LABYRINTH

A Novel

BY

GERTRUDE DIAMANT

PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY
COWARD-MCCANN, INC.
IN THE YEAR 1929

COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY
COWARD-MCCANN, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed in the U. S. A.

CHAPTER I

There are times when the city is mysterious ... a city remembered from ancient times, something for the conqueror to desire. He has fields and gardens and wide rivers running between the hills; but he looks toward the city and longs for it, he marshals his soldiers in bright array, for they are going to woo the city. The mystery of tall buildings panelled with sky, buildings whose surface is a multitude of window-eyes which are void of pupil, except when the sun shines on them and they blaze with a momentary glance; or when they are lighted at night and look out with myriad pin-points of vision. The city that is a magician's box. He has taken squares and squares more than anyone can count and craftily arranged them until there are cubes, and devised it so intricately that the people are trapped in a labyrinth of cubes, and move incessantly within them but cannot escape.

No one can fathom this endless repetition of cubes, or the manner in which they are contained within each other, or the lives of the people that are trapped in them. It is like a pattern that repeats itself forever, that cannot stop ... forever drawn on by the compulsion of its own lines. Only when there is a flaw in the pattern can one see it, when the eye can halt a moment, looking profoundly at a slight imperfect detail ... a beggar motionless in the crowded street, who turns to look after each one that goes by, his head like a queer pendulum ticking off every person that passes. Or it may be that while waiting on the elevated platform and looking into the tenements, someone sees the doll which the little girl who lives there has laid to sleep. It is all wrapped up in a blanket and slumbers near the window, against the trembling pane, against the wind of the trains. In the busy city it has a still infinitesimal being, like something in the woods that lives its life curled up in a leaf, and is not aware of its dying.

Though it has a long and devious way to the tops of the buildings, smoke curls out in the same primitive arabesque by which it lifted itself from the earth ... the tiny white plume that dances on the tips of the skyscrapers the same steps that it danced from the earth. Even the sky reveals its secret kinship with the earth. For there are strange sunsets ... layers of red and yellow, dark and raw like pigments still in the rock, as if the huge invisible cliff of the sky had been quarried out to show its colored interior. From that burning core of the sky the people in the street seem to be fleeing, moving in a stealthy retreat, never once looking back because what they saw was too fearful to be looked at again. Sound passes away. All the noises of the street whirl themselves into a funnel of sound, and only the small pointed end of it can be heard, which is faint and distant as humming. It is the undertone of all the people, a negation of sound because it is all their voices merging. And because of the radiance from which they are fleeing their faces are hidden in shadow ... they are beings without faces, a new and undreamed race whose lineaments are still in solution. Or perhaps they bear the archaic features of an old Aztec race; or else, having wearied of all things, of going to work and returning, of harrying their bodies in the tortuous intercourse of love, they have willed to erase their faces: that the face should break through its outworn ritual and arrange itself otherwise.

And is it strange that the face should change? The navel too is a mysteriously convoluted part of the body, and here may be an inchoate face ... or that all the people should turn with one impulse and flee from the sun, a sudden madness upon them? For in the legends we learn that a whole city could be bewitched ... that a good or bad curse was laid upon each city by someone who entered it unknown, and was refused bread at this door, or given water at another. And we learn that the prince going forth on his adventures is told: in this city they will all be weaving; here they will all be dancing in the streets; in another place everyone will be laughing; and in the last city you come to they will all be fleeing away from the sun, a silent stealthy retreat into nowhere. Indeed it is only the curse that the people are fleeing away from the sun ... their machines are only the curse, and if each day they call out the number of those who are killed by the machines it is because the spell grows old and cannot function perfectly any more. Newsboys are running through the streets shouting: fourteen killed ... But nobody hears them, because it is known too well that everyone must die. They have news too of a building that fell, but no one is curious. There is an infection in steel that spreads, that runs amuck through its secret veins and makes all the vast rigid body of the city a fluid of bricks. But they are content to let these things be, grown listless with the knowledge of their doom. Here on the corner they are barking for Jesus, with singing and drums and a conclave of bonnets. Yet nobody stops to buy ... he is no longer a satisfactory scapegoat. His body is effete with too many wounds, he is worn out with centuries of the crucifix. They will have another scapegoat, one whose body is virgin. Here a long-haired man stands in a place where they are building, under two steel beams that make a huge snout rooting upward into the sky, and talks and talks ... while his eyes are craftily watching everyone that passes. But they will not listen any more ... words are meaningless pellets of sound. And now a troop of soldiers comes by, drawn through them like a bright ribbon, with flags dipping above and a bugle lifting its throat to bray skyward. But each profile is young and austere under its helmet, each is a silent fear glimpsed through all the mummery. But all this is a bazar of miracles where there is nothing to buy. They will have smaller magic, they will forget themselves looking here and there at smaller wonders ... a man selling a device of feathers whirling at the end of a stick, or a doll that jigs on a little black board. And here they are crowded together and staring so hard that their eyes seem to produce the miracle by the power of their concerted gaze ... a peddler selling three knives for a quarter. And here is a top balancing itself, dancing for them, swerving daintily on its single pointed foot, and they watch as intently as if a graceful young girl were dancing for them. Their eyes grow bright and they feel a lust for swift motion. They have forgotten for a moment that they must die, and there is nothing in the world but the joyous dancing of the top. Surely then the spell can be ended ... if only one person remembered that there is choice, if only one person said: this is only the curse.

But at last the silent stealthy retreat into nowhere is over, and in the deserted city nothing stirs ... only the lightning runs mouse-like through the sky. Because there is no longer a light in any window, or the shape of a human being to be the pupil of it, the buildings stare at each other with blinded eyes; and in the darkness the city dreams of a new people that will come with the day ... while it lies in a caul of mist that morning tears apart, insisting on birth.

1

Lighter. He could feel a tension in the room as of something about to strike. He could feel the darkness whirring itself up as a clock does before it strikes. He listened for morning to strike. He raged within himself because it was morning, because the outlines of things came before his eyes and stared at him with their number and finality: six beds, four on this side and two on the other ... one table next to each bed, four legs to each table, four legs to each bed, one man to each bed, three windows ... because everything stared at him with one question that he had been trying not to hear: Well, what are you going to do? Well, what is there to do? Listen ... that's easy ... spend the rest of my life listening to the noises in my head. Sounds as if all the scales I'd ever played were running riot. Turn them into a symphony. Start now and find out what happens ... seems they burst and collapse ... the long wheezing sound of collapse. Microscopic balloons bursting and collapsing inside his head ... fair-day inside my head. Turn over now, shift the noises to the other side. As he turned, an unpleasant thought ... what was it? Searching for it and afraid to find it ... the feeling you get when your teeth bite into something hard, and you keep on eating, afraid of finding the hard spot again ... Turn over, anyway. Shift the noises to the other side. But they don't seem to be moving any more, feels as if each one has fallen into place. Doctor, I have all the noises in place. Dr. Gaynor (as if lecturing): "Excellent, excellent! Now do you recall the game we used to play as youngsters? A little round case, the top made of glass, with tiny white balls in it, and holes for the balls to fall into ... the trick being to roll the balls into place by tilting the box this way and that. Now just keep that in mind. If the noises fall out, keep wagging your head around. After a while you'll be able to get them into place in no time." But doctor, what game does Biondi play when he lies awake twitching his chin that way? Here's a good question, doctor. When does he win? Again ... the hard bitter taste in his mouth! Ruth ... in the center of all his thoughts the hard kernel that he bit on. To forget her for a while ... to sleep, thrust himself back into the darkness. Why should I want to move again? The sheets and the blankets have hardened on me ... a long time ago they were poured over me, and now they have hardened into a mould. Why should I want to move again? I am tired ... I am so tired. How about this when he comes? Doctor, I don't want to be born. No good will come of it, doctor. Let me lie in the womb of the sheets, this way, my body folded up. "But my dear young man, we must discharge you, now that you're well." Dr. Gaynor has his hands on my bed, leaning on them like forepaws. Four-footed ... that's what he is. The way he leans over each bed, gives him a chance to be four-footed again. Sick of seeing his short bow-legs under his haunches ... needs a curve of tail between to make it complete. Can you see Poldy? Poldy's remembering to be grown-up. Keeps shutting his lips when they fall open. He doesn't want to, either, doctor. "Nonsense ... everything wants."

* * * * * * *

Lighter. That time it skipped a beat. Turn over and try to sleep. But instead his mind went back to his childhood. As he lay in the hospital bed trying to sleep, his childhood became a vast water around him, and each time that he dozed off, a little of it flowed in ... filled it up as water from the sea fills up, in the holes that children dig in the sand. In the winter, he remembered, spit froze on the streets in little round slabs that he tried not to slip on. Women put shawls over their heads, and the fringes fell down on their shoulders. From the back they looked like birds. In the winter men warmed themselves with their arms, a flaying motion, as if they suddenly felt guilty of something and had to do penance on the streets. Christopher ... who ran errands for the tailor, who had a lobe of soft flesh hanging like an ornament from his left ear. Christopher standing alone in a dark hallway, stroking his ear and smiling to himself. He had envied Christopher, for the lobe of soft flesh that could be felt at secret times, that gave pliantly between his fingers. His mother ... he remembered her less than the woman who came to do the washing ... whom he watched as she bent over the tub, and followed to the roof to see her hanging the clothes. Under her skirt her buttocks were shaped like large leaves, and when she stepped sideways they shook like leaves on the stem of her body. One time she put a clothes-pin in her mouth, and when she took it out he could see the beads of saliva on it shining for a second in the sun. Then he counted to himself the number it was from the end, so that he would not touch it when he took the things down at night ...

Somebody sighing and turning over in bed ... Geraghty walking around in the dark. In the bed next to him, Poldy muttering something that sounded like an answer to a question in his dream. Forgot himself and answered that one out loud ... how far towards morning? He could not tell when morning would strike. He curled up his legs and tried to sleep, but the past kept flooding in on him ... curious things from his childhood flowed in and drifted about ... Christopher feeling his ear in the dark hallway ... the women's shawls that were strange birds, women with fringed bird-shoulders walking before him. White knuckles ... the game of white knuckles! a secret greeting that he had with the other boys, to lift his hand in front of him and clench it until the knuckles showed white. As he tried it under the blanket a sharp pain went into his arm ... my hand is too weak to clench itself...

Weakness coming over him like a wave, the shallow wave that is left to creep back into the sea. Weakness receding into his body so that he could not move, so that he was held in the mould of the sheets, too weak to break through. Lying on the hill that time ... his fingers clamping themselves into the earth, his cheek to the earth ... and from the corner of his eye seeing a cloud come over him, feeling it pin him to the earth with one taut thread of light. For a moment, then, he could not break through. The earth and the air and the sky were moulded around him, and his body ... the careless shape it made when he flung himself down ... was only the empty space inside the mould ... To be back again, lying on the hill. To thrust himself into the darkness again, flood the deepest plane of his mind with sleep ... a level shore where nothing could lodge and be left for him when the water receded; where there would be no questions, no place for the past to come up and wake him with its swishing back and forth ...

How the napkins smelled of yeast one night. "Well, why don't you eat?" Because the napkins smell yeasty ... it was the night the tree fell in the storm, and lay clear across the street. Strange to see the trunk lying on the pavement, strange to see the boys riding the trunk. He remembered how they swung in the branches all day, and forgot themselves and the street, and became mythical creatures who have only a tree-life. But at night when the others were gone, he had bent over and looked at the roots still fastened in the earth, writhing against each other with arms that were embraced in a terrible struggle. Then he had wondered why the pavement had not burst over the place where the roots were struggling for so long, and the tree became something evil that he ran away from, that grew in his dreams that night ... an evil and brooding presence.

* * * * * * *

Five. Somewhere in a distant part of the building he heard it, he counted five strokes and heard them repeated in the corridors. Strange and sad it sounded to hear the clocks striking out of the silence. For the moment that he listened his being was suspended in longing for some remote wonder of his childhood. He heard the clocks speaking with the sudden utterance of birds ... he thought that somewhere in a distant part of the building there were three birds perching on a dark branch, and giving off in their sleep the same formula of sound ... and that he was a little boy again listening to it. Surely he had lived this moment before, for the infinite sadness of it was something remembered ... the dark branch in the woods was remembered ... perhaps from some picture in a child's book ... Poldy waking up ... but suppose I said it? Doctor, I don't want to be born. See, I have shaped the sheets around me, a snug womb. "Nonsense ... everything wants." Patient pleads to remain in hospital ... try it out on your newspaper headline. Nonsense ... But still-born children! Ah, how about that ...

Dozing off and dreaming of a strange child-birth. It was a drill. First the orderlies came in and ranged themselves against the wall. Then the nurses came and stood along the opposite wall. Dr. Gaynor came in and stood in the center of the room, and all the men were listening to him. They were lying down and sound asleep, yet they were listening. Dr. Gaynor stood in the center of the room and said: "We are going to have a drill. We are going to drill you on being born. The signal will be the clapping of my hands." He clapped his hands, and all the men swung out of bed with their legs first, holding them stiff and erect so that every pair of legs made an arc in the air; and the arcs remained in the air and shaped themselves into windows, rounded cathedral windows and someone was going in and out the windows.

Geraghty. He can't sleep. In and out the windows ... in and out the beds. Geraghty weaving himself in and out of the beds all night, as if he were a spool from which string was being unwound, weaving the string in and out of the beds as one does with an intricate bundle. Can't sleep until he's tied the beds securely. That's why he looks so craftily at the doctor in the morning ... keeps them all guessing why he can't sleep. "Couldn't sleep again, doctor, just couldn't sleep."

Doctor (leaning four-footed on the bed and turning his head to look out of the window): Couldn't sleep?

Geraghty: I don't know what it is, doctor.

Doctor (still looking out of the window): The drugs didn't help?

Geraghty: Not much ... slept at the beginning, but then I had to get up and walk around.

Doctor answers by tapping the right hind leg.

Geraghty (raising himself on his elbow, sudden terror in his voice): Doctor, what do you think it is?

Doctor stands erect, frowning at him ... Geraghty looking back, a wide impudent stare that seems to change into secret laughter. I'll tell you a secret, Geraghty ... Dr. Gaynor smells yeasty. He has a white handkerchief in his pocket that gives off a yeasty smell.

* * * * * * *

Turn over and try to sleep. He turned, hitting his arm against the wall. Someone in the room answered the sound, speaking out of his dream ... look at the sun. Who splashed it on the sky that way? Looks like paint splashed on a palette ... another cloudy day. Doctor, give me a brush. I want to use that splash of paint ... yes, that one ... see what color it is. Only one splash of paint on that whole big palette. Incredibly stupid. Seems to be a green light on the shade ... sign of going crazy, to see new colors in things ... look at Biondi trying to concentrate ... if that isn't! He must be having a difficult dream ...

Biondi frowning in his sleep, with the sheet tucked under his chin like a napkin looked suddenly childish and comic. Biondi turned, and a little wedge of sunlight lay on his back, as if it were a doctor's instrument being moved carefully, thoughtfully ... searching out something that was hidden underneath. And Biondi lying under it so patiently ... he pitied him. I'll see Biondi when I'm gone, be back to see him. Nonsense! The man had a disgusting way of clicking his tongue, and his face never looked clean. Two beds away ... the large man sleeping with his hands folded prayerfully under his cheek ... the heavy flesh collected under his eyes ... like another pair to see with when his eyes are closed. Two tiers of eyes staring at him ... turn away, can't bear that staring. Poldy's ear creeping out of the sheet, a peculiar look of listening to it. So this is your big day. Well, what are you going to do? Sleep. No, the room is too crowded. Oh God, all the listening and staring in the room...

Strange how much light is coming out. Diarrhœa ... the darkness can't stop itself. Well, they should be waking across the street.

* * * * * * *

He raised himself on his elbow and looked across Poldy, down and across to a window where the shade was half-way up, a dark outer shade showing a little way across the top, all carefully measured like the curtains of a stage. Very well, then, begin. The man comes out first...

A man came to the window and stood looking down into the street. His collar stuck out at a tangent from his neck, and while he looked thoughtfully into the street he kept pinching the flesh of his throat. Then he went away and the window was blank for a while, but by careful watching one could catch the flash of a white table-cloth. Now it's the woman's turn ... comes to the window and raises the shade, lifts her hand with it, so that the sleeve of her kimona falls back, and you can see the brown wrinkled flesh of her elbow. Next the man sits down at the table with his back to the window. His legs are curled round the chair, and while he waits for things to be brought he strokes the back of his hair. When they are through eating, the woman stands up and turns off the light ... After that he could not see anything. The window went dark and opaque, like the glass of a slide when no figures are being reflected on it. The lights went out in all the windows, and all the buildings he could see from the hospital became distant and opaque, a picture hung so that no detail of it could be seen. There were pictures of that kind ... the one in my aunt's bedroom. At first only a long white figure lying on a bed, the rest of the canvas in shadow; and he was about to turn away when a face came out of the shadow and stared at him ... an angry old man with a long white beard. Then he saw other faces, all gazing out with a stern and terrible concentration ... and every wayward curving of line became a face, and every blur of shadow was turned into a face, until he felt that the picture had surrounded him ... rushing out and colliding with my aunt in the hall. "But is anything chasing you? Well, then, don't rush so..."

"What did you say?" Dr. Gaynor asked. I said don't let it surround me. Dr. Gaynor could not hear very well, and he had to repeat the words over and over again, making the sounds crisper each time until the sentence was chopped into eight separate ticks, and his tongue ached with the effort of saying it. I said: don't let it surround me...

"But what?"

"The picture. It's badly hung. I can't see the faces."

"Ah, yes, you used to paint..."

"No, I used to play ... Poldy used to paint. Still I know something about it. But I can't see any of the faces. The light is bad."

"I said he may not go blind..."

"The light is bad, doctor, pull up the shade. The light is very bad. I can't see the picture clearly."

"What picture?"

"The one out there, with the windows. The oil coagulated when I painted it. The oil lumped into windows ... they blur the picture. Oil paintings must be hung right."

"Yes ... yes ... I see..."

"But the light is still bad. There isn't enough light, I say. You don't know how the darkness presses on the back of my neck."

"Is that better?" Dr. Gaynor lifted the shade slowly, imperceptibly, and stood near the window pinching the flesh of his throat and looking thoughtfully at the men lying in bed.

"But can't you lift it higher, doctor?" He heard his voice sounding as if it were going to cry. "You don't know how the darkness presses on the back of my neck..."

"Well, is that better..."

But now, as the shade was raised all the way, there was a tremulous motion in the picture. Soon it began to quiver within itself, and while he noted this with a feeling of horror, he saw the doctor seize the picture in his hand and hold it out like a tray. And he saw that the picture was made up of brightly-colored fragments, each fragment shaped differently, but all put together to look like the buildings that he saw from the hospital. And he noted further, with a painfully oppressive feeling that this discovery had some ominous significance, that the picture had never really been painted, but only put together like a puzzle. "You see, it's a puzzle," the doctor said, "and this is the way"—he rattled the fragments on the tray until two or three bounced off—"to break it." Then with a stupid smile on his face Dr. Gaynor continued rattling the tray, and there was no end to the picture, there was no end to the pieces of it that fell on his bed ... showering down on him in a rain of fragments too bright for his eyes, suffocating him so that he could not shout to the doctor to stop; and piling around him so that, if he did not stand up or raise his arms, they would cover him and bury him. But just when he thought they were closing in over his head, the fragments disappeared, and the faces of his friends were looking at him ... stern and mask-like in expression. And he recognized the man who stood at the window pinching the flesh of his throat; and Dr. Gaynor's face went in and out of the others winking like a firefly. There was the face of Ruth, too ... an archway of hair and her face between; but the horror of it was that her face was void like the door-space between the arch. And a clear voice said: the picture surrounded you. Then he awoke. An orderly was at the window. He had raised the shade all the way and the sunlight streamed in, making everything brightly-colored like the fragments in his dream.

"Very clear day," the orderly said.

"Yes, promises to be warm."

* * * * * * *

Sunlight lay on the city ... a scourge of sunlight. But from the hospital window there was no longer the city ... only a set of building blocks small and distant as toys. Blocks laid out by some child who was not yet old enough to play with them, who didn't know how to pile them into a pattern or arrange them according to size ... who knew only which was the top and which was the base, and put the blocks together and considered it sufficient that all their tops were to the sky, and all their bases to the earth. And beyond the buildings was the ragged edge of the city, with boats nosing in at the docks ... coming to be nursed. When a lot of boats came together and stayed for a while in the docks they looked like young at the nipples of their mother. But all this was silent. No sound came from the city, and nothing happened to it except sun and rain. He had looked at it for hours together until it lost perspective, lost depth and height, and had only one plane ... until it looked to him like a vaudeville backdrop waiting there to be rolled up, staring desolately after the voice of the comedians is gone.

