Erik Dorn Part 14

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

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

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

Before he had seen pictures complete, rhythmic pictures of streets and crowds, pleasantly blurred and in motion. Now he saw them as if life was in a state of continual pause--an arrested cinematograph; grotesquely detailed and with the meaning of motion out of it. A picture waiting something to set it moving. This something he could not give it.

Helplessly his words continued to trace themselves over the outlines of scenes about him, as if trying to stir them into a life.

This scene consciousness had become almost a mania in the four months.

But in the mechanical, phraseological movement of his thought he was able to hide himself. Thus he listened to Tesla and looked at the cafe.

The inn was filled with people--elaborately dressed women and shiningly groomed men--grouped about white-linened, silver-laden tables; an ornamental grimacing little mult.i.tude come to the cafe as to some grave rite, moving to the tables with an unctious nonchalance. Women dressed in effulgent silks, their flesh gleaming among the s.p.a.ces of exotic plumage, gleaming through the flares of luxurious satin distortions. A company that gestured, grimaced with the charm of l.u.s.tful marionettes.

Flesh reduced to secrecy. l.u.s.t, dream in hiding. From the secret world they inhabited, moist bodies beckoned with a luscious, perverse denial of artifice.

The picture of it shot into his eyes, arousing a hate in his thought. He heard Tesla ... "life has changed with the industrialization of society.

It is no longer a question of who shall run the court. The court is an atrophied inst.i.tution, a circus surviving in the backyard of history.

It's a question of who shall run the factory. Democracy is a thing that touches only politicians. The factory touches people. Democracy cleared the way but it's not a way in itself. It's still the court idea of government. Steam, gas, and electricity made the French revolution obsolete even before it was ended. This war ... good G.o.d, Dorn, blood pouring over toys we've outgrown!..."

Still fawning voiced, but with a bay underneath. Dorn listened and remained elsewhere--among a turning of heavy hands. Yet he thought of Tesla, "He makes an impression on me. I'll remember his words. A man of power, rooted in visions." He replied suddenly, "I'm convinced the weak will rule some day, if that's what you're driving at. The race can survive only as long as its weakest survive. Christianity started it.

Socialism will carry it a step further. The fight against the individual. What else is any inst.i.tutionalism? A struggle to circ.u.mvent the biological destiny of man, which is the same as the biological destiny of fish--extinction. That's what we're primarily engaged in. The race must protect its weak, so it invents laws to curb the instincts and power of its strong. And we obey the laws--a matter of adjusting ourselves ludicrously to our weaknesses and endowing these adjustments with high names. Bolshevism will be the law of to-morrow and wear even a higher name than Christianity. Yesterday it was, 'only the poor shall inherit heaven, only crippled brains and weaker visions shall see G.o.d.'

To-morrow the slogan will have been brought down to earth. Yes, they'll run the factories--your ma.s.ses. There's the strength in them of logic--a logic opposed to evolution. They'll run the factories as they now run heaven--an Inst.i.tution nicely accommodated to their fears and weaknesses."

Dorn paused. He was not thinking. People said things. An automatic box of phrases in him released answers. Tesla was replying, not so fawningly, the bay beneath his soft words mastering his sycophantic tones. Let him talk. He had something to talk about. He saw something.

There was a new tableau in Tesla's brain. Let him keep murmuring things about it--suavely, unctuously letting off steam.

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

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

But his soul was different--heavy hands turning.

Dorn drank wine from his gla.s.s. Anna, dancing with a plump, laughing stranger, flitted through the distance. A deeper turning over of iron in his heart at the glimpse of her. The scene no longer could divert him.

The thought of Anna dropped like a curtain upon a picture. What could he do? What? At night he grew sick lying beside her. It wasn't conscience.

There was nothing wrong about loving someone else. But there was an uncanniness about it. Lying beside a woman who didn't know what was in his mind. He would lie thinking, "Oh, Rachel, I love Rachel," repeating almost idiotic love words for Rachel in his mind. And Anna would smile patiently at him, unaware. That was the most intolerable thing. The fact she didn't know. And also the fact that he must remain inarticulate. He must sit with his heart choking him and his head in a blaze, and keep stuffing words back down his throat. Through the day he tormented himself with the thought, "I must tell her. I can't keep this thing up any longer." But when he saw her it was impossible to tell her. A single phrase would end it. He held the phrase on his lips--as if it were a knife balanced over Anna's heart. "I love Rachel." That would end it.

But it was impossible. He couldn't say it. Why? He sat, trying to get a glimpse of her dancing again and tried to avoid answering himself. It was something he mustn't answer. He must get away from his d.a.m.ned thought. His eyes fastened themselves upon the fountain in the center of the room. It was Anna that tormented him, not Rachel. Anna ... Anna....

