She looked up. Tears almost in his eyes. His voice grown low. He seemed to be whispering something that didn't belong to the sanity of the hotel lobby and the two large potted palms in the corner.
"I'm unclean. I've been looking for you to ask you to forgive me."
Hazlitt's hands crept over his knees.
"Oh, God, you must listen and forgive me."
This was a mad monkey uttering noises too unintelligible for even an attentive hat, dress, and pair of shoes to make anything of.
"Rachel, I love you. I don't know how to say it. There's something I've got to say. Because ... otherwise I can't love you. I can't love you with the thing unsaid."
He looked bewilderedly about him and gulped, his face red, his eyes tortured.
"It's about a woman."
"Perhaps," she thought, "he's going to boast. No, he's going to cry. What does he want?"
The sound of his voice made her ill. If he were going to make love why didn't he start instead of gulping and covering his face and choking with tears in a hotel lobby as if he were an actor?
"I was drawn into it. I couldn't help it. One afternoon in my office after the trial. Then she kept after me. The thought of you has been like knives in me. I've loved you all through it and hated myself for thinking of you, dragging you into it. I dragged the thought of you down withme. But she wouldn't let me go. God, I could kill her now. I broke away after weeks. She got somebody else. I've been living in hell ever since—on account of you. I'm unclean and can't love you any more. If it hadn't been for my going across I'd not have come to you. But the war's given me my chance. I can't explain it. I went in to—to wipe it out. But I had to find you and tell you. I didn't want to think of dying and having insulted you and not ..."
He stopped, overcome. Rachel was nodding her head. She must make an answer to this. It was a riddle asking an answer.
"For God's sake, Rachel, don't look like that. Oh, you're so clean and pure. I can't tell you. You're like a star shining and me in the mud. You've always hated me. But it's different now. I'm going to France to die. I don't want to live. If you forgive me it'll be easier. That's why I had to talk, Rachel, forgive me. And then it won't matter what happens."
She let him take her hand. It was an easy way to make an answer. A desire to giggle had to be overruled. The words he had spoken became absurd little manikins of words, bowing at each other, striking idiotic postures before her. But he had done something and for some astounding reason wanted her to forgive him for what he had done. He was a fool. An impossible fool. He sat and looked like a fool. Not even a man.
Hazlitt raised her hand to his face. Tears fellon it. Rachel felt them crawling warmly over her fingers. They were too intimate.
"You make me feel almost clean again. Your hand's like something clean and pure. If I come back...."
He stared at her in desperation. He seemed suddenly to have forgotten his intention to die in France. He recalled Pauline. Was he sorry? No. It was over. Not his fault. All this to Rachel was a ruse. Clever way to get her sympathy. Not quite. But he felt better.
He became incomprehensible to Rachel. The things he had said—his weeping, gulping—all part of an incomprehensible business. She nodded her head and looked serious. It was something that had to do with a far-away world.
"Good-bye. Remember, I love you. And I'll come through clean because of you...."
She held out her hand and said, "Good-bye."
But he didn't go. Now he was completely a fool. Now there was something so completely foolish about him that she must laugh. The light in his face detained her laughter.
"You forgive me ... for ..."
She nodded her head again. It seemed to produce a magical effect—this nodding of her head up and down. His eyes brightened and he appeared to grow taller.
"Then if I die, I'll go to heaven."
She winced at this. An unbearable stupidity. But Hazlitt stood looking at her for an instantquite serious, as if he had said something noble. He saluted her, his hand to his cap, his heels together, and went away.
The memory lingered. Hazlitt had always been incomprehensible. His stupidity was easy enough to understand. But something under it was a mess. Now he was a fool. Stiff and idiotic and making her feel ashamed as if she were sorry for him.... Tesla came back and stood on a step dropping blood from his fingers. Brander came back and whispered with his ugly face. Hazlitt, Tesla, Brander—three men that jumped out at her from the superfluous streets. Like the three men in the park walking horribly across the white park in the night.... An idiot, a bleeding man, and an ugly face. But they had passed her and gone. They were things seen outside a window.
Her eyes looking at a clock said to her, "Two hours more. Oh, in two hours, in two hours!"
She sat motionless until the clock said, "One hour more, one more hour!"
Then she stood up and walked slowly out of the hotel. Things had changed since she had left the streets. The strange world full of Marys, Hazlitts, and Teslas had added further superfluities. A band of music. Soldiers marching. Buildings waving flags and crying, "Boom, boom! we have gone to war!..."
She came to her home. A red-brick house like other red-brick houses. But her home. What afool she had been to leave it. It would have been easier waiting here. She walked into the two familiar rooms filled with the memory of Erik—two rooms that embraced her. Her hat fell on the bed. She would have to eat. Downstairs in the dining-room. Other boarders to look at. But Erik would have eaten when he came. He preferred eating alone.
Rachel took her place at one of the smaller tables and dabbled through a series of uninteresting dishes. An admiring waitress rebuked her ... "Dearie, you ain't eating hardly anything."
She smiled at the waitress and watched her later bringing dishes to a purple-faced fat man at an adjoining table. The fat man was futilely endeavoring to tell secrets to the waitress by contorting his features and screwing up his eyes. He reminded Rachel of Brander, only Brander told secrets without trying. She finished and hurried out. She would be hungry later, but it didn't matter. Erik would be there then.
In the hallway Mrs. McGuire called, "Oh, Mrs. Dorn!"
Being called Mrs. Dorn always frightened her and made her dizzy. She paused. Some day Mrs. McGuire would look at her shrewdly and say, "You're not Mrs. Dorn. I called you Mrs. Dorn but I know better. Don't think you're fooling anybody. Mrs. Dorn, indeed!"
But Mrs. McGuire held out her hand.
"A letter for your husband. Do you want to sit in the parlor, Mrs. Dorn? You know I want all my boarders to make themselves entirely at home."
"Thank you," said Rachel. "You're so nice. But I have some work to do upstairs."
Escaping Mrs. McGuire was one of the difficult things of the day. A buxom, round-faced woman in black with friendly eyes, Mrs. McGuire had a son in the army and a sainted husband dead and buried, and a childish faith in the friendliness and interest of people. Rachel hurried up the stairs. In her room she looked at the letter. For Erik. Readdressed twice. From Chicago. She stood holding it. It said to her, "I am from Anna. I am from Anna. Words of Anna. I am the wife of Erik Dorn."