"Very far up..." the orderly said. But how far. The bottom may be miles below ... there may not be any bottom, only the walls of the buildings shooting down. Sidewalks ... a temporary scaffolding, so that they should have something to walk on. But they'd better not stamp on it or it will fall through.

A dream of stepping into the hospital elevator. It plunged down and could not stop itself, and he went over to the colored man who operated it and tapped him on the shoulder. Did you miss the sidewalk? "Yes, I seem to have missed it." And they continued going down, neither of them concerned over what had happened. Finally he grew tired of this. He went over to the colored man again. Reverse it, he said. And on the instant they were catapulted back to the top. "You see," the colored man observed sagely, picking his teeth, "you can reach the top but you can never reach the bottom..."

The orderly crossing the room and standing in the doorway, waving his hand at the window ... yes, great view. Something stopping in the room. What was it that stopped just now? What was it that stopped when the orderly went out? Geraghty ... Geraghty standing near his bed and looking down at it, getting in and sighing heavily. Came to the end of the string, and now he can sleep. But Biondi is waking up ... can tell by the way his chin begins to twitch...

All day Biondi lay in bed twitching his chin so that tiny parallel arches appeared on it, holding it so for a second and smoothing it out again. The moment his chin stopped twitching he fell asleep ... like the animals. They fall asleep easily ... just fold a wing or put their heads away or lift a leg and they're asleep. All Biondi has to do is to stop twitching his chin. I'll try this one on him: Doctor, what should I do to fall asleep? Doctor (thinking profoundly): "Shutting the eyes is good." No, don't shut your eyes ... the others will stare at you. I'll tell you a great secret, doctor, lean over, that's it. The eyes are not only to see with ... they are to prevent others from seeing us. Doctor (with astonishment): "Indeed." Yes, it's true. I found it out. You can't be stared at so easily if your eyes are open. "Oh come, now, he may not go blind." Yes, but suppose he does ... the worst part of it will be the staring that he won't be able to repel with his eyes. He'll have to stay alone most of the time ... being blind is not so bad when you're alone. Isn't that true, doctor? Doctor (lecturing): "Now the blind man that came in here the other day ... you noticed that he walked with his head back? Blindness requires a whole re-adjustment of the body. You balance with the eyes, too. He'll have to learn that..." Doctor (continuing to lecture and leaning on the bed, four-footed): "But we don't really know whether he'll go blind. In many cases vision has been retained. We are often fortunately disappointed ... (smiling here, and quickening his words) yes, yes, very often disappointed..."

In school that time when I was sent to be disciplined ... the dean rubbing his hands and saying: "But we don't really know if you're bad ... I'm satisfied that most people are good. I'm satisfied if only a few people are bad." Why doesn't Dr. Gaynor say it ... I'm satisfied if only a few people go blind ... Well, shut your eyes and try to imagine it ... geometry ... if Poldy goes blind will he see geometry all his life ...

She wrote it all down backhand and blotted as she went along ... name, Lewis Orling ... birth, December 12, 1894 ... age, married, wife's name, history, war record, diseases, religion ... all in ten lines and three for remarks ... I'll give Dr. Gaynor a recipe for creating new people. Dr. Gaynor (lecturing): To create new people, take all the hospital charts out of the files, cut into little strips, shake in a basket until they are thoroughly mixed, then let fall on large pieces of cardboard, a handful of strips at a time ... paste the fragments together ... How would I come out? ... it really can't make any difference, though. Everybody here has a souvenir ... just a little souvenir of the war. But why does Biondi get fat on his?

He turned and examined Biondi's face, the grayish overflowing cheeks. He noticed his hand as it held the sheet, puffed so that the knuckles showed as minute purple dots, and the joints as dark creases. Biondi's flesh filled him with loathing, it seemed like an evil compensation for the loss of his legs ... a senseless mathematical equation stubbornly working itself out. Hatred for Biondi rose in his throat, screwed it tight so that he felt he was suffocating. Hatred for all the men lying in bed. All night he had been lying awake, bearing for them the whole burden of consciousness. All night, with inevitable suction, the busy thoughts of their sleep had flowed into his wakefulness ... and now he hated them for the way in which they had used him. He hated them for their easy acceptance of what had been done to them. The trick of it! The monstrous trick of the whole thing, that for his hope of fame and for everything he had been before the war, he had only the noises in his head to listen to ... only the constant fine whirring in his head. Like the end of a record, somebody forgot to take the needle off ... And again the bitter taste of Ruth in his mouth. Now it came to him with the impact of something first discovered that he would have to go back to her that day; and in that moment his hatred flowed over to her...

But meanwhile he was staring at Biondi, and the force of his stare made Biondi open his eyes. "They change the beds around every day," Biondi observed drowsily ... then scratched his cheek with a rapid vibration of his forefinger, tucked the sheet under his chin and went to sleep again ... I enter Biondi's dream, he woke to let me in. Why can't I sleep, I also am tired. Too late, too late ... no burrowing back any more, there is no darkness left to let me in.

But he seemed to be in utter darkness, and going down a flight of irregular stairs. His body jerked when a step was too shallow, and was carried down to be gently landed on those steps that were too high. But on one of the shallow steps, and just after he had been aware of taking it with an abrupt movement of his foot, he fell asleep.

2

At nine-thirty that morning Lewis and Poldy stepped out of the hospital together. At the entrance they paused, wondering which way to turn. Then, agreeing silently and indifferently, they faced about and walked down Fifth Avenue.

Neither of them spoke. Poldy walked with his head drooping forward and his eyes fixed on the pavement, and Lewis was painfully conscious that his suit was too big for him. He kept plucking at the sleeves to shorten them, and pulling the coat forward on his shoulders. At last these motions made Poldy turn to look at him. "I have a suit in Levine's office which ought to fit me better," Lewis said. But Poldy did not answer.

At fifty-ninth street they stopped to wait for the traffic to change. For the first time Poldy glanced around him, looking wonderingly at the people and the buildings. He turned to Lewis and spoke in a low voice. "Don't you think that night nurse was beautiful?" he asked, frowning anxiously. "Don't you think so?" But before Lewis answered he turned away again, his eyes intently watching the pavement. Now and then as they walked his hands fluttered to his tie, and without looking up or slowing his pace he tried to loosen it, stretching his neck absurdly as if he felt it was choking him. They walked rapidly, speeding up as they went, until Lewis had to take Poldy's arm to prevent him from breaking into a run.

Poldy took occasion then to speak again. "Do you know what I think, Lewis?" he asked, lowering his voice secretively.

"Well ... what?"

"Dr. Gaynor was sorry when we left ... he was pretty sorry about it. And did you see Biondi's face! His jaw just dropped, like that, you know. As though he didn't know right along that we were leaving today."

Something in his friend's voice made Lewis turn and look at him intently. As Poldy's hands kept fluttering to his tie, he noted how small they were ... the perfect small-boned modeling of the fingers that seemed to be always engaged in such busy and ineffectual motion. Many times before he had observed this, and always with a feeling of pity for Poldy, as if in some way the hands were a betrayal of the strong and well-formed body. But today he saw it with a slight disgust. He found himself wishing that Poldy would leave him; at the same time he knew he was afraid to be alone. While they were together he felt himself still secure, still held in the world of illness which had walled him in. Poldy, walking beside him with his abstracted air, his slack profile ... the lips parted and always moist ... made a defense around him, holding off the threat of ordinary life. And so, though Lewis knew he should have turned his steps westward, though he thought of all the things that had to be done, they continued to walk together. And always there was this absurd speeding up of their pace, until it seemed they were engaged in a walking race with each other and people turned to stare at them. Lewis took Poldy's arm. "See here, Poldy," he said irritably, "we don't have to walk so fast. Don't you see how we're rushing?" But when Poldy obediently slackened his pace, going too slowly this time, he stopped short and faced him angrily.

"See here, Poldy, what are you going to do? You can't walk the streets all day."

"Why not, I'd like to know?"

"Something might happen to you."

Poldy withdrew his arm pettishly. "Oh, what could happen to me now! That's a good one." He turned away frowning, absorbed in watching the automobiles ... looking at the wheels as they came within range of his vision and following their motion with his eyes as far as he could without turning his head. And in this intent observation of the wheels, with his head bent forward and rigid, there was something secretive and guilty. So wrapt was he that when the time came to cross he started nervously and looked up, bewildered. As he followed the lines of a tall building to its far-away pyramid top, his gaze widened with childish wonder. He stared at it and then looked away, sighing as at a problem that had to be given up. Finally he remembered Lewis's question. "I'd like to walk around a while," he said.

"What will you do after?"

Poldy considered. "Go to Bannerman's ... he has my pictures ... I must see what they're like. I really don't remember." He laughed shortly. "Say, did you see Biondi's face when we left? His jaw just dropped ... like that, you know. Yet he knew right along—"

Lewis turned from him impatiently. "I think we had better part now, Poldy," he said. "It's stupid to walk around this way." And when Poldy looked at him, not understanding, Lewis drew him into the shadow of a building and gave directions on what he was to do, enforcing each with a tap on the shoulder. The last was that Poldy should call him up at night and they would tell each other what had befallen them during the day. Poldy nodded and walked away. But he had gone only a short distance when he turned and came back to Lewis, and stood before him, his eyes transfixed with a look of intense pleading.

"Lewis ... do you know what I really wish?" he began in a low hurried voice. "I wish I had made a promise ... I wish someone had made me promise that I would do a special thing, spend my life doing it ... and that I had to do it now. Then everything would be simple. I don't know what sort of thing, though..." He stopped abruptly and looked at Lewis with troubled eyes. There was something else that he tried to say, but unable to find words for it he swung round on his heel and walked jauntily away. Lewis stood alone. As he watched Poldy's going he knew a beginning was made, he faced the obligation to set his own affairs in motion. He too turned briskly and walked in the opposite direction.

* * * * * * *

But after a while he felt tired. The energy which had made him leave Poldy was gone, and he turned into a quiet side street, walking against sidewalks so bright with sun that they struck like a blare of sound. He drew his cap over his eyes until he could see only what came just in front of him. With his hands curled up in his sleeves so that they seemed to be swinging empty, and coasting near the buildings for guidance, he gave himself up to his wanderings ... to the feeling of exhaustion that was settling around him, a fine film of it through which everything was strained.

Poldy was gone. Lewis remembered now that their parting on the street-corner had been like the parting in a fairy-tale: each to his separate adventure after the common fate in which they had been bewitched. And as the fairy-tale also taught, they were to meet at night and tell what had befallen them. But, Lewis asked himself, what could befall? In his heart was the deep conviction that all adventures were at an end ... resentment that now he was forced to go about again, continuing his life. As he walked through the streets and tried to think of the future, he felt like someone unwillingly awake ... someone who expected to sleep all night but opens his eyes after a while, and is forced to lie that way, painfully feeling his own awareness. From the war and the hospital years he had been forcibly awakened ... they had been a profound sleep in which everything had rusted away within him. What could it matter then if anything did befall? Experience was now nothing to be desired, it was valuable only because it could be recounted to Poldy at night. Poldy! All his thoughts kept swinging back and forth about Poldy, as if they were leashed to one center. Somewhere near him he was walking about, they might even encounter each other at the casual turning of a corner. But the fear of it made Lewis energetic again, he walked briskly to the corner and stopped there, and threw his head far back so that he could read the sign-post from under the brim of his cap. Where was he? The answer gave him a shock. He was near his home ... she was near ... he might even have coasted past the house and been seen by her. As he stood there looking up in panic and wondering what to do, a tiny figure swam up before his eyes ... seemed to hover between him and the lamp-post ... a miniature statue swathed in gauze, something he must have seen somewhere and forgotten, until this moment when it came back to him strangely invested with meaning. It was swathed in hospital gauze that went in spirals around it, and somehow made an intricate cross in back ... went over the face of the statue in so many thicknesses that the head looked ovoid, nothing but a little peak in front to indicate that there were features. And in the transfixed moment that he saw it Lewis decided not to go back to her ... not yet, he pleaded with himself. Better to walk around a while, to be alone for a while longer. He turned from the sign-post and found that he was at a point where many streets intersected. He chose the one that he was facing because it would lead him far away.

* * * * * * *

Towards nightfall he found himself in the park. All day he had not stopped to eat or rest; and now, exhausted from his wanderings, he sat down on a bench that faced the avenue, intending to have a nap before he went home. But hardly had he stretched his legs and settled his hands in his pockets, when a strange alertness came over him. He felt the indefinite light and steady droning of traffic and the movement of people merging together into a heightened silence, in which some word was about to sound ... some revelation that would change everything, and make it possible for him to rise and go home as if there had never been any interruption. But only the thought of Christopher swam insistently into his mind; and he asked himself why it had troubled him all day ... why he remembered for the first time today all the delight and terror that he felt, in that moment when they had come upon Christopher standing alone and stroking his ear in the dark hallway. Craftily, now, he understood ... that Christopher had taught him all the subtle ways in which the body gives pleasure, that now he too could go apart with his pain, as Christopher had done with his deformity, and make a privacy of it where nothing could reach him ... where Ruth's love could not reach him or the memory of his past. So much had his childhood served him ... he had this to begin his life with. And from the war, he asked ... was there nothing to remember from the war, nothing swishing back and forth in his mind from all that rich cargo of debris? He could think only of the time with Poldy ... how Poldy burst out crying in the middle of the road, standing there with the tears running down his cheeks, ashamed to put his hands to his face, ashamed to look up. "But everything is over now, Poldy. Look how quiet it is." And Poldy taking his hand as if he wanted to crush it and looking at Lewis with anger and hatred in his eyes. "Tell me, will it happen again? Will I cry this way again?" Except for that there was nothing to remember. He could not look back at his past, he did not want it to exist. His past baffled him, as if he were looking into a room where he could see all that went on, without being able to hear what was said or distinguish the faces of those who were in it. Though the room was brightly lighted and people came and went before the window, all their gestures were detached and unreal, it was all a mysterious pantomime. Sound was muffled in it, and on every face was the impassive stern overtone of a mask. For him there would be neither past nor future, but only a timeless isolation of pain. He would not make any concession to the past ... no, not the first one, which was to accept her love again; for fear it might act as a breach, and all the things which he had forgotten ... all the things he had desired ... would come flooding back on him. Before he rose from the bench he warned himself: not to accept Ruth's love again, but to harden himself against his memories, and live with her as if they were strangers to each other. So he would hold himself intact, so the gesture of pain would be frozen into permanence ...

Lewis rose to go home. On his way, however, he decided to stop at Levine's office first and change his suit, and there to call up Poldy.

3

They had been talking for hours. Levine's back was to the lamp, his face shadowed save for the bright prismatic play of his glasses. Lewis sat opposite. Between them the desk bore the burden of their gestures. Lewis kept striking it with his clenched fist when he talked, or nervously smoothing it with his palm whenever he was forced to listen. Levine sat massive and immobile, his hands for the most part clasped in front of him, except when the word he wanted did not come. Then he would release his right hand, and putting the thumb and forefinger together, shake off an invisible drop of water ... a gesture which seemed to have the virtue of bringing the right word to mind. From the ambush of shadow in which he sat Levine studied his caller, his face never once relaxed from the curious expression with which he had first greeted him.

It was true, he noted, that Lewis's appearance had changed little. There were the same quick resentful motions of his small brown eyes, the same nervous gestures and voluble speech. If the war had made any change in him it had been merely to accentuate his mannerisms, to give them a hysterical tempo. Otherwise there was the same expression of the face ... an expression slightly fanatic, due perhaps to the sparsity with which it was fleshed ... an air of strain about the features, which seemed to be always peaked with the effort of staying together ... a strained expression about the nostrils, which were clamped too tightly into the upper lip and had a trick of whitening whenever Lewis was angered. As his friend spoke to him, Levine noticed it often ... this sudden concentrated pallor about the nostrils; and he sensed that under the voluble reminiscences and abrupt outbursts of laughter, there was a current of anger ... whenever they stopped speaking he could feel it almost physically present, waiting for a reckoning. Yes, all that had been said so far, Levine told himself, was nothing. He understood that Lewis had sought him out for something special that had to be said, to have the reckoning with his anger in his presence. So in a long silence that fell between them, he leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. "Tell me," he said, "why didn't you go home first?"

Lewis flashed a look at him that was half sulkiness, half appreciation. "You might understand that yourself, I think."

"But you see, I don't," Levine said humbly. "Well, no ... perhaps I do. There are so many things, at least, to understand by it..."

But Lewis was staring at him with fascinated eyes, as if he were held spellbound in an idea that had just occurred to him. He took from his pocket four tiny pieces of newspaper, each one folded small as a thumb-nail. These he opened and smoothed out on the desk.

"I'd like to tell you something," he said slowly. "It is a sort of explanation. But first you'll have to read these. I cut them out of newspapers," he added carelessly, "various times, when I had nothing better to do."

Frowning, and holding the paper so close to his face that he seemed to be smelling it, Levine read:

Last night a fire broke out in the town hall during a performance of the Brahms' Requiem, given by the Ascension Choral Society. Flames were discovered by an usher in the cloak room on the balcony, and the extinguishers immediately applied. It required the quick action of the fire department, however, to prevent the flames from spreading. The audience left in good order, except for a slight panic at one of the exits, which occurred when one of the ushers had difficulty in opening a door.

Levine put it aside and glanced up inquiringly. "Read them all," Lewis said, shoving them across the desk. "They're pretty much alike, though." There was a peculiar expression on his face, a look of distrust and cunning while he watched his friend read. At one time he rose and began to pace excitedly around the room, rapping everything as he passed. More and more seriously, scarcely daring to look up and ask the meaning of it, Levine read:

Last night a performance of Faust at the Opera House was temporarily interrupted by the discovery of fire in one of the property rooms. A fifteen minute delay in raising the curtain on the third act caused considerable impatience and anxiety among the audience. The flames were extinguished by stage hands before any serious damage occurred.

and,

Fire, attributed to the careless lighting of a cigarette, burned the Trentini Theatre to the ground, last night between nine and ten o'clock. The fire broke out during a performance of Cosa Sia, and there was a general stampede to the exits. Fireman Conrad Meltzi was fatally injured when a section of the balcony collapsed.

The last one was different:

A performance of The Sunken Bell was interrupted last night at the Playhouse by a disturbance in the audience, due to the sudden illness of one of the women spectators. Dr. Alfred Downing who attended the patient announced that she had given birth to a boy in the women's rest room.

"Interesting! All very interesting!" Levine exclaimed on finishing. He took off his glasses and polished them, speaking meanwhile in a brisk professorial manner. "As I see it, there's a common element in all these notices. In each case a performance seems to have been interrupted. In three cases a fire caused the interruption, in one the premature delivery of a child under unfavorable circumstances. Now if we proceed from this point, our next step—" he looked inquiringly at Lewis. "Our next step, I should say, is to find out ... discover, I should say, what the symbols involved..."

"Do you think it was foolish?" Lewis interrupted.

"Think what foolish..."

"To collect those ... the papers you were reading." He leaned forward impulsively and swept them off the desk. "A hundred times I've been on the point of throwing them away, and yet I couldn't. I treasured them as if they were valuable coins. I insisted on keeping them every time they searched my pockets for things to throw away. People looked at me queerly. Something wrong here, you know, up here." He rapped his forehead three times and burst out laughing. "Yet it's awfully simple. I kept those papers," Lewis began, deliberately tapping off the words on the desk, "as a record of my life ... a simple, clear-cut record of my life. In each case, as you say, a performance is interrupted by fire. Fire is the war, of course, the years I've been away. Now isn't that easy? Don't you feel it when you read it?" He half-rose in his chair and thrust himself forward at Levine, a fixed triumphant expression on his face. Levine, intent on polishing his glasses, looked up gravely.

"Say you're sitting in a theatre," Lewis continued hurriedly. "Say you're listening to the performance ... a beautiful and deliberate performance. And suddenly some one cries fire, and instead you find yourself listening to the horrible crackling of the flames and screams of terror, and the sound of feet trampling over human bodies. Only—and this is the worst part of it—through your panic you still hear the performance going on, even through your terror. Faint and far away you hear it completing itself. And while you struggle and scream and trample over the others you're still listening to it, a thousand times more beautiful and majestic because it comes to you through the fire. But now suppose—" He sat down abruptly, still staring across at Levine with that fixed expression of triumph.

