"Shh, shh," he murmured to himself, "let's not be nuts tonight. Plenty of nights for that. Let's talk about other things. About her."
Her face was beautiful. Dark eyes, dark hair, silent, that was like she was. The thought of her madehim grimace inside with pain. He wanted her as much as that. But what did he want her for? God knows. What does one want for? In order to get rid of wanting. Nothing else. Kiss her? Bah! She was a victory. He wanted her like that.
When he was near her they didn't have to talk or hold hands. They came together in a different way. She was so beautiful....
"I love her," he said quietly. He wanted to be quiet so he spoke quietly. She was marvelous. He would like to cut himself up into bits and give himself that way to her. He would like to die a thousand different ways and say, "Here, I destroy everything I am in order to become a gift for you." That was like placing oneself on a burning altar—the ecstacy of the sacrificed one. That was it.
Some nights like this the world became too small to live in. The city swept away from his senses and everything in the city seemed like a room full of cheap little broken toys he had outgrown. He would sit in a room within this bigger room, a lamp on his table and write. Or he would strike out like this time and walk to her—miles across streets.
"I want her," he said. His thought paused. "But what do I want of her?" he asked. "I don't know. But I want to give myself to something."
And he began thinking over how many ways there were to die as a gift.
This lighted window was her house. The curtains were down but light spurted through the sides. The sight of the house with its light-fringed windows depressed him. It was a disillusionment. She wasn't a woman then like he was a man but she was a part ofthings. He saw her as he walked up the stone steps, saw her talking to people. She had parents. In his mind she lived as an entity. A beautiful one without background or lighted windows or stone steps. Someone for him. Nobody else.
He rang. The door opened. A man like himself stood blinking in the lighted hall.
"Good evening," said Lindstrum. His voice was deep for his age. He spoke in a drawl that seemed edged with anger. "Is Doris in?"
"Oh, hello," Basine exclaimed. "Yes, she's in. Come right in."
People were talking in the next room.
"Company?" said Lindstrum. He didn't want to go in. But Basine was leading the way. The supper had ended ten minutes ago. The company looked up at him. They were all dressed well. Their faces were dressed well, too. They wore carefully tailored satisfactions in their eyes. When they smiled their mouths postured like ballet dancers in a finale. They were rich people. Their hands were soft.
The room blurred before Lindstrum. There was no reason for it now because he wasn't thinking or caring but a rage crept into his senses. He breathed in deep with his mouth opened and the feel of the air on his teeth and tongue made his jaw set. Because he would have to be careful what he said. Because he was saying inside to himself, "Damn 'em. The scum!"
His eyes brought pictures into his anger. They stared with deliberation into other eyes and brought back messages. He was being introduced. He was saying to himself deep down, "They're all alike. Like peas in a pod. They smirk and talk alike. And they'reall stuck on themselves alike. And they're all liars—damn liars, all alike."
He would have to take care and not argue. He would sit down. Doris was upstairs and she would appear in a minute. Then they would go for a walk and shake this room out of their eyes.
They chattered like monkeys. Satisfied with themselves. Yes, know-it-alls, tickled to death with themselves. An old man with a heavy pink face and sleepy eyes, a well dressed old man they called Judge—if he could punch this guy in the face, let his fist smash into his jellyface, God! what a thrill! A flushed girl, Doris' sister, wiggling her body in a chair. What she needed was somebody to grab hold of her and say, "Come on kid." A square, hard-faced old woman talking of society. What she needed was someone to walk up behind her and kick her hard. And when she raised her glasses to look, laugh like Hell and spit in her eye. That would make her human! And this smart-aleck Basine.... Hm! What he needed was somebody to tie him to a stake in a dark prairie and let the wind and rain go over him till he got hungry and began to whine. That's what they all needed—wind and rain to bring them back to life.
But he must be careful and say nothing. There was Doris' mother. She wasn't so bad. But this other guy, this writing guy, talking about books! God! Why didn't somebody choke the life out of him! What did he know about books? And he talked about writing! What was good writing? He asked that, this guy did! He would have to be careful what he said to this guy and keep himself from jumping up and murdering him. Hell take all of them and make'em burn. That's what they needed. He hated all of them. They were rich. Damn 'em! He must sit and grin at them, these jellyfish who wiggled in their graves and called their wiggles by great names, who were dead ... dead.... How dead they were! And happy about it! Happy.... Didn't they know how dead they were?
Doris was like them. He was a fool for coming to see her. As if she were any different from them. She belonged with this filthy crew. She was a filthy little tart like the rest of them. Let her go to Hell. He'd tell her to go to Hell when he saw her. She was one he could talk to.
Uh huh, they were giving him the up and down. His shoes were dirty. His collar soiled. His clothes weren't pressed. That was the way with these dead ones, they made standards of their clothes because clothes were all they had. And their idea was to make people feel inferior who were inferior to their clothes or to their manners or to their other artificialities. But he didn't have to feel inferior if he didn't want to. He was the kind who could stand up in a graveyard like this and say "Go to Hell" to the pack of them and grin and walk away and forget all about it.
He noticed they looked at him not quite as they looked at each other. That was right. They knew he had their number. Mrs. Basine, too, was looking. She asked:
"I understand you write, Mr. Lindstrum?"
Books all bound and pretty standing in a row with your name in the papers as a young writer of note and invitations to speak at women's clubs—was whatshe meant. That was what writing was to people, to jellyfish.
"I try to write," he answered, making the correction softly so that his words purred.
"You should know Aubrey Gilchrist," said Basine. "Do you know his work?"
"I do not," said Lindstrum still purring. "What does he write?"
Basine chuckled inside. His unaccountable aversion for Aubrey was growing.
"Novels," said Basine.
"Oh," said Lindstrum dragging the syllable out and placing a huge granite period after it.
"What writers do you like?" Fanny inquired with a successful attempt at social artlessness. She was looking for something in this friend of Doris'. She was in awe of him because he was dirty looking and because he swayed as he sat in his chair. He kept swaying as if he were on secret springs and would jump up any minute. He frightened Fanny.
"I read good books," said Lindstrum, "books written by men."
Mrs. Gilchrist sat up stiffly. Her husband peered out of his glasses. He liked Lindstrum. He wanted to talk to him. But he got no further than clearing his throat several times. The judge interrupted with a glower. He was given the floor, eyes turning to him. A defender. But he merely glowered. That was his decision, that settled it. If he glowered this moujik was done for. He glowered Lindstrum off the face of the earth. But Lindstrum turned full on him and thrust his face forward as if he were going to come closer.
"What kind of books do you read?" he asked the glowerer. The snap in his voice startled Henrietta. She was afraid for a minute this strange looking creature waiting for Doris would do something and she turned appealingly to Basine.