Anna was a reality. Long ago Anna had been a reality. A background against which the dream of Erik Dorn raised itself. She remembered sitting close to Anna and smiling at her the first time she had visited Erik's home. Why had she gone? If only she had never seen Anna! Her tired, sad eyes that smiled at Erik. Rachel's fingers tightened over the envelope. She laughed nervously and tore the letter. He was hers. Anna couldn't write to him.
A pain came into her heart as the paper separated itself into bits in her fingers. She felt herself tearing something that was alive. It was cruel to tear the letter. But it would save Erik pain.... To read Anna's words, to hear her cries, see her sad tired eyes staring in anguish out of the writing—that would hurt Erik.
She dropped the bits into the waste-paper basket and stood wide-eyed over them. She had dared. As if he had belonged to her. What would he say? But he wouldn't know. Unless Mrs. McGuire said, "There was a letter for you, Mr. Dorn." Why hadn't she read the letter before tearing it up? Perhaps it was important, saying Anna had died. When Anna died Erik would marry her. She would have children and live in a house of her own. Mrs. Rachel Dorn, people would call her. This was a dream.... Mrs. Rachel Dorn. He would laugh if he knew; or worse, be angry. But ... "Oh, God, I want him. Like that. Complete." Anna had had him like that. The other thing. Not respectability. But the possession of little things.
She would have to tell him about the letter. She couldn't lie to him, even silently. The clock on the dresser, ticking as it had always ticked, said, "In a half-hour ... a half-hour more."
She sprang from the bed and stood listening.
Someone was coming down the hall. Strange hours fell from her. Now Erik was coming. Now life commenced. The empty circle of the day was over.
Her body grew wild as if she must leap out of herself. Her eyes hung devouringly upon the blank door—a door opening and Erik standing,smiling at her. It was still a dream. It would never become real. She would always feel frightened. Though he came home a hundred thousand times she would always wait like now for the door to open with a fear and a dream in her heart. But why did he knock?
She opened the door with a feverish jerk. Not Erik. A messenger-boy blinking surprised eyes.
"Mrs. Dorn?"
"Yes."
"Sign here, second line."
A blank door again. The message read:
"I'll be home late. Don't worry.Erik."
Warren Lockwood was a man who wrote novels. He had lived in the Middle West until he was thirty-five and begun his writing at his desk in a real-estate office of which he had been until then a somewhat bored half owner.
During the months Erik Dorn had been working on the staff of "theNew Opinion—an Organ of Liberal Thought," he had encountered Lockwood frequently—a dark-haired, rugged-faced man with a drawling, high-pitched masculine voice. Dorn liked him. He talked in the manner of a man carefully focusing objects into range. Lockwood was aware he had gotten under the skin of things. He talked that way.
The change from the newspaper to the magazine continued, after several months, to irritate Dorn. The leisureliness of his new work aggravated. There was an intruding sterility about it. TheNew Opinionwas a weekly. From week to week it offered a growing clientèle finalities. There were finalities on the war, finalities on the social unrest; finalities on art, life, religion, the past, present, and future. A cock-sure magazine, gently, tolerantly elbowing aside the mysteries of existence and holding up between carefully manicured thumb andforefinger the Gist of the Thing. The Irrefutable Truth. The Perfect Deduction.
There were a number of intelligent men engaged in the work of writing and editing the periodical. They seemed all to have graduated from an identical strata. Dorn, becoming acquainted with them, found them intolerable. They appealed to him as a group of carefully tailored Abstractions bombinating mellifluously in a void. The precision of logic was in them. The precision of even tempers. The precision of aloof eyes fastened upon finalities. Theoretical radicals. Theoretical conservatives. Theoretical philosophers. Any appellation preceded by the adjective theoretical fitted them snugly. Of contact with the hurdy-gurdy of existence which he as a journalist felt under the ideas of the day, there was none. Life in the minds of the intellectual staff of theNew Opinionsmoothed itself out into intellectual paragraphs. And from week to week these paragraphs made their bow to the public. Mannerly admonitions, courteous disapprovals. A style borrowed from the memory of the professor informing a backward class in economics what the exact date of the signing of the Magna Charta really was.
Lockwood was the exception. He wrote occasional fictional sketches for the magazine. Dorn had been attracted to him at first because of the curious intonations of his voice. He had not read the man's novels—there were four of them dealing with the Middle West—but in the repressed sing-song of his voice Dorn had sensed an unusual character.
"He's a good writer, an artist," he thought, hearing him talking to Edwards, one of the editors. "He talks like a lover arguing patiently and gently with his own thoughts."
After that they had walked and eaten together. The idea of Warren Lockwood being a lover grew upon Dorn. Of little things, of things seemingly unimportant and impersonal, the novelist talked as he would have liked to talk to Rachel—with a slow simplicity that caressed his subjects and said, "These are little things but we must be careful in handling them, for they're a part of life." And life was important. People were tremendously existent. Dorn, listening to the novelist, would watch his eyes that seemed to be always adventuring among secrets.
Once he thought, "A sort of mother love is in him. He keeps trying to say something that's never in his words. His thoughts are like a lover's fingers stroking a girl's hair. That's because he's found himself. He feels strong and lets his strength come out in gentleness. He's found himself and is trying to shape secrets into words."
In comparing Lockwood with the others on the staff of the magazine he explained, "There's the difference between a man and an intellect. Warren's a man. The others are a group of schoolboys reducing life to lessons."
There grew up in Dorn a curious envy of thenovelist. He would think of him frequently when alone, "The fellow's content to write. I'm not. He's found his way of saying what's in him, getting rid of his energies and love. I haven't. He feels toward the world as I do toward Rachel. An overpowering reality and mystery are always before him; but it gives him a mental perspective. What does Rachel give me? Desires, ambitions—a sort of laughing madness that I can't translate into anything but kisses. I'm cleverer than I was before. I talk and write better. There's a certain wildness about things as if I were living in a storm. Yes, I have wings, but there's no place to fly with them. Except into her arms. There must be something else."
And he would rush through the day, outwardly a man of inexhaustible energies, stamping himself upon the consciousness of people as a brilliant, dominating personality. Edwards, with whom he discussed matter for editorials and articles, had grown to regard him with awe.