"What should we suppose?" Levine asked mildly.

Lewis looked down and spoke more slowly, finding the words with difficulty. "Suppose that moment ... the moment of panic terror which should normally last only a second," he said, "were to be prolonged indefinitely. Suppose a person was destined to a lifetime of it ... to be haunted by the music even in his terror. If we could imagine such a person, if there was a person who had that fate..."

"Then what?" Levine interrupted drily.

But Lewis could not go on. His face flushed and now he felt a painful quivering in both eyelids, so violent that he wanted to shade his eyes with his hands, to hide it from Levine's scrutiny. "Well, take me for such a person," he finished, looking away shamefacedly.

Levine continued meditatively polishing his glasses. After a while he asked, "When did you figure all this out?"

"Oh, a long time ago ... too long ago," Lewis said wearily. "I got my first idea of it, I remember, one day during the war, when I came across that notice you read about the theatre burning down. Quite accidentally, while I was standing near a flight of steps, I remember, and happened to look down, and I saw an American newspaper lying on the ground. I read that part over and over again, while the paper was still lying on the ground, without knowing why it excited me so. Then I bent down and tore it out and put it away in my pocket. After that—weeks after, I remember—the meaning of it flashed on me. But there were a great many things that went before, before I could understand it."

"Well, what went before?" Levine held his glasses in front of him, turning them this way and that to catch the light from the window.

"There's something I'd have to explain first."

"Namely..."

Lewis hesitated. "The queer ways," he began slowly, "in which people amuse themselves ... comfort themselves when they suffer. Probably you don't know." He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "Of course they thought I was acting queerly, collecting those papers and saving them ... but only because they never noticed the queer ways that people have of comforting themselves. There was a fellow, for instance, who seized every scrap of tin foil he could lay hands on, and cut it up into the shape of nickels, and rubbed the design from real nickels on it so that it looked like real money. He must have had a fortune in make-believe nickels ... he carried them around in his pocket and acted as if everyone were trying to steal them. Whenever there was anything to eat, chocolate or cheese that came wrapped in tin foil, he cared more about getting the wrapper than the food. He was so greedy for it that he regularly traded his share of food for it. I lost track of him after a while, but I saw him again one time lying in bed, and making the artificial nickels with the one arm and few fingers he had left. So you see," he looked swiftly at Levine and turned away again, "once you have seen things like that...."

"My dear young man," Levine said drily, "you don't have to justify your ways to me."

"I'm glad, though, that I threw them away." Lewis sighed and touched the papers gingerly with his foot. Meanwhile Levine's gray eyes were fixed on Lewis. With his glasses off, their expression was mild, slightly astonished. Yet there was in that very mildness a hint of something implacable. There was, in Levine's eyes, infinite kindliness, but also infinite insistence ... eyes possessed of implacable patience, that would inevitably draw from whatever they looked at the intimate secret of that thing. Lewis looked away and tried to fixate the narrow line of red ribbon that showed on the typewriter, but the quivering in his eyelids began again and he was forced to look down. He began to trace imaginary circles on the desk, and while he gave his recital in a voice scarcely audible, he seemed intent on the circles he was making, now very rapidly, now slowly.

"It happened to me first," he said, "while I was waiting on line. There is, of course, endless waiting on line. It's not the least of the things one has to go through. This time we were standing in a narrow hallway, all leaning against the wall—some of us with our backs to the wall and our arms folded; and these were the ones who had their heads back as if they were sleeping standing up. And others standing sideways, crouching against the wall as though they had to support it. I think I remember the way we stood so well because it seemed at that moment as if we were all asleep, instead of standing and waiting on line. We were all so listless and tired. Nobody spoke, nobody cared any more whether the doctor's door would ever open again and call the next one in. It made the place where we were unnaturally quiet, the sort of quiet that happens only when there are people together who have been silent for a long time. And while I was standing there, and probably because it was so quiet—I didn't know what it was to be in a quiet place for months together—I began to hear music ... an orchestra playing in the distance, but very clearly. So far away and sad, it seemed to me that I had never heard music before or known how sad it could be. It sounded very distinct, playing a triumphal march.... I heard it from the beginning to the last note, and after the last note it stopped. Only when it stopped, I realized that it hadn't been triumphant, but mournful ... and that all the time it had been going farther away while it played. And then suddenly, suddenly it seemed—" Lewis stopped, his lips twitching so that he could not speak. He sat in silence for a moment, rapping the desk violently with his clenched fist. "How do these things happen?" he asked harshly. "Perhaps you know all about it, Levine. How did it happen that the music I heard then ... that march being played somewhere in the distance, became the symbol for my life ... no, it was my life. It was all the past I had ever lived, every day I ever lived, every moment. Do you believe it, Levine, that a man can suddenly hear his life?" He stared across at his friend with an absurd expression. "But it wasn't ordinary listening," he continued, raising his voice angrily as if someone had challenged him. "I tell you I felt a shock of recognition. I listened to it with horror, as though a physical presence, a ghost in the form of sound, were confronting me...."

Levine was about to speak, but Lewis motioned for silence. "And after that it came back to me ... in the midst of the fighting, when I could not even hear my own shouting, it would come back clearly ... screaming above the noise, never played too fast, but only magnified somehow a thousand times. And in every moment of pain, or when it was intensely quiet ... especially when it was quiet ... or when I couldn't sleep, I heard it again, at such times soft and far away. But often as I heard it, there it was—the strange feeling that my own life was speaking to me."

"Yet after a while," Lewis continued, intent again on the circles his finger traced, "after a while the experience became a sort of horror to me. I lived every minute in fear of it, and once that fear got hold of me, the war seemed to go on in another world, and I did my share of it in a trance. That time is all a blur to me. My real life was the fear of hearing the music. I could face danger, then, without thinking of it, I could kill without knowing it, because I had gone into a stupor of fear. And the strange thing is that it wasn't the fear of anything around me—all the things that threatened my life—but only the fear of hearing the music, the horror that at the next moment I would hear it playing. 'Very well,' I said to myself, quite calmly, 'that's what they mean by going insane.' And I might have gone insane, if not for finding the notice that way. It's so trivial that it sounds ridiculous to speak of it ... yet in some way it had the power to relieve the tension ... it cleared things up for me and lifted me out of my stupor into the world again...."

Lewis paused and looked directly at Levine for the second time in his narrative ... a swift suspicious glance. "Shall I continue," he asked sharply, "or does it sound stupid to you?"

"No ... no ... go on."

"But it is stupid," Lewis insisted, watching him.

It seemed for a time as if Levine had forgotten Lewis. He had been pacing back and forth while he listened, measuring his route diagonally across the room, never varying it by a single step. Now he stopped near the window and busied himself with rubbing off the specks of paint that were spattered on the glass. He went to the typewriter and blew away the dust that lay on it in a thin film. Then a picture on the wall claimed his attention. This he straightened carefully, measuring it by the line of white moulding. In all these actions there was an air of profound absorption.

"No, I don't think it's stupid," he said, standing back to observe the effect of the picture.

"It was stupid," Lewis insisted in a nettled voice. "Perhaps I did go insane ... mildly, without knowing it..."

Levine shrugged his shoulders. "Go on with the story."

"Well, you have to know first," Lewis resumed, his voice deliberately careless, "that I was a musician before the war."

"I know. And now?"

"Now? Why—why that's all over with ... head noises ... tinnitus aurium, the technical name." He laughed self-consciously. "And so it was natural that I should think of my life in terms of music ... as a symphony, let us say, that I was conducting ... something being conducted very deliberately to its end. You understand that I didn't see all this in a flash. It's a matter which I had to figure out, a part occurring to me now and then, and I pieced it together. But I must have been thinking about it for a long time without knowing it. I must have said: my life will be a performance, it will be deliberate. I know that all the steps were planned in my mind, they were to follow each other inevitably like the movements of a symphony. But perhaps..." Lewis paused and stared thoughtfully ... "perhaps one has no right to be so deliberate about living ... or triumphant either? Perhaps there was something wrong with that ... I've often wondered." He was silent, rubbing his forehead and frowning. "Well, what does it matter anyway," he resumed. "At any rate the first step was already over—the first movement, I ought to say. And I began to hear the second, a few introductory notes, that is, nothing more. Do you remember that picture of me at the piano?"

"You mean the one where you were playing and looking over your shoulder?"

Lewis nodded. "The shoulder was too coquettish, by the way. Just nervousness that made me lift it a little when they snapped me."

"Why no, I didn't notice."

"It was, though. You can't imagine how I suffered because of that shoulder. I thought: it's impossible that anyone will take me seriously after that picture. But there it was the next morning ... 'a name that will rank with the greatest ... a musical talent of the first magnitude.' You know, those two phrases kept going through my head for weeks after, practically deafening me. It was terrible, like having the words of a popular song in your head. One time it occurred to me, just as I was starting to play, that the first one ... about the name that would rank ... made the opening words for my minuet ... the one that goes this way..." he hummed a few measures, emphasizing the time with short rhythmic movements of his right hand. "It seemed to me it was actually written for those words, light but sort of important. Or sometimes I amused myself by arranging the words like notes. A musical talent of the first magnitude ... that's sixth-eighth time. A name that will rank with the greatest, either three-quarter or..."

Lewis stopped and burst out laughing ... a paroxysm of laughing and coughing that made the tears stream from his eyes. He put his handkerchief to his mouth and looked over it at Levine, his eyes widening with an expression of surprise, that turned into alarm as the coughing continued. When at last he was able to withdraw the handkerchief, his face was red and he turned away sheepishly.

"No, really," he said, wiping his eyes, "I shouldn't laugh. It's nothing to laugh at, I assure you."

Levine sat down and looked thoughtfully at Lewis. He clasped his hands in front of him, then released the right hand and shook off an invisible drop of water from his thumb and forefinger. But the gesture failed him, and he rose abruptly and continued with his pacing back and forth. For a long time he seemed absorbed in his own thoughts, until a knock at the door roused him. He opened it to admit a stout little man whom he addressed as Lustbader. Lustbader sat down in a corner of the room, and with a quick dainty movement vaulted one leg across the other.

"I'll wait, I'll wait!" he protested, looking brightly from Levine to Lewis. "Nothing special, Levine, just a friendly call." And by way of establishing this, he looked off into the distance, whistling, and occupied himself with throwing his cane from one hand to the other. This he did with a skill and precision that fascinated Lewis.

Later, when Lustbader removed his hat, he revealed that the fringe of hair on his head, his eyebrows and eyelashes, even the little tuft of mustache, were all of the same color ... a dull brick red, which seemed to cast a reflected glow on his cheeks; and not merely of the same color, but perfectly matched in shading and texture. And this uniform coloring made his face look so unreal, so much as if it were made up for a masquerade, that Lewis found himself unable to take his eyes from the newcomer. He was staring open-mouthed when Levine called him to attention, and he realized that they were being introduced.

"Lewis Orling, whom you may be able to use in your theatre, a musician before the war, but he's been out of things for a long time—"

Lustbader interrupted with an imperious motion of his hand. "The name is no good," he said, and then, nodding genially to everything that Levine said, he permitted him to continue. "Excellent! Very excellent!" he said, when Levine had finished. "We have a musical audience in the theatre ... he'll appreciate that. Besides, he can work up a little orchestra later on. Go around tomorrow, Levine will give you the address, and ask for Mr. Lange. Be sure you say Lan-ge, in two syllables like that. He always insists on it." He looked from one to the other with a droll wink, and then burst into a mighty laugh, from which he abruptly extricated himself. Switching on a most serious expression, he stared at Lewis as if he were noticing him for the first time.

"The name is entirely too short," he said emphatically. "But we can fix it, we can fix it. How about adding something? Orlingoff? No, that won't do. Have to make it something Italian, you know. Antonini is one I've often used. Now when will you report, Antonini? Tomorrow, say, at three?"

Lewis nodded as if hypnotized. He looked toward Levine, but seeing him absorbed in sorting out papers, he took his leave with a muttered and self-conscious good-bye to Lustbader. As he went down the stairs, a feeling of complete weariness and indifference to everything overcame him. But he remembered, on his way home, to call up Bannerman, to find out whether Poldy had been there. He was told that Poldy had not been heard from all day.

4

The subway train ran out of the station, flashing sparks from the rear like a sudden bright excretion. Poldy stood on the platform looking after it ... listening to the wheels spinning themselves out in the distance, spinning themselves into a sharp needle of sound that went probing through his brain.

It seemed to him that everyone knew his purpose, everyone was waiting for it to happen ... walking impatiently around him, glancing at him slyly as they passed. He wanted to say to them, "Be patient ... in a little while..." Even the newsboy grew tired. He put down his papers angrily, slapped the back of his hands to his buttocks, and began to dance up and down on his heels. "Wait ... only wait," Poldy wanted to plead with him. "I've been afraid all day ... in a little while ... when the next train comes it will happen." And while he thought of these words, the newsboy looked at him as if he understood, and sat down on his papers and patiently watched the tracks.

Poldy wondered whether he had spoken out loud and the boy had really heard, or whether it was only a coincidence that he sat down that way and watched the tracks. It was strange. It was all part of the strange feeling that had come over him since the moment he left Lewis and continued his way alone ... a feeling that he could not tell any more what part of reality he dreamed to himself, made up as he went along, and what part actually existed. A painful feeling that he had entered into a waking dream, and that everything that happened ... faces he saw and words that he heard ... played up to it, like actors called on to improvise ... a dream that he was powerless to stop and could not escape from by waking. There were only unexpected moments when it was suddenly lifted from him; and then he would look around self-consciously, ashamed of what had happened in his fantasy, ashamed of what he had made the others say and do...

But now it seemed to be growing darker. He could feel the darkness hanging lower over his eyes each time, as if he were being slowly blindfolded. Everything was quiet. The noise of the trains and the clapping of turnstiles and the shouts of the newsboys had all stopped together. Nothing was left of it but the silent shuffling of feet around him, like the part of a parade where there is no music.

And now a tall negro carrying a monkey wrench came walking down the platform. He picked out one of the slot machines and began to pry it loose from the steel pillar. He turned, as he worked, with his cheek to the mirror, and Poldy could see his eye reflected. All around it there was heavy wrinkled flesh, and his eye nested snugly in the flesh, white and round as an egg. And when the negro looked down, he seemed to be covering the egg and laughing to himself because he had hidden it.

"When he is through he will put the slot machine on his head and bend his knees outward, and walk down the platform that way, frightening them..." and he smiled, knowing what would happen. But the newsboy turned to him severely.

"There's a train coming," the newsboy said.

"I can't hear it."

"There's a train coming."

"Let me alone ... I feel sleepy."

And Poldy closed his eyes and dozed off at once; but every time that his head seemed to fall into something which was cool and bottomless water, and then to be catapulted to the surface again, he would open his eyes and give a long, low whistle: "Did you see that one?" But the boy stood up as if he had just reminded himself of something. He picked up one of the papers and waved it over his head, turning himself slowly around under it. "Fourteen killed," he intoned, "fourteen killed..."

"You needn't turn around that way."

"Ah ... but watch this." Bubbles of saliva began to wink at the corners of his mouth, he curved the paper over his head for a sail and whirled himself faster and faster, crying to all the mirrors of the air: "Fourteen killed ... fourteen killed..." until they were caught in a network of voices, in the whirling deafening center of it, and every voice was calling in the same pitch and rhythm: "Fourteen killed..."

Poldy put his hands to his ears. "Stop them now," he said irritably. The boy stopped whirling at once and it was quiet again.

"Besides, fourteen what? It might be rabbits."

"There's a train coming..."

The whistle of the train sounded in the distance. His eyes grew blurred with a vision of wheels ... an imprint of wheels whirling wherever he turned, and in the hollow rim of each wheel a curve of light swinging, swishing itself gleefully to and fro. He shut his eyes, but with a cunning quick motion they began to rotate under his eyelids, swifter and swifter rotating in their narrow framework, until they beat against it with a fury of imprisoned motion ... until his head was set quivering with the impact, and his whole body fluttered back and forth in the air like some huge tuning fork. "Now ... now," the boy whispered ecstatically. But instead Poldy put his hand out and caught the steel pillar near him, he waited with fingers clamped to the shaft until the train passed. Again he saw it flash an excretion of light, he heard the wheels spinning themselves out in the distance. Then the wheels under his eyelids stopped turning, his body touched with something hard and rigid, was steady again ... nothing was left but a slow deliberate pulse in his head like part of a machine that has to swing itself still....

Poldy went to the bench and sat down. The newsboy followed, staring at him rapt and attentive, and once he thrust his cap back from his forehead with an excited motion.

"It won't happen," Poldy said humbly. "But there's a man walking on the tracks, it may happen to him."

"You were afraid."

"I'll buy a paper. Will that fix it?"

The boy handed him the paper without answering and walked away. He was almost out of sight when a wind blew his blouse out in back, as if he were flashing back an obscene gesture.

And now the man came strolling out of the tunnel. There was something queer about his face. All the features sagged into the right cheek, as if the face had been fluid once and congealed while it was being held at the wrong angle. He was very short and thin, and a large red can was attached to his side, like the strange cylinders that insects wear. He was filling it with papers, prying them out from the tiny crevices under the tracks, rubbing them for a moment between his fingers and slipping them away. But once he glanced up and saw that everyone was watching him. Then he seemed to be frightened and he crossed over to the platform and paced back and forth in front of it, peering into all the spaces underneath for a place where he could crawl in. There, where no one would see him, he would shift his cylinder to his back, fold his arms and legs under him and go to sleep....

But in a little while this man on the tracks was going to be run over. It was known beforehand to Poldy. He knew it by the way the man was standing ... in shoes that were too big for him, and turned out and sprawling away from each other ... the same way that the shoes looked in his dream: that a man had been run over and the crowd gathered to see him, and all they could see was his shoes sticking out from under the wheels, sprawling away from each other at a crazy angle. He knew it because he remembered the wheels ... how a curve of light sat swinging in each wheel, swishing itself gleefully to and fro with a foreknowledge of its prey.

So he turned to the old man sitting near him. "There's a fellow down there on the tracks who's going to be run over."

The old man did not answer.

"He looks Jewish," Poldy thought, "and he's a peddler. There's a fellow down there on the tracks who is going to be run over."

But the old man shifted his bundle and moved away. He had a handkerchief tied over his chin, and there was something bulging out underneath. His hand was trembling with palsy, and he held it close to his body and tilted his head to one side, listening to the trembling of his hand, as if to a very faint ticking. After a few minutes he looked at Poldy with a crafty sideways glance. "Do you hear it?" he asked.

Poldy heard it, and the sound of his palsy was so loud that it reverberated through the whole station, it vibrated in his ears, deafening him.

"Stop it!" he snapped.

The old man's eyes widened innocently. "Stop what?"

"That noise you're making with your hand."

"What noise?"

"I tell you it's making me deaf," Poldy retorted angrily, and he caught the old man's hand and held it in his; but under his palm he could feel it craftily vibrating, like a still thing that a little boy picks up, and it suddenly begins to wiggle. He dropped it then, and the old man put it near him again and went on listening to it.

"Besides, what have you under your handkerchief? Why is your chin covered that way? There must be something loathsome on it."

The old man fingered his chin and looked archly at him.

"There's a man down on the tracks who's going to be run over," Poldy said. "Ah ... I knew that would interest you."

"But how do you know?"

"By his shoes."

"By his shoes?"

"Exactly ... did you ever stop to notice your shoes just after you've slipped them off? They stand there at a crazy angle ... nobody ever walks that way...."

"I seem to remember something like that."

"Well, that's the way he's standing down there on the tracks, and that's how his shoes will look when they stick out from under the wheels."

"Indeed!" He looked admiringly at Poldy.

"Yes," Poldy continued. "You can see how the crowd shuffles around him, as if they're waiting for a tardy performer. They want to see him turn his feet out like a clown when he's lying under the wheels ... and his face will be fluid again..."

"Fluid?"

"Ah ... there's the whistle..."

They stood up and went to the edge of the platform, and the old man's fingers were thrumming his handkerchief, as if he wanted to tear it away. People drifted here and there, uncertain where it would happen. The train whistled in short frantic bleats, but the man on the tracks was standing quietly before it, looking up at it with infinite wonder on his face, and once he lifted his hand and flapped it weakly. That was comical, as if a timid patient were trying to wave the dentist away, when he takes up a new instrument. Meanwhile the old man was scurrying around on the edge of the crowd. Poldy took his arm and drew him aside.

