"Erik!"
She made his name mean something--a world, a heaven. For an instant his laughter ended and a sadness engulfed him. Then once more he was alone and laughing. Rachel was walking away, something rather ridiculously normal about her step. Yes, he would laugh forever. Lord, what a jest!
Like water coming out of a stone. Laugh at the crowds and buildings that desired to annoy him by sweeping toward him the memory of Rachel saying "Erik!" He diverted himself, as he hurried to his home, by staring into people"s eyes and saying, "This one has a dream. That one hasn"t. This one loves. The streets hurt him. That one is dead. The streets bury him."
On the third day the bombardment of Paris interfered with his plans. He remained too late in the office to walk with Rachel. As he sauntered about the shop, a.s.sisting and directing at the extras and replates, he vaguely forgot her. Word had come from the chief to hold the paper open until nine o"clock. If Paris failed to fall by nine everybody could go home and spend the rest of the night wrangling with his wife or looking at a movie. If it fell by nine there would be a final extra.
"I hope the d.a.m.ned town falls five minutes after nine," growled Warren, "if it"s got to fall. Let it fall for the morning papers. What the h.e.l.l are they for, anyway? I"ve got a rotten headache."
Dorn told him to run along. "I"ll handle the copy, if there is any. A history of Paris out of the almanac will answer the purpose, I guess."
Warren folded his newspapers and left. Dorn sat scribbling possible headlines for the next re-plate: "Germans Bombard Paris ..." and then a bank in smaller type: "French Capital Silent. Communication Cut Off." He paused and added with a sudden elation, "Civilization on Its Knees."
The hum and suspense of the night-watch pleased him. He liked the idea of sitting in a noisy place waiting to flash the news of the fall of Paris to the city. And the next day the four afternoon papers would carry a small box on the front page announcing to the public that, as usual, each of them had been first on the street with the important announcement. The fall of Paris! His thought mused. Babylon Falls....
Civilization on Its Knees. The City Wall of Jericho Collapses. Carthage Reduced to Ashes. Rome Sacked by Huns. Yes, there had been magnificent headlines in the past. Now a new headline--Paris. There would be a sudden flurry; boys running between desks; Crowley trying to shout and achieving a frightful whisper; a smeared printer announcing some ghastly mistake in the composing room; and Paris would be down--fallen. Nothing left to do except grin at the idea of the morning papers cursing their luck. He sat, vaguely hoping there might be tidal waves, earthquakes, cataclysms. On this night his energies seemed to demand more work than the mere fall of Paris would occasion. "Might as well do the thing up brown and put an end to the world--all in one extra," he smiled.
A messenger boy brought a telegram. He opened it and read,
"I am going away. RACHEL."
All a part of the night"s work. Killing off Paris. Answering telegrams to vanishing sweethearts. He stuffed the message into his pocket. On second thought he tore it up. Anna was coming home the next day. "Wife Finds Tell-tale Telegram...." Another headline.
"Wait a minute, boy."
The messenger lounged into an editor"s chair. Dorn scribbled on a telegraph blank:
"Wait till Friday. I must see you once more. I will call for you at seven o"clock Thursday. We have never been together in the night. ERIK."
The messenger boy and the telegram disappeared. Still the laughter persisted. There was a jest in the world. Paris seemed a part of it.
Everything belonged to it.
"I wonder what the writers of Paris are saying," Crowley inquired.
"Enjoying themselves, as usual," Dorn answered. "I"ll tell you a secret.
We live in a mad and inspiring world."
There was no final headline that night. Wednesday brought problems of conduct. It was obvious that Rachel was going away because of Anna. Her departure was a fact which presented itself with no finality. It resembled an insincere thought of suicide. Rachel, having gone, would still remain. The emotional prospects of the farewell closed his thought to the future. He spent Wednesday waiting for a seven o"clock on Thursday. An hour had detached itself from hours that went before and that followed. At home in the evening he endeavored to avoid his wife.
His letters to her during her visit in Wisconsin had brought her back violently joyous. She desired love-making. He listened to her pour out ardent phrases and wondered why he felt no sense of betrayal toward her.