"I've never felt genius so keenly before," Edwards explained him to Lockwood. "The man seems burning up. Did you read his thing on Russia and Kerensky? Lord, it was absolutely prophetic."
Lockwood shook his head.
"Dorn's too damn clever," he drawled. "Things come too easily to him. He's got an eye but—I can't put my finger on it. You see a fella's got to have something inside him. The thingsErik says cleverly and prophetically don't mean anything much, because they don't mean anything to him. He makes 'em up as he goes along."
Edwards disagreed. He was a younger man than Lockwood, with an impressionable erudition. Like his co-workers he had been somewhat stampeded by Dorn's imitative faculties, faculties which enabled the former journalist to bombinate twice as loud in a void three times as great as any of his colleagues.
"Well, I've met a lot of writing men since I came East," he said. "And Dorn's the best of them. He's more than a man of promise. He's opened up. Look what he's done in the new number. Absolutely revolutionized the liberal thought of the country. You've got to admit that. He's a man incapable of fanaticism."
"That's just it," smiled Lockwood. "You've hit it. You've put your finger on it. He's the kind of man who knows too damn much and don't believe anything."
The friendship between Lockwood and Dorn matured quickly. The two men, profoundly dissimilar in their natures, found themselves launched upon a growing intimacy. To Lockwood, heavy spoken, delicate sensed, naïve despite the shrewdness of his forty-five years, Erik Dorn appealed as some exotic mechanical contrivance might for a day fascinate and bewilder the intelligence of a rustic. And the other, in the midst of magnificent bombinations that amazed his friend, thought,"If I only had this man's simplicity. If on top of my ability to unravel mysteries into words I could feel these mysteries as he does, I might do something."
At other times, carried away by the strength of his own nature, he would find himself looking down upon Lockwood. "I'm alive. He's static. I live above him. There's nothing beyond me. I can't feel the things out of which he makes his novels, because I'm beyond them."
He would think then of Lockwood as an eagle of a rustic painstakingly hoeing a field. On such days the disquiet would vanish from Dorn's thought. He would feel himself propelled through the hours as if by some irresistible wind of which he had become a part. To live was enough. To live was to give expression to the clamoring forces in him. To sweep over Edwards, hurl himself through crowds, pulverize Warren, bang out astounding fictions on the typewriter, watch the faces of acquaintances light up with admiration as he spoke—this sufficed. The world galvanized itself about him. He could do anything. He could give vision to people, create new life around him. This consciousness sufficed. Then to rush home from a triumphant day, a glorious contempt for his fellows lingering like wine in his head—and find Rachel—an eagle waiting in a nest.
Joy, then, become a mania. Desires feeding upon themselves, devouring his body and his senses and hurling him into an exhausted sleep asif death alone could climax the madness of his spirit—these Dorn knew in the days of his strength.
But the days of disquiet came, confronting him like skeletons in the midst of his feastings upon life. The ecstasy he felt seemed suddenly to turn itself inward and demand of him new destinations. On such days he had fallen into the habit of going upon swift walks through the less crowded streets of the city. During his walking he would mutter, "What can I do? What? Nothing. Not a thing." As if secret voices were debating his destiny.
Restless, vicious spoken, venting his strainings in a skyrocket burst of phrases upon the inanity and stupidity of his fellow creatures for which he seemed to possess an almost uncanny vision, he fled through these days like the victim of some spiritual satyriasis. No longer a wind at his heels riding him into easy heights, he found himself weighted down with his love, and strangely inanimate.
The direction in which he was moving loomed sterilely before him. His love itself seemed a feverishly sterile thing. His work upon the magazine, his incessant exchange of intolerant adjectives with admiring strangers—these became absurdly petty gestures, absurdly insufficient. There was something else to do. As he had longed for Rachel in the black days before their coming together, he longed now for this something else. Without name or outline, it haunted him. Another face of stars, but this time beyond his power to understand.Yet it demanded him, as Rachel had demanded him, and towards it he turned in his days of disquiet, inanimate and bewildered.
"I must find something to do," he explained to himself, "that will give me direction. People must have a monomania as a track for their living, or else there is no living."
Then, as was his custom, he would begin an unraveling of the notion.
"Men with energies in them wed themselves quickly to some consuming project, even if it's nothing more than the developing of a fish market. Rachel isn't a destination. She's a force that fills me with violence and I have no direction in which to live to use this violence. I don't know what to do with myself. So I'm compelled to live in the violence itself. In a storm. A kind of Walkyrie on a broomstick. But, good God, what else is there? Sit and scribble words about fictitious characters. Bleat out rhapsodies. Art is something I can spit out in conversation. If I do anything it's got to be something too difficult for me to do. My damned cleverness puts me beyond artists who find a destination for their energies in the struggle to achieve the thing with which I begin. If not art, then what? War, politics, finance. All surfaces meaning nothing. If I did them all there'd still be something I hadn't done. I want something that's not in life. Life's too damned insufficient. I want something out of it."
Rachel had thought at first that his fits of brooding restlessness came from a memory of Anna. But phrases he had blurted cut half-consciously had given her a sense of their causes. The thought of Anna had died in him. Neither consciousness of her suffering nor memory of the years they had lived together had yet awakened in him. He had been moving since the night he had walked out of his home and there had been no looking back.
Undergoing a seeming expansion of his powers, Erik Dorn had become a startling, fascinating figure in the new world he had entered. The flattery of men almost as clever as himself, the respect, appreciation of political, literary, and vaguely social circles, of stolid men and eccentric acquaintances, were continually visited upon him. He was a personality, a figure to enliven dinner parties, throw a glamour and a fever into the enervated routine of sets, cliques, and circles.
He had made occasional journeyings alone and sometimes with Rachel into the homes of chance acquaintances, and had put in fitful appearances at the various excitements pursued by the city's more radical intelligentsia—little-theater premiers, private assemblings of shrewd, bored men and women, precious concerts, electric discussions of political unrest. From all such adventurings he came away with a sense of distaste. Friendships, always foreign to his nature, had become now almost an impossibility. He felt himself a procession of adjectives exploding in the ears of strangers.