"Don't be excited," he advised. "I've a riddle."

"Yes?"

"Why are people always standing on the edge of a crowd and thinking they see something?"

With his free arm the old man gesticulated frantically towards the train.

"Look ... look at that..." Poldy continued. "It's much more fun back here. Just stay here and see how their buttocks quiver. You can tell everything that's happening by watching their buttocks."

But now the people seemed to be going off in different directions, and the old man looked at Poldy in alarm. "What is it ... what is it? Has nothing happened?"

"Wait ... only wait. It's teasing them for a while. Did you ever see anyone holding a piece of candy in the air and teasing the children with it?"

"Of course ... of course."

"They don't know where to stand, because the candy is being waved around all the time. That's how it is."

The old man wagged his finger playfully against his chin. "Ah ... I see, I see..." he murmured. But now Poldy noted with terror that the old man could not stop wagging his finger, but that it went faster and faster, almost tearing away the handkerchief. And he knew that he was waking at last from the dream; for he remembered that in every dream there is the moment when one of the actors will not go on with it; he keeps doing the same thing over and over, and the dreamer is forced to wake up. But because of his disobedience, that actor in the dream is still with him when he awakes, masked with reality and slyly arranging his speech so that it sounds like a continuation of the dream. So Poldy awoke, and found that he was standing next to the old man, and that he had just stepped aside to let him see the accident better. And the old man was looking down into the tracks with a sorrowful face, and murmuring: "Ah, I see ... I see." Meanwhile his finger took the handkerchief from his chin, and there was nothing underneath but his beard. "And he was a young man, too," he added softly, turning to Poldy. "You noticed him on the tracks, didn't you? We were sitting there on the bench."

Poldy nodded.

"And his shoes too big for him. Ach! the poor fellow!"

And it was all as he had foreseen. The shoes were sticking out from under the train and sprawling away from each other, as if someone had placed them carelessly outside the door; and now he thought the old man turned to him accusingly, as though in his dream they had been in some secret place together, and willed that it should happen.

"A young man, wasn't he?"

"Yes, a young man."

"Didn't have time to get away?"

"I don't know..."

"Did he hear the whistle?"

"No..."

A policeman came and ordered them all to move back against the wall. They retreated before him, walking backward with their eyes fixed on the tracks as if they were hypnotized. "Yes, watch ... watch..." Poldy told himself bitterly. "It will all be this way when it happens to you. You thought of suicide quickly but you will see little by little what it is like. You catch something in your hand quickly, but you open your hand slowly to see what it is...."

But now for a time there was nothing to do. It was like a badly-written play that lags ... new players drifted in at regular intervals in response to a silent unsuspected cue. They made desultory gestures and spoke sometimes. The newsboy came running the whole length of the platform. He sat down on his bundle of papers, put his hands on his knees and rode them back and forth, never once looking at the tracks. He seemed to care only to sit there, riding his hands back and forth on his knees. The brakeman came out of the train and jumped down on the tracks, and looked at the shoes for a long time, and then at the wheels and then at the train, involved in strange calculations of his own. At length his face grew puzzled, as if he could not fathom the relation between all these things. He took off his gloves and dusted them against the platform. Then he leaped up cheerfully and hailed the policeman. A man appeared from nowhere, swinging a lantern and shouting: "Back her up ... back her up."

"Here, here ... what's the hurry?" the policeman called back. "It'll keep."

A soldier stepped out of the crowd and planted himself near the policeman. "Say ... perhaps he's living yet," he said.

"Brother, that's an idea."

"Sure ... you never can tell."

The policeman winked at the others and burst into a hearty laugh. They moved nearer and some who were going away turned back, looking eagerly from the policeman to the soldier, as if they were two performers whose repartee would lead up to a joke for all of them.

"You never know what you can pick up living," the soldier began.

"No, you don't."

The old man kept twitching Poldy's coat. "He lies dead," he whispered. "He lies dead and they quarrel."

"Strangest thing how they keep on living ... I've seen it."

"You certainly have," the policeman agreed cordially. He had been facing the crowd, but now he wheeled around to the soldier and raised his voice. "Well, now, suppose he is living..."

The soldier stared at him, completely entranced by the finality of that question. But to Poldy, looking intently at the feet under the wheels, it seemed as if there was a slight movement. The right foot seemed to turn itself inward, with the indifferent movement of a very tired sleeper. "Then if I dream it again tonight," he thought, "I must revise the position of the shoes." But now the old man was twitching Poldy's coat again. His face was pale and he fingered his beard nervously. "The train's moving back," he whispered. They had been coaxing the train backward, and it was moving away reluctantly. The man with the lantern swung it into the air, and the train stood still. Then they ran to the edge of the platform, swift as a litter of kittens when the plate is uncovered, and turned away again, each with the memory of it on his face. The old man mounted the stairs with Poldy. He tucked the handkerchief over his chin and went away. The newsboy ran down the street waving his paper and shouting: Fourteen killed ... There was one thought in Poldy's mind that came to him fluently and impersonally, as if he were reading it: he had gone down into the subway to commit suicide, but the death of the man on the tracks had given him a reprieve. There was one word that he kept repeating to himself as he walked ... tomorrow.

CHAPTER II

1

It was several weeks after his interview with Lewis that Levine stepped out of his office into a street swept with wind and rain. It was welcome to him, tired out by an afternoon spent in unraveling the evidence in a case that was pre-empting the headlines of all papers. He ducked against the oblique advance of the rain, buttoned his coat across his throat, and resolved to walk the three miles to Bannerman's studio. Poldy had not been heard from since the day he left the hospital, and Levine was going to look at his pictures, his curiosity about them heightened by the fact of Poldy's disappearance. By looking at the pictures, Levine thought, he might be able to predict whether Poldy would return or not; though he could hardly have told what would be the cue for this revelation, what evidence in the pictures would guide him. There was, moreover, a certain portrait that he wanted to see, in the presence of which he thought he might decide things that were troubling him, that he mused over as he strode forward against the rain.

The streets were deserted. Walking alone in his long rain-coat, and with his head and huge shoulders thrust forward, Levine looked like a mythical figure doomed to appear in storms when all others are indoors. He walked rapidly, save when his glasses became too wet and a temporary blindness overtook him. Then he had to seek the shelter of a doorway to take them off and dry them. It was almost dark when he knocked at Bannerman's door, and found his friend working in bathrobe and stocking feet. Bannerman turned to him, revealing a forehead that was wet and shining from cold applications.

"Levine," he announced, "I'm a chart ... a regular chart." He paused and gingerly fished out a napkin from the bowl of water that stood under his easel. "I'm going to hire myself out to a clinic. I'm convinced that medical science has a great deal to learn from me. And why am I a chart? Because I can tell where every nerve is located by the pains I have. For instance, why does it suddenly catch me here? Right here, on this particular spot, whenever I put my foot down? Because there's a nerve there, of course, nearer the surface than the others." He lifted his foot and laid his finger with great precision on the tip of his heel. "May be a nerve there that they don't know about as yet. Never in the left foot, you understand, but always in the right. Now that must be significant. Or take this ... the fleshy part of the arm up here. There's a nerve here that's specially vicious. How do I know? It just barks whenever I move. As for my back, there's a whole mob of them there. Yes, sir ... a tribe of them. And one of them acts like a streak of lightning. Now watch this." He ducked his head forward and held his face contorted for a moment. "Aha ... there it is," he called out triumphantly, and demonstrated with his hand. "From the right shoulder blade across to the left ribs, then straight around my middle losing itself in the navel. I don't mention my head. That's entirely too complicated. But God! What a freak I am. Come in, ladies and gentlemen, and see the human chart. An illuminated chart, lit up by pains. What do you say, Levine, do you know of a good clinic that I can hire myself out to?"

"Nothing but your cervical plexus," Levine answered, taking off his hat and contemplating its wet surface. "But if your devotion to science is so keen, why not donate your carcass after death? It will mean much more to them."

"Now as to that," Bannerman lifted his finger admonishingly, "I don't know. I'm sensitive about it. No, I shouldn't like it at all. But here I am, quite willing to give my living carcass. I'd stand up before them and say: Gentlemen, watch! In another moment a pain will light up somewhere else, and you may draw your conclusions accordingly. Then we would all wait breathlessly, and suddenly, when it catches me here in the forearm my hand would fly to the spot, and they'd all say: Ah, there! ... there must be something right there. And they would all fall on their notebooks and write: Right forearm, peculiarly vicious; twinges every two minutes. Don't you think it's a brilliant plan?"

"I think it's plain exhibitionism. But incidentally, if it gratifies you at all to know it, you're probably developing a first-class case of neuritis. If I were you I'd give up painting for a while."

"Hm ... neuritis," Bannerman said suspiciously. "What are the symptoms?"

"Oh no ... oh no," Levine chortled. "You don't get me to tell the symptoms. People develop too much pride about such matters. A woman that I had for a client once got very confidential with me, and came into my office one day, sick ... sick as a dog. This was wrong with her and that was wrong with her, and half a dozen other things, that she recounted for a half-hour in a heartbroken voice." Levine stopped to wring his hat into the bowl where Bannerman's wet napkin was floating. "Well, by the time she was through I decided she was a perfect case of catarrhal enteritis. Yes, sir, I built up a beautiful case for her, by picking a symptom here and a symptom there—those that I needed, you understand—and discarding others that didn't help the case. And then, when we were all through and she was quite enthusiastic, a dreadful thing happened. 'Do you have diarrhœa?' I asked. 'Are your excreta green in color?' No ... no ... that wasn't the case at all. Conditions were quite otherwise in fact. 'Very well, then,' I said, 'it isn't catarrhal enteritis at all.' Would you believe it ... she was completely broken up! She wilted, she was crushed. I tried to fix it for her when I saw how disappointed she was. We searched together among all the other symptoms, those we had discarded, to see whether there was anything we had overlooked that might fit in. There wasn't, of course. Her case was completely ruined. 'Madam,' I said, 'go to a specialist. This matter is very complicated.' And she did, and she called me up some weeks later, and she was just chirping with happiness. 'He says,' she said over the telephone, 'it's a perfect case of an infected liver.' Emphasis on the perfect, you understand. Yes, my boy, it was so perfect that she died of it a month later. Why she had to. What's that you're making?"

Bannerman covered the object he was working on. "It's a doll," he said sheepishly.

"Really? Well, why not?"

"Oh, I wouldn't bother with a thing like this if I weren't called upon to do it. It's for a bazar. Several well-known artists have been asked to make dolls and I'm among them. Do you know about the Young People's Philanthropic League? It's a wonderful idea. No one can belong unless they're under twenty-three. The idea," he concluded sententiously, "is to enlist the youth of the country."

"Yes ... I see. Some old procuress runs it, I suppose?"

"What do you mean?"

"There are some women," Levine began, striding about the studio and whirling his arms in an effort to dry himself, "old women, who, finding that they can no longer solicit men, compromise by soliciting youth. Young people become a sex to them ... a disgusting vice. I'm right, that an old woman runs it?"

Bannerman looked thoughtfully before him. "Well, there's Mrs. Wainwright," he said slowly, "a sort of preserved woman. But come to think of it now, she does give you the feeling of being old as mother earth, just because she's so preserved. Incidentally, Levine, you're sprinkling water on that picture. There's the faucet in the bathroom that I use as a hatrack."

"Yes, I saw one of them the other day," Levine continued after a temporary retirement to the bathroom. "I was standing on the steps of the library and she came sailing along with her victims, and mounted the steps and took out all sorts of banners and posters, and prepared for some sort of demonstration. Whew! ... how she reeked of being old. And in the midst of it, while she was fluttering around and giving directions, she stopped before one of the rather better-looking girls, and chirps out: What I like about you young people is your youngness. Yes, take my word for it. Whenever a movement has the word youth in it, be sure one of these old procuresses runs it."

Bannerman continued to look thoughtful for a while and then sighed by way of dismissing the problem. "Well, anyway," he said, "they're running this bazar and all the well-known artists are making dolls for it. No specifications as to what sort of dolls ... so I had a very original idea. Now the others, I'm sure, are all making dolls ... the usual pretty little girls. I," Bannerman continued, removing the cloth from his work with a spectacular flourish, "am making a man-doll. Levine, what do you say to that?"

Levine gave a long appreciative whistle. "Not bad! Not bad at all," he said crisply, holding the doll at arm's length. "Complete ... horribly complete. Shoes, laces, socks, tie, and ... can it be? Cuff buttons. How did you manage it all, Bannerman? It's marvelous. There isn't a thing omitted. Marvelous ... these little buttons in the crutch of his pants."

Flushing at Levine's praise, Bannerman took the doll and balanced it tenderly on his palm. "It's quite an idea, isn't it, to make a man-doll. I thought it would make a hit. And when I thought of doing it, I decided to make it complete, as you say. No point to it otherwise."

Levine was studying it with narrowed eyes. "Bannerman," he began, "come to think of it, you've hit off one of the major faults of our American civilization."

Bannerman nodded approval.

"I mean the complete degeneration of dolls. Do you realize what has happened to dolls in this country? How completely they've been feminized? A degenerate fate, a terrible fate for a noble and ancient species. Take any of the dolls of ancient civilizations. We find they are always man-dolls, and always beautifully complete. But here in America, the doll—"

"Precisely," Bannerman finished. "In fact that's how I got the idea. I saw some Chinese dolls in a window, male of the species, and something of what you said struck me then and there. It's a beginning ... a humble beginning."

"And what is the purpose of the doll?" Levine continued with a rhetorical wave of his hand. "To throw the civilized being into relief by means of miniature. Very good. Yet what will excavators two thousand years from now, let us say, be able to learn about Americans today, if there should be only dolls to go by? After a while, having found nothing but women dolls, they will exclaim with horror: What, were there no men in those times?"

Bannerman, absorbed in adjusting an infinitesimal belt around the waist of his man-doll, nodded cordially at Levine's harangue. The pins in his mouth made him pucker his lips and scowl. "I can't talk while I'm doing this," he announced thickly, as soon as there was only one pin left in his mouth. "If you don't mind, Levine, play by yourself a while. If you want to see Poldy's pictures, they're off in that corner. Truth is, I've never taken the wrappings off. You'll have to undress them yourself."

Except for occasional grunts from Bannerman, when operations on the doll became too difficult, and the sound of Levine's movements as he unwound the cloth from Poldy's pictures, there was silence in the room. Levine worked awkwardly, making too many motions around the canvas, and all but stepping into one of the pictures. As they emerged he stood them against the wall, scarcely looking at them, reserving them for a time when they could be contemplated at leisure. "What sort of a chap was this Poldy?" he asked.

Bannerman, with his lips shut severely on the pins, looked at Levine and shrugged his shoulders.

"I thought he came here to paint."

Bannerman nodded. After a while he removed the pins, putting his hand to his mouth with a motion as if he had just eaten a cherry and wanted to get rid of the pit. "Look at his portrait," he said, noisily sucking back a thread of saliva. "He did the usual self-portrait. Not a bad likeness, either. About the only one of his pictures that he did well. Personally, I don't think much of a painter who doesn't do women."

Standing away from it, his head to one side, Levine studied Poldy's self-portrait for a long time. "Rather good-looking," he pronounced slowly. "Yes, quite good-looking. The dark and romantic type."

"Too much jaw-bone," Bannerman said.

"A little, perhaps. Makes the face weak ... too Christ-like."

"Yes, I think myself he was the weak sort." Bannerman's voice came muffled and distant from the closet in which he was rummaging. "He used to tear in here at any time of the day ... or night, for that matter, to paint something that was on his mind. Now one never has to be so urgent about things. The results are always better if you take it easy. Then there wasn't any scheme or central idea in his work as far as I could figure out ... no vision. Then take his peculiar attitude towards his money. It sort of frightened him. He went pale if you mentioned it, looked almost guilty..." Bannerman's voice grew fainter and trailed off into silence. He emerged and took up the man-doll again, his face once more severe and concentrated above it. "The hair," he mused in the interval between pins, "will give me a lot of trouble. Whether it should be straight or curly..."

"Make him bald."

Bannerman continued to work in silence. "Straight will make him too ferocious," he mused again, "curly is too effeminate. Did you say make him bald?"

"Make him bald, I said."

"But why?"

"Because," and Levine felt his own hair ruefully, "baldness is the formal hair-comb of the civilized American, isn't it? It's always been a sign of civilization to do something decorative with the hair, so he solves the problem by letting it fall out. Behold in me a living example." He stroked his hair, rubbing the thinning surfaces with a woebegone look. "Bannerman," he sighed, "take my word for it. There's nothing more formal, more civilized than baldness."

"Curly..." Bannerman said wistfully. For a long time he held the doll on his palm, his eye fixed tenderly and speculatively on its tiny celluloid scalp. Then he put it down and began to stretch himself to a loud vocal accompaniment, in the midst of which he paused abruptly to pluck off the little white threads that clung to his bathrobe. These he rolled between his fingers into a pill of perfect roundness, which he carefully mounted on a wooden cube.

"Personally," he began, carrying the cube aloft with sacrificial solemnity, "I don't think much of painters who don't do women. Now a woman's body is all you need. There isn't any arrangement of planes or masses that you can't achieve with a little ... research. And the chances for composition are endless ... positively endless. And then, what's equally important—in addition to pure composition, you have the woman there too. Instead of—" He shuddered and looked fearfully in the direction of Poldy's pictures, "oranges!"

Levine did not answer, too absorbed in unwrapping the pictures, and Bannerman put the cube down on a table in the center of the room and stepped back, surveying the arrangement with his head on one side. In the midst of his survey, however, his face suddenly contorted itself into a comic expression of pain, he collapsed groaning into a chair. "I swear to you, Levine, I swear that two muscles changed places just then. Oh lord, oh lord ... why do my muscles play leap frog inside of me?"

"Where was it?"

"Here ... right here in the shoulder blade."

"Yes, just where it would be. Take my advice," Levine said, setting one of Poldy's pictures against the wall, "and give up painting for a while."

For a long time Bannerman sat there, lifting his hand from time to time to his shoulder, with a fearful expression. He rose after a while and walked about the room, picking his steps carefully, as if he had the pains nicely balanced and did not want to jar them. Then he fetched an apple from out of the confusion of his paint tubes, and sat down again, holding it in his hand. When Levine looked round in the fading light, he saw Bannerman's plump white fingers vaguely and brightly outlined against the apple, and for a moment he had the feeling that the fingers were a five-petalled calyx, part of the fruit, and that Bannerman would have to pry them away. He felt sorry for his friend. Though there was too much flesh to Bannerman, it did not barricade him in, but seemed rather to be porous ... to leave him more exposed than others. And he tried to carry it off so gallantly, his head ticking from side to side when he walked, a light accompaniment to the major lilt of his body. It struck Levine for the first time, when he saw his friend sitting there with the apple, that he had always to be holding something; and after the core had been slowly and analytically consumed, he observed how Bannerman sat and rubbed his finger-tips lightly against each other, the auto-erotic play of his fingers when there was nothing to hold. But at length Bannerman rose and gathered his bath-robe around him. He announced that he would take a bath, in a tone of finality which seemed to indicate that this would solve everything. Soon sounds of splashing and singing emerged from the bathroom.

Left alone with the pictures, Levine was able to look at them more carefully. None of them had names, he noticed, and only one bore a signature almost illegibly scrawled ... Leopold Crayle. Another, the profile of a woman with dark flowing hair and protruding teeth, had writing on it: Hold this upside down. He did this, and so regarded, the profile took on a strange quality, the teeth growing out of the flesh like shining white petals. Levine stared at it for a long time.

