Erik Dorn Part 13

Tesla fastened a repugnantly appreciative eye upon her, as if he were becoming privy to an exclusive secret. She frowned inwardly. An ugly man with something bubbly about him.

"I was telling Mrs. Dorn you were a bomb-thrower or something," Meredith announced. His good spirits frisked about the table like a troupe of frolicsome puppies.

"Only an apprentice," Tesla's soft voice--a voice like his hands--answered. "But why talk of such things in the presence of a beautiful lady." He bowed his head at her. She thought, "An unbearable man, completely out of place. How in the world could Eddie...."

The music had changed. Muted cornets, banjos and saxophones were wailing out a tom-tom adagio. People were rising from tables and moving toward a dancing s.p.a.ce. Eddie stood beside her bowing with elaborate stiffness.

"My next dance, Miss Winthrop."

Anna looked up blankly.

"Good Lord, have you forgotten your own name? Come on. You know Dorn, don't you, Emil? Well, throw a fork at him when he shows up. Come, we haven't danced together for ten years. The last time was...."

"The last time was the senior prom," Anna interrupted quickly. "You see I haven't forgotten." She stood mechanically.

As they walked between tables and diners, he said, "I sure feel like a boy again seeing you."

"I'm afraid I've almost forgotten how to dance, Eddie. My husband doesn't dance much."

"Here we are! Like old days, eh? Remember Jimmie Goodland, my deadly rival for your hand?"

They were dancing.

"Well, he's married. Three kids."

"And how many children have you, Eddie?"

"Me?" He laughed. "Have I forgotten to tell you that? Well, I'm still at large, untrammeled, free. There've been women, but not _the_ woman."

His voice put on a pleasing facetiousness.

"Mustn't mind an old friend getting sentimental. But after you they had to measure up to something--and didn't."

Since the night Erik had singled her out at the party no man had spoken to her that way. She listened slightly amazed. It confused her. His eyes, as they danced, were jolly and polite. But they watched her too keenly. Erik might misunderstand. Her love somehow resented being looked at and spoken to like that. She hurried back to their first topic.

"What became of Millie Pugh, Eddie?"

"Married. A Spaniard or something. Two kids and an automobile. Saw them in Brazil somewhere."

"And Arthur Stearns?"

"Fatter than an alderman. Runs a gas works or something in Detroit.

Married. One kid."

Anna laughed. "You sound like an almanac of dooms."

"Well, all married but me--little Eddie, the boy bachelor, faithful unto death to the memories of his childhood. Do you remember the night we ran Mazurine's out of ice-cream?"

This was another world, another Anna. She closed her eyes dreamily to the movement of the dance and music--delicious drugs.

"Faster," she whispered.

They broke into quicker steps. "Erik.... Erik.... my own. Love me again.

Come back to me...." Still in her thought, but fainter, deeper down.

Not words but a sigh that moved to the rhythm of the music.

"And how may children have you?"

She answered without emotion, as if she were talking with a distant part of herself. "There was a little boy. He died as a baby. We haven't any."

Deep, kindly eyes looking at her as they danced. "I'm so sorry, Anna."

She whispered again, "Faster!" A shadow over his face. She must be careful of his eyes--eyes that laughed, but keen, almost as keen as Erik's. "My Erik ... my own...." It was all a dream, a nightmare of her own inventing. Nothing had happened. Imaginings. Erik loved her. Why else should he weep and kiss her when he thought her asleep? He loved her, he loved her!

Her face grew bright. Faster. Always to dance and dream of Erik. She must tell Eddie....

"Erik is wonderful. I'm dying to have you meet him. Oh, Eddie, he's wonderful!"

Now she could laugh and enjoy herself. Something had emptied out of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s--cold iron, warm lead. She was lighter, easy to bend and glide to the music. Everything was easy. Her face lighted by something deeper than a smile, she danced in silence. Eddie was far away--ten years away.

His eyes that were smiling at her were no eyes at all. They were part of the music and movement that caressed her with the sweetness of life, of being loved by Erik....

Tesla watched his friend lead the red-haired lady away to dance. For a while there lingered about him the air of unctious submission that had revolted Anna. Then it vanished. His face as he sat alone seemed to tighten. The flabbiness of his eyes became something else. Diners at other tables caught glimpses of him while they ate. A commanding figure, rugged, youthful-faced. Features that made definite lines, compelling lines, in the blur of other features. A man of certainties, yet with something weak about him. His eyes were like a child's. They did not quite belong in his face. There, eyes should have gleamed, stared with intensities. Instead, eyes purred--abstract, tender eyes; the kind that attracted women sometimes because they were almost like a women's eyes dreaming of lovers.

"h.e.l.lo, Tesla!"

Again the fawning lights, smiles, bowings. This was Dorn--a Somebody.

Somebodies always changed Tesla. There was a thing in him that smirked before Somebodies, as if he were a timorous puppy wagging its tail and leaping about on flabby legs.

"Mrs. Dorn is sitting here with a friend. They're dancing. We're all at this table, Mr. Dorn."

Dorn caught the eager innuendo of his voice. He knew Tesla vaguely as a radical, an author of pamphlets. Tesla continued to talk, a sycophantic purr in his words.... The war was financed by international bankers.

Didn't he think so? America was being drawn in by Wall Street--to make the loans to the Allies stand up. But something was going to happen. The eyes of the workers were opening slowly all over the world. In Russia already a beginning of realities. Ah, think of the millions dying for nothing, advancing or improving nothing by their death. Soldiers, heroes, workingmen, all blind acrobats in another man's circus. But something was happening. Revolution. This grewsome horseplay in Europe's front yard would start it. And then--watch out!

The voice of Emil Tesla, eager, fawning, had yet another quality in it.

It promised, as if it could not do justice to the things it was saying and must be careful, soft, polite. Dorn felt the man and his power. Not a puppy on flabby legs but a brute mastiff with a wild bay that must come out in little whines, because the music was playing, because he was talking to Somebody. A man physically beaten by life, his body sc.r.a.ping, bowing; his words mumbling confusedly in the presence of other words.

Yet a powerful man with a tremendous urge that might some day hurl him against the stars. He had something....

To Tesla's sentences Dorn dropped a yes or no. Tesla needed no replies.

He purred on eagerly before his listener, seeming to whine for his appreciation and good will, yet unconscious of him. A waiter brought wine. Dorn stared at the topaz tint in his gla.s.s. His eyes had changed.

They no longer smiled. A heaviness gleamed from them. The thing in his heart would not go. Heavy hands turning him over and over, as if life were tearing him, crowds and streets pulling at him. There had been no rest since Rachel had gone.

He sat almost oblivious of Tesla. In the back of his brain the city tumbled--an elephantine grimace, a wilderness of angles, a swarm of gestures that beat at his thought. But before his eyes there were no longer the precise patterns of another day. He was no longer outside. He had been sucked into something, the something that he had been used to refer to condescendingly as life. People sitting in a room like this had been furniture that amused him. Now they were alive, repulsive, with a meaning to them that sickened him. Streets had once been stone and gesture. Now they, too, were meanings that sickened. A sanity in which he alone was insane, surrounded him; a completion in which he alone seemed incomplete. Men and women together--tired faces, lighted faces--all with destinations that satisfied them. And he wandering, knocked from place to place by heavy hands, pushed through crowds, dropped into chairs. Time itself a torment into which he kept thrusting himself deeper.

The change in Erik Dorn had come to him with a cynicism of its own. It laughed with its own laughter. A mind foreign to him spoke to him through the day.... "You would smile at life, Erik; well, here it is.

Easy for a sleeper to smile. But smile now. Life is a surface, eh?

s.h.i.+fting about into designs for the delectation of your eyes. Watch it s.h.i.+fting then. Darkness and emptiness in a can-can. Watch the tumbling streets that have no meanings. No meanings? Yet there's a torment in them that can hoist you up by your placid little heels and swing you round ... round, and send you flying. A witch's flight with the scream of stars whistling through it. Flight that has no ending and no direction ... no face of Rachel at its ending. Burning eyes, devouring eyes ... face like a mirror of stars. There's a face in the world and you go after it, heels in air, tongue frozen, breathing always an emptiness that chokes. Easy for sleepers to dawdle with words and say carelessly life is this, life is that. What the h.e.l.l's the difference what life is? It means nothing to me. People and their posturings mean nothing. But what about now? A contact, a tying up with posturings, and the streets and crowds tearing you into gestures not your own...."

Aloud he would say, "My love for her has given me a soul and I've become a fool along with other fools."