Erik Dorn | Page 6

his deadened nerves. Inside the flabby,
coarsened body with its red face munching out monosyllables, lived a
recluse. "Too much living has driven him from life," Dorn thought,
"and killed his lusts. So he sits and reads books--the last debauchery:
strange, twisted phrases like idols, like totem poles, like Polynesian
masks. He sits contemplating them as he once sat drunkenly watching
the obscenities of black, white, and yellow bodied women. Thus, the
mania for the rouge of life, for the grimace that lies beyond satiety,
passes in him from bestiality to asceticism and esthetics. Yesterday a
bacchanal of flesh, to-day a bacchanal of words ... the posturings of
courtezans and the posturings of ornate phrases become the same." He
heard Crowley repeating, "Damned idiot, Egan! No sense of human
values. Crowded the best story of the day off page one." ... Some day
he'd have a long talk with Crowley. But the man was so carefully
hidden behind perfunctories it was hard to get at him. He resented
intrusion.

Dorn passed on and looked around for Warren--a humorous and
didactic creature who had with considerable effort destroyed his Boston
accent and escaped the fact that he had once earned his living as
professor of sociology in an eastern university. Dorn caught a memory
of him sitting in a congenial saloon before a stein and pouring forth
hoarsely oracular comments upon the activities of men known and
unknown. The man had a gift for caricature--Rabelaisean exaggerations.
Dorn was suddenly glad he had gone for the day. The office oppressed
him and the people in it were too familiar. He walked to his desk
thinking of the South Seas and new faces.
"I tell you what," a voice drawled behind him, "Nietzsche has it on the
whole lot of them." Cochran, the head of the copy desk, was talking--a
shriveled little man with a bald face and shoe-button eyes. "You've got
to admit people are more dishonest in their virtues than in their vices.
Of course, there's a lot of stuff he pulls that's impractical."
Dorn shrugged his shoulders, smiled and lifted his hat out of a locker.
He remembered again to telephone his wife, but instead moved out of
the office. A refreshing warmth in the street pleased his senses and he
turned toward the lake. Walk down Michigan avenue, take a taxi
home--what else was there to do? Nothing, unless talk. But to whom?
He thought of his father. A tenacious old man. Probably hang on
forever. God, the man had been married three times. If it wasn't for his
damned infirmities he'd probably marry again. Looking for something.
What was it the old man had kept looking for? As if there was in
existence a concrete gift to be drawn from life. A blithering, water-eyed
optimist to the end, he'd die with a prayer of thankfulness and gratitude.
Thus innocuously abstract, moving in the doldrum which sometimes
surrounded him after his day's work, he turned into the boulevard along
the lake. The day grew abruptly fresher here. An arc of blue sky rising
from the east flung a great curve over the building tops. Dorn paused
before the window of a Japanese art shop and stared at a bulbous
wooden god stoically contemplating his navel.
During his walks through the streets he sometimes met people he knew.
This time a young woman appeared at the window beside him. He

recognized her with elation. His thought gave him an index of her ...
Rachel Laskin, curious girl ... makes me talk well ... appreciative ...
unusual eyes.
CHAPTER IV
They walked together down the avenue. Dorn felt a return of interest in
himself. Introspection bored him. His insincerity made self thought
meaningless. Listeners, however, revived him. As they walked he
caught occasional glimpses of his companion--vivid eyes, dark lips, a
cool, shadow-tinted face that belonged under exotic trees; a morose
little girl insanely sensitive and with a dream inside her. She admired
him; or at least she admired his words, which amounted to the same
thing. Once before she had said, "You are different." As usual he held
his cynicism in abeyance before flattery. People who thought him
different pleased him. It gave them a certain intellectual status in his
eyes.
His thought, as he talked, busied itself with images of her. She gave
him a sense of dark waters hidden from the moon--a tenuous fugitive
figure in the pretty clamor of the bright street.
"You remind me," he was saying, "of a nymph among dowagers and
frightened to death. There's really nothing to be frightened of, unless
you prefer fear to other more tangible emotions."
She nodded her head. He recalled that the gesture had puzzled him at
first. It gave an eager assent to his words that surprised him. It