Besides this there was a picture of three oranges floating against a black background that might have been a curtain; their surfaces were of a bright unnatural yellow, and in one there had been an attempt to present a mottled skin, but all that it looked like was a rash of green dots. There was a boy leaning out of a window, his hair of a fiery red; a landscape in the midst of which rose a mountain shaped like a pyramid, sculpted into steps on one side, and a tall white-robed figure standing on the third step. On the top of the mountain a goat-like animal stood with one foot lifted, and at the base three-quarters of a sun was visible, with rays of every bright color. There was a strange animal floating through a rain of stars, with five red-colored teats arranged between its dainty curved legs. And the last picture showed a group of kitchen objects on a dazzling white table-cloth. All these Levine looked at. He saw that the drawing was bad and the paint laid on thick and uneven. Yet there was something in the pictures that held his attention. In the darkness of the room a dazzling brightness of color radiated from them, it seemed that all the yellow in the world had converged on the three oranges. Though he could not guess at the meaning of the mountain and the goat-like animal on top, or the strange creature with floating legs that went through the sky, he saw that the artist had caught the brightness of things, seeing as a child does, perhaps ... dazzling color before shape or meaning can be discerned ... and that the sense of this brightness had been so urgent and terrible that he had forced his hand into drawing it. And then there was that other picture which Levine had come specially to see, the one of Marah Howard. Here too there was a brightness to be caught, but not to be snared so easily by color. As Levine studied the picture, holding it on his knees and peering at it in the dim light, he saw that Poldy had faithfully remembered the small child-like features, and faithfully traced the perfect oval of her face. But the eyes looked out at him too brightly. He knew this was wrong, he knew by heart the calm glance of those eyes, that always seemed to have just alighted with the simple and indifferent movement of a bird. Her hair was straight, falling away from each side of the swift part, and curling up at the ends; and it had pleased Poldy to paint it in separate sheaves, so that she seemed to be wearing long brown petals drooping downward. Studying this caprice of the artist, Levine realized how much more faithful it was to her than any literal portraiture. In the formal yet child-like headdress, the two natures in her were expressed ... that mixture of child and woman which seemed to be reflected also in her body ... in the slight flexible torso and the slow-moving limbs. It seemed always as if she had just paused from swift motion, as if a heaviness were creeping into her limbs, a transformation growing on her from the earth; her body, like that of the maidens in mythology, always on the point of beginning its tree-life. This too Poldy must have observed. But in the picture there was no hint of that fluent motion which her body possessed, whether still or moving; the figure stood heavily in the canvas, with one hand needlessly, foolishly upraised. In an access of anger at this gesture, Levine put the portrait from him, resentful that Poldy had clutched at this brightness, feeling a sudden revulsion for the pictures that stood before him. Decidedly Poldy would not come back. There was nothing here to recall him, perhaps he had even forgotten the paintings. And even if he remembered, yet what was there to come back to? Here, for a moment, Poldy had tried to possess the bewildering world in some way, to create a unity for himself ... and there were only absurd fragments. His mind dwelled in the shadowed periphery of things ... what center was sufficiently bright to lure him and hold him? For a time, perhaps, he had seen in Marah the central brightness of all things, he had probably come one night in haste to paint her, to possess her in that way along with whatever else dazzled him. Again Levine studied the portrait, with its intently staring eyes and petal hair, and the grotesque admonishing gesture, and his gorge rose with anger against Poldy. And yet, he reflected bitterly, had he himself any right to possession? Not, certainly, by that act which constitutes the technical ownership of a woman, not by any token except his own desire. That he should desire her physically! There was, to Levine, something infinitely humiliating in this, a sense that he had been tricked ... tricked into a wish that, by the profoundest standards of his being, he knew to be false to himself ... yet from which there was no escape until it had been fulfilled. And he knew that the whole burden of it rested with him. She was too secure in herself either to desire him or repel him. She would never give him a sign, imprisoned as she was in the perfect balance of her nature ... the balancing of mind and body against each other to the point of complete stillness. He knew that she could only take him passively, when the time came that he willed it.

Then why did he hesitate? What was it that caused him to hesitate, torturing himself day after day, ashamed when he thought of it, and unable to put it from his mind? It was a time for pairing off, he reflected. There was nothing else to do in the world, of any importance. It was a time when men and women paired off like children playing on the shore, saying: "Here we will dig a hole and see what comes into our cup." So that each couple caught from the sea a tiny circle of brackish water. "It will be brackish..." Levine said to himself, and the word satisfied him for a moment and seemed to make things clearer.

Bitterly pondering these things, Levine walked back and forth in the dark studio, taking a zigzag path through the statues and pictures. Meanwhile he was conscious of a presence in the room, something watching him with a cunning infinitesimal eye. He stooped down in the dark and looked at Bannerman's man-doll. "Yes, complete..." he said again, "terribly complete..." Holding it gingerly in his fingers, he carried the doll to the mantle and turned it with its back to the room. Tired now and bewildered, he sat down in an old rocker and shut his eyes. And now he remembered Poldy again, and what he had written ... hold this upside down. In those words he beheld all the vastness of Poldy's dream. He heard also their infinite pleading.

2

Early next morning Levine was awakened by the telephone. "Be up," a voice commanded. "I'll be over in ten minutes with important news." He recognized the voice of his colleague, a slight lisp in it that always flashed before his mind the vision of a pink tongue struggling against large teeth. Reluctantly Levine started to dress, feeling stiff from a sleepless night, and unequal to the impending interview. When he was ready he went to the door and unlocked it, then sat down at the desk, his hands clasped patiently before him. And this fore-handed unlocking of the door, this posture of waiting at the desk, were strange to him. Strange also to find that he could not bring himself to say come in, when he heard the knocking. Clandon knocked several times, waited, coughed, rattled the knob and discovered he could enter. "Don't you ever lock this door?" he asked as he hung up his hat and sat down opposite Levine. He took a newspaper from his pocket and laid it folded before him. Unconsciously imitating Levine's immobile pose, he clasped his hands over it.

"Levine," he said impressively, "the Eldridge case is cleared up. Last night at 8:55 Smith confessed. Out of a clear sky ... suddenly called for his lawyer and sat down on the bed and recited it from beginning to end. Out of a clear sky, mind you, after he'd been holding out so long that some people almost began to think he was innocent. Look at that." He unfolded the paper and held it up before him like a bulletin. "'Smith confesses under attorney's cross-fire.'"

Levine looked at the headlines. "What of it?" he asked.

"What of it! That's a silly question, it seems to me." Clandon's face emerged above the paper with lifted eyebrows. "Can't you see that if Smith confessed, Konig is likely to do it, too? They catch it from each other. Why, it's—it's tremendously important," he spluttered, his face reddening. "It will shorten the prosecution by months."

Levine lowered his eyes, as if the headlines that Clandon held before him were too bright.

"Shorten it by months, I say, a question of months. The best thing that could happen just now. Once Konig hears of it, he'll tell, all right. You see if the contagion doesn't get him. Yes ... nothing, I repeat, nothing that we could think of could have been more fortunate for us at this moment."

"Not that," he continued briskly, unfolding a packet of legal papers, "I haven't just the right questions for the next grilling. Sat up all night fixing them, and somewhere among them, you can be sure, is the question ... the one that always betrays them. You never can tell which one it is, but it's always there. Remember, Levine, what I always say when things begin to drag. Keep turning corners. Never go straight ahead. Keep turning corners. Suddenly you'll turn the right corner and find what you want. Keep asking questions. Suddenly you'll find the right question. Read them." He handed the packet to Levine, and waited with his head thrown back, studying the ceiling. "Good, don't you think?" he asked, when the papers were returned to him and he was folding them back in his wallet. Levine did not answer, and midway in his manœuvers Clandon paused, his head half turned away, looking at Levine with a coquettish smile. "Good, don't you think?"

"I think they're quite good."

"Rather ... rather. Something there that's sure to trip him up. We've got to make more of a to-do, I decided, over his failure to mention the money he borrowed. The big question is, the crux of the whole situation is: Why did he hide the fact that he borrowed money from her?"

Levine mused. "Four dollars ... the sum was so small he was probably ashamed of it."

"Ah, but that's where you're wrong," Clandon snapped. "Just where you're wrong! Because the sum was so small, why should he hide it? Why? unless there was a pretty good reason for it. Now if he had borrowed four hundred dollars, or forty, or even fourteen, let us say—yes, even so small a sum as fourteen, then one could understand a certain desire to conceal it. He doesn't want us to know how far he was indebted to his victim. Now that's logical. But when a man goes out of his way to conceal the fact that he borrowed four dollars, out of his way, mind you..." he finished by shaking his head solemnly.

"I'll tell you what," Levine said, rousing himself with too much energy from the reverie into which he had fallen while Clandon spoke. "We'll go over the questions again this afternoon. I'll be at your office at three, how's that?"

"You just saw them."

"Yes, but I want to read them more carefully, that's all. Just now, when you handed them to me, I merely glanced at them. The truth is..." he paused and looked imploringly at Clandon, trying to placate his fierce stare, "I merely counted them. Thirty, aren't there?"

"Thirty!" the word clicked. Clandon paused, his hat suspended above him, arrested in its descent on the thin yellowish hair. In that posture he stood and surveyed Levine, his eyes moving deliberately from the bright hexagonal glasses down to Levine's red slippers. "Nothing to change, I hope?"

"No, I think not. In fact I'm sure of it. I just want to look them over when I'm less tired."

"As you say," Clandon answered with elaborate courtesy. "At three, then, in my office. You might, however, read the account of Smith's confession before that. Only for Smith read Konig. 'Konig confesses under attorney's cross-fire.' How does that sound to you?" His voice came back in an indrawn falsetto. "Try it over ... try it over," he sang from the doorway.

Levine took the paper and began to read; but just as Clandon was disappearing, he looked up as if reminded of something.

"Konig can't confess," he said sharply, "unless he's guilty."

The door was hastily shut and Clandon turned and stared at him. "Do you doubt it?" he asked softly.

"I don't know..."

A perceptible time elapsed before Clandon spoke again, with forefinger wagging impressively. "All I can say, Levine, all I can say, is that such an attitude on your part makes the prosecution of the case extremely difficult. Besides, it's unheard of. I might say it foredooms us to defeat. It would be better to resign now, Levine, than to go on in this spirit. But fortunately ... fortunately for us, I know he is guilty."

"How do you know?"

Again Clandon looked at Levine, curiously, as if his friend had suddenly changed color before his eyes. "By the evidence," he snapped, and stopped. The tip of his tongue struggled ineffectually against his teeth, and above this struggle his eyes looked at Levine with mute reproach. At last he turned and slammed the door behind him.

* * * * * * *

Levine put the paper away from him with an expression of infinite disgust. There was a tightening in his throat, as if each detail that he had been reading had crammed him too full. He was not interested in the confession, he read almost without grasping the meaning of the sentences. What struck him was the routine of things ... how, once Smith had announced a desire to confess, one step followed inevitably on the other. It seemed as if a machinery was set in motion over which no one had any control, and that there was no end or purpose to it, and yet the motions had to start at a certain cue and could not stop themselves. It was this nausea with the routine of it that Levine felt now, that made him put the paper aside with the swift angry movement of one who has suddenly had enough.

He rose to walk off his anger. Yes, Clandon was a fool, he reflected, with his turning the right corner, his theory of the question. In his own time a man confessed. Nothing that others could do to him could hasten that time. Had there not been the case, some time ago, of Edward Reddick ... who, a year after others had been tried for his crime and acquitted, had written to the police announcing himself as the murderer? And when they refused to heed it, had he not come in person and proved to them step by step that he was guilty? Because, Levine told himself, a man can be glutted with his crime; he can have too much of it to keep to himself, and when that time came he vomited it out, and then one said he confessed. Glutted ... that was the word to remember ... and strangely enough, with that word his irritation passed. He sat down on the bed, and feeling calm again, began to take off his slippers and change into his shoes. He remembered now how Clandon had looked just before he turned and slammed the door. Those eyes glaring fiercely at him above the struggling tongue and teeth ... what were they like? You might think of the prow of a ship with a struggling of waves at its base, and two lights staring steadfastly above them. Clandon's eyes were the lights and his tongue and teeth churned under them. The pity of it ... that Clandon had been unable to say what he wanted. Levine smiled to himself as he finished tying his shoes, deftly tightening the bows.

But he was still bending over when the telephone rang again. The sudden anger that filled him projected him across the room, but there he stopped as if paralyzed. He seemed to be trying to speak to the instrument above the anger in his throat and the noise of the ringing, and at last the words came harshly from him.... "What do you want ... what do you want of me?" An expression of defiance settled on his face, he stared at the telephone as if to show it that he would brazen out the ringing. And not until it had stopped did he turn away, to lie on the bed feeling ill and exhausted from his paroxysm. For the time that he lay there his mind was a complete void, until a question, sounding distinctly in the room as though someone were speaking it, made him sit up again. Who is glutted? ... the question said.

Yes, how strange that he had not understood before this that the word applied to himself. And having found the word, one had, he reflected, already found the solution. It was clear that he could not go on with his work. The steps he must take were simple and inevitable: first to see Clandon and tell him that he would resign from the Konig case ... then he could reflect on the next move. Perhaps to go away. That too was obvious. But where and for what purpose? Well, later he could answer those questions. It was sufficient now to know that he must go away, escape somewhere. It was foolish, foolish to talk only of criminals confessing. There was a time when everyone became glutted with what he was doing. Now it was his own turn to confess...

Then he must call Clandon to cancel the three o'clock appointment. With that the solution began immediately. But then what reason to give? What could he say, so that Clandon would not come around to protest? Why not go there at three and count the questions again? Levine lifted the receiver, keeping his thumb on the hook. He held it to his ear for a moment, and then put it back, softly, as though someone might overhear him. Suddenly all his anger was concentrated on Clandon. It was Clandon who bound him to everything, who stood before him blocking the way to escape, with his tongue and teeth churning foolishly in his face. Again Levine made an effort to call him, clenching his hand around the stem of the telephone as if he would crush it. A voice kept asking for the number, and he listened, trying to think of the number, unable to recall it, though a moment before it had been in his mind. Then very softly, in fear of being overheard by the voice, he put the receiver back. He spoke out loud: Sit down ... sit down, you fool, and think...

What was he doing ... what was happening to him? Think.... But he did not think. He was only aware of himself sitting at the desk and resting his head on his hands ... he could only recall everything he had done since Clandon left, with a sudden sense of the strangeness of his behavior and a realization of his loneliness—the loneliness of his anger which no one saw. Now he felt like someone groping in a dark room, who becomes aware, because of the darkness, of all the gestures he makes ... stretching his arms in front of him, letting his hand crawl along the table, frowning and pursing his lips. In a dark room ... who could see him or hear? Twice he had spoken out loud...

And only a moment ago the solution seemed so clear ... Then finding the right word, Levine reflected bitterly, was not enough. Now, having come to the end of all words, he longed for unconsciousness, for a way to forget himself, even if it was only being absorbed in some casual trifling thing that was near him. In his childhood, he recalled, this had always been the solution ... the tired drifting reverie that came when his passion was over. And now, remembering this, he raised his head and stared before him, and let himself become absorbed with the pattern of the wall-paper, tracing the intricate winding of it ... until for a while he did forget himself. Then he found something else ... the two gold oblongs in the wall, each with its black electric socket; and for the first time he noted that they were close to each other, one oblong put in vertically and the other horizontally ... and merely noting this fact gave him a curious indifferent pleasure. And then he seemed to see Bannerman standing near them, as if it were a picture he had painted, and Bannerman waved his hands at the electric plugs and said: "Well, what do you think of that?" After which Bannerman stepped back and put his head on one side and continued: "Good, isn't it! You see the idea ... I'll explain it to you. There are two women and they're both fat. Only one is fat latitudinally, and the other is fat longitudinally. It is," Bannerman concluded profoundly, "the idea of the picture."

Then Levine's reverie shifted to Marah ... He thought of her sleeping; her dancing body, having taken all its poses while it was awake, lying straight and still now in a negation of them ... in a gesture that was an erasure of all dancing. He saw the straight limbs with their perfectly carved cheek of muscle, blue-gold with hair and veins; and the faint line of the thighs, where the thighs are cupped in an ancient attitude of prayer. Her body lay immobile, no other pattern to it than its own intrinsic lines. Her body lay remote from him and unattainable ... and, having come to this word, Levine knew that his thoughts had reached their completion. And again he tried to assign the blame ... whether it was his own fault, the fear—no, the faith—that it would taste brackish to him; or whether it was the perfect circle of Marah's nature, as yet so shut-in and complete that nothing could enter it ...

And again finding no answer to this question, he gave himself over to the story of how they had met ... a story that he told himself often, hoping to find some comfort in it, a little assurance that they were in some way fated to each other, because of the strange and devious way in which they had met. But here a voice said with sarcastic inflection, "Strange and devious?" And Levine had to stop and explain patiently that for him to have acted impulsively was indeed strange and devious. "Over-emphasis, then," the voice said sharply, adding, "she is merely the foil for your impulse." He smiled bitterly in acknowledgment, admitting that it was true he had never seen her clearly ... But rather than go astray any further in these thoughts, he gave himself over to the story, beginning with that hot crowded day when he had been walking through the streets ... so tired that he seemed to move on the larger propelling motion of the crowd, rather than by his own efforts.

Merely for a place to rest he had entered a theatre, and spent the first numbers in accustoming his eyes to the dark, uneasy in the vast auditorium until he could discern the balconies and arched dome; and the faint outline of faces all around him, that looked so listlessly, so somnolently at everything that passed before them. By an effort he concentrated on the stage. Dancers were moving there, black silhouettes that seemed intent on a business of their own, indifferent to anyone watching. He found himself following one dancer through all the intricate threading to and fro, because, he thought, of something familiar in her gestures. And as this conviction grew, a feeling of intense excitement rose within him, he had the illusion that he could see her face and that he had known it for a long time. He thought too he could see the expression of her eyes, changing with the movements of her head.

Later he knew that this sense of recognition had been only a memory ... the composite memory of women which he had gathered all his life, of all the women he had ever seen dancing swiftly and joyously in pictures; and that now it was concentrated, suddenly and with the terrific force of something too long diffused. But at the time nothing had seemed strange to him. When he came in from the street he was committed to a new world and to a mood of acceptance; and nothing that he thought or felt at the time surprised him. Besides, he knew that whenever he was too tired things like that happened. Through the breach in his consciousness that tiredness made, old sentimentalities flowed in ... feelings that he was inclined to laugh at otherwise. And they came with a special vengeance, because he had withstood them so long...

He had hardly noticed the rest of the performance, all his senses dazed with a new feeling. And it had not occurred to him that he would ever have to leave the theatre, until there was a concerted movement of people going out. But, as he drifted out with them, he had stopped, hardly aware a second beforehand that he was going to do it ... and inquired the way backstage of one of the ushers. After that, the moments of standing confused and self-conscious in endless corridors, wondering which way to turn, while a young man in shirt-sleeves stared at him, and shifted his pipe in his mouth to stare better ... then asked Levine a question that demanded his telling the whole story. Incredible it was to be standing in that corridor telling what he wanted to the young man in shirt sleeves. He was, perhaps, dreaming aloud and consciously; and a specially painful moment in his dream came when the young man took the pipe from his mouth and held it suspended in air, as if this was a sight that required staring at with all his features.

She had not looked as he imagined. He was not even sure that she was the one whose movements he watched in the theatre. Yet what did it matter? Of its own momentum, now, the adventure went on ... she was for all times identified with the dancing figure he had singled out. He remembered also that she had not laughed. Recalling it now, Levine pressed his hands to his forehead, pressed his eyes until he could see them wavering in his palms.... trying to savor again the wonder of that moment when he spoke and she had not laughed. But the next moment something made his hands fly apart, he looked out at the room, wide-eyed and thoughtful. Was it that which bound him to her, then ... his gratitude for her not laughing? Somberly, his glance transfixed, Levine considered ... It would be a strange thing if he was bound all his life, only because of his gratitude for that moment; if all along he had been deceiving himself, and only now the mechanism of it was clear to him. The mechanism of it ... he smiled at that word. How many words are coming to me today, he thought. But he covered his eyes again, and something within him said wearily: what of it ... what of it. People were bound to each other in stranger ways...

At last Levine rose and went over to the mirror. He put his glasses on and a new expression came into his face.. He leaned forward and studied his reflection curiously. "You're a strange fellow, Levine," he said aloud. "You always think you have escaped, but something..." he leaned closer, "something always overtakes you." And now it seemed like a very easy thing to call up Clandon and say he would not come.

3

At three o'clock that afternoon he was walking with Marah. The morning was far away. Of all the morning turmoil only one question remained, and this kept going through his head with a rhythm that was part joyous surprise, part reproach. The question was: did you believe in this ... Because it was so good to be walking with her, he knew that he should have believed in it that morning; he knew that if he had only taken the time to believe it, nothing could have troubled him from that moment forth.

