sat for a mo-

i8 Erik Dorn

ment 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 . . . scrib- ble suggestion for changes . . . peer for items of information that might be expanded humor- ously or pathetically into Human Interest yarns. . . . These were functions he discharged mechanically. A perfect affinity toward his work characterized his attitude. Yet behind the auto- matic efficiency of his thought lay an ironical appreciation of his tasks. The sterile little chron- icles 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 whis- pered 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 com- ing from the depths of him. Equally unconscious

Sleep 19

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; head- lines 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 news- paper— 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 suc- cessful air which distinguishes men who have come to the end of their rope. He had become an edi- tor and a fixture. The office observed an intent, gray-eyed man, straight nosed, firm lipped, cor- rectly 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

20 Erik Dorn

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. Argu- ments, 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 dear- est . . . " Dorn read over his shoulder as he passed. Promising young men, both, whose col- lars would grow slightly soiled as they advanced in their profession. He remembered one of his early observations: "There are two kinds of news- papermen— those who try to write poetry and those who try to drink themselves to death. Fortu- nately for the world, only one of them succeeds."

In a corner a young woman, dressed with a cer- tain ease, sat partially absorbed in a book and par- tially 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 news- paperman 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

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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 news- paper figure. Dorn caught his eye and wondered over his sensitive infatuation of exotic writing. In the pages of Huysmans, De Gourmont, Flau- bert, 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 be- yond satiety, passes in him from bestiality to asceticism and esthetics. Yesterday a bac-

22 Erik Dorn

chanal 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 uni- versity. Dorn caught a memory of him sitting in a congenial saloon before a stein and pouring forth hoarsely oracular comments upon the activi- ties 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."

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Dorn shrugged his shoulders, smiled and lifted his hat out of a locker. He remembered again to tele- phone 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 win- dow of a Japanese art shop and stared at a bulbous wooden god stoically contemplating his navel.

During his walks through the streets he some- times 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 cyni- cism 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

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assent to his words that surprised him. It pre- tended 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 won- dered if she was intelligent. They had met several times, usually by accident. He had found him- self able to talk at length to her and had come away feeling an intimacy between them.

"Look at the windows," he continued. "Cor- sets, 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

26 Erik Dorn

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 naive 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 Amer-

Sleep 27

ica, "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 under- stand 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 pleas- ant were it more difficult to discover. He became

28 Erik Dorn

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 an- noyance, whereas ideals are charming procrastina- tions. 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.

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Her eyes were flatteries. He desired to be amus- ing, 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 them- selves 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. Intelli- gence is a faculty which enables people to boast. And it's difficult boasting in silence. And inas- much 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 stum- bled. He felt his speech was degenerating into a compliment.

3° Erik Dorn

"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 him- self 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 na- ture. Whereas with a God to blame the thing is simple."

She nodded, which was doubly idiotic, inas- much 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

Sleep 31

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 metronomicallv

32 Erik Dorn

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

Sleep 33

& jiptiness 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 some- thing 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 notori- ous 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 abstrac- tion. She appeared to be listening to him with- out hearing what he said. Dorn contemplated her confusedly. He frowned at the thought of

34 Erik Dorn

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 confu- sion what she was dreaming about. Her hand as it lay on his forearm gave him a sense of compan- ionship which his words sought clumsily to under- stand.

"•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. Ad- mired, 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.

Sleep 35

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 tc 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 re- pugnance 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 il- lustrations 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 think- ing of people. There was an endless swathing of people, buildings, faces, words, that wound itself tightly about her. She would cover her face sud- denly and whisper, ' ' Oh, I must go away. I must. "

36

Sleep 37

She hurried through dragging days as if she were running away. But there were things she could not escape. Men smiled at her and estab- lished 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 like- wise 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, "Goodbye, 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 doubt- ful. 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 preocupied with something

38 Erik Dorn

that did not concern them. Men found the recol- lection of her more pleasing than her presence- Something they remembered of her seemed al- ways 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

Sleep 39

dropped across her cheeks. She had felt con- fused 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 in- timate 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 differ- ent. 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.

40 Erik Dorn

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 proprietory 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 con- viction 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 draw- ing 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.