"Conscience," he thought, "seems to be a vastly over-advertised commodity." He sat beside Anna, caressing her hand, smiling back into her pa.s.sion-filled eyes, and gently checking an impulse in him to confide to her that he was in love with Rachel. It would be pleasant to tell her that, provided she would nod her head understandingly, smile, and stroke his hair; and answer something like, "You mean Rachel is in love with you. Well, I can"t blame her. I"m horribly jealous, but it doesn"t matter." An incongruous sanity warned him to avoid confessions, so he contented himself by rolling the situation over on his tongue, tasting the jealousy of his wife, the drama of the denouement, and remaining peacefully smiling in his leather chair.
Thursday arrived. The afternoon dragged. He sat at his desk wondering whether he was sorrowful or not. The thought of meeting Rachel elated him. The thought that she was leaving and that he would not see her again seemed a vague thing. He put it out of his mind with ease and devoted himself to dreaming what he would say, the manner in which he would bid farewell.
Walking now swiftly in the street toward Rachel"s home his thought still played with his emotions. It was this that partially caused his laughter. Also, now that he was going to see her, there was again the sense of fullness. An unthinking calm, complete and vibrant, wrapped him in an embrace. The fullness and the calm brought laughter. His thought amused him with the words, "There"s a flaming absurdity about everything."
He delighted in dressing his emotions in absurd phrases, in words that grimaced behind the rouge of tawdry ballads. Thinking of Rachel and feeling the sudden lift of sadness and bewilderment in his blood, he murmured aloud: "You never know you have a heart till it begins to break." The words amused him. There were other song t.i.tles that seemed to fit. He tried them all. "I don"t know why I love you, but I do-o-o."
Delightful diversion--airing the mystic desires of his soul in the tattered words of the cabaret yodelers. "Just a smile, a sigh, a kiss...." A sort of revenge, as if his vocabulary with its intricate verbal sophistications were avenging itself upon interloping emotions.
And, too, because of a vague shame which inspired him to taunt his surrender; to combat it with an irony such as lay in the ridiculous phrases. This irony gave him a sense of being still outside his emotions and not a submissive part of them. "I am still Erik Dorn, master of my fate and captain of my soul," he smiled. But perhaps it was most of all the reaction of a verbal vanity. His love was not yet pumping rhapsodies into his thought. Instead, the words that came seemed to him somehow ba.n.a.l and commonplace. "I love you. I want to be with you all the time.
When we are together things grow strange and desirable." Amorous mediocrities! So he edited them into a further ba.n.a.lity and thus concealed his inability to give lofty utterance to his emotions by amusing himself with deliberately cheapened insincerities. "Saving my linguistic face," he thought suddenly, and laughed again.
Rachel was sad. They left her home in silence.
"We"ll go toward the park," he announced. It irritated him to utter matter-of-fact directions. Why when he had had nothing to talk about had he been able to talk? And now when there was something, there seemed little to say? Words were obviously the delicate fruit of insincerity.
Silence, the dark flower of emotion.
"I must go away." Rachel slipped her arm into his. He stared at her. She seemed more sorrowful than tears. This annoyed. It was ungrateful for her to look like weeping. But she was going from him. He tried to think of her and himself after they had parted, and succeeded only in remembering she was at his side. So he laughed quietly.
"Yes, to-morrow the guillotine falls," he answered. "To-night we dance in each other"s arms. Immemorial tableau. Laughter, love, and song against the perfect background--death. Let"s not cheat ourselves by being sad. To-morrow will be time enough."
He realized he was collapsing into a pluck-ye-the-roses-while-ye-may strain, and stopped, irritated. There was something he should talk to her about--the causes of her departure. Plans. Their future. Was there a future? Undoubtedly something would have to be arranged. But his mind eluded responsibilities.
"I"m happy," he whispered. "I talk like a fool because I feel like one.
Heedless. Irresponsible. You"ve given me something and I can only look at it almost without thought."
"It seems so strange that you should love me," she answered. "Because I"ve loved you always and never dreamed of you loving." She had become melting, as if her sadness were dissolving into caresses. "Let"s just walk and I"ll remember we"re together and be happy, too."
Thoughts vanished from him. He released her hand and they walked in silence with their arms together. A sleep descended. Their faces, tranquil and lighted by the snow, offered solitudes to each other.
It was now snowing heavily. A thick white lattice raised itself from the streets against the darkness. The little black hectagonals of night danced between its s.p.a.ces. Long white curtains painted themselves on the shadows of the city. The lovers walked unaware of the street. The snow crowded gently about them, moving patiently like a white and silent dream over their heads. Phantom houses stared after them. Slanting rooftops spread wings of silver in the night and drifted toward the moon. The half-closed leaden eyes of windows watched from another world.
The snow grew heavier, winding itself about the yellow lights of street lamps and crawling with sudden life through the blur of window rays.
Beneath, the pavements opened like white and narrow fans in a far-away hand. Black figures leaning forward emerged for an instant from behind the falling snow and disappeared again.
Still the lovers moved without words--two black figures themselves, arms together, leaning forward, staring with burning hearts and tranquil faces out of a dream, as if they did not exist, had never existed; as if in the snow and night they had become an unreality, walking deeper into mists--yet never quite vanishing but growing only more unreal. Snow and two lovers walking together with the world like a dream over their heads, with life lingering in their eyes like a delicately absent-minded guest--the thought drifted like a memory through their hearts.
Then slowly consciousness of themselves returned, bringing with it no relief of words. Their hearts seemed to have grown weak with tears, and in their minds existed nothing but the dark vagueness of despair--the despair of things that die with their eyes open and questing. Faces drifting like circles of light in the storm. At the end of the street a park. Here they would vanish from each other. The snow would continue falling gently, patiently, upon an empty world.
The cold of Rachel"s fingers pressed upon his hand. Her face turned itself to him. A moment of happiness halted them both as if they had been embraced. A wonder--the why and where of her leaving. But an indifference deprived him of words.
"This is all of life," he muttered. Rachel staring at him nodded her head in echo. They were standing motionless as if they had forgotten how to live. Beyond this there were no gestures to make, nowhere to go. They had come to a horizon--an end. Here was ecstasy. What else? Nothing.
Everything, here. Sky and night and snow had fallen about their heads in an ending. They stood as if clinging to themselves. Dorn heard a soft laugh from her.
"I thought I had died," Rachel was murmuring. He nodded his head in echo.
A lighted window lost in the snow drew their eyes. People sat in a room--warm, stiff figures. The lovers stood smiling toward it. Words, soft and mocking, formed themselves in Dorn. A pain was pulling his heart away. The ecstasy that had raised him beyond his emotions seemed suddenly to have cast him into the fury of them. He would say mocking things--absurd phrases to which he might cling. Or else he must weep because of the pain in him. "Two waifs adrift in a storm, peering into a bakery window at the cookies." That was the key. A laugh at the dolorous asininity of life. "Face to face with the Roman Pop U Lace. We who are about to die salute you." Laugh, a phrase of laughter or he would stand blubbering like an imbecile.
He struggled for the theatric gesture and found himself shivering at Rachel"s side, his arm clinging about her shoulders. Lord, what a jest!
After the moment they had lived through, to stand round-eyed and blubbering before the gingerbread vision of joys behind a lighted window. The whine of a barrel-organ. The sentimental whimpering of a street-corner _Miserere_. And he must weep because of it--he who had stood with his head thrust through the sky. His thought, like an indignant monitor, collapsed with scoldings. Let it come, then! With a sigh he gave himself to tears, and they stood together weeping.
The little lighted room seemed an enchantment floating in the scurry of the storm. It reached with warm fingers into their hearts, whispering a broken barrel-organ lullaby to them. Life shone upon them out of the lighted window and behind it the world of rocking-chairs and fireplaces, wall pictures and table lamps, lay like a haven smiling a good-by to them. Their hearts become tombs, closed slowly and forever upon a vision.
"The world will be a black sky and the memory of you like a shining star that I watch endlessly." He listened to his words. They brought a dim gladness. His phrases had finally capitulated to his love. He could talk now without the artifice of ba.n.a.lity to hide behind. Talk, say the unsayable, bring his love in misty word lines before his eyes; look and forget a moment.
Rachel"s voice at his side said, "I love you so. Oh, I love you so!"
Yes, he could talk now. His heart wagged a tongue. The pain in him had found words. The mystic desires and torments--words, words.
"We"ll remember, years later, and be grateful we didn"t bury our love behind lighted windows, but left it to wander forever and remain forever alive. Rachel, my dear one."
"I love you so!" she wept.