CHAPTER II
There were people in New York who came to Erik Dorn and said: "Tell us about Europe. And Germany. Is it really true that...." As if there were some inner revelation--a few precious phrases of undistilled truth that the correspondent of the _New Opinion_ had seen fit to withhold from his communications.
The skysc.r.a.pers were intact. Windows shot into the air. Streets bubbled with people. A useless sky clung tenaciously to its position above the roof-gardens. The scene was amiable. Dorn spent a day congratulating himself upon the genius of his homeland. He felt a pride in the unbearable confusion of architecture and traffic.
But in the nine months of his absence there had been a change; or at least a change seemed to have occurred. Perhaps he had brought the change with him. It was evident that the Niagara of news pouring out of Europe into the press and periodicals of the day had inundated the provincialism of his countrymen. People were floundering about in a daze of facts--groping ludicrously through labyrinths of information.
It had been easy during the war. Democracy-Autocracy; a tableau to look at. Thought had been unnecessary. In fact, the popular intelligence had legislated against it. The tableau was enough--a sublimated symbol of the little papier-mache rigmarole of their daily lives, the immemorial spectacle of Good and Evil at death grips, limelighted for a moment by the cannon in France. The unreason and imbecility of the mob crowned themselves. Thought became _lese majeste_.
Dorn returned to find the tableau had suffered an explosion. It had for some mysterious reason glibly identified as reaction burst into fragments and vanished in a skyrocket chaos. Shantung, Poland, little nations, pogroms, plebiscites, Ireland, steel strikes, red armies, Fourteen Points, The Truth About This, The Real Story of That, the League of Nations, the riots in Berlin, in Dublin, Milan, Paris, London, Chicago; secret treaties, pacts, betrayals, Kolchak--an incomprehensible muddle of newspaper headlines shrieked from morning to morning and said nothing. The distracted mob become privy for the moment to the vast biological disorder eternally existent under its nose, snorted, yelped, and shook indignant sawdust out of its ears.
In vain the editorial Jabberwocks came galloping daily down the slopes of Sinai bearing new tablets written in fire. The original and only genuine tableau was gone. The starry heavens which concealed the Deity Himself had become a junkpile full of its fragments.
"In the temporary collapse of the ba.n.a.lities that conceal the world from their eyes," thought Dorn, "they"re trying to figure out what"s really what around them--and making a rather humorous mess of it."
He went about for several days dining with friends, conferring with Edwards and the directors of the _New Opinion_, and slowly shaping his "experiences abroad" into phonograph records that played themselves automatically under the needles of questions.
At night, he amused himself with reading the radical and conservative periodicals, his own magazine among them.
"The thing isn"t confined to the bloated capitalists alone," he laughed one afternoon while sitting with Warren Lockwood in the latter"s rooms.
"The radicals are up a tree and the conservatives down a cellar. What do you make of it, Warren?"
"I haven"t paid much attention to it," the novelist smiled. "I"ve been busy on a book. What"s all this stuff about Germany, anyway? I read some things of yours but I can"t figure it out."
Dorn exploded with another laugh.
"You"re all a pack of simpletons and bounders, still moist behind the ears, Warren. The whole lot of you. I"ve been in New York three days and I"ve begun to feel that there isn"t a remotely intelligent human animal in the place. I"m going to retreat inland. In Chicago, at least, people know enough to keep their mouths shut. I"ll tell you what the trouble is in a nutsh.e.l.l. People want things straight again. They want black and white so"s they can all ma.s.s on the white side and make faces at the evil-doers who prefer the black. They don"t want facts, diagnosis, theories, interpretations, reports. They want somebody to stand up and announce in a loud, clear voice, "Tweedledum is wrong. Tweedledee is right, everything else to the contrary is Poppyc.o.c.k." Thus they"d be able to put an end to their own thinking and bury themselves in their own little alleys and be happy again. You know as well as I, it makes them miserable to think. Restless, irritable, indignant. It"s like having bites--the more they"re scratched the worse they itch. It"s the war, of course. The war has been a failure. The race has caught itself red-handed in a lie. Now everybody is running around trying to confess to everybody else that what he said in the past was a lie and that the real truth is as follows. And there"s where the trouble begins. There ain"t no such animal."
"I see," said Lockwood, smiling.
"Yes, you do," Dorn grinned. "You don"t see anything. The trouble is ...
oh, well, the trouble is as I said that the human race is out in the open where it can get a good look at itself. The war raised a curtain...."