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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 en- fevered senses had come to perceive in the conven- tionally 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 unsensi- tive arid 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 emotionallv unbearable influence

42 Erik Dorn

into an intellectually insufferable type. A con- version 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 him- self 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 dedevilments were "nuts." A dreadful species like herself, given to wrong hair cuts, in- sanities, 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 con- sisted 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.

Sleep 43

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 sad- dened 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 wait- ing, 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 vic- tory 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 —

44 Erik Dorn

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 unbear- able. 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

Sleep 45

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.

1 ' 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 contem- plated it serenely. He would talk to her soon and find out what was the matter. There was un- doubtedly 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 naivete 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 bar- barians? The way they mess up their hair and go in for savage colors ! Sometimes I get to feeling

46 Erik Dorn

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 youself, 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

Sleep 47

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. Be- wilderedly 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.

48 Erik Dorn

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 ringers was bring- ing an ache into her heart. It was sad. The night and the room were sad. She could feel sadness open- ing 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 say- ing, 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'"

Sleep 49

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 mo- ment 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 loath- some 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.

5° Erik Dorn

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 mechani- cally. 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. 1 'Erik Dorn , , Erik Dorn."

CHAPTER VI

rE world in which Erik Dorn lived was com- pounded of many surfaces. Of them Anna, his wife, was the most familiar. It was a familiar- ity of absorption. Weeks of intimacy passed be- tween 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 con- tribution 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 sud- denly real. He would feel a despair. Words un- like the sophisticated patter of his usual thought would come to him. . . . "What is there . . . I would like something . . . what? ..." A

51

52 Erik Dorn

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 pic- tures 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 out- casts 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

Sleep 53

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 star- ing 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 to- gether 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

54 Erik Dorn

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 sensual- ism 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 myste- rious 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 at- taching her garters to the tops of her stockings; Anna tautening her body as she slipped out of her

Sleep 55

nightgown . . . or a picture of her pressing his head against her breasts and whispering passion- ately, "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 ani- mation in her behalf, listening to his banter with an intent, almost preoccupied smile in her eyes. While he talked, asking her questions and press- ing 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

56 Erik Dorn

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 laugh- ter, 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.

4 '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 ar- gument seemed routed.

"Of course that's true," he agreed. Mr. Har- lan 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 with- drawing itself and Mr. Harlan stammered like an

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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 hus- band 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 em- braced 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 whis- pered. "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.

58 Erik Dorn

If we get into this squabble you'll find them cheer- ing 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 out- line.

"I agree," the red face chimed in. "It's non- sense. Dorn's full of clever nonsense. I quite agree with you, Miss Dillingham." Miss Dilling- ham 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

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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, hus- bands, uncles, and fathers with a high, firm spirit, announcing to the press that they are only sorry their supply of relatives is limited. The sacri- ficing 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 or- ganizes 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

60 Erik Dorn

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

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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 merri- ment of her husband with a ''John, you're impos- sible!" 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 risque remarks were invariably inspired by memories of her.

"Barring, of course, the unembattled stay-at- homes," he continued. "The sanity of battle- fields is in direct ratio to the insanity of the non-

62 Erik Dorn

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-com- batants a holy war. And we get a swivel-chair collection of nincompoops raving weirdly, as the casualty lists pour in, of humanity and demo- cracy. 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 result- ing 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 bio- logical, 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

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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 de- sired 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.

64 Erik Dorn

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 sur- prising force, charged with a rush through his thought. Sentences unrelated, bizarre combina- tions of words — a kaleidoscopic procession of as- tounding ideas — art, life, war, streets, people — he knew what they were all about. An illumina- tion 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 ar- rested 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

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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 un- able to speak, as if a hand had been laid threaten- ingly 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 in- fidelity. 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 con- scious of himself in an overheated room sur- rounded by a group of awed and saccharine faces. Rachel was smiling at him with a meaning that he

66 Erik Dorn

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 evi- dence. The owlish glasses focused with non- committal 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 ap- peared to be lingering dejectedly among its echoes. Rachel slipped quickly to her feet, her arms thrust

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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 breath- less, 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

68 Erik Dorn

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 approach- ing 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 her- self. She desired to speak with a disarming casual- ness. 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." 69

70 Erik Dorn

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 theii 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 invari- ably 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 fulhiess 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 eager- ness 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 hang- ing around me — as if you were apologizing to your- self for liking them, and doing penance. Or you call them names."