Did you believe in this ... It was always his custom, he told himself as he strode along ... conscious of Marah's quick and irregular steps beside him ... never to believe in the next moment. When he despaired there was no future time ... from the earliest years of his life he remembered it was so. He remembered the long nights when he lay awake, tortured by the conviction that his suffering would not end; and how, strangely and unexpectedly, there had always been the next day. How, also, the custom had developed of asking himself: did you believe in this ... And now, with the same old ring of delight and reproach the question long forgotten returned to him. "Fool ... fool," he laughed to himself. "It was so simple."

He was walking fast, gaining momentum with each step, until he lost the sense of movement and was aware of it only by the flight of trees and bushes beside him. Though Marah tried to keep up with him she had to make little running steps now and then, and she laughed softly at this as if she were cheating him in a game. There was a certain impersonality in the air ... neither sun nor wind, yet the air was a sharp and definite presence. Behind them as they walked the buildings of the city lost in height and distinctness, and one time when Levine glanced back they seemed to have moved closer together and to be crouching in ambuscade.

"Look, Marah," he cried with delighted surprise, "doesn't it seem to you the buildings have moved closer together? Doesn't it seem as if they had been watching us pass, and like people when they watch something strange passing, they move closer together as the strange thing goes farther away?"

They laughed together, and Marah had to study the effect with narrowed eyes before they turned and continued on their way. But they had gone only a short distance ahead when something darted from the bushes and flew against her face, stinging with the impact of its wings. She turned her cheek to Levine, fearful that there was a mark on it.

"I don't think so," Levine answered, stopping to inspect it.

"They say," Marah observed, shutting her eyes, her face upturned for Levine's inspection, "that if you take the honey away from bees in winter, you must give them sugar instead."

"Yes, you have to make candy for them."

"And they say that if bees have no place to put their honey they suffer terribly."

"Yes, I've heard that you have to build them a place to put their honey. If you don't, they go elsewhere." He examined her cheek carefully once more and released her. "Why, it's nothing," he said gaily, "only the force of the wings that hurt you. Now you would think that if you stayed twenty yards away from a bee-hive and molested them from that distance, you would be absolutely safe. But a friend of mine says he once shot into a hive twenty yards away and they flew for him anyway..."

As they strode manfully ahead, echoes of their talk lingered in Levine's mind. It seemed to him, after a while, that in speaking of the bees they had just been speaking of a strange people, and he thought this over, remembering that it had often been so in his boyhood. In his boyhood, he remembered, they used to sit around recounting to each other the habits of an animal ... saying, for instance, they never attack; or, they spend most of their time in water; or, they hide all winter. And then it happened that the animal they were telling about became so mysterious to him, so much like an eccentric person, that he used to think it was listening to them, he had even been frightened of its presence while they talked. But now it was good to have this feeling again ... the second time in their walk that a definite gesture of his boyhood came back to him. It made him laugh and catch Marah's hand as she ran her few steps to keep up with him. "Very well, then, a little slower..."

But he could not go more slowly, he could not help striking the trees as he passed or leaping for the low branches. Marah glanced at him shyly and tried not to notice that he missed the branches every time. She had never before known him to behave so much like a small boy, to laugh so unreasonably; and because of this there was a heaviness in her heart. In his strange gaiety she felt a subtle threat to herself, she knew the heaviness in her heart for fear ... the fear that today she would no longer be able to escape him. For a while she smiled in response to his gaiety with an abstracted air, as someone does who is busy and has to be companionable to a child. But after a time his sudden irresponsible outbursts of laughter repelled her, she found that she did not want to look any more at his huge body leaping up for the branches. "Let's sit down," she said sharply, and stopped short. "I'm tired." So they found a shaded circle of grass, ringed in with boulders that served, as they rested, for backs. But Levine, his gaiety suddenly at an end, looked at her with a puzzled expression.

* * * * * * *

After a while Marah took off her hat and crushed it into her pocket. She thrust her hair back so that it curled in a soft panel for her face, against which the taut finely-modeled cheeks were more clearly defined. Swiftly her mood changed. Lying flat on her stomach, her feet waving in the air, she looked up at Levine ... at his glasses in which the sun made bright prisms that shifted themselves like a kaleidoscope whenever he moved. His serious stare she returned with equal solemnity, and spoke in a solemn manner.

"Your eyes behind your glasses," she began, "look for all the world like fish staring out of a bowl ... just as mournful. Tell me, what do fish think about when they stare out so mournfully?"

Levine picked up a twig that lay near him, and began to rub a thin rut into the earth. The twig broke under his hand and he threw it away. "Shall I tell you what I was thinking about?" he asked slowly. And in answer to her nod he said, "I was thinking, just then, that I first fell in love with you on account of your shoes."

Her eyes widened incredulously.

"It's the way you lie there," Levine continued earnestly, "that reminds me of the time when I found you asleep in my room. You were lying with your face to the wall, and I remember that as I stood there looking at you I noticed your shoes. They were very tiny, I remember, with very high heels, and I saw how they were fastened to your feet. I can't really explain the feeling I had at that moment, Marah. But then I saw how your feet were imprisoned, and it made me feel such tenderness for you, and pity..." He ignored her quick impudent laughter. "I think I began to love you from that moment."

Her laughter arrested by the constrained tone of his last words, Marah pondered this. She was about to speak when a party of ragged little boys appeared in the clearing, held an excited conference, and all but leaped over her as they continued on their flight. Later came a straggler, who stopped to say breathlessly, "Which way ... which way..." But before they could answer he too was off. Marah looked after him. "So ... you pitied me," she said.

"But not in the way you think," Levine answered quickly, his eyes pleading for respite from her mockery. "It was more understanding than pity, Marah. In that moment I understood how many things bound you ... how you were bound by your beauty. I saw then that you were two persons ... the Marah that thought and saw, and the Marah that men saw. And when I understood that I forgave you a great many things."

"Oh, what did you forgive me?" she asked lightly.

Levine pondered in his turn. "I don't know ... I don't know," he said slowly. "Perhaps," he added almost to himself, "I think there is something to forgive because..."

She caught him up sharply. "Because of what?"

He looked away, and an involuntary bitter smile curved his lips. "Because I feel hurt..." he said.

She did not answer and a long silence fell between them, in which only the occasional clash of their glances betrayed the interplay of their thoughts. In this silence they heard people talking and laughing on the other side of the boulders, and after a while they knew they were no longer thinking of each other, but only listening to the words and laughter that drifted toward them. Levine stood up without warning and spoke in a petulant whisper. "How many people do you think there are on the other side?"

Marah listened. "I can distinguish only three voices."

"And someone who laughs all the time."

"No, the laugh belongs to the man with the deep voice."

"No, it belongs to another person who doesn't talk at all, but only laughs."

She looked up at him wonderingly.

"I tell you there's someone there who laughs and doesn't do any talking," he insisted irritably. "Laughs in a way that nauseates me." He gathered their things and walked away, looking angrily in the direction of the voices. His face was red when he sat down and he did not look at her. "It wouldn't be so bad," he muttered, "if he said something once in a while." And he seemed so unhappy that she put her hand on his arm and tried to console him, patting it awkwardly. "I'm sorry, Joseph. Let's go away from here. We can go where it's altogether quiet."

"No, I'm quite all right here, thank you. It's fairly quiet here. Let me put my head in your lap instead."

"Do you know what I wish, Marah?" he said after a while, shutting his eyes against the bright blue of the sky. "I wish I could lie this way all day, with nothing to do but listen. I wish I could hear the wind at this moment. There would be something healthful in it...." He paused, observing thoughtfully the fluted brown trunk of the tree that shaded them, and the floating branches above it. "Sometimes I amuse myself," he continued and smiled a little at his own words, "by thinking of all the sounds that no one hears. When part of a glacier cracks and rumbles away by itself ... to be present at such a lonely sound. Or when it thunders, I should like to be alone in the hills, listening to it. But I would be satisfied at this moment if only I could hear the wind. It would be healthful for me. Or what do you say..." he looked up at her, smiling and shading his eyes. "Is it all because my head is in your lap?"

Though Marah touched his forehead and the arched line of his eyebrows lightly with her fingers, in her expression as she looked down at him, and in that gesture of her fingers, there was something wondering and remote, something puzzled. She did not speak ... only in answer to Levine's insistent look she smiled slowly. Then he shut his eyes and was silent for a long time, she thought he must have fallen asleep.

"Joseph ... Joseph," she called softly.

But he did not stir until a long time after, until the sun came suddenly through the leaves and touched his face, and he opened his eyes and looked up at her without surprise, as if she were part of his dream. "Do I tire you, Marah?" he asked.

"No, I'm all right."

"Strange for me to sleep in the day-time," he mused, "and out-of-doors too."

"I called to you."

"Did you? I thought I heard it from very far away, and I tried to struggle back to you. But it was better to sleep."

"It's quiet here..."

"Yes..." He closed his eyes and listened for the quiet, feeling it all about them, complete and authentic. On his face now was the expression of a small boy who is content. He reached his hands up to Marah and drew her face towards him, and kissed her gently. "Now I am happy..."

"But this morning," he continued, frowning a little, "do you know what happened to me this morning, Marah? I was very unhappy, and I heard a ringing in my ears, and it seemed that the only way I could forget my unhappiness was to listen to that sound in my ears. But a voice warned me, 'Don't listen to it.' Because this was like one of the perils in the fairy-tale ... if you once listened to it, then you would have to spend your whole life listening to it." He looked up at her, and there was infinite fear in his eyes. "Marah," he cried in a low voice, and it seemed as though he were calling to her from a great distance ... "don't let me listen to it. Help me, Marah, not to hear it."

"Do you hear it now?" she asked softly.

He sighed, as though something that had been troubling him for a long time was settled at last. After a while he shut his eyes and spoke with low halting words, seeming to listen for each word first before he could say it aloud.

"When I was little, Marah," he said, "I had the dream of spending my whole life alone on a hill, from which I could see both the rising and the setting sun. Sometimes that dream comes back to me now ... the earliest thing I desired, before I knew there were people in the world. But now it seems sad to me, a little terrifying. And do you know why it seems that way now? Because your presence has come into the world ... because all that loneliness of nature that I used to desire, is now only the loneliness of your not being there. And so my earliest, my profoundest wish is lost to me ... the impersonal is lost to me. Do you understand that, Marah? Do you know what I have lost for you?"

"If you knew," he continued, looking up at her and smiling again at his own words, "you would see how humble I am, how dependent on your favor. Because there is this difference. I could have the other thing that I desired whenever I wanted it, at my own pleasure. But having you ... well that, you see, is entirely dependent on you. Marah, do you see my humility before you?" But when she did not answer again, he sat up and looked away from her. "You see, at any rate," he said bitterly, "that I am not ashamed to parade it."

With a motion that was awkward and swift as a boy's she reached to him; but Levine mistook the gesture, and she tried to ward him off with outstretched arms, her eyes averted in terror. But all her movements to release herself would not avail, and she shut her eyes against him, waiting passively until he had finished, her face rigid with its expression of secrecy and fear. He looked at her with troubled eyes. "What is it, Marah?" he cried. "Dear child of mine, can't you tell me what it is?"

But she sat for a long time with eyes half-shut and oblique, and sighed deeply as if she were trying to awaken herself. From this trance she turned to him at last, with a look in which there seemed to be a profound and final understanding of things. "Yes, I think I know what it is..." she said faintly. But seeing how Levine was brooding in his turn, his face haggard with displeasure at himself, she rallied and laughed lightly, and drew close to him with a penitent gesture.

"But it's only a superstition," she said, "that occurred to me this moment."

"Yes, tell me what it is..."

Marah folded her hands in her lap and looked before her, her eyes darkened with their burden of unwilling knowledge. "I believe," she said slowly, "in this: that nothing can happen to me unless I wished for it in my childhood ... that everything that does happen to me is in some way a fulfillment of a wish that I made as a child." She paused, musing for the right words. "And these wishes," she continued, "were made without my knowing it, and only by seeing what happens to me now can I tell what they were. It seems to me so," she added, frowning a little. "I can't tell why I believe it ... yet it seems to me so, I think it must be so for everyone."

Pausing in his motion of feeling the blades of grass between his thumb and forefinger, Levine pondered her words.

"Why, that must be true," he nodded gravely. "It seems so to me, also. But tell me, Marah," he added smiling, "did you wish for me?"

"I don't know..." she smiled back to him.

"But it doesn't really matter," he retorted gaily, "because I know that I wished for you, Marah. I know that."

"But in a way I did," Marah continued thoughtfully, laying her hand on his arm and looking at him with steadfast eyes. "Because I remember that one day in my childhood I made a pact with myself ... that I must never forget myself, never lose myself in anything that happened to me. Though why ... why I made the pact," she mused, "what happened that made me warn myself, that I can't seem to remember at all. But I remember saying to myself: always know what is happening to you ... always be watchful..." She stopped and raised her eyes to him with a swift appealing glance. "Do you understand that, Joseph?" she asked sadly. "Do you see in what way I wished for you?"

He did understand, and to hide from her the completeness and bitterness of his knowledge, he turned away. Again he felt baffled by the perfect balance of her nature, that security which kept her apart from the world, content to be merely watchful. Though he remembered such a time in his own life, he had also the bitter knowledge of what followed ... how from being too watchful he had grown weary, and come to desire forgetfulness ... a way to forget himself the one thing he had never achieved. "It's not true, Marah," he said harshly. "It's not true that you don't want to forget yourself..."

But she did not answer, and they sat for a long time in silence, until, like the swift change of mood in a song, Levine's anger and bitterness left him, and a sudden happiness assailed him, in which he knew all their words for nonsense. "Marah..." he called from his happiness, "Marah..." But she watched him sprawling grotesquely over the earth, his hands caressing the grass, his lips pressed to the ground, and again there was something remote in her expression, something slightly puzzled. She saw him tearing the grass and cupping it in his hands, and lifting it to his lips as though he would drink it. And she discerned in it the pantomime of possessing her. For a moment there seemed to be in her body the gesture of submission, a feeling of paralysis before Levine's will ... simultaneously she felt disgust for what she saw.

"We'd better go," she said sharply, "it's late."

"Why ... what has happened, Marah? What have I done?"

"I don't like this ... this smelling under the armpits."

"Oh, I see..." Levine sat up and looked at her angrily. He gathered their things and they rose and walked for a long time without speaking.

* * * * * * *

They came at last to a place where there were many small birches standing as in a stockade, with the skeletons of large trees lying among them. Where one birch had started to grow along the ground ... its trunk horizontal with the earth ... and then turned sharply upwards, they sat down to rest. The place was very quiet. Once a large bird started from the ground with a snort of wings, and Marah looked for it with startled eyes. But otherwise nothing moved. When the sun broke through the leaves it was as if a group of dancers with one motion had turned up the bright side of their fans. When the sun went away it seemed that the fans were being slowly closed. Levine looked up at a large maple that stood near them, and saw through the leaves a dark lightning of branches. He noticed the dappled effect of the leaves and saw what made it ... because on the edge of each bright leaf there was a dark segment, where the shadow of another leaf showed through. He noticed, also, that one of the stones in the earth was glistening wet. "Spittle of snakes," he said to himself, and he was surprised that these words came to him. Things occurred to him to do. He thought of swinging on one of the branches of the maple tree, his knees curled up, and then jumping down and letting the branch rebound. He wanted to feel the smooth bark of the birch trees with his finger-tips ... or take a twig and probe the soft, damp-looking lumps of moss. Yet nothing of this was necessary. It was not necessary to talk, or to touch Marah in order to feel her nearness. All their words, he felt, had been spoken; and there was nothing left now but the drift of impressions ... the lazy backwash of his mood, like a wave that had broken in its full height. He felt this rhythm, he felt the recession of his troubled mood. He was at peace in this moment, and his peace would not be troubled again for all the time that he was with Marah. He turned to her. "Now I have you both," he said softly.

She was sitting with her chin on her hand, looking thoughtfully before her; but rousing herself once and glancing around she caught sight of a tree that had the first red leaves of autumn. Her gray eyes rested on it with startled delight, and she touched Levine's arm with a gesture as if the tree were swiftly moving away. "Do you know what I have to say to myself when the trees turn color?" She laughed to herself with sheer pleasure at the sight ... "I'm almost afraid of it ... and so I keep saying to myself: is it any different from their being green..." To see the childlike delight in her eyes, and to hear her laughter and words, was for Levine an exquisite moment of forgetfulness.

But now it was growing darker, and with one accord they rose and stood uncertainly confronting each other. "Are you tired, Marah?" he asked. She smiled to him, as if she had not understood the question, yet wished to show that she had heard. "Shall we lie in that little open space and look up at the sky?" and she nodded silently. They lay down where they could see a stretch of sky fretted at its edges with the dark silhouette of leaves, and listened for a long time to the silence gathering around them, to a distant and ominous murmur that seemed to come from a great distance.

"Trucks on the state road...." Levine observed drowsily. It seemed to him that he was sleeping. The patch of sky that he saw between the trees, the faint sprinkle of stars, the fantastic shape of the leaves against the sky ... here what seemed to be the head of a gigantic horse rearing up from the earth ... all this was a scene such as only a dream could put together. It was too perfect, he said to himself, too allegorical.... If only he could consciously will that the dream should continue, and that Marah should always be in it ... part of the allegory, the meaning and core of it. If only he could lie forever in his waking dream, that seemed to rest him more profoundly than sleep.

After a time Marah sat up and clasped her hands round her knees. In the dark she looked lonely and child-like, and she put her head down on her knees as if she was very tired. "I had such a strange feeling just this moment," she said. "I was looking up at the sky and I lost all sense of looking up. I had the feeling that I was on board ship, looking at very still blue water all around me. Is it true, do you think, that you can forget you're looking upwards, and think you're looking down on the sky?"

"But it should be true..." Levine said, speaking softly and reluctantly, unwilling to break his waking dream with speech ... "Yes ... why shouldn't we be able to look upward long enough, until all our senses are accustomed to it, and it seems no different from looking down?"

"And the sky is really all around the earth," Marah continued in a drowsy voice. "You see it going down to the horizon..."

She lay down again, sighing. The darkness moved closer about them, and a single mournful cry of some animal came from the woods ... a note hoarse and bird-like. A long time after, when the cry had been forgotten in the silence, Levine spoke. "Didn't it sound as if there was an idiot boy in the woods..."

"Because animals cry out that way," he mused to himself, "like idiot boys. They open their mouths and a sound comes out, and you can't tell whether there is joy or sorrow in their souls..."

The cry was repeated, and Marah drew closer to him. Now it was so dark that they could not see anything beyond the place where they lay, and only the white outline of Marah's arms circling her head in an attitude of complete relaxation relieved the shadow. Almost palpably they felt the silence and darkness deepening around them, like stealthy water in which they were being slowly trapped. They rose, knowing that this time they were not to part, and they looked into each other's faces and saw confirmation of it. Marah drew towards him with a quick confiding gesture, and he could only guess by her words at the sweet and child-like fear in her heart. "Oh, where shall we go now," she cried softly, "where shall we go now..."

CHAPTER III

1

Yes, Lewis was getting stouter. He stood before the glass that hung in his room, examining his face with chin thrust forward. "I am getting stouter," he said to himself, and lightly touched the flesh over his cheek-bones. The fact struck him as curious. Since the day he had left the hospital, since that brief and futile reckoning with his anger in Levine's office, nothing in the way of good fortune had befallen him. He had returned unwillingly to Ruth, and taken up the work at Lustbader's as if still under the spell of that first moment when Lustbader engaged him. In all this he felt there was nothing to make him happy ... and yet it was certain that he was getting stouter. He thrust his face closer to the mirror and pinched his cheeks with an angry panic motion. In sudden terror he remembered Biondi, and the loathing that had filled him at the thought of Biondi's flesh ...

Yet it was true, he admitted, that his life at the moment had a sufficiently pleasant rhythm. The work at Lustbader's was not difficult ... he liked the quiet and isolation of the house to which they had moved on the outskirts of the city. He could rise in the morning when he pleased, and stroll through the tidy streets before going to work. Then there was the long trip in the subway with the certainty of the dark and cool theatre at the end. And if he came early enough, there were the few hours when he was alone and played only for himself. With Lustbader, moreover, he was on the best of terms. For one night when the lights of the theatre were out and the building empty, Lustbader, more drunk than usual, had called him into his office, intending, as he said, to give Lewis his most intimate confidences. In the course of their conversation it had developed that Lustbader was the victim of a grave misconception. "You see in me, Antonini," he had said, resting his head on his hand and speaking as though he were about to cry, "a man who has never been taken seriously. And why? Because my hair is red, and my eyelashes are red, and my moustache is red. Yet what's so peculiar about that? Wasn't all the hair on the body meant to match? And suppose it is peculiar ... tell me, does it make me any the less real? Ah, believe me, Antonini, you don't know what it is to be so perfectly matched. It's too much for people. Wherever I go they smile. And the women ... they certainly don't know how to take it." He had lapsed into mournful contemplation, from which he roused himself to beg Lewis to take a more enlightened view. Lewis had reassured him, and after that night Lustbader treated him with special consideration, even suggesting that he organize a quartet in order that he might draw a larger salary. But Lewis had been content with things as they were ... he had desired only that the routine of things continue. Even the thought of Poldy came to him less and less. Tonight, the first time that he stopped to take stock of himself, as if emerging from the shock which had come with his leaving the hospital ... tonight he did not think of Poldy at all.

