Part 12 (2/2)

He covered his eyes with his hands as he walked.

”Her face,” he mumbled, ”her face was beautiful....”

CHAPTER V

In a dining-room of the city known as the Blue Inn, Anna Dorn sat waiting for her husband. Opposite her a laughing-eyed man was talking.

She listened without intelligence. He was part of old memories--crowded rooms in which lights had been turned off. They had danced together in their youth. She had worn his fraternity pin and walked with him one night under a moon and kissed him, saying: ”I will always love you. The other boys are different. You are so nice and kind, Eddie.” And Eddie had gone away east to continue a complacent quest for erudition in a university. Almost forgotten days and places when there had been no Erik Dorn, and when one debated which pumps to wear to the dance. Erik had blotted them out. A whimsical, moody young Mr. Dorn, laughing and carousing about the city and singling her out one night at a party....

”We must get out of here or we'll choke to death. Come, we'll go down to the lake and laugh at the stars. They're the only laughable things in the world.”

She looked sadly at the man whose kindly voice sought to rally her out of a gloom. Before the laughing stars there had been another day--other stars, another Anna. All part of another world. Eddie Meredith and another world sat dimly apparent across the white linen of the table.

Anecdotes of old friends they had shared, forgotten names and incidents reached through the shadows of her thought and stirred an alien memory.

He hadn't changed. Ten years--and he was still Eddie Meredith, with eyes that looked for simple pleasures and seemed to find them. He had always found something to laugh about. Not the way Erik laughed. Erik's laugh was something that had never ceased to hurt. Strange that Eddie's voice had never grown tired of laughing during the ten years.

The ache in her heart lightened and she listened with almost a smile--the ghost of another Anna smiling. It was the other Anna who had walked through youth with a joyous indifference to life, to everything but youth. Buried now deep under years, Eddie warmed it back. Eddie sat talking to the ghost that had been Anna Winthrop and that could not answer him.

He was a poor talker. She was too used to Erik. Simple, threadbare phrases, yet she had once thought him brilliant. Perhaps he was--a different kind of brilliance. She noted how his words seemed stimulated with an enthusiasm beyond their sense. Trifles a.s.sumed an importance.

For moments she felt herself looking at the joyousness of an old friend and forgetting. Then as always through the day and night.... ”Erik, Erik,” murmured itself in her mind ... ”he doesn't love me. Erik, dear Erik!” Over and over, weaving itself into all she said and saw.

Sometimes it started a panic in her. She would feel herself grow dark, wild. Often it seemed to bring death. Things would become vague and she would move through the hours unaware of them.

The joyousness of Eddie drifted away. She remained smiling blankly at him. His words slipped past her ear. Inside, she was wandering--disheveled thoughts were wandering through a darkness. At night she lay beside him as he slept, with her eyes wide open and her lips praying, ”Dear Jesus, sweet brother Jesus, give Erik back to me!”

... Or she would crawl out of bed and walk into a deserted room to weep.

Here she could mumble his name till the anguish of her tears choked her.

As the cold streets grew gray she would hurry to bathe her face, even rouging her cheeks, and return to their bed to wait for Erik to awake, that she might caress him, warm something back in him with her kisses, and perhaps hear him whisper her name as he used to do. But he drew himself away, his eyes sometimes filling with tears. ”It's nothing, Anna, nothing. Please don't ask. I don't know what it is. My head or something. I feel black inside....” And he would hurry to work, not waiting for her to join him at breakfast.

Then there had been nights when he held her in his arms thinking she was asleep, and she felt his tears dropping over her face--tears of silence. She would lie trembling with a wild joy, yet not daring to open her eyes or speak, knowing he would move away. These moments, feigning sleep and listening to Erik weeping softly against her cheek, had been her only happiness in the four black months since the change had come to him. He still loved her. Yes.... Oh, G.o.d, it was something else. Perhaps madness. She would drift to sleep as his weeping ceased, long after it ceased, and half dreams would come to her of nursing him through terrible darknesses, of warming him with her life, of magically driving away the things that were tormenting him out of his mind--great black things. Through the day she hungered for his return from work, that she might look at him again, even though the sight of him, dark and aloof, tore at her heart till she grew faint.

She had never thought of questioning him calmly. There had been no suspicion of ”someone else.” That was a thing beyond even the wildest disorder of her imaginings. It was only that Erik was restless, perhaps tired of his home, of her too much loving and longing to go somewhere--away. Her awe of his brain, of his strange, always impenetrable character, adjusted itself to the change in him. There were mysterious things in Erik--things she couldn't hope to understand. Now these unknown things had grown too big in him. He was different from other men, not to be questioned as one might question other men. So she must wander about blindly, carefully, and drive things away.

She came out of her sorrow reveries and smiled. Eddie was still talking.

The music of a violin, harp, and piano was playing with a rollicking wistfulness through the clatter and laughter of the cafe. Eddie was saying, ”There, that's better. That makes you look like Anna. You were looking like somebody else.”

His jolly eyes had a keenness. She must dissemble better. Erik would come in a moment and Eddie must never think....

”I've heard about your husband, the lucky dog!” Eddie beamed at her impudently. ”Think,” he exploded, ”of meeting you accidentally after ten years. Wow! Ten years! They say themselves quickly, don't they? By the way, there's a curious fellow coming to meet me here. I'll drag him in.

If your Erik don't like it I'll sit on him till he does. His name's Tesla--Emil Tesla. Bomb-thrower or something. I don't know exactly. He's helped me with my collection. Oh, I forgot. You don't know about that. I keep thinking that you know me. You see nothing has changed in me. I'm still the same Eddie--richer, balder, foolisher, perhaps. It seems you ought to know all about the ten years without being told. But I'll tell you. I'm an art collector on the sly. Pictures--horrible things that don't look like anything. I don't know why I collect them, honestly.

Pictures mean nothing to me. Never did. Particularly the kind I pick up. But it's a habit that keeps me cheerful. Better than collecting stamps. Cubist, futurist, expressionist. Ever see the d.a.m.n things? I gobble them up. I guess because they're cheap. Here he is--the young fellow with the soft face.”

Meredith rose and jubilantly waved a napkin. A stocky man in loose clothes nodded at him and approached.

”Not Mrs. Erik Dorn,” he repeated. Anna nodded. The sound of her husband's name on others' lips always elated her, even now. She lost for a moment the aversion she felt at the touch of Tesla's hand. It seemed boneless.... They would all eat together. Anna was an old school friend.

Years ago, ah! many years.

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