The tension broke. He was looking at the fountain surmounted by a marble nude crouched in a posture of surprise; probably disturbed by her nudity. It was necessary for nudity to be disturbed by itself. Did virgins eyeing themselves in mirrors blush with shame? Unquestionably.

The nude peered into the water of a large tiled basin. A gush of water over her managed to veil her unsuccessfully in an endless spray. Water filled the air with an odorless spice.

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

Leave nothing behind--not even ashes."

True enough. Why answer it? But what difference did it make if paper burned? Was man after all a creature consecrated to inst.i.tutions, doomed to expend himself upon inst.i.tutions? A hundred million nervous systems, each capable of ecstasies and torments, devoting themselves to the business of political brick-laying. Always yowling about new bricks.

Politics--a deformity of the imagination; a game of tiddledy-winks played with guns and souls.

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

artificial shadows, painted lights, forlorn fountain ripplings.

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

Tesla, flabby-eyed and almost maliciously polite, as if he would expose the innate absurdity of politeness, tipped over a water gla.s.s in his floppings. Anna, still alive with the joyousness that had come to her, seated herself beside her husband. Her hand rested eagerly on his arm.

He must love her ... must. Must. It had been only a nightmare she'd invented. Oh, G.o.d, did anything matter as long as they loved each other?

"Tired, dearest?"

He looked at her and tried to lighten his eyes.

"Yes, a little. The d.a.m.ned war."

"I'm so sorry."

She mustn't ask him to dance. He was tired. She would coddle him. He was only a baby--tired, sleepy, sad. She must ask no questions. Only love.

Before her love the darkness of his face would clear away as before sunshine.

"I'm so happy, Erik darling!"

Her fingers quivered on his arm. He looked at her and smiled out of misty eyes. Of all the unbearable things in an unbearable world her happiness was the most unbearable. She nodded, as if she understood. Her pretense of understanding was a ghastly business. But Anna smiled. Poor Erik, he was only a boy. If only they were alone! If Eddie and Tesla and the whole world would go away and leave her with him, to kiss his eyes and stroke his hair. Sleep, baby, sleep.... What a crazy, wild thing, thinking that Erik no longer loved her. No longer loved her! Dear G.o.d, she was only a part of him. He must love her.... Must!

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

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

There--she shouldn't have asked. She didn't mean to. Her eyes apologized. When he answered, "No, I'm tired," there was wine from a gla.s.s that warmed the little coldness his words dropped into her.

Listening to her, answering with words he tried to soften and make alive, Dorn tried to occupy himself with the details of the scene again.

Could he keep on living as two persons--one of them turning over and over in a fire that consumed him--and the other making phrases, gestures, as if there were no fire consuming him? If he kept his eyes working, perhaps. He hated Anna. But that was because he couldn't bear the thought of her suffering. He hated her because he must be kind to her.

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

Anna was watching him with her senses. Why didn't he speak to her as Eddie did? Perhaps he was going mad. His eyes suffered. He looked at things and seemed to hurt himself with looking. She kept her voice vibrant with a hope of joyousness. "I mustn't give in to the nightmare.

It's only imagining...."

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

Talk, talk! Dorn listened. Anna was saying, "Eddie thinks as you do about the war, Erik. Isn't that odd?" Yes, that anybody should be able to think as he did. He was a G.o.d. A super-G.o.d. If only she hated him. A moment of hate in her eyes would be heaven.

"A plain case of accepting an evil and making the best of it," laughed Meredith. "If we go in all I ask is for G.o.d's sake let's keep our eyes open and not s...o...b..r around."

Soft remonstrances from Tesla with polite references to Wall Street.

Food on platters. An air of slight excitement with Anna directing the talk and serving. What made her so vivacious? The sight of an old friend, Meredith? Meredith ... oh, yes, school days, long ago. A wild hope unfolded itself in Dorn. He looked at the man anew. Fantastic notion. But throw them together, day and night. Cafes, dancing, music, propinquity. He was her type--kindly, unselfish, prosperously elate over life. He'd help her on with her wraps and be polite over doorways.

Perhaps. He turned to his wife and laughed softly. A way out. Give her to the man. Give her away. End her love for him--her d.a.m.ned, torturing love that made him turn over inside and weep at night when she was asleep; that hounded him like an unclean memory. It was only her love that made him unclean. He looked at her with his eyes lighted.

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

He smiled as he spoke with the unctuousness of a villain administering poison in a bouquet of roses. But a way to get rid of her love. He didn't mind her, but the thing in her. That was the whole of it. Why hide from it? G.o.d, if he could only kill it he'd be free. Otherwise he'd never be free. Even if he went away there'd be the thought of her love.... Anna's face bloomed with joy at his words.

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

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

"Surest thing."

They forgot Tesla.