But it was hot in the room, and he turned away from the mirror and went to the window to look out ... across the level land and low-lying lights, to the place where the buildings of the city were faintly visible ... to the searchlights playing over the river in a perpetual crossing and re-crossing, lifting themselves like the snouts of huge primeval animals lying somewhere below the horizon. He heard faintly a distant murmur from the city, and near at hand the sound of Ruth's footsteps going rhythmically back and forth in the yard.

Sharply and suddenly, as if he were seeing it for the first time, the scene came to him ... he glimpsed it as a vast and quietly-colored canvas, of which he saw the abstract arrangement and balance ... his own dark figure at the window ... Ruth walking alone and thoughtfully below it ... the level field of lights and the far-away fanwise motion of the searchlights. And with this poignant momentary sense of how the whole earth was spread out beneath him, and the masses of things balanced on it, there came the feeling that it was good to be on the earth's surface ... good to be alive and poised on the broad plane of earth; a feeling that he had not known since boyhood, that he thought could never visit him again. In that moment he wished that Ruth would speak to him with some old reassuring word, breaking the silence which had come between them since he returned from the hospital. In his heart he called to her ... understanding that in some way she was part of the moment, of the longing and pleasure that was in it. But she continued to walk back and forth unaware of him, and at last baffled and a little angry because she did not notice him, he turned away from the window and sat down at the piano. He tried a few notes and stopped, and put his elbows softly on the black keys, resting his head in his hands.

How strange, he thought, how strange that this feeling of happiness had come to him ... that for a while he had been able to forget his anger and resentment. There was in it the same pleasure and discomfort that might come from interrupting a habitual motion ... as if a certain gesture of his hands that went on unceasingly had been arrested for a moment. Strange too, this longing for Ruth, a longing which he had just felt so urgently and profoundly that it terrified him. A moment before he had not suspected it was there ... he had thought himself secure from her in his isolation of pain, and the feeling that there was something to be ashamed of. But now for the first time since his return he had glimpsed the chaos in his soul, it had been flashed out from his calm like a complicated landscape flashed out from the sky at night. And now that it was over he was left more bewildered, with the same feeling of terror at what was happening to him that he had felt before, when he stood before the mirror remembering Biondi's flesh.

But why didn't she speak to him? Why was there this silence between them, in which their few words rang out with a cruel and terrible distinctness? He remembered that they had loved each other in the past. In the past their love had been a place where they were intimately together ... yet now they were strangers, often he had the painful feeling that his eyes could not see her clearly. Now they were like two people who have walked by each other on the road, and then look back and find that the road has curved in such a way that they can no longer see each other. Which of them, then, had turned the corner? Whose fault was it ... whose fault, he questioned bitterly, that they could no longer see one another? Yours, something reproached him ... because he had come back to her unwillingly, because he thought she would be ashamed of him, and had countered in his heart with anger and hatred. Yet he knew that secretly he had wanted Ruth to comfort him ... secretly he had hoped that on the first day she would take him to her and say comforting words. If this had not happened ... if the first night had passed and the first day, and all the days after, and she had not spoken, then it was really, true that she was ashamed of him. She had even denied him her body, and it was this that especially confused and humiliated him. For if she repelled him whenever he tried to touch her, how very great must be her shame of him, how loathsome he had become. And at the thought of it Lewis felt his breath come more quickly, he felt his throat tightening again with hatred for her.

In a curious desire to see her, to study her out of his anger, he went to the window and looked out. She was walking near the wall of the house, her head thrust forward, her eyes fixed thoughtfully on the ground. For a moment as he listened her footsteps seemed to be speaking sadly to him ... to be the symbolic language of the thoughts that came to her as she walked alone. And again he wanted to call to her, lifting from his eyes the painful feeling that they could not see her clearly. And the burden of his call, the words of it ... what would that be? "Where are you, Ruth..." he could call to her, "where are you..." And she would hear him and know that he longed for her. But when he waited and she did not look up at him, he remembered that he had come to study her objectively, to put her at a distance by watching. His cue now was to watch her all the time ... as she went about her work in the house ... when she walked in the yard, when she spoke to him. Always to be watching her, and so keep her at a distance ...

But how tall she looked and unreal, pacing back and forth in her long skirt, like a woman out of an old and sad legend. When she passed under the window he could see the glistening blackness of her straight hair, parted in the center and drawn back in a knot. "Italian hair," he said to himself, unexpectedly and dispassionately, as if he were examining a picture. She walked slowly, with a certain queer hesitation, as though the ground might not be firm beneath her feet. He had the curious feeling that she was walking barefoot. And sometimes she was startled by a slight noise, and looked around, seeming bewildered to find herself pacing back and forth.

It did not seem possible that she could be walking so close to him and not feel his presence at the window; yet when he caught a glimpse of her face he saw in it an expression completely turned in on itself ... a strange and brooding look, as if one thought came continually to her mind, which she could not understand at all, yet which had to be turned this way and that and examined again and again, calling for perpetual wonder. In this one thought she seemed to be spellbound, caught in its terrifying strangeness, trying to shake it from her with this trance-like pacing back and forth. And because of it she could forget his presence and everything around her, she was even unaware of the expression on her face ... the strange beauty that it had of something completely absorbed and unconscious of itself. He stood at the window watching, feeling almost afraid of her, of this new wonder of her face. And when she stopped at the far end of her walk and rested with her hand to the wall, he was startled almost to outcry by the intent glance with which she gazed before her ... the intraverted look of a statue whose features have grown to one expression for centuries...

What was she thinking of? What thought was it, he wondered, that held her spellbound, and was so strange and bewildering that since the first moment it occurred to her, all her days had been passed in a stupor of trying to understand it. He remembered times when he came upon her brooding alone, and she would lower her eyes secretively, fix them for a moment in mysterious somnolence ... then lift them with a swift glance of reproach, as if it lay in his power to free her. There would be a bittersweet tumult in his heart at the thought that she brooded over him, and was puzzled and unhappy for the ending of their love. Yet in the next instant he would question it ... why did she not speak to him if this was true ... why was there only question and answer between them, her answers always simple and courteous, like echoes of his question ... and if he did not seek her out with questioning, why was there only silence? And though he recalled from the past the sort of person she was ... one to whom words did not come easily ... yet now there seemed to him a treacherous quality in her silence. In it he heard many things ... her scorn, her censure, her shame. It terrified him now with its infinite meanings...

But now she became aware of him, and stopped under the window and looked up inquiringly. He was irritated because she had spied him too late, after the moment of his longing was over. "Why don't you go to bed?" he said sharply. She answered in a low voice that it was too hot, and stood near the wall with one hand lifted, letting her finger-tips play lightly along the part of her hair. Lewis waited for her to speak further, and when she remained silent he turned away from the window with a gesture of weary finality. The room seemed suddenly too small for his anger. He fled from the room and the house, walking in a trance of speed until he came out of the dark road to the main street. There the number of people made him slacken his pace. He permitted himself to be caught up into the rhythm of their march, losing for a while all the torturing sense of his own identity and the anger that had driven him forth.

On each side as he walked people caught up with him and passed him. He could feel their bodies flowing by with the bobbing motion of debris on a swift stream. But after a few blocks he felt wearied with the constant motion of people passing him and their endless number. There were too many people in the world, he told himself ... too many noises also. Day after day the noises in his head to listen to ... by now he had learned how cunningly they could adjust themselves ... weak and timid when it was quiet, proportioned to the silence. But at other times trying to out-scream the sounds around him, as if they could hear them and felt a hysterical contagion. He longed for only a moment's freedom from them, for only one moment of absolute silence. And it was true after all, he resumed, that his life was hateful to him, and the fact that he was growing stouter was only a trick of his flesh. It was true that he hated the work at Lustbader's ... that he was nauseated with the necessity to sit and play for people who weren't listening, and felt infinitely humiliated each day at the indifferent going of the audience. It would be better to give up the work at Lustbader's and find something else to do, not so intimately associated with his past. Better also to leave Ruth, rather than continue their living together as strangers. For a while he tried to plan this seriously; but the feeling of dizziness that overcame him made him stop short in his thoughts and warn himself ... that these paroxysms were dangerous, that he could not afford to let himself grow discontented. These were the dangerous moments, he warned himself ... when, because of his discontent, he began to desire something more than his life could give him, to long wildly for a new and undefined fulfillment. Then he could see how precarious was the stillness of his mind ... that it was only the apparent stillness of something whirling so fast that no drop could spill ... but if once the motion slackened, if it eased for only a moment, then everything that had been held in balance by it would fly apart. He knew that he must never permit any let-down in this excitement of his mind ... there must always be something, something to keep up its swift motion.

But what would that be, he asked himself? What was there left for him now, exiled from Ruth's love, unable to play any more, unable to hear things clearly? What was there left save to hold fast to the routine of his life, letting the rhythm of it, accumulating from day to day, convince him at last that he was living. It was so for everyone else ... for all these bodies that bobbed past him. They moved in an insect activity, and repeated it in time and repeated it in each other, so that they might feel doubly sure of themselves. They moved daily in an insect migration, and everything they did was automatic, and their love was unclean ... men and women living together, and with too long familiarity and handling of each other's bodies their love became incestuous. He too should be content to live as they did, he should not slacken his pace and be thoughtful on the street ... but even while he hastened his step his throat tightened with hatred for them, for that air of urgency which they always had, which was so skilful an imitation on their part of insect importance. No, he told himself ... it was not so easy for him ... he knew the trick that had been played on him. And his anger seemed to deafen him, so that he heard for a moment the absolute silence that he craved ... and he stopped bewildered, fearing that it was the end of the whirling, the sudden jar of silence that comes when the machinery stops. At first he wanted to shout to them for help, he wanted to lay hold of someone and cry out what had happened. But in that interlude of silence he heard a thought speaking clearly to him ... that he must begin to work on a symphony, and that he would be famous through this work, that through it he would express all that had happened to him, and it would lift him out of the incognito in which he now lived. An incredible lightness of heart came over him, a desire to laugh and embrace the people who passed him ... for it seemed that now he heard the music of his own life again, and could conduct it once more to a triumphant conclusion. He had found too a further recess from Ruth, where she could watch him, puzzled and shut out in her turn. Strange that it had not occurred to him before, that something so obvious should be so slow in coming to him...

But here somebody jostled him, and Lewis realized that he had been standing still and staring at the sidewalk. Informally, then, the noises resumed, and he started to walk again, but still with the feeling of lightness in his heart.

2

It did not leave him for many days ... days in which cloud-sweeps of music played about him ... endless panoramas of music that kept merging and separating, folding and unfolding, with the prodigality, the ceaselessness of insanity. Days when he heard terrific and intricate harmonies ... the accompaniment for profound dancing, for the courteous minuet of the worlds. When the noises in his head opened up new vistas, arranging and rearranging themselves in kaleidoscopes of sound, from which he caught an occasional pattern of rhythm and melody, at the undreamed exquisiteness of which he held his breath. When everything was saturated with music, and every object that he looked at gave off musical sound like a property of its matter ... and all the motions of his hand gave off music, as simply as the motion of a whip gives off the swishing sound. All day and even through the thin wall of his sleep he listened, and the meaning of what he heard comprehended all words, was the infinite meaning of things that lies beyond any word that has ever been spoken. Meanwhile he went about pale and absorbed, going through his work with the mechanical gestures of a sleep-walker. People stared at him, who had the expression of someone lost in the nightmare of his own ecstasy. But the end came at last. He sat down one evening to recall what he had heard, his pencil finely-sharpened and poised over the staff.

3

And at times they would come back to him ... themes that moved so inevitably from phrase to phrase, in which he heard so clearly the implicit harmonies, that to record them was only the labor of putting down the notes on the staff. At other times he was baffled, working for days without adding anything ... humming over and over in his mind the parts that were already written, until they grew sterile with the repetition and he could not hear them any more. Then in a sudden impotence he would sit and stare at the notes, believing that they might begin to move around on the page, or that in some mysterious way he could conjure them, as if they were round black symbols on a chart of magic. But when nothing happened and the whole work seemed futile, his nostrils whitened with suppressed fury, he would take his work in his hands with a furious desire to tear it ... or when Ruth was in the room he would turn on her, as if it was her quiet presence in the room or some casual movement of hers that caused his failure. And on nights when this happened sleep was not for either of them, but with careful and crafty questioning he sought to call her to account ... why had she removed the picture of herself that hung in his room ... why had she re-arranged things? And she would answer him obediently, a suggestion of weariness in her slow obedient answers. All night they lay in bed exhausting their words ... until it seemed to Ruth as if their words had become a symbolic intercourse, more exacting and insatiable than the intercourse of their bodies ... and she would lie still and thoughtful in the long interval between his questions, like someone not entirely absorbed by her passion, with much leisure to think in the midst of it. Why had she removed the picture of herself that hung in his room ... and she answered him obediently: how she had noticed that he looked angrily about him when he worked, and she had not wished him to look at her picture in that way. But in that slow obedience of all her answers there was great weariness and indifference, as if it was only a way of disguising her words, the way she had found at last of speaking to him and yet guarding the secrecy of her thoughts. These, now, were more important to her. All day to whatever she did her thoughts were an insistent accompaniment, and in bed they had to be counted again, told over every night like prayers before she could fall asleep....

First, she remembered, there were the days just after his return. From the beginning he had been strange to her, and yet she had not suspected anything, she had been willing to wait. When the newness of things wore off, she had told herself, he would look around once more and remember her. And at first it had been easy to find reasons: it was moving to the new house that pre-occupied him, or the work at Lustbader's ... but when time passed and he did not change she saw how excuses could multiply themselves, how she was put off indefinitely. Then had come a period of panic, when she felt the strangeness settling between them like a stealthy gathering of mist, and was powerless to stop it. When she had tried to snare his attention ... foolishly, in ways that made her ashamed to remember ... placing something new where he would see it ... a vase of green glass or a bright square of silk for the wall. There had been for a moment a magic in everything she bought, a belief that everything must change because this or that was brought into the house. And when these had failed she thought the fault must be in herself. Then what do I need? she had asked, standing in front of the mirror and examining herself. "I am too dark ... too sombre-looking...." and this discovery had filled her with a sense of guilt, she was ashamed because she was not light-hearted...

So everything had ended in shame and confusion. And now that all her thoughts were over, now that she had counted them like prayer beads, what was there left to do save to lie rigid and wait for sleep? Though each night she was conscious of her body and its sweetness going to waste, she knew it was better to lie alone. In the loneliness of her body there was, somehow, a little cause for pride ... there was also hope, an element in their relations that was still in solution. Each night when they lay in bed she felt the separateness of their bodies as a question, and she feared that if she gave herself to him the question would be answered, and there would be no longer any hope for her ... only complete humiliation. Better, then, to lie with her fantasy ... to feel her body as if it were a statue, immobile yet conscious. So in some ancient evil court women were used ... arranged naked as adornments for the corners of the palace, on their knees and under a towering headdress, so that they might be more rigid and unreal. So she thought of herself, a slave-woman whose body was turning into stone, while near her a long and dispassionate intercourse was occurring.

She would lie so long without moving that Lewis would raise himself on his elbow and turn to look at her ... seeing her face white between the lines of its Gothic hair, and her eyes staring upward, gleaming like black stones. Angrily he would repeat his question...

4

But she had put back the picture and arranged everything as it was before. Yet one afternoon when she entered his room, she found Lewis sitting disconsolately over his work, resting his head on his hands and staring before him. He turned on her with unexpected ferocity. "Why did you change things around? Everything is going wrong since then."

Ruth hesitated whether to speak, and then asked indifferently, "Why, what is wrong..."

"You should never have meddled," Lewis insisted petulantly. "Did I ask you to come in and arrange things? Did I ask you to spy on me?"

Ruth sat down, her arm on the back of the chair, her fingers musingly feeling the part in her hair. At her feet was a pile of papers torn into deliberate tiny scraps. These she stared at and then touched with the tip of her foot. The action infuriated Lewis. He went over to her and caught her wrist, so that she drew away from him with a cry of pain.

"I tell you we can't go on this way," he said bitterly. "It must end. We can't go on with this crime."

"What is the crime?" she asked, with weary automatic curiosity. "Tell me what crime you mean. Have I committed it?"

She fixed her dark eyes on him for a moment, and then turned her attention again to the papers on the floor, shifting them about with the tip of her foot, trying to arrange them into a circle. In this occupation she was profoundly absorbed, hardly aware of him. Only once she frowned. When he said, "It would be better for me to be alone," she frowned as if she could not understand the words, but had caught them between her eyebrows, and would hold them that way to be considered in the future. Meanwhile, with delicate and intent movements of her foot she perfected the circle of papers.

Then she rose and went into the bedroom. For the colloquy that she was going to have it seemed necessary to let down her hair first, and lay the hair-pins carefully away. She leaned forward and stared at herself in the glass, still frowning. "What was my crime?" she asked softly, and lowered her eyes in thought. "Why no, it wasn't that," she reasoned. "Something went wrong with the music. My crime was only to be present." She smiled at this and looked at her reflection triumphantly. "Yes, my crime was that I was present." But immediately she leaned closer, and looked into her eyes that were now large and startled. "But suppose that is a crime," she whispered. Because she did not know what to say ... because there was a terrible finality in that question, she turned away from the glass, and a wave of dizziness and terror swept over her. One thought came to her mind ... flight ... to go away from him instantly, to make the house suddenly empty of her presence. In a moment this became so urgent that she did not stop to do more than comb her hair and brush the dust from her dress. Softly she opened the door, and reassuring herself that she was unobserved, she went lightly down the stairs. Where she was going or what she would do was not clear to her ... she only knew that it was urgent that he be left alone, that Lewis should feel the emptiness of the house at once. She struck out in the direction of open country, unconsciously turning from the street that would lead her among people. Walking so swiftly that she seemed to be moving in a dream, she came to the state road, and not until she had gone far into the country did she stop. Then as if awakening she looked around her. Suddenly tired, she turned back a few paces to the ending of a stone fence, and sat down there, surveying the scene around her with a listless interest in its details.

She saw a field in which the gathered and tented wheat lay in a quiet encampment, and in the stillness she heard the dry rustling of bugs through the stalks. A row of little pines stood near the edge of the field, their trunks no bigger than branches. She looked at them and thought of children standing in a row, stretching on thin legs to see which was tallest. Across the road and a little beyond the place where she sat there was a white farmhouse under dark trees, and she heard the voices of men shouting in the distance. She sat there looking indifferently at the field, or letting her eye travel listlessly over the tall grass and flowers at her feet. For a long time she followed the movements of a white butterfly that caromed against her knees, she sat so still; or noted how, in the least wind, the tall grasses bent toward each other. A loud humming of some insect, sounding near her like a man's voice, made her start. She jumped up hastily and looked around, then seeing what it was she sat down again, smiling self-consciously at her fright. Now she remembered things she had passed on the road. At one house two children had been standing in a doorway, regarding her curiously; and when she looked back the children in the doorway had strangely multiplied themselves into a group of all sizes, all staring at her with one expression of astonishment. Another time she had followed a road that led unexpectedly to a house, and she had turned and walked away quickly, while two old women on the porch called to her, each one holding an egg in her hand, arrested in the act of counting. These details came back to her now, with the strange overtone of something she might have read about in a fairy-tale. And the field of wheat before her and the young pines stretching to see which was tallest seemed unreal as the picture in a child's book. She felt rather foolish now. She had achieved that sudden emptiness of the house which had seemed at the moment of her flight so urgent and precious to her ... but now what to do? Return? No ... she must stay away longer. She bestirred herself and walked on more slowly. But now she felt faint and exhausted and sat down to rest wherever she could find a little shade. At length she came to the end of the state road and faced a country lane, unshaded and desolate-looking. Here a man was working in the fields, and when he saw her he rested on his hoe, watching her as she stood uncertainly at the cross-roads. "Where are you going?" he called. Ruth went over to him. "I don't know..." she began confusedly, feeling the blood mount in her cheeks. "What's off that way?"