"All kinds, sir," the judge answered in his most effective baritone. Lindstrum nodded his head slowly and a grin came into his eyes. He kept looking at the judge and grinning and nodding his head and just as the judge was going to say something Lindstrum abandoned him. He had turned to Aubrey. Aubrey had grown eager. A confusion inspired by an impulse toward garrulity was in his eyes. He wanted to talk to this Lindstrum and discuss things beyond everybody in the room. Lindstrum thought he was a soda-water clerk. One of those radicals with unbalanced ideas. But he wanted to talk to him. Perhaps they had something in common? Aubrey felt himself growing angry. But it was not an anger of silences. An anger of words. He wanted to talk, to reason with Lindstrum and put himself over with Lindstrum. Lindstrum was like a conscience.
"Hello!" The arrival stood up and looked at Doris. He forgot about calling her names. She was smiling at him like a fresh wind blowing through his heart. The roomful dropped out of sight.
"Do you want to go for a walk?" he asked slowly. "It's nice and cold outside."
She nodded and Lindstrum, with a long, deliberate stare at the company spoke to them.
"Good night," he said. When he had said it he continued to stare as if he were weighing the matterover carefully and should say something more. The pause grew embarassing but not to him. Without nodding his head he repeated the result of his deliberations.
"Good night," he said in the same voice. That was enough.
He left them sitting in their chairs—a general calmly marching off the field of victory. He left behind a silence. The company was uncomfortable.
Mrs. Gilchrist and the judge stared hard at the doorway through which Lindstrum had passed. They wanted to insult the doorway. Lindstrum's visit had had a curious effect upon Ramsey. He had sat silent and avoided the young man's eyes. But he had felt himself becoming animated as if something were exciting him. When the young man had glanced at him for a moment he had blushed and an odd nervousness had made his thin body tremble. Now that Lindstrum was gone he felt the room had become empty and entirely lacking in interest.
"How do you like him?" Mrs. Basine whispered at his side. She was worried.
"Him? Oh yes, the young man," Ramsey muttered. "He ... he has nice eyes."
In the park Lindstrum sat on a bench with Doris and talked.
"All this," he said, "all this night and trees and things we feel more than we see, are like what you're like. But why should we call that love. Because love means to hold a woman in your arms. I don't care about holding a woman. I want to hold somethingelse. If you hold something in your arms you haven't got it. It's what you can't get your fingers on that you own most. Because you dream about it. It's what you dream about that you own most."
He spoke disconnectedly. There were pauses during which he allowed the night to punctuate his thoughts.
"Have you written any more things since last time?" Doris asked.
"No. I didn't bring anything with me."
He was silent. Doris wished he would sit closer to her. His silence excited her. She could feel things moving in him. She became nervous. Her dark eyes looked fully at his profile and a pride elated her. Other men didn't stare like that into the night. They had fussy little eyes and fussy little bodies. They fidgeted around. But Lief sat as if he were turned to granite.
There was something ominous about him. The glint of his straight eyes and the leather color of his face were ominous. She felt that he was powerful, more powerful than the spaces he stared into. He could stand up and swing the park around their heads. She wanted to come close to him.
"Lief," she whispered, "why don't you come oftener. I get lonely for you. I hardly talk to anybody else."
He nodded as if agreeing with her and saying silently, "That's right. Don't talk to anybody else." But he said nothing aloud.
She wanted to be the thing he swung around his head. If he would take her up and destroy her it would make her crazy with happiness. She closed herfingers around his hand and trembled. Her body felt weak. Her arms were as if she no longer directed them. They were being drawn.
"I'm so proud of you. You're so different from all of them, Lief. I can't stand them sometimes. They're terrible."
He nodded his head with a ponderous air of sagacity.
"They make me sick," she went on. "All of them. They're not like people but like something else. Like parts of people."
He nodded his head again. She was all right—this girl. She didn't belong with the pack in the room he had left. She wasn't a little slut ... one of those lying, filthy ones. But he was afraid of her. He wanted to keep things like they were. If you let down to a woman she started climbing all over you and asking for this and for that. Anyway it was time to walk back now. There was a lot of work in the shop. He got up at six.
They walked out of the park together. The spring night called for endings. The darkness hinted. The day with its houses and noises lingered like an unnatural memory in the shadows. What were people for? The darkness hinted. Doris felt a mist in her blood. So curious, the day. Unreal, empty. Noises that circled, faces that went on forever. People had been moving forever. They kept walking and walking. There was no ending to people. The years passed under their feet like a treadmill and they kept moving on.
Now it was quiet. Beside this man she felt there was no more moving on. Her heart filled with impatience.It was hard to breathe. Her arms were heavy, overcrowded. "Oh," she whispered to herself, "I'll die. I'll die."
But they continued to walk. The man's silences, his ominous reserves, his sagacious noddings had excited her. She felt angry with him. He had called for her a half dozen times in the last two months. They had met by accident in a book store. A clerk had introduced them. He called and they went for walks. But he said nothing. Once he had told her she was beautiful. Another time he had mentioned, as if it were a casual thing, that she was the sort of girl to whom he would like to make a gift. But of what, he didn't know. Some gift worthy, he said. She had been frightened of him at first. But gradually as she grew accustomed to his strange manners, his bristling silences, she became impatient, angry.
He stopped.
"I'll go this way," he announced. "Good-night."
He stood looking at her for a long minute and then turning, walked away. She watched him but he didn't look back. She walked to the house alone.
Her thoughts now were clear. He was a man who didn't want her but was looking for something of which she was a part. He never tried to touch her. He never said, "I love you," to her. But he did love. She knew that. He called it by other names and misunderstood himself. And he might go on that way till he died, misunderstanding himself. To be near her thrilled him. She remembered how he became taut, immobile, sitting on the bench. His arms quivered. Yet he never tried to embrace her.
She thought about this as she walked to her home.Would he ever embrace her? She knew about his silences. She could even feel how he suffered inside because something was urging him that had no direction. It was this life in him that lured her. It stirred her senses.
Nothing before had interested her. Days had passed with no difference in them. Now he made a difference. When she remembered him a pain that was like anger filled her.
She would go to bed and lie in the dark dreaming of him with her eyes open. A languor made it difficult to walk. She smiled to herself. It was pleasant, sweet to think of him. For a moment the image of his face transfixed her. She whispered aloud, "Talk to me. Oh, please ... please...."
Then images that disgusted her crowded her thought. They came of their own volition. Her sister Fanny kissing men. Her brother George kissing women. Keegan, the judge, Ramsey, Aubrey and Henrietta—they disgusted her with their continual love-making, kissing, dirtiness. People like that didn't understand anything else. Their bodies searched each other out and clung to each other. Bodies clenched together—she began to rage in silence against them. He called them the pack. They were like that—a pack of animals with nothing else but animal bodies to live with. She paused in her hating, a chill coming between her silent words. The company of images in her mind had dissolved. Their faces came together and blurred into a single face and she saw Lief Lindstrum holding her wildly against him, his lips open and hot against her mouth....
The company had gone. Her family was left in thelibrary. She had intended going upstairs without speaking. But she came into the room and sat down. Fanny looked at her with a questioning innocence that said, "Dear me, I wonder what people do who walk in the park at night?" Her brother was talking. He looked at her with a smile and went on.
"You mustn't think I'm a blockhead, mother, about these people here tonight, for instance. Just because I get along with them. I'll give you my theory of people. We were discussing our guests," he explained turning to Doris. She nodded. "Never believe them," he grinned. "They're all liars. The thing to do is to lie better than they. Honesty, purity, nobility—bah! I know what I'm talking about. That's what people tell each other they are. And they are, of course. Till they're found out. You said a little while ago I was lying. Of course I was. But not the way you mean. That breach of promise case really happened. I wasn't lying about that. You wait, you'll understand what I mean after a few years. I'm going to do things."
He stood up and yawned. Mrs. Basine smiled happily at him. The day had tired her. She felt pleasantly responsible for her three children. Three human beings that belonged to her. At least she could pretend they did. And sometimes it was almost as nice dreaming of what they had in their minds as planning her own tomorrows. Basine went to his bedroom.
He undressed and lay down. Sounds continued in the house. Doris coming upstairs. Fanny chattering to his mother. Water running in the bathroom. Heturned the gas out and lay with his face toward the window.
His body was weary. But he felt young. He thought of the many years ahead of him. Everything was new. Even the century had just begun. A new century. Life was a gay unknown. He thought about things. Things filled the future. They could not be seen or understood but their presence could be felt. Unlived years stretched ahead, like a track without end.
He must be careful not to grow too serious. Lying was easy but he must avoid getting tangled up. Say anything you want to, but look out how hard you say it. People were easy. It would all come out beautifully. Success, power, fame, money, happiness—they were all easy. They would all come to him. People were fools and you could get ahead of them. He yawned. He almost fell asleep. His mind mumbled with words. His day dreams, his memories, his weariness jumbled dim pictures. Phantoms drifted without outline over his head.
He fell asleep and dreamed he was in a brightly lighted hall. Men were cheering. Music played and people were yelling his name. In the dream he was going to make a speech. The brightly lighted hall grew larger and the crowd reached as far as he could see. But he didn't come out to make the speech. Instead a woman in a gaudy dress came out. Her face was white with powder and heavily painted. Her eyes were sunken. In the dream he shuddered because the great crowd would rave indignantly at the substitute who had come out to make the speech for him. But instead, a tremendous cheer went up at thesight of this woman and everybody yelled, "Basine ... Basine.... There he is. Hooray for Basine!" They mistook the woman for him. The woman began to make his speech. The one he had prepared. She spoke in a tired, hollow voice but the crowd continued to cheer. Where was he in the dream? There was no Basine in the dream. He kept wondering about this. There was no Basine but the crowd thought this woman in the gaudy dress with the painted face was Basine and they cheered her for him, calling her, "Basine...." while he, hiding somewhere, the dream didn't say where, listened to the woman and the cheers and the shouts of his name. He was saying to himself with a feeling of horror, "I know that woman they think is me. It's that woman Keegan and I met once. Keegan and I met her, by God!" He was going to stop something but the dream went away.
The city grows and keeps on growing. People vanish. Buildings spring up to take their places. The streets become full of vast, intricate activities. People have vanished but these activities keep on growing.
The city shakes with noises. A cloud of noises rises from the street and bursts slowly into names. Everywhere one turns, doors and windows chatter with names. Names run up and down the faces of buildings. Gilt names slant downward, porcelain names curve like lopsided grins. Names fly from banners, hang from long wires, lean down from rooftops.
The city is plastered with names. Tired men stop and blink. They mutter to themselves in the street, "Lets see, where am I?" Their eyes stare at an inanimatedance of names. Names fall out of the sky. An alphabet face with eyebrows, nose, lips and hair made of names winks and sticks out its tongue.
These are not the names of people but of activities. As the city grows the names pile up and reach higher. Names of things to eat, wear, see, feel, smell, dream of and die for—they become too many to see and far too many to read. They drift up and down the faces of the buildings and scamper over the pavements like a lunatic writing.
The vanished people no longer look at them. But the names continue to pile up and spread out. They are a city apart. They no longer offer clews to people. They are no longer advertisements yelping vividly out of the air, but a decoration. Inscrutable hieroglyphs that salute each other in the grave confusion of windows. They grimace with secret meanings at each other and keep each other company in the night sky. Like the people they too have become too many. As the city grows their meanings and purposes also vanish, leaving behind a comet's tail and a deaf and dumb good-bye.
The city grows and devours itself and ceases to become articulate in names. It shakes and howls senselessly. No one understands where the noises come from or why. Windows become too many to count. Activities double on themselves and tangle themselves up in other activities until each activity becomes a mystery to itself. Business men buried in business pause to blink at their desks and mutter, "Let's see, where am I?"
Underneath the activities and the comet's tail of names, the vanished ones crawl about their business ofdestinations. They have remained sedately unaware of their disappearance. They have barricaded themselves behind activities and for the most part they are silent. Their activities talk for them in a language easy to hear but difficult to understand. Furnaces, engines, factories, traffic—these talk. Their talk is very important. It is curious that for the simple business of keeping alive there should be so many activities necessary. It is also incomprehensible.
Among themselves people offer each other informations and interpretations. But these informations and interpretations are not of their souls but of their activities which have nothing to do with them except to hide them. They talk of business enterprise, of success, progress, civic development, industrial achievement, political ideals; of money made and money spent. This talk sounds very important. It becomes an important part of the confusion of activities.
Faces uncoiling in the streets, legs slanting against dark walls, suits of clothes—these are the vanished people. Masses of rich and poor moving on, everlastingly moving on through the whirl of years. Age like a tenacious pestilence shovels them off a treadmill. Yet they remain and increase and become hidden from each other by their too many selves, hidden from themselves by their too many activities. They grow confused and stop staring at each other. They walk listening to the shake of the city, blinking at the alphabet face above them.
The city is a great bubble they have blown. It floats over their heads and grows greater and more dazzling. Slowly it sinks down and engulfs them.
This bubble talks for them. Activities talk forthem. It is easier that way. Activities say, "We, the people." This suffices. The vanished ones point with relief to the glitter of activities and repeat, "There are we."
