Part 22 (1/2)

There grew up in Dorn a curious envy of the novelist. He would think of him frequently when alone, ”The fellow's content to write. I'm not. He's found his way of saying what's in him, getting rid of his energies and love. I haven't. He feels toward the world as I do toward Rachel. An overpowering reality and mystery are always before him; but it gives him a mental perspective. What does Rachel give me? Desires, ambitions--a sort of laughing madness that I can't translate into anything but kisses. I'm cleverer than I was before. I talk and write better. There's a certain wildness about things as if I were living in a storm. Yes, I have wings, but there's no place to fly with them. Except into her arms.

There must be something else.”

And he would rush through the day, outwardly a man of inexhaustible energies, stamping himself upon the consciousness of people as a brilliant, dominating personality. Edwards, with whom he discussed matter for editorials and articles, had grown to regard him with awe.

”I've never felt genius so keenly before,” Edwards explained him to Lockwood. ”The man seems burning up. Did you read his thing on Russia and Kerensky? Lord, it was absolutely prophetic.”

Lockwood shook his head.

”Dorn's too d.a.m.n clever,” he drawled. ”Things come too easily to him.

He's got an eye but--I can't put my finger on it. You see a fella's got to have something inside him. The things Erik says cleverly and prophetically don't mean anything much, because they don't mean anything to him. He makes 'em up as he goes along.”

Edwards disagreed. He was a younger man than Lockwood, with an impressionable erudition. Like his co-workers he had been somewhat stampeded by Dorn's imitative faculties, faculties which enabled the former journalist to bombinate twice as loud in a void three times as great as any of his colleagues.

”Well, I've met a lot of writing men since I came East,” he said. ”And Dorn's the best of them. He's more than a man of promise. He's opened up. Look what he's done in the new number. Absolutely revolutionized the liberal thought of the country. You've got to admit that. He's a man incapable of fanaticism.”

”That's just it,” smiled Lockwood. ”You've hit it. You've put your finger on it. He's the kind of man who knows too d.a.m.n much and don't believe anything.”

The friends.h.i.+p between Lockwood and Dorn matured quickly. The two men, profoundly dissimilar in their natures, found themselves launched upon a growing intimacy. To Lockwood, heavy spoken, delicate sensed, nave despite the shrewdness of his forty-five years, Erik Dorn appealed as some exotic mechanical contrivance might for a day fascinate and bewilder the intelligence of a rustic. And the other, in the midst of magnificent bombinations that amazed his friend, thought, ”If I only had this man's simplicity. If on top of my ability to unravel mysteries into words I could feel these mysteries as he does, I might do something.”

At other times, carried away by the strength of his own nature, he would find himself looking down upon Lockwood. ”I'm alive. He's static. I live above him. There's nothing beyond me. I can't feel the things out of which he makes his novels, because I'm beyond them.”

He would think then of Lockwood as an eagle of a rustic painstakingly hoeing a field. On such days the disquiet would vanish from Dorn's thought. He would feel himself propelled through the hours as if by some irresistible wind of which he had become a part. To live was enough. To live was to give expression to the clamoring forces in him. To sweep over Edwards, hurl himself through crowds, pulverize Warren, bang out astounding fictions on the typewriter, watch the faces of acquaintances light up with admiration as he spoke--this sufficed. The world galvanized itself about him. He could do anything. He could give vision to people, create new life around him. This consciousness sufficed. Then to rush home from a triumphant day, a glorious contempt for his fellows lingering like wine in his head--and find Rachel--an eagle waiting in a nest.

Joy, then, become a mania. Desires feeding upon themselves, devouring his body and his senses and hurling him into an exhausted sleep as if death alone could climax the madness of his spirit--these Dorn knew in the days of his strength.

But the days of disquiet came, confronting him like skeletons in the midst of his feastings upon life. The ecstasy he felt seemed suddenly to turn itself inward and demand of him new destinations. On such days he had fallen into the habit of going upon swift walks through the less crowded streets of the city. During his walking he would mutter, ”What can I do? What? Nothing. Not a thing.” As if secret voices were debating his destiny.

Restless, vicious spoken, venting his strainings in a skyrocket burst of phrases upon the inanity and stupidity of his fellow creatures for which he seemed to possess an almost uncanny vision, he fled through these days like the victim of some spiritual satyriasis. No longer a wind at his heels riding him into easy heights, he found himself weighted down with his love, and strangely inanimate.

The direction in which he was moving loomed sterilely before him. His love itself seemed a feverishly sterile thing. His work upon the magazine, his incessant exchange of intolerant adjectives with admiring strangers--these became absurdly petty gestures, absurdly insufficient.

There was something else to do. As he had longed for Rachel in the black days before their coming together, he longed now for this something else. Without name or outline, it haunted him. Another face of stars, but this time beyond his power to understand. Yet it demanded him, as Rachel had demanded him, and towards it he turned in his days of disquiet, inanimate and bewildered.

”I must find something to do,” he explained to himself, ”that will give me direction. People must have a monomania as a track for their living, or else there is no living.”

Then, as was his custom, he would begin an unraveling of the notion.

”Men with energies in them wed themselves quickly to some consuming project, even if it's nothing more than the developing of a fish market.

Rachel isn't a destination. She's a force that fills me with violence and I have no direction in which to live to use this violence. I don't know what to do with myself. So I'm compelled to live in the violence itself. In a storm. A kind of Walkyrie on a broomstick. But, good G.o.d, what else is there? Sit and scribble words about fict.i.tious characters.

Bleat out rhapsodies. Art is something I can spit out in conversation.

If I do anything it's got to be something too difficult for me to do. My d.a.m.ned cleverness puts me beyond artists who find a destination for their energies in the struggle to achieve the thing with which I begin.

If not art, then what? War, politics, finance. All surfaces meaning nothing. If I did them all there'd still be something I hadn't done. I want something that's not in life. Life's too d.a.m.ned insufficient. I want something out of it.”

Rachel had thought at first that his fits of brooding restlessness came from a memory of Anna. But phrases he had blurted cut half-consciously had given her a sense of their causes. The thought of Anna had died in him. Neither consciousness of her suffering nor memory of the years they had lived together had yet awakened in him. He had been moving since the night he had walked out of his home and there had been no looking back.

Undergoing a seeming expansion of his powers, Erik Dorn had become a startling, fascinating figure in the new world he had entered. The flattery of men almost as clever as himself, the respect, appreciation of political, literary, and vaguely social circles, of stolid men and eccentric acquaintances, were continually visited upon him. He was a personality, a figure to enliven dinner parties, throw a glamour and a fever into the enervated routine of sets, cliques, and circles.

He had made occasional journeyings alone and sometimes with Rachel into the homes of chance acquaintances, and had put in fitful appearances at the various excitements pursued by the city's more radical intelligentsia--little-theater premiers, private a.s.semblings of shrewd, bored men and women, precious concerts, electric discussions of political unrest. From all such adventurings he came away with a sense of distaste. Friends.h.i.+ps, always foreign to his nature, had become now almost an impossibility. He felt himself a procession of adjectives exploding in the ears of strangers.

With Warren Lockwood alone he had been able to achieve a contact. In the presence of the novelist there was a complement of himself both in the days of his disquiet and strength. Together they took to frequenting odd parts of the city, visiting lonely cafes and calling upon strangers known to the novelist. The man's virile gentleness soothed him. He was never tired of watching the turns of his navete, delighting as much in his friend's unsophisticated appreciation of the arts as in the vivid simplicity of his understanding of people and events.