"Up there," he said, and seemed to be figuring it out, "up there's the lake, but it's so hot on that road, you'll get cooked."

She considered a moment, thanked him and turned back. One time she stopped and leaned against a tree, laughing and crying at the same time. "You'll get cooked..." she repeated to herself.

It seemed to her as she retraced her steps that there was an eternity of time before she would reach the place where she had rested. Things she had noticed on her way seemed to have moved farther apart, the sky was overcast, and behind her there was a constant rumbling of thunder ... when she reached the white farmhouse heavy drops were falling. In terror of the storm she stood in front of the house, wishing that someone would call to her. But only a huge dog came bounding out, and when she lifted her arms he leaped at her. For a long time she tried to ward him off, standing there in the center of his leaping, swishing her arms back and forth, fearing that at any moment the grotesque duel between them would end. Her breath came in short gasps, she tried to call for help, but her terror prevented her. At last she raised her voice. "Call off your dog," she cried hoarsely, and blushed at the boldness of shouting that way. Two young girls appeared on the porch and called to the dog, and then, after a short consultation with each other, invited her in. The storm broke as they entered the kitchen. There the shades were drawn and the lights turned on, giving the effect of night.

They permitted her to sit alone on a low stool near the window. When the rain slackened and it grew lighter, the girls raised the shades and turned off the lights, and busied themselves once more with their sewing. Infinitely pleasant to Ruth was the tidy kitchen and the sound of the clock ticking and the rain outside ... a quiet interlude in which she lived for the time the calm house-bound life of the two girls, in which her own unhappiness did not exist. In a desultory manner the girls talked while they sewed.

"Do you think they are coming back here to live?"

"It's hard to say," the taller one answered. "They wrote that they were selling the place."

"And didn't say what they would do after?"

"No, he likes it out there."

The first one who had spoken stooped to pick up a skein of silk from the floor. "I think this red is too bright," she said, holding it up to the light. "Tell me," she continued after a long silence. "Are you ever lonesome here?"

The other hesitated. "No ... not really lonesome," she said thoughtfully. "I have my moods of course, but I'm not lonesome for any particular person, or any place either. It's just..." she sighed and looked down at her work. "But it's very nice here," she added.

From time to time they glanced shyly at Ruth, and becoming conscious of her presence they would be silent. She wished they would forget her entirely, that she could lose her own identity and sit there forever, listening to their quiet dialogue. For there seemed to be something so impersonal in what they said, an indifference in their manner of speaking, that gave her a strange sense of peace. She saw them as beings still content with their world and secure in the little details of it ... still untouched by desire, by the knowledge that would make of the whole world a prison of one person. "Not for any particular person..." the taller one had said. Ruth remembered the words as if they had been spoken for her. There was only one place in the world, she knew, where she could dare to exist, and that was near Lewis. She was not strong enough to be without him ... she would accept any terms, only to be near him. And having made this confession she felt infinitely degraded, she felt that if the two girls could have looked into her heart they would have recoiled with horror. In all that they were yet to learn this would seem to them most terrible ... that they should become so bound, that the whole world should become a prison of one person. And could they not tell what was in her heart? Wasn't it known to them already? Why was she walking alone this way, if not because she was unhappy for someone? Her cheeks flushed with shame at the thought that they understood her ... she wished she could hide from them, feeling too exposed when they looked at her with their swift glances.

But now she realized that they wanted her to go. "It's cleared up," they urged gently. Ruth sighed and rose, and stood for a while glancing around the room, lingering on its neatness, on the shining clock and the pictures, which she saw through their eyes as dear possessions. She looked out and saw that it was clearing, and over the wheat field there was the reddish glow of sunset. "Yes, I'll be going," she said reluctantly. They followed her courteously to the door.

5

Ruth knew, as she walked down the road, that they were watching her go, and while they could see her she kept her head up bravely. But as soon as a turning of the road effaced the house, she sat down and gave way to a passionate angry outburst of tears. There was not so much sorrow in it as anger for all the things that had happened to her, for everything that was yet to occur. She had thought to flee, and had given herself the momentary satisfaction of making the house empty of her presence. But that was all ... that was all she could accomplish. She clenched her hands and beat them against the stone ... "I am not strong enough," she said aloud, with bitter anguish in her voice. "It's true ... I am not strong enough...."

Lewis was standing outside, looking anxiously up and down the street.

"Where have you been?" he asked reproachfully. "I was looking for you...."

She stood in the doorway resting, her hand to her heart. Of a sudden an expression of pain crossed her face. "Lewis," she said faintly, and looked at him, her eyes wide with fear. "Put your hand on my heart. Isn't it beating too fast?" He obeyed her, but the feeling of her heart beating under her wet dress was repulsive to him, as if she had asked him to touch a wound. He forced himself to hold his hand there and shook his head. "Where have you been?" he repeated. "I've been looking for you...."

Upstairs in the bedroom she lay down, feeling her forehead burning hot and the blood beating in it with imprisoned fury. She lay alone for a long time, until the room grew dark and her eyes closed in uneasy slumber. Lewis woke her, bending over and awkwardly touching her forehead.

"Does your heart hurt any more?" he asked.

"No ... I'm all right..." and she turned away from him.

"You have fever, Ruth..."

"No, it's nothing," she repeated sharply. "Let me alone."

But after a while she turned to him, and he could see her face bewildered and pale in the darkness.

"Tell me, Lewis," she said, her voice low and reluctant. "Why do you torture me?"

He pondered her question. "Why no ... that's not true," he said harshly. "We torture each other."

"But why ... why..." The word was repeated with dull insistence, with the unhappy petulant tone of someone who has asked a question too long. And it seemed natural that silence should follow her question, having in it the quality of a profound answer.

Nothing could be more terrible to her than his caress on that night. While there had been the separateness of their bodies, she had felt a little cause for pride. But she knew this for the end of everything, she knew, now, that her degradation was complete.

CHAPTER IV

1

The turning of a corner suddenly thrust Poldy against the march of homecoming workers. He shocked with a squad of young girls walking arm in arm, a taut buoyant line. They giggled and wavered for a moment, unwilling to break the lovely repeated pattern of their arms. Then the line swung away from him like a slackened whip. He walked forward, progressing in a blind zigzag, his eyes closed against the sun. But it seemed to him after a while as if he were no longer walking, but being drawn onward by the suction of all those bodies moving against him ... as if they were mute automatons being moved on the belt of some vast machine, and he was part of the machine that had to move counterwise ... a unique intimate part, articulating with the crowd. "Surely I am not to die yet," he said to himself ... "surely there is a way to be saved." And there came to him a word that he wanted to cry out, a strange word that he had never heard before, which held the secret of all things. Fast as he was walking, the sense of walking was lost to him. He yielded himself passively to the motion, he felt his body in complete subjection to the will of the machine on which they all moved ... and the word within him was urgent as matter that had to be voided, he felt prophetic powers closing upon him, because he was haunted by the impishness of a word. But soon he became afraid because they moved against him too swiftly. He wanted to fling his arms out as children do and call out mischievously, "Stop!" ... to see them storm against his arms, a mute animal terror in their eyes as the huge belt moved on relentlessly, leaving them behind. He wanted to trick them with the word, to fling it into that orderly route ... cry it with his arms stretched straight above him and his fingers spread wide. And at the clang of it panic would spread through them, they would drift confusedly here and there ... a viscous flow of bodies, as if they were held on a plate being tipped different ways. It was no word that he had ever heard before ... a foreign word of three syllables ... and as he groped for it in his mind it came to him. "Kuramos!" he would shout ... "Kuramos...."

But now the lust for something unknown swept over the people; and because there was a man on the street selling something, who was so short that he could not be seen from the outside of the crowd, they thought that there was the miracle ... in that mysterious axis around which the crowd was ranged. And those on the outside began to ask, "What is it?" and to conjecture what it was. And the question spread, some hearing it with joy and others with terror, each one answering it according to his desire. Soon the street was blocked, and those on the outside fought with those who were nearer; and each one who came in contact with the fighting could not withstand it, until everyone was struggling with his neighbor, wrestling blindly with the thing that opposed him ... and the little man in the center stopped flourishing his knives and looked at them with terror. He climbed up to his wagon and lay on it with his belly to the boards, and reached down to draw up his signs and his satchel; and they closed in on the space where he had been standing.

Just then it was that Poldy saw a figure standing quietly in the turmoil, a man with a face that was indescribably narrow, the eyes and mouth switched about as if they were trying to adjust themselves lengthwise. The face smiled and blew hard at a whistle. Policemen came running from all sides, as though they had been lying in wait for the cue. Their clubs sputtered in the crowd, and there followed an insane waving of arms as those who were fighting tried to clutch at the clubs, still bucking their heads at those who were near them. The man lying in his wagon curled himself up in the farthest corner of it. And he did not dare crawl down again until they were all dispersed, moving once more away from the sun in an orderly rout. Poldy touched his forehead. It was bleeding and his mouth ached. The fellow who blew the whistle was coming toward him, smiling apologetically.

2

On closer inspection Poldy decided that it was not so much the narrowness of his face which had twisted the eyes and mouth. The nose too was slightly out of focus, and it seemed to act like an axis on which the other features were turned. The result was an expression of perpetual slyness, a winking-off to someone in the distance. The fellow had one leg longer than the other, and it was only when he tried to walk fast that this sly expression of his face changed. Then his whole face was contorted ... his mouth hung open, too much of the lower lip exposed, and his eyelids quivered, his whole body seeming to shake with inward laughter. He came close to Poldy, stood at attention and clicked his heels. But in order to do so he had to bend back a little and sideways, a swaggering pose with a hint of pugnaciousness in it, as though he were preparing to leap forward and attack.

"I saw you being clubbed," he announced, and bowed very courteously. "My card."

Poldy took it mechanically. He was still wiping blood from his forehead and felt in no humor to speak. He pocketed the card and was about to go away, when the cripple caught his arm and begged him to read it. It was elaborately printed: "David Solner, Expert on Authority."

"A very original title," Poldy remarked politely.

The fellow threw his head back and burst out laughing. "I thought it was." He jerked his thumb at the policemen. "They don't know who I am, of course."

"No ... I suppose not."

"They always play right into my hands. Oh it's too easy, much too easy. But just then..." He drew nearer and put his hand on Poldy's shoulder with great good fellowship. "Just then I had real action."

"I'm glad you were not disappointed," Poldy said in his best manner. "However, I must be going." But he had gone only a few steps when he felt a tugging at his arm. The expert on authority's face had elongated itself as if it were elastic, there was a look of consternation at the prospect of Poldy's departure. And this look poised paradoxically above the swaggering pose of his body made him seem so forlorn that Poldy had not the heart to turn away. He suffered himself to be led into the park, where they settled themselves on one of the benches around the fountain. The cripple's walk registered his joy, growing so ecstatic with all its elaborate bending and twisting, that it seemed to be all a mimicry ... as if he were only clowning it for the children, and might turn around any minute and say, "How did you like that? Now watch this one." When he sat down he crossed his legs and swung his long foot with a delicate rhythmic motion, almost maidenly. At last he turned to Poldy.

"As you see, I'm a cripple," he began in a very matter-of-fact voice. "Cripples very often are beggars. Is that right?"

Poldy nodded.

"But sometimes you see a beggar who doesn't seem to be crippled. Is that right?"

Again Poldy nodded. The catechism seemed to have been memorized and rehearsed many times, and he felt that the safest answer was a silent one.

"But in that case," the fellow continued, "what do you do?"

Poldy was confused. "I forget where we were at," he said humbly. "If you'll only repeat..."

David began again with stern emphasis. "If you see a beggar who is not crippled, what should you do? ... What should you do?" he repeated, leaning forward and regarding Poldy slyly. Poldy hesitated. "Really, now, I don't know," he said. "I've never thought of the situation."

"Think ... think..."

Poldy frowned and pursed his lips, making an elaborate display of thinking. His decision seemed to be of great importance to the cripple, who was regarding him with an expression of challenging slyness. At length Poldy ventured an opinion.

"I might count his fingers," he said slowly.

"Right!" and David slapped his thighs gleefully. "Count his fingers. Right! Now I know that you're a man I can talk to. Yes, I can trust you. In fact I knew it the moment I saw you in the crowd, but I never talk to anyone until he can answer that question. Because, of course, there may not be the correct number of fingers. You have to be clever to find that out. Well, you're one of the clever ones, I see. I can trust you. But now it's your turn. Ask me any question."

"Well now..." Poldy thought for a moment. "Of course," he observed briskly, "you have other work besides ... beside your work as expert on authority?"

David spread his hands in negation. "A cripple!" he sighed. "How can I work? ... Well, I do run errands."

"Your work as an expert on authority doesn't pay, then?"

"No ... oh, no. It's a labor of love." He turned to Poldy with a challenging look, a hint that he desired further questioning. But Poldy was silent, and finally David was forced to talk.

"I make toys, too..."

"Indeed."

"Oh, yes. You should see them." He brought out a little cardboard figure from his pocket, the face drawn in with the regularity of a child's drawing, a fringe of hair on the forehead to heighten the stupid expression. Little red strings were tied to the head and arms and legs, terminating in an intricate knot whose loops were kept apart by pins. David held it nonchalantly in his hand for a while, to let the intricacy of it register on Poldy. Then with a rapid movement of his thumb and forefinger he manipulated the pins. The cardboard man began to dance, an insane ecstatic dance.

"It's marvelous ... marvelous," Poldy said. "But what is it for?"

David nudged him with his elbow and looked well pleased. "I knew it, I knew it," he crowed. "I knew you would ask. Clever, isn't it?"

"Exceedingly."

"It took me almost two years to make it. Some people would say it shows real inventive power, wouldn't they..."

"And not be far from the truth."

"Here ... see if you can do it."

Poldy touched the doll gingerly. Its staring mechanical face affected him almost with terror. He remembered a man he had once seen at a fair ... standing in one of the booths, his face painted so that it looked like a doll's, and another man lecturing on him ... now ladies and gentlemen, step inside and you will see them cut Bimbo in two. And with that the man had been given a hearty push, and he stumbled a few steps, never once relaxing the doll-like expression of his face. Then he recovered his balance, and raised his hands again with marionette rigidity. Poldy had felt sick at heart at this mummery, at the man's degradation before the crowd. Unwillingly he manipulated David's toy, while the owner looked on approvingly. "Do you know, I had a model for that head?"

"Yes ... it's very lifelike."

"Oh, no ... it's not lifelike at all. I don't call myself an artist. This fellow who was my model used to come into the hospital. He moved his head just the way that the doll does ... all day, mind you. Wait..." He fumbled nervously in his pocket, but only a crumpled piece of paper was forthcoming.

"I can't find it," he said forlornly.

"Isn't it on the paper?"

"No..." He threw the paper away and turned his back to Poldy and stared morosely at the pavement. He even stopped swinging his leg. Poldy tried to rally him.

"Why do you carry it ... the doll?" And David at once rewarded him with a grateful glance, the leg started to swing again, he clasped his knees and held his elbows rigid with delight.

"I was waiting for you to ask. Listen. When I was in the hospital I had nothing to do. So I decided to figure out how many times this fellow wagged his head, by the minute, you understand. That's what I was looking for. I thought I had the paper in my pocket with the figures on it. So one morning I said to the nurse, 'Give me your watch.' 'What do you want it for?' she asks. 'I want to count my pulse.' 'No ... that's not what you want it for.' 'I want to see what time it is.' 'Well, I'll tell you the time.' 'I want to see what kind of a watch it is. I used to fix watches...'"

"Really! You're expert in many ways, I see."

"No, not in the least. I only told her that."

"And did she give you the watch then?"

"Oh, no. She wouldn't give it to me for that reason either. So at last I said to her: 'Well, I want to count the number of times a minute that Joe wags his head.' She didn't believe that at all, so she laughed and gave me the watch. Then I called Joe over to my bed. 'Joe,' I said, 'come talk to me....' and I held the watch in my hand and counted it by the minute hand, just as the doctor counts your pulse."

"A very interesting experiment. And the result?"

Once more David flashed him an approving look. He searched his pocket again, but this time nothing was forthcoming, and an expression of alarm came over his face, unfolding down from his forehead like a mask. First the eyebrows elevated themselves, making the apex of a triangle, the nostrils distended, the lower lip dropped. He held the expression for a moment, then switched it off. "I can't find it," he announced sadly.

"Perhaps you remember?"

"No ... no ... But tell me, what do you think?" His face brightened and he looked at Poldy anxiously. "Perhaps I never did it?"

"Oh, it's altogether likely..."

But this accommodating answer had an electric effect on David. He jumped away from Poldy to the end of the bench, and lowered his eyes sullenly. "Ah ... I knew I couldn't trust you ... I knew it," he muttered, and he would not talk to Poldy for a long time.

"But you started to tell me why you keep that doll," Poldy coaxed.

"Oh, that," his mood changed again and he flashed an appreciative smile at Poldy, as if he had a bright pupil who was asking the right questions. "I'll tell you. After I got that idea about Joe, I decided to figure out how many times a day I swing to one side. Now allowing sixteen hours to the day, since there's nothing doing while I sleep, and about thirty-one swings a minute, it gives you sixteen times sixty times thirty-one, which is twenty-nine thousand seven hundred and sixty. But allowing three hours when I'm standing still and two hours when I work at the press—I press clothes in a shop—I subtract five times sixty times thirty-one, which is nine thousand three hundred, leaving ... do you follow?"

"Continue, continue."

"Oh, there's nothing to continue about," he ended sullenly. "Don't you see it now?"

"I confess that I don't."

"You can guess, can't you?"

"I'm not good at guessing."

"Well, never mind," David said sulkily. "I knew I couldn't trust you."

"I'd like to know...." Poldy said with great humility.

David leaned closer toward him and tapped off his words in the manner of one closing a deal. "Now don't you think I deserve something for all that?" he whispered.

"Of course ... of course."

"There you are!" He sprang back and raised his voice briskly. "Did they get you? Tell me, did they get you?"

"I don't know what you mean..."

David burst out laughing. "The war ... the war. You had to go?"

"I had to go."

"Mmm ... I thought so. But tell me, didn't you foresee it?"

"Foresee it!"

"Yes, of course. Tell me now," his voice became smoothly argumentative, he eyed Poldy in the manner of a storekeeper who has to persuade a difficult customer, "Tell me, what did you expect? Now if you had been crippled, say ... if something had been the matter with you then ... well, that would have been different, wouldn't it..." Poldy felt an impulse to strike him, but David seemed to divine the trembling in his arm, and rebounded to his former position. "Well, never mind," he said airily. "Strange title that, on my card. Don't you think so?"

"It's very strange."

"You saw me blow the whistle..."

"Yes, I saw you."

"That's part of my job."

"Indeed."

"Wherever people," David began with strongly marked accents, "wherever people are being bullied ... I'm there! I watch it! If things are too slow I blow the whistle. It's a delicate matter too, knowing when to blow it. But it's quite all right, you see. I'm in it myself. Now this leg, you might say," he stretched it grandly, "bullies me all the time. It's my authority. 'Swing,' it says ... I swing. That's why I figure that I have a right to enjoy myself. They owe me something for this, I say."

"And do you find many diversions?"

"Oh, I know where to look," he said mysteriously. "Did you read in the papers the other day of a meeting here in the square? I follow the papers and so I know where to go. There was a riot here and one man was killed. The club hit him wrong ... they can't always be careful about such matters. You should have seen his head wobble before he fell, just as if he was saying, 'This is all wrong, all wrong.' Besides, wherever they build."

"Build, you say?"

"Yes, build ... put up buildings. There's generally a chance there of seeing somebody killed. They fall down. Now have you ever watched a man trying to balance himself on a beam a hundred feet in the air?"

"No, not particularly..."

David nudged him ecstatically. "There's something, now ... The way he has to dance around ... that's authority, too. Do you see it now?"

"It grows clearer to me."

"Now, have you ever noticed a crowd being driven back when they want to see something?"

"I seem to remember it..."

"They walk backwards. Strange thing, isn't it, to see people all walking backward." He mused for a time, and resumed in the manner of someone pleasantly reminiscing. "I had a great show once when I was riding on the ferry. They had some soldiers on the island that they were punishing. