Erik Dorn | Page 9

years ago before their eyes had become cotton, holding hands
and trying to give a meaning to the moon. Are you tired?"
"No, please. Let's walk, if you haven't anything else to do."
"Nothing." It was the seventh anniversary of his marriage. An annoying
thought. "You're an antidote for inertia. I marvel, as always, at my
garrulity. Women usually inspire me with a desire to talk. I suppose it's
a defensive instinct. Talk confuses women and renders them helpless.
But that isn't it. I talk to women because they make the best
sounding-boards. Do you object to being reduced to an acoustic? Yes,
sex is a sort of irritant to the vocabulary. It's amusing to converse
profoundly with a pretty woman whose sole contributions to any
dialogue are a bit of silk hose and an oscillation of the breasts."
"You make me forget I'm a woman and agree with you."
"Because you're another kind of woman. The reflector. Or acoustic. I
prefer them. I sometimes feel that I live only in mirrors and that my
thoughts exist only as they enter the heads of others. As now, I speak
out of a most complete emptiness of emotion or idea; and my words
seem to take body in your silence--and actually give me a character."
"I always think of you as someone hiding from himself," she answered.
Dorn smiled. They were old friends--a union between them.
"There's no place of concealment in me," he said after a pause. He had
been thinking of something else. "But perhaps I hide in others. After
talking like this I come away with a sort of echo of what I've said. As if

someone had told me things that almost impressed me. I talk so
damned much I'm unaware of ever having heard anybody else but
myself express an opinion. And I swear I've never had an opinion in my
life." He became silent and resumed, in a lighter voice, "Look at that
man with whiskers. He's a notorious Don Juan. Whiskers undoubtedly
lend mystery to a man. It's a marvel women haven't cultivated
them--instead of corsets. But tell me why you've disdained art as an
ideal. You're curious. It's a confessional I should think would appeal to
you. I'm almost interested in you, you see. Another hour with you and
you would flatter me into a state of silence."
Dorn paused, somewhat startled. Her dark lips parted, her eyes glowing
toward the end of the street, the girl was walking in a radiant
abstraction. She appeared to be listening to him without hearing what
he said. Dorn contemplated her confusedly. He frowned at the thought
of having bored her, and an impulse to step abruptly from her side and
leave became a part of his anger. He hesitated in his walking and her
fingers, timorous and unconscious of themselves, reached for his arm.
He wondered with a deeper confusion what she was dreaming about.
Her hand as it lay on his forearm gave him a sense of companionship
which his words sought clumsily to understand.
"I was saying something about art when you fell asleep," he smiled.
Rachel threw back her head as if she were shaking a dream out of her
eyes.
"I wasn't asleep," she denied. They moved on in the increasing crowd.
"Men and women," Dorn muttered. "The street's full of men and
women going somewhere."
"Except us," the girl cried. Her eyes, alight, were thrusting against the
cold, amused smile of his face. He would be late. Anna would be
waiting. An anniversary. Anniversaries were somehow important. They
revived interest in events which had died. But it was nice to drift in a
crowd beside a girl who admired him. What did he think of her?
Nothing ... nothing. She seemed to warm him into a deeper sleep. It

was a relief to be admired for one's silence. Admired, not loved. Love
was a bore. Anna loved him, bored him. Her love was an applause that
did not wait for him to perform--an unreasonable ovation.
He looked at the girl again. She was walking beside him, vivid eyes,
dark lips--almost unaware of him, as if he had become a part of the
dream that lived within her.
CHAPTER V
When she was a child she used to see a face in the dark as she was
falling asleep. It was crude and misshapen, and leered at her, filling her
heart with fear. Later, people had become like that to her.
When she was eighteen Rachel came to Chicago and studied art at an
art school. She learned nothing and forgot nothing. She read books in
English and in Russian--James, Conrad, Brusov, Tolstoi. Her reading
failed to remove her repugnance to the touch of life. Instead, it lured
her further from realities. She