But activities grow too fast and too intricate to understand. The burst of names becomes too violent to grasp. Then the people lost in their bubble become an insupportable mystery to themselves.
Buried beneath activities that grow by themselves, that seem to pulse with mathematical passions and to multiply like a devouring fungus, the vanished ones send up a clamor for whys and wherefores. An official clamor. Life has become an enigma deeper than death. The cry is no longer "Who is God? And where does He live?" But, "Who are We and what are We?"
Surveying themselves they see nothing and demand explanations of this phenomenon. Baffled by their anonymity they demand identifications. They want to be assured that things are all right, that their burial is O. K.
And thus new explainers and identifiers leap daily into existence. These are the bombinators, the dexterous geniuses able to translate the insupportable mystery of life. Life is a mumble mumble, a pointless delirium. People feel this and grow very serious. They feel life is a little breath, a whimsical zephyr capering for a moment through space.
But these are insupportable feelings. It is easy for the fish in the sea to feel like that but in people there is a mania for direction. Out of this mania is born the necessity of illusion—the illusion of direction. There must be illusion. Life is not a mumble mumble but a clear voice teeming with precisions. Not a pointlessdelirium but a vast, orderly activity that has names—too many names to count.
As children demand lights in the darkness, grown older they demand illusions in life. Their reasoning is simple. "We are so puny," they think. "There is hardly anything to us. We dare not dream or even think. Look what would happen if we allowed ourselves to dream. We would begin asking impossible questions of ourselves. Why are we? What lies under our senses? So we must put away dreams and thought. They're dangerous. But without them we become insufficient to ourselves. We become incomplete. So make us a part of something outside ourselves that we may remain unaware of our insufficiency. Make us a part of laws and ideas, Gods, systems and activities. We are frightened by what we do not know. And above the highest names on our buildings is a circle of unknowns. Dispel this circle so that we may be rid of our fear. Give us paths to traverse, goals to struggle toward and make these paths and goals outside ourselves. We dare not adventure inside ourselves because that way is inimical. Inspire us with great outward purposes so that the inward purposelessness of our lives that would devour us in enigmas will be obscured."
The illusion-bringers arise—dexterous craftsmen able to fashion purposes, Gods, ideals. Their work is to create heroic destinations, to invent objectivity. These are the geniuses. They provide the sanities which are the vital solace for terror. They invent masters because masters are necessary since to have a master is to have an objective—servitude. The instinct for servitude is an old, unfailing friend. It representsthe clamor for an outward purpose to conceal the inner purposelessness of the vanished ones. And the geniuses are those in whom the instinct for servitude inspires new visions of lovelier masters. Thus is progress made—by increasing and making more definite the demands of masters.
Once the geniuses found their task simple. Now it grows difficult. Famous masters, famous illusions, famous objectives lose their value. Their capacity for solace dwindles. The illusion of God grows dim. The illusions that bore the names Zeus, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohamet are fading. The knees of the race have stiffened with vanity and prayer grows difficult. The great Heavens overladen with their angel choirs and hierarchies tumble about the ears of people. Slowly the reservoirs of faith in consoling myths dry up. Epigrams have almost sponged away one of the immemorial deeps of the soul.
The geniuses cast about inventing new masters, masters who will reward and punish and establish paths to traverse and goals to achieve. As the activities increase and as people vanish deeper under the self-growing fungus of finance, industry, government, they develop a paradoxical vanity. A vanity by which they seek to preserve themselves. A vanity becomes necessary that will save them from the knowledge of their inferiority to life.... Their age-old illusion of Gods on High drifts away. The new illusion slowly unfolds. Again the reasoning is simple.
The race speaks.... "There is no longer a God or a Heaven of futures. The words eternity and infinity are bottomless and no longer hold us or guide us. But we must have a master, one who will enableus to dream of His recompense since we still dare not adventure in dreams of our own. And this master must assure us as our old master did—that there are great purposes in life, great rewards. We will make a minor change in our theology. Once it was our desire to think of ourselves as having been created in the image of God—a Superior. This was when we were strong, when we walked the earth and wore our destinies like gay feathers in our caps. Now we have grown diffused and weak. The world is no longer simple enough for us to understand and ignore. We dare not ignore our disappearance from life. Therefore in order to compensate for this disappearance we will create a God in our image and worship Him. The deeper we sink, the further we vanish, the higher, nobler and more powerful will we make our new God. Come, illusion mongers, we desire a new God. We desire a new Heaven. Make us a Heaven of quicksilver in which we may see not Jehovah who is a myth but our own image glorified, which is closer to reality, and which our dawning intelligence may more easily swallow. In this heaven let us see our civic virtues magnified. We want for a master an idealization of ourselves, whom we may serve in hope of rewards."
Thus the vanished ones stare aloft and slowly the heavenly mirror spreads itself for them—a mirror of identifications and explanations. It is all clear—or at least it grows clear—in this mirror; who we are and what we are.... A beautiful image marches across its face. It is the image of the vanished ones, ennobled and deified—become a new illusion, become a God-like creature with flashing eyes. A marvelous, unsurpassable creature whose every gesture is perfection,whose every grimace is unsurpassable perfection. A reassuring God. Whatever their moods, their despairs, their manias—they have only to look up and see them ennobled and deified in the mirror-heaven.
Gazing aloft the vanished ones raise their voices in a cheer of triumph.
"We are confused. We have disappeared. Our activities have devoured us. But we are not afraid. For behold, whatever we do, we remain God. See our reflection. We are always and consistently perfect. Our stupidities, hysterias, bewilderments shine back at us out of this new Heaven as God-like attributes. Wisdom and victory smile at us eternally out of our mirror. Let the city devour itself and become a jungle of names. Let life lose itself in the labyrinth of activities. Let the buildings devour life until it becomes less than a tiny warmth under huge ribs of steel. These things are no longer insupportable. There is an answer always to 'Who are we and what are we?' We are God. By worshipping ourselves we may now dispel the dawning knowledge of our insufficiency. The old God is dead. He was an illusion. The new God alone now has the power to punish and reward. We will kneel with fanatical servitude before the image of our virtues and punish ourselves with a terrible justice in order to appear God-like in our own eyes."
Slowly the new heaven above the city grows and the vanished ones with the eyes of Narcissus stare enchanted into its quicksilver depths.
In the days that followed her walk with Lindstrum in the park, Doris Basine abandoned herself to her passion for the man. Her body desired him. Shedreamed of their coming together as of some transcendental climax.
But the months passed and Lindstrum held himself aloof. She felt certain of herself though. It was only necessary to wait. She could go on dreaming of him and waiting too. To think of him, to remember he was alive, this for the time was happiness enough.
After a number of months they saw each other oftener. He seemed to grow more dependent on the fanatical admiration of her eyes and words. Her flattery stirred an excitement in him that he was learning to utilize in writing. The fact that he was loved made it easier to write. The memory of the things she said, of the desire in her eyes was like music. It was easier to write with music playing in his head. But the more he wrote and dreamed of writing the less he desired her. So her passion became an applause urging him from her.
He would listen trembling to her gradually shameless avowals.
"You're so wonderful. So remarkable. You're the only man in the world that's alive. Your genius is something I can't even talk about. It must be worshipped. I love you."
In the midst of such monologues she would suddenly vanish from Lindstrum's thought. Her beauty and desire were powerless to hold his attention. Her enfevered praise would become a lash that drove him into himself. And, trembling with a passion that her love had aroused, he would leave her. But it would be a passion which demanded possession not of her but of himself.
He would walk excitedly to his room over his father's shop and sit down to write.
After many months Doris began to understand. He brought her poems he had written; poems like night music and passion music. She felt his heart throbbing among their words. Even his body was in them. What she wanted of him he gave to the poems he wrote.
She announced herself at home as tired of her surroundings and dependence. Through the aid of a friend she secured a job as clerk in a large bookstore. One evening she came home to tell her mother she was going to move.
Basine entered the argument that followed. To her surprise he took her side, agreeing with her that a modern young woman had a better chance of realizing herself if she lived alone and made her own way.
Mrs. Basine refused to be convinced. Not about the theories, she explained, but about Doris. When her two children argued with her she felt herself the victim of a conspiracy. Why did Doris want to leave her home? And why did George want her to? The answers didn't lie in the arguments they gave. But because she was unable to determine what the answers were, she assented. Later she thought,
"If I hadn't given my consent she would have done it anyway. This way I've saved her from being disobedient."
Doris took up her life in a two-room apartment on the near north side of the city. The district was alive with rooming-houses, little stores, lovers who walked hand in hand at night, artists who tried to paint, writers who worked as clerks and tried to write, workingmen, artisans, derelicts. Everyone seemed alonein this district and on warm evenings groups of strangers sat stiffly on the stone steps of the houses and stared at the sky.
Doris was able to live on her salary. She made friends and her evenings were devoted to conversations. But they were a curious type of friends. They were men and women one got to know only by their ideas. One became acquainted with their ideas, then familiar with them, then on terms of intimacy with them.
It had been different at home. At home she knew men and women as they were. They sat around and talked and if you listened to what they said you came close to them. You understood them and when they said good-night you knew where they were going. You knew all about them, where they worked, their family, their homes. They grew into familiars as uninteresting and unmysterious as your own relatives.
But here where Doris had come to live were men and women about whom you never learned anything. They talked and talked but all the while you wondered where they worked, what things were in their hearts. You wondered how they lived and what they did all the time. But you never found out. Such informations were not a part of the talk that went on. It was all talk about outside things, about politics and women and art. Everybody in the circle Doris entered became familiar in a short time. But after they had become familiar there remained this mystery about them. What sort of people were they under their poses and behind their words?
The most curious change her freedom brought Doris was a garrulity that surprised even herself. She became adept in arguments vindicating the emancipationof her sex and proving that the ideals and standards by which women lived were the rose-covered chains forged for their enslavement by man.
But her garrulity did not deceive Doris. She grew more clearly aware of herself. She knew that her entire upheaval, her taking up new ideas, her repudiating conventions had been inspired by a single factor. She wanted to live alone in a room so there would be no difficulty in giving herself to Lindstrum when the opportunity came.
With this in mind she had deliberately converted herself into a "new woman," since an expression of the new womanhood was independence of family and since independence of family meant a room to herself. Of this subterfuge Doris became tolerantly aware. Her hypocricies did not concern her. In her desire for the man she loved the surfaces of her life disappeared like straws in flame.
Lindstrum had visited her in her new quarters with misgivings. When he was alone he often sat thinking of her and repeating her ardent phrases. This helped him to make love to himself, to seduce the strange companion who lived in the depths of his soul into embracing him. Out of this embrace came words. Out of the ecstacy these hypnotisms induced, he was able to create gigantic phrases, mystic sequences of words whose reading often inspired people with an excitement similar to the emotion that had produced them. Women in particular grew emotional at the contact of his written words. When he read his poetry to some of them who were his friends they closed their eyes and thought he was making love to them.
Lindstrum utilizing the adoration Doris gave himas a means of self-seduction, remained aware of the danger this offered. The danger was summed up in the word "marriage." At twenty-six his sexual impulses found sublimated outlet in the orgies of self-seduction which he called his creative work. Thus his physical nature clamored for no other mate than his own genius, and the lure of marriage as a legalized debauch failed to touch him. His egoism likewise found a more perfect surfeit in his own self-admiration than in that of others. He saw in marriage merely a forfeit of his privacy and an intruder upon his self-love.
Doris studying him carefully from behind her abandonment discovered the barrier.
"I don't want ever to marry," she explained to him. This started talk in which Lindstrum defended marriage as an institution. He grew eloquent on the subject that society and civilization were dependent upon marriage and that a man who sought to dispense with it was merely being unfaithful to himself as a member of society.
Doris saw through the angry phrases of her friend that he was trying to tell her how little he desired her. He was defending marriage and proclaiming his belief in it, in order to excuse his physical indifference toward her, both in his own eyes and hers. Since she had said she thought marriage was an abomination, he could safely defend it without compromising himself. He need have no fear that she would agree with him. In this way his pose as a moralist was a convenient method of concealing the fact that he had no impulse toward immorality. He could even insist with impunity that she marry him and so useher rhetorical stand against marriage in general as a personal refusal.
Doris allowed matters to drift through the year. One winter night Lindstrum, invited innocently to occupy the sofa in the studio rather than to tackle the storm-bound transportation outside, consented. He sat reading things he had written until midnight came.
He did not see how it had happened but when he looked up after one of his readings Doris was sitting before the small grate fire. Her face was turned from him and he stared at her. She had undressed and slipped a green silk robe over her body. Her black silk stockings gleamed like exclamation points in the firelight. Her throat and breasts were visible and the shadows mirrored themselves in her white arms.
As he looked at her the warmth of the room seemed to bring her closer. He thought her beautiful and standing up went to her side. His hand sought clumsily to caress the hair coiled on her head. He stood silent, remembering how she loved him. Always the thought excited him. But now he seemed to be thinking about it with a curious calm. There was something about a woman who loved that was beyond words to figure out.
She looked up at him with a smile. A faint odor stirred from her. He found himself drawing deep breaths and staring at her with a heavy pain in his arms. The pain she had always brought to him and out of which he had made his words. Now this was easier, simpler—to reach his arms around her....