With Warren Lockwood alone he had been ableto achieve a contact. In the presence of the novelist there was a complement of himself both in the days of his disquiet and strength. Together they took to frequenting odd parts of the city, visiting lonely cafés and calling upon strangers known to the novelist. The man's virile gentleness soothed him. He was never tired of watching the turns of his naïveté, delighting as much in his friend's unsophisticated appreciation of the arts as in the vivid simplicity of his understanding of people and events.
He had finished a stormy conference with the directors of the magazine on the subject of a new editorial policy toward Russia—new editorial policies toward Russia had become almost the sole preoccupation of theNew Opinion—when Lockwood arrived at the office, resplendent in the atrocities of a new green hat and lavender necktie.
"There's a fella over on the east side you ought to meet," Lockwood explained. "I was going over there and thought you'd like to come along."
He leaned over, seriously confidential.
"If you can lay off a while in this business of revolutionizing the liberal thought of the whole country, Erik, I'll tell you something. Between you and me, this man we're going to see is the greatest artist in America. I know."
Lockwood waved his hand casually as if dismissing once and for all an avalanche of contradictions. Dorn hesitated. It was one of his days of disquiet;and he had left a note with Rachel saying he would be home at eight. It was now six.
"If you've got a date," went on Lockwood, "call it off. Lord, man, you can't afford missing the greatest artist in the world."
Dorn frowned. He might telephone. But that would mean explanations and the pleading sound of a voice saying, "Of course, Erik." He would send a message, and scribbled it on a telegraph blank:
"I'll be home late. Don't worry.
"Erik."
"We'll make a night of it," he laughed.
Lockwood looked at him, shrewdly affectionate.
"What you need," he spoke, "is a good drink and some fat street woman to shake you out of it. You look kind of tied up."
"I am," grinned Dorn. "Wound up and ready to bust."
Lockwood nodded his head slowly.
"Uh-huh," he said, as if turning the matter over carefully in his thought. "Why don't you buy a new hat like I do when I get feeling sort of upside down? Buying a new hat or tie straightens a man out. Come on!" He laughed suddenly. "This artist's name is Tony. He's an old man—seventy years old."
They entered the street, Lockwood watching his companion with dark, fixed eyes as if he were slowly arriving at some impersonal diagnosis.
"A lot of fools," he announced abruptly, wavinghis hand at the crowds. "They don't know that something important's happening in Russia." He pronounced it Rooshia. Dorn saw his eyes kindle with a kindliness as he denounced the rabble about them.
"What do you figure is happening in Rooshia?" he inquired of the novelist.
"I don't figure," smiled Lockwood. "I feel it. Something important that these newspaper Neds around this town haven't got any conception of. It's what old Carl calls the rising of the proletaire." He chuckled. "Old Carl's sure gone daft on this proletaire thing." His face abruptly hardened, the rugged features becoming set, the swart eyes paying a far-away homage. "But old Carl's a great poet—the greatest in America. God, but that old boy can write!"
Dorn nodded. In the presence of the novelist the unrest that had held him by the throat through the day seemed to ebb. There was companionship in the figure beside him. They walked in silence for several blocks. The day was growing dark quickly and despite the crowds in the streets, there seemed an inactivity in the air—the wait of a storm.
Into a ramshackle building on the corner of a vivaciously ugly street Lockwood led his friend in quest of the greatest artist. An old man in a skull cap, woolen shirt, baggy trousers and carpet slippers appeared in a darkened doorway. With his long white beard he stood bent and rheumaticbefore them, making a question mark in the gloom of the hall.
"Hello, Tony," Lockwood greeted him. "I've brought a friend of mine along to look at your works."
The old man extended thin fingers and nodded his head. Dorn entered a large room that reminded him of a tombstone factory. Figures in clay, some broken and cracked, cluttered up its floor and walls. In a corner partly hidden behind topsy-turvy busts and more figures was a cot with a blanket over it. Dorn after several minutes of silence, looked inquiringly at his friend. The works of art, despite an obvious vigor of execution, were openly banal.
"He's got some more in the basement," announced Lockwood with an air of triumph. "And there's some stuck away with the family upstairs. The whole street here's full of his works."
The old man nodded.
"He doesn't talk much English," went on Lockwood. "But I'll tell you about him. I got the story from him. He's the greatest artist in the world."
As Dorn moved politely from figure to figure, the old man like a museum monitor at his heels, Lockwood went on explaining in a caressing sing-song:
"This old boy came to New York when he was in his twenties. And he's been living here ever since and making statues. He's working right nowon a statue of some general. Been working for fifty years without stopping, and there's nobody in this town ever heard of him or come near him. Get this picture of this old boy, Erik, buried in this hole for fifty years making statues. Working away day after day without anybody coming near him. I brought a sculptor friend of mine who kept squinting at some of the things the old boy did when he first came over and saying, 'By God, this fella was an artist at one time.' Get the picture of this smart-aleck sculptor friend of mine saying this old boy was an artist."
The eyes of Warren Lockwood grew hard and seemed to challenge. He extended his arm and waved his hand gently in a further challenge.
"The fools in this town let this old boy stay buried," he whispered, "but he fooled them. He kept right on making statues and giving them away to the folks that live around here and hiding them in the basement when there wasn't anybody to take them."
Lockwood grasped the arm of his friend excitedly and his voice became high-pitched.
"Don't you get this old man?" he argued. "Don't you get the figure of him as an artist? Lord, man, he's the greatest artist in the world, I tell you!"
Dorn nodded his head, amused and disturbed by the novelist's excitement. The old sculptor was standing in the shadow of the figures piled on top of each other against the wall. He wore the air ofa man just awakened and struggling politely to grasp his surroundings.
"A sort of altruistic carpenter," thought Dorn. "That's what Warren calls an artist. Works diligently for nothing."
The respect and awe in the eyes of his friend halted him.
"Yes, I get him," he added aloud. "Living with a dream for fifty years."
Lockwood snorted and then with a quiet laugh answered: "No, that isn't it. You're not an artist yourself so you can't quite get the sense of it." He seemed petulent and defeated.
They left the old man's studio without further talk. It had started to rain. Large spaced drops plumbed a gleaming hypotenuse between the rooftops and the streets. They paused before a basement restaurant.
"It looks dirty," said Lockwood, "but let's go in."