"Miss Laskin," Dorn answered, delighted to

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protract the conversation, "is a vivid sort of im- becile 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 re- minds me of an emotion undergoing a major opera- tion. 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 indigna- tion 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 dark- ness. 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."

72 Erik Dorn

A little laugh came, and tears reached her cheeks.

1 ' 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!"

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" 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 tight- ened 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

74 Erik Dorn

old make-believe. But this time he felt himself further away. There was no meaning. . . .

He tried vainly to think of Anna, but an empti- ness 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 — 4<I love you, I love you! Oh, I love you so much! .

PART II

DREAM

75

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 ma- sonry 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.

77

78 Erik Dorn

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 scroll- work— 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 s©unds 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

Dream 79

winds up clocks, sleek men and desirable women. In the inner offices of the city the new heroes sit through the day, watchmakers themselves, wind- ing 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 news- papers.

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 ex- hibited 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

8o Erik Dora

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 impor- tant 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 Liege, on a Tues- day, the blood-dripping Huns added another horror to their list of revolting crimes. Three citizens of Liege 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 in- teresting 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-

Dream 81

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 cafe. 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 foot- note on a timetable. Inconsiderate firemen who take up important space on a crowded day !

Apology ceases. Here is something that re- quires 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. Opin- ions 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 epi-

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demic 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 lead- ing Loop hotel whither he had gone to divert him- self 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 scoun- drels, 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 con- tinually 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 abnormali- ties 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,

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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 them- selves 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 his- tories that dreamers invent. For they are ar- rangements 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 sub- stitute 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 en-

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sues 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 Mat- thews Versus Matthews, Illinois Sixth, Chapter Eight, Page ninety two, in which in the Third Para- graph 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 in- structs 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 ver- dict." "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 com- mitted 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-

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•

doers and the doers of good bear a fatuous resem- blance to each other. God Himself might well be confused by this curious fact. But fortunately there are arrangements of words capable of adjust- ing themselves to confusion, capable of tick-tock- ing 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 Pop~ in Rome, the Presi- dent 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 pos- ture 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 plati- tude with bromide, legal precedent of the State of Illinois with legal precedent of the State of In- diana; 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

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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 pre- tending 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 propor- tion with its ability to distinguish evil. The de- nunciation of evil-doers was the boasting of George

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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 spiritu- ally 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 dis- order. Of this triumph Hazlitt felt himself a part.

Disorder he thought not only illegal, but debas- ing. The same virtue which prevented him from promenading in his pajamas in the boulevard stirred with a feeling of outrage against the con- fusion attending a street-car strike. His intelli- gence, 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 re-

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spect 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 conven- ient 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 expres- sion 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 re- sponsibility 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 luna- tics 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 mo-

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ments 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 — neu- rasthenics, 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 him- self 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

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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 handker- chief in her hands. The jury that had listened for three weeks to the tale of the young woman's mur- der 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 merci- less 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 ;

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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 sacri- fice 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 court- room, 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 function- ing in her mind, she is guilty. Hang her, gentle- men 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 promis-

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cuous 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 de- ceased 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

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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 re- porters buzzing around, forming themselves into relays between the press table and the door, fur- ther 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 empti- ness of life without Rachel, the emptiness of court- rooms, 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

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gestures of her full-grown hands that moved al- ways 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. Some- thing 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 con- tinue sending her letters. Once each week he

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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. Every- body 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 down-town . . .

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"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 wan- dering energies and a realization of his victory in the court-room brought him a belated glow. He was young, on an upgrade, able to command success.

Hazlitt felt a sudden lusty kinship toward the

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swarm of bodies unwinding itself through the snowfall. A contact with other ... a pleasant, comforting contact. What more was life, any- way? 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 — •

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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,

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"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."

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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, aban- doned 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 whisper- ing, "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."

1 ' Yes, yes ! There, there ! " Of course he would

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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 liks 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

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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 weep- ing. 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

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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 patr

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

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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 with- out 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."

"Whereto, mister?"

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

Hazlitt reentered 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

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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 at- tempted only to console her. Irrelevant and im- material 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 sacri- fice 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 dark- ness. Familiar faces, buildings, snow. Theater facades making a jangle of light through the storm.

io8 Erik Dorn

Entrances, exits, cars clanging, figures hurrying, signs sputtering confusion in the snow. All fami- liar, 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 sweep- ing 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 laugh- ter. From afar came the sound o^ 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

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flying-haired Maenads 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. An- other 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 with- out 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 Amer- icanism, 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 him- self in. It seemed to him now that his love had become a part of the snow and the far-away dark

i io Erik Dorn

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 punish- ment 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 con- fronted with the intricate business of forgiving himself. He felt shame, but shame was some- thing 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

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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 wh» 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 t© 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 court-room and his future. That was part of life, to be thought of and envied by others.

ii2 Erik Dorn

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 fel- low 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 garrul- ity 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 mo- ment, his words abhorring idleness, fell to inventing emotions — a complete set of emotions for himself and for Rachel. These were discussed, explained, and forgotten.

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ii4 Erik Dorn

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 them- selves, deriving a movement and a meaning beyond themselves. Then the end of concealment. An exhausted vocabulary sighed, collapsed. A fran- tic discarding of ornaments and the nude body of the dancer stood posturing naively, timidly. There- with an end to mystery. The thing was known.

It had happened during one of their walks. Leaden clouds over day-dark pavements. Ware- houses, railroad tracks, factories — a street toiling through a dismantled world. Their hands to- gether, they paused and remained staring as if at a third person. He had reached out rather im- personally 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 vocabu- lary 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!"

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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 em- braced, 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 indi- cated 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 distin- guish offhand. He desired nothing more than to stand still and close his eyes and permit himself to shine. Vague words traced his emotions. A full- ness. 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.

n6 Erik Dorn

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 sud- denly 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 hap- pened 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 be- hind 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

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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 en- velope. ' ' 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 meaning- ful outlines. There comes a contact. One is a

ii8 Erik Dorn

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 hence- forth 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 in- spired him to marry Anna. There had un- doubtedly 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 Raohel. 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."

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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."

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On the third day the bombardment of Paris in- terfered 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

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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. . . . Civil- ization on Its Knees. The City Wall of Jericho Collapses. Carthage Reduced to Ashes. Rome Sacked by Huns. Yes, there had been mag- nificent headlines in the past. Now a new head- line— 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 en- ergies 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."

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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 disap- peared. 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 an- swered. "I'll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world."

There was no final headline that night. Wed- nesday 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 fare- well closed his thought to the future. He spent Wednesday waiting for a seven o'clock on Thurs- day. 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 de- sired love-making. He listened to her pour out ardent phrases and wondered why he felt no sense of betrayal toward her. ' ' Conscience, ' ' he thought,

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"seems to be a vastly over-advertised com- modity." 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 understanding] y, 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 con- fessions, so he contented himself by rolling the situation over on his tongue, tasting the jealousy of his wife, the drama of the denouement, and remaining peacefully smiling in his leather chair.

Thursday arrived. The afternoon dragged. He sat at his desk wondering whether he was sor- rowful 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 unthink- ing calm, complete and vibrant, wrapped him in an embrace. The fullness and the calm brought

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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 diver- sion— 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 so- phistications were avenging itself upon interloping emotions. And, too, because of a vague shame which inspired him to taunt his surrender ; to com- bat 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 per- haps 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

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his inability to give lofty utterance to his emo- tions by amusing himself with deliberately cheap- ened 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 sorrow- ful than tears. This annoyed. It was ungrate- ful 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 re- membering she was at his side. So he laughed quietly.

"Yes, to-morrow the guillotine falls," he an- swered. ' ' 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, irri- tated. There was something he should talk to her about — the causes of her departure. Plans. Their future. Was there a future ? Undoubtedly some-

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thing 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 be- come 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, tran- quil 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 pa- tiently like a white and silent dream over their heads. Phantom houses stared after them. Slant- ing 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

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sudden life through the blur of window rays. Be- neath, the pavements opened like white and nar- row fans in a far-away hand. Black figures lean- ing 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 re- turned, 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 vague- ness 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

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her leaving. But an indifference deprived him of words.