... "I belong to you now," she whispered as the dawn lighted the room. The fire in the grate stillburned feebly. They had kept it alive during the night.
"You see," she went on, "I was right about not marrying. We can love each other like this without marrying ever. Oh I love you so. You make me so happy."
"Yes," he murmured sleepily, intent upon the whitening room. "Dawn—the white shadow of night," whispered itself through his mind. But he said nothing. After an interval he repeated as if delivering himself of innumerable ideas—"Yes."
... Lindstrum slowly extricated himself from the lure of her passion. For months her love, dissolving rapturously in his embrace, remained a flattery too bewildering to resist. He allowed himself then to yield to the slowly accumulating demands of his mistress. Nevertheless in a month he had lost interest in his own sensations. The thought of impending embraces in the studio failed to arouse him.... There was nothing Doris had to give that was comparable to the delicious elation his own self-seduction held for him.
But although the physiology of sex lost its attraction for him, he remained interested in Doris' submission. Her delight in his caresses and her exclamations of arduous love fascinated him as a species of applause. He grew able to resist the contagion of her sensualism and to make her happy, without essentially occupying himself.
In the second year of their association he gradually undermined her passion. Aware of his complete coolness, Doris fought successfully to suppress theecstacies he was able to stir in her. Their relations by degrees returned to a platonic basis.
Lindstrum was becoming known. His poetry printed in fugitive labor gazettes was attracting a slight attention. He was being identified as a poet of the masses. The masses, however, unable to understand, let alone appreciate the mystic imagery and elusive passion of his vers libre phrasings remained oblivious to him. They continued to read and swear by the newspaper jinglers celebrating in rhyme the platitudes which kept them in subjugation. His fame was beginning through the enthusiasm of a few scattered dilletantes who abhorred the masses and saw in his work an intense technique and high asthetic quality.
He remained loyal to Doris in one respect, still coming to her for the adulation which somehow quickened his desire to write. But Doris, with the repression of her own desires had grown silent. She appeared to relapse into her former self—the enigmatic and disdainful virgin of the Basine library.
But this simulation included only her mannerisms. As a girl of twenty she had been without thought. Now a strange intellectualism preoccupied her. It developed when she was twenty-three and when Lindstrum was beginning to ignore her again. It began with the knowledge that there were definite preoccupations luring her lover from her. Against one of these she knew herself powerless. This was his desire to write. She had understood this thing in Lindstrum from the first. It had been, in fact, the lure of the man. But now it had taken entire possession of him and had become her rival.
He had grown dumb. His grey eyes no longersmiled or roved. They gazed without movement as if fixed on invisible objects. They seemed without sight, yet there was life in them—an intensity like the anger of blindness. He no longer looked at things. He avoided contact with the visible and imposed a deliberate fog on his vision. He went through his day unaware of details, yet absorbing them; unseeing, yet translating the commonplaces around him into phenomena that tugged at the hearts of his few readers.
Doris knew the futility of combating in her lover the habit of self-seduction now became a vital necessity. She tried to establish a harmony between them by turning to writing herself. The clarity of her mind made poetry impossible. Her thoughts refused to dissolve into magnificent blurs. Her emotions were too definite to find solacing outline in ambiguous pirouettes.
She envied her lover his natural aptitude for poetry. It seemed to her a comforting and satisfying evasion—to write poetry. There were no rules of logic, coherence, technique. There was even no rule of intelligibility.
There was a man named Levine with whom she discussed matters of this sort, exchanging definitions with him of such things as life, love and art. He was a Jew and worked on a newspaper. Lean, vicious-tongued and unkempt, the fantastic skepticism of this man attracted her. He was a man without principles, ideas, prejudices. His attitude toward life she sensed to be a pose. But he had been completely consumed by this pose and the pose was one of superiority. His brain was like a magician. It waved words over ideas or problems and they turned inside out. Or theyvanished and reappeared again as their opposites. He appeared to devote himself with a mysterious enthusiasm to proving everyone but himself in the wrong. When he read editorials in the newspapers he would comment, "They say this. But they mean this." And he grew elated explaining the low, sordid motives which inspired the noble-phrased pronouncements in the press and elsewhere.
When she talked to him about poetry one evening he knew her well enough to understand she wanted to talk about Lindstrum. Doris had tried her hand at poetry and the results had been in a measure satisfactory. Poems had come out under her pencil. She compared them coldly with things Lief had written. They were as good and better. She offered them to Levine to read. He nodded after each one and smiled, "Very nice. Excellent. Superb." Then he handed them back to her and added, "I've always known this. Anybody can write poetry. This poetry is quite good. But it remains, you're no poet."
And he recited from memory a few lines of Lindstrum's work.
"You see the difference," he said. "His rings truer. Although yours is much more lucid and beautifully written. The difference isn't between your work and his but between your work and yourself and his work and himself. When Lindstrum wrote that he felt a thrill of satisfaction. He had for a minute completed himself in the poem. Therefore the thing represented a certain perfection. When you wrote you felt nothing after writing it. In an hour the whole thing seemed rather senseless and unworthy of you. You felt no thrill of completion. This shows that no matter if youwrite a dozen times better than Lindstrum the fact remains that you're not a poet and he is.
"But why write poetry. I have a friend who says that poetry is an impish attempt to paint the color of the wind. He hasn't written any himself yet but he will. But I've warned him. He'll never succeed. Lindstrum will because Lindstrum has the faculty of rising above logic. He can recreate his emotions in words. Emotion is unintelligent, banal, wordless. The trick of being a great poet is to make your mind subservient to your emotion—the triumph of matter over mind, in other words."
He noticed an inattentiveness and stopped. He hoped some day to make love to her but as long as she remained interested in his verbal jugglings he was content with that.
When she was alone Doris took a morbid interest in unravelling ideas and attenuations of ideas. Morbid, because the process seemed to bring a melancholy to her. But she persisted. There was an elation. Thinking was like a game in which one surprised oneself with denouements.
One day while walking she reasoned silently about her situation. Her love for Lindstrum had grown. At times it fell on her like a despair. She would lie in the dark of her room repeating to herself that she would go mad unless he came back to her, unless he loved her.
Walking swiftly she began to think of her plans. Her plans centered upon bringing him back to her arms.
"If I'm going to do this I must first of all be clear about myself," she thought. "I've become interestedin lots of things. I must find out why and what's started me."
The answer that came to her was one of the denouements of the game. It repeated, but clearly, that she was chiefly concerned with bringing Lief back to her and that one way to do this was to become keener than he, become brilliant enough to deflate him, to confuse him. And this could best be done by attacking his subject matter, by turning his conceptions of life and people upside down and so throwing him out of gear.
When she got home she was still thinking.
"What I must do, is make him think. He doesn't think. The pictures he sees pass like blurs through his eyes and come out like blurs under his pencil. If I can make him think he'll have to open his eyes. He'll have to defend what he accepts without defenses now—the nobility of the masses, the beauty of life. And if he starts thinking and doubting he won't be able to write because he's not built to write that way. He's built to write out of passion."
The idea became cruelly apparent in her mind. She must destroy Lindstrum in order to possess him. She must beat down the passionate certitude of the man, puncture his blind, roaring egomania, take away from him his genius and then he would turn to her.
Her thought at this point gave itself over to the passion in her. Anger filled her and a strange viciousness as though she had something under her hands to tear to pieces. Her clear-thinking mind was a weapon—a thing she could use to destroy a rival with. And if it destroyed Lief along with the rival, what matter? Slowly the morbidity of her position grew. Levinewas an ally. His talk gave her ideas—directions in which to think. She disliked his attitude. The man was an insincerity. There was also something unctuous and cowardly about him. He never stood up for his notions in the face of conservatively indignant people. He capitulated and even denied his beliefs or lack of beliefs. Yet in the nihilism to which he pretended she found a background for her own thinking. Nihilism to Levine was a conversational pastime. To Doris it became a despairing hope for salvation. She poured over books, carefully questioned the secrets of life, not like a philosopher seeking answers but like a Messalina questing for poisons.
Her debates with Lindstrum were at first casual and good-natured. A humility before his genius made her unable to assert herself. He could hurl his mystic word sequences at her and their beauty made her incapable of appreciating their lack of psychologic content.
But her determination grew. She must destroy—what? The somber ecstasy which the spectacle of people awoke in him. People ... people ... the word contained the shape and soul of her rival. People ... workers, toilers, underdogs ... he sang of their bruised hearts and their little gropings. Songs of unfulfilled dreams, of moods like ashen baskets that broke under the weight of life. Coal miners, farmers, stevedores, vagrants, desperadoes, drowsy clerks and fumbling factory hands—the dull faces of the immemorial crowd sweating for its living, grunting under its burdens—his phrases hymned their loneliness and their defeats. Beautiful phrases that seemed almost the work of a fantastic word weaver.But she knew better. The little images, the patterns of street scenes, the aloof fragments of idea—these might be to some only decorations. The curve of a pick going through the air, the shake of a great trestle with an overland train thundering across, the glint of a night torch under the eyes of a section gang—these might be only abstractions outlining bits of rhythm and color. But then Lindstrum would not have been a poet.
There was beneath them, buoying them higher and higher like some mysterious, invisible force, a passion. It escaped now and then from between the lines of his work, shaking itself like a fist, holding its arms out like a lost woman. Threats crept out of the placid little images in which fragments of street scenes postured vividly for the eye. A fury loomed suddenly behind the mumble of a hurdy-gurdy piece; a snarl offered itself as invisible punctuation for a fol de rol of city life.
It was a passion that identified itself with, and seemed to fatten upon, the injustices of life. It sought to champion the war of the crowd against man and nature.
"The humble ones ... the humble ones...." it sang, "they are God. The ones life walks upon. The working ones, the cheated ones—here is their song. The oppressed ones, listen to their hearts beating."
It was a passion out of which a great propagandist might have been born. But Lindstrum's mind was too simple to utilize it, even to understand it. He was aware only of a torment that seemed to twist at his heart and bring words like soothing whispers intohis thought. A craftsman obsession moulded it slightly. But always the inarticulate excitements that had started him writing remained fugitive among his written words saying neither "I hate," nor "I love," but affirming with a monotonous crescendo, "I am. I am!"
Doris caught by the fanatic lyricism of his songs yielded her intellect to them for a time. The shoemaker Wotans and hobo Christs startled her into an acquiesence. But she was determined. She knew that her praise of his poetry was like an admiration of his infidelity. Yes, he loved people as he might have loved her, blindly with his heart, with his arms around their bodies and his grey eyes looking hungrily through them.
The debates grew less casual. There were abrupt climaxes during which he stared at her with anger. Then it was no longer a debate of ideas but of wills. Here she knew herself powerless and yielded at once, making use of her apology to caress his face or seize his hand.
Alone again she would study the things she had said as she studied from day to day the social, political and spiritual history of her own and other times. Her mind grew to master the phrases which outlined the illusions of the crowd, which revealed the lusts and errors of the crowd. Her thought inspired by the single desire to destroy for her lover the beauty of her rival, rallied continually from its defeats before his anger. Her cynicism became a mystic thing—her adoration of her lover turning into a hatred of life, a contempt of people.
At night she sat in the window of her room overlooking the thinly crowded street. The obsession heldher now, occupying her energies entirely. In its excitement, in the mental twistings, she found rest from the desires that burned.
Alone ... she was alone. She would play langorously with this sense of loneliness. She would repeat quietly, "He'll never come to me again. Never hold me in his arms. How beautiful he is. His lips are not like any man's lips could be. But he doesn't love me any more. He loves this in the street below. Men and women in the street."
And here her thinking would begin, a sequel to the preface of sorrow. Below her moved the face of her rival—the crowd. She must study the thing out carefully so as to be clear in her words when she talked to him. So as to make her words a poison in him that would destroy the passion for her rival.
The night lifted itself far away. Little lights ran a line of yellow at the foot of buildings. Men and women. What were men and women? The blur of faces in the street, moving along every night, what was that? Something to idealize and give one's soul to? No.
Individuals racing toward their secret destinations and tumbling with a sigh into an inexhaustible supply of graves—that was a phenomenon to be studied separately. Out of that one could locate plots, dramas, humor, tragedy. But here below the window was another story—was a great character that had no name but that her lover worshipped. The crowd ... this thing in the street he sang of as the crowd was a single creature. Its face was one, its voice one. It had one soul—the soul of man. A dark thing, alive with inscrutable desires.
"They're not people," she whispered, her eyes staring down, "but traditions walking the street. Accumulations of desires and impulses taking the night air."
She watched it move in silence, buried beneath names and buildings.
The crowd.... It was blind to itself. Its many eyes peered bewilderedly about. Its many legs moved in a thousand directions. And yet it was identical. Faces, different shaped bodies, different colored suits—these were part of a mask. Sentences that drifted in the night, laughters, sighs—these were part of a mask. Under the clothes, faces, names, talk of people, was a real one—the crowd. It had no brain.
And yet this creature that moved in the street below, in all streets everywhere, made laws, made wars, and mumbled eternally the dark secrets of its soul. The crowd ... a monstrous idiot that devoured men, reason and beauty. Now it moved with a purr through the street. It was going somewhere, making love, making plans, diverting itself with little hopes. Its passions and its secrets slept. It moved like a great somnambulist below her window, with a fatuous complacency in its dead eyes. Its many masks disported themselves in the night air. But let hunger or fear, let one of the inscrutable impulses awake it, and see what happened. Ah! Communes, terrors, rivers of blood, heads on spikes, torture and savagery!
She must tell this all clearly to him, explain lucidly to him how the hero-crowd of his singing was a gruesome and stupid criminal blind to itself and afraid of itself and inventing laws to protect it from itself. How it was a formless thing with hungers and desiresmoulded in the beginning of Time. How it demanded proofs of itself that the darkness of its brain and the savagery of its heart were the twin Gods from whom all wisdom and justice flowed. How the workers, the defeated ones, the under dogs he sang of and loved were like the others—lesser masks envying superior masks. And how the idealisms, Gods and hopes they all worshipped were lies the beast whispered to itself, fairy tales by which the beast consoled itself. Yes, a monster that devoured men who threatened its consolations, a wild fanged beast purring eternally in the path of progress. Reason was a little cap the masks wore that every wind blew off. Her loneliness faded. Seated by her window Doris no longer desired the lips of her lover. There was another elation ... a knowledge of the thing in the street, a certainty that she could make Lief Lindstrum understand.
One evening when he had returned to her after an absence of a month she decided to talk calmly to him of the things she had been thinking. He came in with an air of caution, that frightened her for an instant. She studied him as he took off his coat and hat and sat down. It was autumn outside. Dark winds seemed to have followed him in. This was an old trick of his that had once thrilled her. He seemed always to have come from far-away places, to have risen out of depths with secrets in his eyes. Her heart yielded as she watched him. There was the quality about him she could never resist, the thing her senses clamored for. Not that he wrote poetry—but that he was a poet.
It was almost useless to argue with him, to destroy him. No matter what he said or what he was doingshe could see him always as he really was—a silent figure walking blindly over men and buildings, over days and nights; walking with its eyes snarling and its mouth tightened; walking over days and nights after a phantom—a silent figure walking after a phantom. The phantom whispered, "Come" ... and the silent figure nodded its head and followed. That was how she saw him when her heart yielded, when she desired again to throw herself before him, make herself the phantom he was following.
But the obsession in her changed the picture slowly. Not a phantom but a face she knew—the face of the crowd. A wild fanged monster that had cast a spell over her lover and he went walking blindly after it calling words to it, singing lullabys to it, when all these things should have been for her.
Their talk began as she wished it. He was ill at ease. Why had he come? He was afraid to stay away? Why? She wondered questions as he sat uncertainly in the chair and offered vague gossip and information to explain his presence. Then she said abruptly:
"I'm writing a story. I've decided not to do any more poetry but write a story—a book, maybe."
He nodded.
"What about?" he asked.
"People. About people," she smiled. She noticed his body stiffen and his eyes grow hard.
"Yes, about people," he repeated slowly.
He was cautious when he came to see her now. She had reason to make demands of him. She had given herself to him and he didn't trust her. And she was always trying to do something to him. He knew this.It was hard to understand her lately but one thing was easy—she was not to be trusted.
"How they come together in crowds," she continued evenly, "and lose themselves in a common identity. How they become a hideous, unreasoning savage—a single savage. I'm going to write a book making this savage the ... the hero."
She paused to look at him. He was inattentive but she knew better.
"You should be interested," she smiled.
"Why should I be interested?" he asked slowly.
"Because you write about people, too."
"Yes."
"Or think you do," she went on. "I'm going to write about people as a crowd—as one savage without a brain. That's the crowd. And this savage is the hero of my story. Without a brain to think he creates out of his savagery the Gods, laws and illusions under which you and I live, Lief. Do you understand that?"
He looked at her without answer. Her heart grew alive with strength. She knew he was incapable of any answer but anger. His anger could usually defeat her but this time she felt she could laugh at him when he began to scowl. She stood up.
"You," she said softly, "are like they are. Like the crowd. You do not think or reason. You only feel. Words are accidents to you ... crazy hats that rain down on your head. You write out of a hatred for things superior to the beast. You're mad at life because it isn't as beautiful as you'd like it to be. So when you get maddest you begin to sing lies about it."
She laughed at the scowl on his face.
"Yes, I've figured it out, Lief. You're a terrible liar. When you say you love people, the crowd, you're a terrible liar then. You don't love the crowd at all. What is your love of people but a blind infatuation with yourself? You hate them. Whose humanity are you all the time writing about and singing about? Your own. But you're ashamed to admit that. Sometimes people are ashamed to boast of themselves so they boast of something else they've created in their own image—of their Gods. That's the way you boast of your crowd. You're ashamed to boast of yourself so you fix it up for yourself by giving the virtues you think you've got to people and then singing about them as if you were an altruist and a sympathetic human observer. You're a great liar, Lief. And the thing you love is a lie you make up. Because people are foul. And you know it. They're not like you or me. They can't think even as much as a rat thinks. They're as rattle-brained as chickens, as greedy as vultures. And they lie all the time—good God, how they lie. You hate them too. You know all this better than I do. But you keep feeling things and you imagine they're things people feel. You...."
She stopped and looked at him with a smile. She had started to insult him and had ended by pleading with him. His jaws were working as if he were chewing. This was his anger. But she felt no defeat, nothing but a slight confusion. She was disappointed in herself because she could not recapture the thoughts that had filled her during the month. They had been clear at their inception but now they were mixed up with desires for Lief, with a fear of him. They were mixed up so that out of what she was saying therearose no clear image of Lief and his relation to life or of the crowd and its foulness.
"Why don't you answer what I say?" she asked. "Are you afraid to discuss things you are absorbed in? If people are so wonderful let's talk about them."
She felt a triumph. She had destroyed something. She could tell by his eyes. They were becoming wild and unfixed. If she could be certain of destroying it forever, of killing in him the love for her rival ... then....
"The little finger of one intelligent man is worth the whole of the French revolution," she was saying excitedly. "You're no different from the other cowards who devote themselves to flattering the monster. You know what I mean. The monster rewards liars and flatterers. All you have to do to be great in the eyes of the world is to celebrate the glories of the monster. To make a lickspittle of your genius. It's an old and easy formula. Why don't you think? You stand up with your eyes closed and sing about things that never existed—about the beauty of people and ... and...."
Lindstrum thrust his face close to her. She paused. A desire to laugh came as she stared at the too familiar features of the man. This was the face she had held in her hands and covered with kisses. Nights of passion and adoration had been shared with this face. Now it held itself savagely before her and grew blurred. Something had been destroyed in it. It was no longer familiar. It was somebody else's face....
"People," it said as if it were going to spit at her. "Yes, like you say. Think about them! God damn...."