Here they ordered dinner. During their eating the noise of thunder sounded and the splash of the storm drifted in through the dusty basement windows. A thick-wristed, red-fingered waitress slopped back and forth between their table and an odorous kitchen door. Lockwood kept his eyes fastened steadily upon the nervous features of his friend. He thought as the silence increased between them: "This man's got something the matter with him."
Gradually an uneasiness came over the novelist,his sensitive nerves responding to the disquiet in the smiling eyes opposite.
"You're kind of crazy," he leaned forward and whispered as if confiding an ominous, impersonal secret. "You've got the eyes of a man kind of crazy, Erik."
He sat back in his chair, his hands holding the edge of the table, his chin tucked down, as if he were ruminating, narrow-eyed, upon some involved business proposition.
"I get you now," he added slowly. "I'll put you in a book—a crazy man who kept fooling himself by imitating sane people."
Dorn nodded.
"Insanity would be a relief," he answered. "Come on."
He stood up quickly and looked down at his friend.
"Let's keep going. I've got something in me I want to get rid of."
In the doorway the friends halted. The grave, melodious shout of the rain filled the night. The streets had become dark, attenuated pools. The rain falling illuminated the hidden faces of the buildings and silvered the air with whirling lines.
As they stood facing the downpour Dorn thought, "Rachel's waiting for me. Why don't I go to her? But I'd only make her sad. Better let it get out of me in the rain."
Holding his friend's arm he stood staring at the storm over the city. Through the sparkle andfume of the rain-colored night the lights of café signs burned like golden-lettered banners flung stiffly into the downpour. About the lights floated patches of yellow mist through which the rain swarmed in flurries of gleaming moths. There were lights of doors and windows beneath the burning signs. The remainder of the street was lost in a wilderness of rain that bubbled and raced over the pavements in an endless detonation.
He spoke with a sudden softness: "I didn't get your artist, Warren, but you don't get this storm. It's noise and water to you."
The novelist answered with a sagacious nod.
"There's something alive in a night like this," Dorn went on, "something that isn't a part of life."
He pulled his friend out of the doorway. They walked swiftly, their shoes spurting water and the rain dripping from their clothes. Dorn felt an untightening. His eyes hailed the scene as if in greeting of a friend. He became aware of its detail. He smiled, remembering the way in which he had been used to hide his longing for Rachel in the desperate consciousness of scenes about him. Now it was something else he was hiding. Beneath his feet he watched the silver-tipped pool of the pavement. Gleaming in its depths swam reflections of burning lamps, like the yellow script of another and wraith-like world staring up at him out of a nowhere. The rest was darkness and billowy stripes of water. People had vanished. Later a sound of thunder crawled out of the sky.A vein of lightning opened the night. Against its blue pallor the street and its buildings etched themselves.
"Stiff, unreal, like a stage scene," murmured Dorn. "Another world."
The rain flung itself for an instant in great ghostly sheets out of the lighted spaces. He caught a glimpse in the distance of a hunched, moving figure like some tiny wanderer through tortuous fields. Then darkness resumed, seizing the street. A wind entered the night outlining itself in the wild undulations of the rain reaching for the pavements.
Dorn forgot his companion, as they pressed on. Disheveled rain ghosts crowded around him. The fever that had burned in him during the day seemed to have become a part of the storm. The leap and hollow blaze of the lightnings gave him a companionship. His eyes stared into the inanimate bursts of pale violet outlines in the dark. His breath drank in the spice of water-laden winds. The stumble of thunder, the lash and churn of rain were companions. The something else that haunted him was in the storm. He turned to Lockwood, who seemed to be lagging, and shouted in his ear:
"Great, eh? Altar fires and the racket of unknown gods."
Lockwood, his face filmed with water, grunted indignantly:
"Let's get out of this."
The night was growing wilder. Dorn's eyes bored into the vapors and steam of the rain.
"We're in a good street," he cried again. "A nigger street."
A blinding gust of light brought them to a halt. Thunder burst a horror of sound through its dead glare. Dorn stiffened and stared as in a dream at a face floating behind the glass of a door. A woman's face contorted into a stark grimace of rapture. Its teeth stood out white and skull-like against the red of an open mouth.
Silence and darkness seized the street. Rain poured. The sound of a laugh like some miniature echo of the tumult that had torn the night drifted to them. Lockwood had started for the door.
"Come on," he called, "this is crazy."
Dorn followed him. The streaming door opened as they approached and two figures darted out. They were gone in an instant and in pursuit of them rushed a rollicking lurch of sound. Dorn caught again the shrill staccato of the laugh, and the door closed behind them.
Dancing bodies were spinning among the tables. Shouting, swinging noises and a bray of music spurted unintelligibly against the ears of the newcomers. A chlorinated mist, acrid to the eye, and burning to the nose, crawled about the room. Dorn, followed by Lockwood, groped his way through the confusion toward a small vacant table against a wall. From here they watched in silence.
A can-can was in progress. The dancers, blackand white faces glued together, arms twined about each other's bodies, tumbled through the smoke. Waiters balancing black trays laden with colored glasses sifted through the scene. At the tables men and women with faces out of focus sat drinking and shouting. Niggers, prostitutes, louts. The slant of red mouths opened laughters. Hands and throats drifted in violent fragments through the mist. The reek of wine and steaming clothes, the sting of perspiring perfumes and the odors of women's bodies fumed over the tumble of heads. Against the scene a jazz band flung a whine and a stumble of tinny sounds. Nigger musicians with silver instruments glued to their lips sat on a platform at the far end of the room. They danced in their chairs as they played, swinging their instruments in crazy circles. A broken, lurching music came from them, a nasal melody that moaned among the laughters.
Dorn's fingers lay gripped about the arm of his friend. His senses caught the rhythm of the scene. His eyes stared at the dancing figures, blond heads riveted against black satin cheeks; bodies gesturing their lusts to the quick whine and stumble of the music; eyes opening like mouths.
"God, what an orgie!" he whispered. "Look at the thing. It's insane. A nigger hammering a scarlet phallus against a cymbal moon."
His words vanished in the din and Lockwood remained with eyes drawn in and hard. When he turned to his friend he found him excitedly pounding his fist on the table and bawling for a waiter. A man, seemingly asleep amid confusions, appeared and took his order.
"There's a woman in here I've got to find," Dorn shouted.
"You're crazy, man."