"This is all of life," he muttered. Rachel star- ing 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 hori- zon— 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 asi- ninity 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

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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 whim- pering 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 unsay- able, 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!"

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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 mo- ment— till the time comes when their yesterdays die. Then they become little, half-dead people, who wait in lighted rooms, empty handed, fum- bling 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? Noth- ing 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 say- ing good-by to things that no longer exist. We part with living things, and so keep them, some- how. Your face makes life for the moment fa- miliar. Visions bloom like sad flowers in my heart. Your body against mine brings a torment even into

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my words. Oh, your weeping's the sound of my own heart dying. Rachel, you are more wonder- ful 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 ac- quiesced 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. Be- neath, 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.

132 Erik Dorn

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 point- ing. Her voice rang brokenly. "They're coming for me, Erik. Erik, don't you see? People wan- dering toward me. Horrible strangers. Oh, I know, I know!" She laughed. "My grand- mother 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

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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, un- certain. 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 al- ways 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."

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Dying, dying! She was dying. Another mo- ment 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 remem- ber!" 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

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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 con- tinue a complacent quest for erudition in a univer- sity. 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

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stars, another Anna. All part of another world. Eddie Meredith and another world sat dimly ap- parent across the white linen of the table. Anec- dotes 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 al- ways 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 be- yond their sense. Trifles assumed an importance^ For moments she felt herself looking at the joyous- ness of an old friend and forgetting. Then as al- ways through the day and night. . . . "Erik,

138 Erik Dorn

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 tome!" . . . 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

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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. . V . 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 warm- ing 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 "some- one 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 some- where— away. Her awe of his brain, of his strange, always impenetrable character, adjusted itself to the change in him. There were mysteri- ous 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

140 Erik Dorn

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 wist- fulness through the clatter and laughter of the cafe. 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 dis- semble 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 them- selves 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 ex- actly. 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

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did. Particularly the kind I pick up. But it's a habit that keeps me cheerful. Better than col- lecting 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 ex- clusive 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,

Erik Dorn

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 for- gotten." 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, untram- meled, free. There've been women, but not the woman."

His voice put on a pleasing facetiousness.

"Mustn't mind an pld friend getting senti-

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mental. 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 mis- understand. 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.

1 ' Faster, ' ' she whispered.

They broke into quicker steps. "Erik. . . . Erik. . . . my own. Love me again. Come back to me. . . . " Still in her thought, but

144 Erik Dorn

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 Jier 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 alia dream, a nightmare of her own inventing. Noth- ing 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. Some- thing 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

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and movement that caressed her with the sweet- ness 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. Fea- tures 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 timor- ous 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

xo

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pamphlets. Tesla continued to talk, a sycophan- tic 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, advanc- ing or improving nothing by their death. Sol- diers, heroes, workingmen, all blind acrobats in another man's circus. But something was hap- pening. 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, bow- ing; his words mumbling confusedly in the pres- ence of other words. Yet a powerful man with a tremendous urge that might some day hurl him against the stars. He had something. r . .

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 appre-

Dream 14?

ciation 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 ges- tures 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 in- complete. 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

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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, breath- ing 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 differ- ence what life is ? It means nothing to me. People and their posturings mean nothing. But what about now? A contact, a tying up with postur-^ ings, 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

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fantastic amorous rigmarole of Rachel and him- self walking together over the heads of the world ; child dreams that substituted themselves for the realities he demanded. But these were infre- quent. 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 caf6, 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 caf6, 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 vo- cabulary 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 cinema- tograph; 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 con- tinued to trace themselves over the outlines of

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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 mechani- cal, phraseological movement of his thought he was able to hide himself. Thus he listened to Tesla and looked at the cafe. The inn was filled with people — elaborately dresssed women and shiningly groomed men — grouped about white- linened, silver-laden tables ; an ornamental grimac- ing little multitude come to the cafe 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. De- mocracy 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

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court idea of government. Steam, gas, and elec- tricity made the French revolution obsolete even before it was ended. This war . . . good God, Dorn, blood pouring over toys we've out- grown! ..."

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 ad- justing 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. Yester- day 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 fac- tories — your masses. There's the strength in

152 Erik Dorn

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 master- ing 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 sprawl- ing 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.

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The nymphs on the wall reminded one chiefly that they were careful