"What about the radicals, though? They seem to be saying something definite?"
"Yes, shooting one another down by the thousands in Berlin--as they will some day in New York. Yes, the radicals are definite enough.... The revolution rumbling away in Germany isn"t a standup fight between Capital and Labor. It"s Radical _versus_ Radical. Just as the war was Imperialist _versus_ Imperialist. One of the outstanding lessons of the last decade is the fact that the world"s natural enemies haven"t yet had a chance at each other, being too busy murdering among themselves. It"s coming, though. Another tableau. All this hysteria and uncertainty will gradually simmer down into another right-and-wrong issue--with life boiling away as always under a black and white surface."
"Do you think we"re going to go red here?" Lockwood asked pensively.
"It"ll take a little time," Dorn went on. He had become used to reciting his answers in the manner of a schoolmaster. "But it"s bound to happen.
Bolshevism is a logical evolution of democracy--another step downward in the descent of the individual. Until the arrival of Lenine and Trotzky on the field, there"s no question but what American Democracy was the most atrocious insult leveled at the intelligence of the race by its inferiors. Bolshevism goes us one better, however. And just as soon as our lowest types, meaning the majority of our politicians, thinkers, and writers, get to realizing that bolshevism isn"t a Red Terror with a bomb in one hand and a dagger in the other, but a state of society surpa.s.sing even their own in points of weakness and abnormal silliness, they"ll start arresting everybody who isn"t a bolshevist. Capital will put up a fight, but capital is already doomed in this country. It isn"t respected for its strength, vision, and creative powers. It is tolerated to-day for no other reason than that it has cornered the plat.i.tude market. I"m telling you, Warren, that when we get it drummed into our heads that bolshevism isn"t strong and powerful, but weaker, more prohibitive, more sentimental, more politically inefficient, and generally worse than our own government, we"ll have a dictator of the proletaire in Washington within a week."
Lockwood sighed unhappily and lighted a pipe.
"If you were talking about men and women maybe I could join you," he answered. "But I got a hunch you"re just another one of those newspaper Neds. The woods are full of smart alecks like you and they make me kind of tired, because I never can figure out what they"re talking about. And I"ll be d.a.m.ned if they know themselves. They think in big hunks and keep a lot of words floating in the air.... What old Carl calls "Blaa ...
blaa....""
The two friends sat regarding each other critically. Dorn nodded after a pause.
"You"re right," he smiled. "I"m part of the blaa-blaa. I heard them blaa-blaa with guns in Munich one night. And up in the Baltic. You"re right. Anything one says about absurdity becomes absurd itself. And talking about the human race in chunks is necessarily talking absurdly.
Tell me about that fellow Tesla."
"They deported him to Rooshia," Lockwood answered. "There was quite a romance about the girl. That was your girl, wasn"t it?"
"Yes, Rachel. She wouldn"t tag along, eh?"
"No. I suppose they wouldn"t let her. I don"t know. There was a lot of stuff in the newspapers."
The novelist seemed to hesitate on the brink of further information. His friend smiled understandingly.
"It doesn"t matter, Warren. Go ahead. Shoot."
"Cured, eh?"
"No--dead."
Lockwood nodded sagely, his mouth half open as if his words were staring at Dorn.
"Well, there isn"t much I know. I met a little girl the other day--Mary James; know her?"
"Yes."
"She was quite excited. She told me something about an artist that used to hang around Tesla. It seems that he kidnapped her and carted her to Chicago. This James girl was all upset."
An interruption in the person of Edwards the editor occurred. The talk lapsed once more into world problems with Lockwood listening, skeptically open-mouthed.
Late in the evening Edwards suddenly declared, "You"re making a big mistake leaving New York, Erik. You"ve got a market now. Your stuff went big."
"I"m through," Dorn answered. He arose and took his hat. "I"m leaving for Chicago to-morrow."
He paused, smiling at Lockwood.
"I"m going home."
The novelist nodded sagely and murmured, "Uh-huh. Well, good-night."
Making his way slowly through the night crowds and electrophobia of lower Manhattan, Dorn felt peacefully out of place. His thought had become: "I want to get back to where I was." In the midst of the mechanical carnival of Broadway he caught a memory of himself walking to work with a stream of faces--of a sardonic Erik Dorn to whom the street was a pattern; to whom the mysteries tugging at heels that scratched the pavements were the amusing variants of nothing.
CHAPTER III
"Eddy."
"Yes, dear."