"I saw her," he persisted, talking close to his friend's ear. "I saw her face in the door. You wait here."
Lockwood seized his arm and tried to hold him, but he jerked away and was lost in a pattern of dancing bodies. Lockwood watching him disappear, frowned. He felt a sudden uncertainty toward his friend, a fear as if he had launched himself into a dark night with a murderer for a companion.
"He's crazy," he thought. "I ought to get him out of here before anything happens."
He sat fumbling nervously with the stem of a wine-glass. Outside, the rain chattered in the darkness and the alto of the wind came in long organ notes into the din of the café. He caught sight of Dorn pulling an unholy-looking woman through the pack of the room.
"Here she is—our lady of pain!"
Dorn thrust the creature viciously into a seat beside Lockwood. She dropped with a scream of laughter. The music of the nigger orchestra had stopped and an emptiness flooded the place. Dorn bellowed for another glass. Lockwood looked slowly at the creature beside him. She was watching Dorn. In the swarthy depths of her eyes moved threads of scarlet. Beneath their lashes her skin was darkened as if by bruises. An odd sultry light glowed over the discolorations. Her mouth had shut and her cheeks were without curves, following the triangular corpse-like lines of her skull. Her lips, like bits of vermilion paper, stared as from an idol's face. She was regarding Dorn with a smile.
He had grown erratic in his gestures. His eyes seemed incapable of focusing themselves. They darted about the room, running away from him. The woman's smile persisted and he turned his glance abruptly at her. The red flesh of her opened mouth and throat confronted him as another of her screaming laughs burst. The laugh ended and her gleaming eyes swimming in a gelatinous mist held him.
"A reptilian sorcery," he whispered to Lockwood, and smiled. "The face of a malignant Pierrette. A diabolic clown. Look at it. I saw it in the lightning outside. She wears a mask. Do you get her?" He paused mockingly. Lockwood shifted away from the woman. Erik was drunk. Or crazy. But the woman, thank God, had eyes only for him. She remained, as he talked, with her sulphurous eyes unwaveringly upon his face.
"She's not a woman," he went on in a purring voice. "She's a lust. No brain. No heart. A stark unhuman piece of flesh with a shark's hunger inside it."
He leaned forward and took one of her hands as Lockwood whispered,
"Christ, man, let's get out of here."
The woman's fingers, dry and quivering, scratched against Dorn's palm. He felt them as a hot breath in his blood.
"What's the matter, Warren?" he laughed, emptying a wine-glass. "I like this gal. She suits me. A devourer of men. Look at her!"
He laughed and glared at his friend. Lockwood closed his eyes nervously.
"I've got a headache in this damned place," he muttered.
"Wait a minute." Dorn seized his arm. "I want to talk. I feel gabby. My lady friend doesn't understand words." The sulphurous eyes glowed caresses over him. "You remember the thing in Rabelais about women—insatiable, devouring, hungering in their satieties. The prowling animal. Well, here it is. Alive. Not in print. She's alive with something deeper than life. Wheels of flesh grinding her blood into a hunger for ecstasies. She's a mate for me. Come on, little one."
He sprang from the table, pulling the woman after him.
"Wait here, Warren," he called, moving toward the door. It opened, letting in a shout and sweep of rain, and they were gone.
"A crazy man," muttered the novelist, and remained fumbling with the stem of his glass.
Outside Dorn held the body of the womanagainst him as they hurried through the storm. Her flesh, like the touch of a third person, struck through his wet clothes.
"Where we going?" he yelled at her.
She thrust out an arm.
"Up here."
They came breathless up a flight of stairs into a reeking room lighted by a gas jet.
In the café, Lockwood waited till the music started again. Then he rose and, slapping his soggy hat on his head, walked out of the place. The rain, sweeping steadily against the earth, held him prisoner in the doorway. He stood muttering to himself of his friend and his craziness. Gone wild! Crazy wild with a mad woman in the rain. Long ago he might have done it himself. Yes, he knew the why of it. The rain fuming before him made him sleepy. He leaned against the place and waited. The storm faded slowly into a quiet patter. Starting for the pavement, Lockwood paused. A hatless figure had jumped out of a doorway across the street and was running toward him.
"It's Erik," he muttered, and hurried to meet him.
Dorn, laughing, his clothes torn and his face smeared with blood under his eye, drew near. He took his friend's arm and walked him swiftly away. At the corner Dorn stopped and regarded the novelist.
"I've had a look at hell," he whispered, and with a laugh hurried off alone. Lockwood watched him moving swiftly down the street, and yawned.
It was near midnight. Rachel's eyes, brightened with tears, watched her lover bathing his face.
"It seemed so long," she murmured, "till you came."
"That damned Warren Lockwood led me astray," he smiled. He dried his face and came toward her. She dropped to the floor beside him as he sat down and pressed her cheeks against his knees. His hands moved tenderly through her loosened hair.
"You told me to be careful about getting run over," she smiled sadly, "and you go out and get all cut up in a brawl. Oh, Erik, please—something might have happened."
"Nothing happened, dearest."
She asked no further questions but remained with her face against his knees. This was Rachel whose hair he was stroking. Dorn smiled at the thought. After a silence she resumed, her voice softened with emotion:
"Erik, I've been lying to you—about my love. It's different than I said it was. I've said always what you've wanted me to say. You've always wanted me to be something else than a woman—something like a dream. But I can't. I love you as—as Anna loved you. Oh, I want to be with you forever and have children. I'm nothing else. You are. I can't be like you. For me there's only love for you and nothing beyond."
"Dear one," he answered, "there's nothing else for me."
"Now you're telling me lies," she wept. "There is something I can't give you; and that you must go looking for somewhere else."
"No, Rachel. I love you."
"As you loved Anna—once."
"Don't! I never loved Anna—or anyone. Or anything."
"I can't help it, Erik. Forgive me, please. I love you so. Don't you see how I love you. I keep trying to be something besides myself and to give other names to the things I feel. But they're only sentimental things. My dreams are only sentimental dreams—of your kissing me, holding me, being my husband. Oh, go way from me, Erik, before I make you hate me! You thought I was different. And I did too. Iwasdifferent. But you've changed me. Women are all the same when they love. Differences go away."
She looked up at him with tear-running eyes.
"Different than other people! But now I'm the same. I love you as any other woman would. Only perhaps a little more. With my whole soul and life."
"Foolish to talk," he whispered back to her."Words only scratch at things. I love you as if I had never seen you or kissed you."
"But I'm not a dream, Erik. Oh, it sounds silly. But I want you."
He raised her and held her lithe body close to him. The feeling that he was unreal, that Rachel was unreal, rested in his thought. There was a mist about things that clung to them, that clung about the joyousness in his heart.
"There's nothing else," he whispered. "Love is enough. It burns up everything else and leaves a mist."
His arms tightened.
"Erik dear, I'm afraid."
His kiss brought a peace over her face. She had waited for it. She looked up and laughed.
"You love me? Yes, Erik loves me. Loves me. I know."
She watched his eyes as he spoke. The eyes of God. They remained open to her. She began to tremble and her naked arms moved blindly toward his shoulders.
"This is my world," she whispered. "I know, Erik. I know everything. You are too big for love to hold. The sun doesn't fill the whole world. There are always dark places. I know. Don't hide from me, lover."
She smiled and closed her eyes as her lips reached toward him.
The eyes of Erik Dorn remained open and staring out of the window. There was still rain in the night.
Erik Dorn to Rachel, September, 1918:
" ... and to-night I remember you are beautiful, and I desire you. My arms are empty and there is nothing for my eyes to look at. Are you still afraid. Look, more than a year has gone and nothing has changed. You are the far-away one, the dream figure, and my heart comes on wings to you.... I write with difficulty. What language is there to talk to you? How does one converse with a dream? Idiot phrases rant across the paper like little fat actors flourishing tin swords. I've come to distrust words. There are too many of them. Yet I keep fermenting with words. Interlopers. Busybody strangers. I can't think ... because of them.... Alas! if I could keep my vocabulary out of our love we would both be better off. Foolish chatter. I thought when I sat down to write to you that the sadness of your absence would overcome me. Instead, I am amused. Vaguely joyous. And at the thought of you I have an impulse to laugh. You are like that. A day like a thousand years has passed. Dead-born hours that did not end. Chill, empty streets and the memory of you like a solitude in which I sat mumbling to phantoms. And now in the darknessmy heart sickens with desire for you and the night sharpens its claws upon my heart. Yet there is laughter. Words laugh in my head. The torment I feel is somehow a part of joyousness. The claws of the night bring somehow a caress. Even to weep for you is like some dark happiness whose lips are too fragile to smile. Dear one, the dream of you still lives—an old friend now, a familiar star that I watch endlessly. You see there are even no new words. For once before I told you that. It was night—snowing. We walked together. I remember you always as vanishing and leaving the light of your face burning before my eyes. I shall always love you. Why are you afraid? Why do you write vague doubts into your letters? I will be with you soon. You are a world, and the rest of life is a mist that surrounds you.... I have nothing to write. I discover this as I sit staring at the paper. I remember that a year has passed, that many years remain to pass. Dear one, I know only that I love you, and words are strangers between us."
Rachel to Erik, September end, 1918:
" ... when I went away you were unhappy and restless. Now that I have gone you are again happy and calm. Oh, you're so cruel! Your love is so cruel to me. I sit here all day, a foolishly humble exile, waiting for you. I keep watching the sea and sometimes I try to feel pain. When your letter comes I spend the day reading it....I am beautiful and you desire me. Oh, to think me beautiful and to desire me, suffices. You do not come where I am. Nothing has changed, you write with a joyous cruelty. In your lonely nights your dream of me still brings you torments and I am a star that you watch endlessly. I laugh too, but out of bitterness. Because what you write is no longer true and we both have known it for long. I am no longer a dream or a star, but a woman who loves you. Yes, nothing has changed, except me. And you remedy that by sending me away. When you send me away I too become unchanged in your thought. I am again like I was on the night we parted in the white park and you can love me—a memory of me—that remains like a star....
"But here I am in this lonely little sea village. There is no dream for me. I am empty without you and I lie at night and weep till my heart breaks, wondering when you will come. It were better if I were dead. I whisper to myself, 'you must not write him to come to you, because he is too busy loving you. He weeps before the ghost of you. He sits beside an old dream. You must not interrupt him. Oh, my lover, do you find me so much less than the dream of me, that you must send me away in order to love me? My doubts? Are they doubts? We have grown apart in the year. On the night it snowed and I went away from you you said, 'people bury their love behind lighted windows....' Dearest, dearest, of whatdo I complain? Of your ecstasies and torments of which I am not a part, but a cause? Forgive me. I adore you. I am so lonely and such a nobody without you. And I want you to write to me that you long for me, to be with me, to caress me and talk to me. And instead you send phrases analyzing your joyousness. Oh, things have changed. I am no longer Rachel, but a woman. I feel so little and helpless when I think of you. Strangers can talk to you and look at you but I must sit here in exile while you entertain yourself with memories of me. You are cruel, dear one, and I have become too cowardly not to mind. This is because I have found happiness—all the happiness I desire—and hold it tremblingly. And you have not found happiness but are still in flight toward your far-away one, your dream figure. I cannot write more. I worship you and my heart is full of tears. I will sit humbly and look at the sea until you come."
Rachel to Frank Brander, September:
" ... I answer your letter only because I am afraid you would misunderstand my silence. I send your letter back because I cannot throw it away. It would make the sea unclean. As you point out, I am the mistress of Erik Dorn and he may some day grow tired of me, at which time you are prepared to be my friend and protect me from the world. I will put your application on file, Mr. Brander, if there is a part of my mind filthy enough to remember it."
Rachel to Emil Tesla:
" ... I was glad to hear from you. But please do not write any more. I am too happy to read your letters. I never want to draw pictures forThe Cryagain. I hope you will be freed soon. I can think of nothing to write to you."
Erik Dorn to Rachel, November, 1918:
"Dearest one!
"Beneath my window the gentle Jabberwock has twined colored tissue-paper about his ears and gone mad. He shrieks, he whistles, he blows a horn. The war, beloved, appears to have ended this noon and the Jabberwock is endeavoring to disgorge four and a half years in a single shriek. 'The war,' says the Jabberwock, in his own way, 'is over. It was a rotten war, nasty and hateful, as all wars are rotten and hateful, and everything I've said and done hinting at the contrary has been a lie and I'm so full of lies I must shriek.'
"Anybody but a Jabberwock, dear one, would have died of apoplexy hours ago. But the Jabberwock is immortal. Alas! there is something of pathos in the spectacle. Our gentle friend with tissue-paper around his ears prostrates himself before another illusion—peace. Says the shriek of the Jabberwock beneath my window, 'The Hun is destroyed. The menace to humanity is laid low. The powers of darkness are dispelled by the breath of God and the machine-guns of our brave soldats. The war that is to end war is over. Hail, blessed peace!'
"Why do I write such arid absurdities to you? But I feel an impulse to scribble wordly words, to stand in a silk hat beside the statue of Liberty and gaze out upon the Atlantic with a Carlylian pensiveness. Idle political tears flow from my brain. For it is obvious that the war the Jabberwock has so nobly waged has been a waste of steel and powder. Standing now on his eight million graves with the tissue-paper of Victory twined about his ears, the Jabberwock is a somewhat ghastly, humorous figure. He has, alas! shot the wrong man. To-morrow there will be an inquest in Paris and the Jabberwock will rub his eyes and discover that the corpse, God forgive him, is that of a brother and friend and that the Powers of Darkness threatening humanity are advancing upon him ... out of Moscow. I muse ... yes, it was a good war. War is never pathetic, never wholly a waste. Maturity no less than childhood must have its circuses. But the Jabberwock ... Ah! the Jabberwock ... the soul of man celebrating the immortal triumph of righteousness ... the good Don Quixote has valiantly slain another windmill and your Sancho Panza shakes his head in wistful amusement.
"I did not send you this letter yesterday and many things have happened since I wrote it. I will see you in a few days. It has been decided that I go to Germany for the magazine. Edwards insists. So do the directors, trusting gentlemen. I will stop at Washington and try to get two passports andthen come on to you, and we will wait together until the passports are issued. Another week of imbecile political maneuverings in behalf of the passports and I will again be your lover,
"Erik."
"We've been separated almost three months," he thought, looking out of the train window. "I'll see her soon."
There were four men in the smoking-compartment. They were discussing the end of the war. Dorn listened inattentively. He was remembering another ride to Rachel. Looking out of a train window as now. Whirling through space. A locomotive whistle wailing in the prairies at night like the sound of winds against his heart.
The memories of the ride drifted through his mind. He saw himself again with the tumult of another day sweeping toward Rachel. What had he felt then? Whatever it was, it was gone. For he felt nothing now but a sadness. He had telegraphed. She would be waiting, her face alight, her hands trembling. He had started from Washington elatedly enough. But now in the smoking-compartment where the men were discussing the end of the war he felt no elation. He was thinking, "It'll be difficult when we see each other." He became aware that he was actually shrinking from the meeting. The voices of the men about him began to annoy and he returned to his seat in the train.
Early evening. Another two hours and the trainwould stop to let him off. Dear, dear Rachel! He had wept tormented by a loneliness for her. Now he was coming to her with sadness. There had been another ride when he had come to her in a halloo of storms. Things change.
The porter brushed him and removed his grips to the platform. The far lights of a village sprinkled themselves feebly in the darkness. This was where Rachel was waiting.
Dorn stepped from the train. It became another world, lighted and human. He looked about the dingy little station. Rachel was walking toward him.
"She looks strange and out of place," he thought.
They embraced. Her kisses covering his lips delighted him unexpectedly. He found himself walking close to her in the night and feeling happy. They entered a darkened wooden house and Rachel led the way upstairs.
"I can't talk, Erik."
She held his hand against her cheek.
"No, don't kiss me. Let me look at you. Sit over here. I must look at you."
She laughed softly, but her eyes, unsmiling, stared at him. He remained silent. The sadness that had fallen upon him in the train returned now like a hurt in his heart. He had expected it to vanish at the sight of her. But her kisses had only hidden it. She came to his side after a pause and whispered gently,
"Perhaps it would have been better if you hadn't come, dearest. I've become almost used to being alone."
He embraced her and for the moment the sadness was hidden again. Rachel's hands crept avidly to his face, holding his cheeks with hot fingers.
"Erik, oh, Erik, do you love me? I'm not afraid to hear. Tell me."
"Yes, dear one. You are everything."
"What makes you cry?"
He kissed her lips.
"I don't know," he whispered. "Only it's been so long."
"Oh, you are so sad."
Her voice had grown thin. Her eyes, dry, burning, haunted the dark room. She removed herself from his arms and stood with her hand in her hair. She looked at the dark sea that mirrored the night outside the window. Turning to him after a pause she murmured:
"I had forgotten Erik Dorn was here."
A sudden stride, the gesture of another Rachel, and she had thrown herself on the bed.
"Oh, God!" she sobbed. "I knew, I knew!"
Dorn, kneeling on the floor, pulled her head toward him. He whispered her name. Why was he sad, frightened? A thought was murmuring in him, "You must love her."
"Rachel, I love you. Please. Your tears. Dearest, what has happened? Tell me."
"Don't ask that." Her tears came anew. "But you come to me sad, as if I were no longer Rachel to you."
The thought kept murmuring, "You must love her...."
"Beautiful one," he said softly, "you're weeping because something has happened to you."
The thought murmured, "because something has happened to you, not her."
"No, no, Erik!"
"Then why? If you loved me you would be happy."
Absurd sentences. They would deceive no one.
A belated emotion overcame him. Now he was happy. His arms grew strong about her. He would say nothing, but lie beside her kissing her until the tears ended. This was happiness. He watched her lips begin to smile faintly. Her face touched him as if she had sighed. She whispered after a long silence, "Oh, I thought you had changed."
He laughed and pulled her to her feet. His head thrown back, his eyes amused and warm, he asked, "Do I seem changed now?"
He waited while she regarded him. Why was he nervous? Must he answer the question too?
"No," she said, "you are the same."
Her face shining before him. Her head quickly lifted.
"I was a fool. Look, Erik, I am happy—happier than anybody on earth."
She dropped to her knees, kissing his hand.
"I am so happy, I kneel...."
They stood together in the window and laughed.
"There's a wonderful old woman here. We've talked a great deal, about everything, and you. You don't mind? To-morrow we'll lie all day on the shore. Oh, Erik. Erik!"
"We'll never be alone again, Rachel."
"Never!" she echoed.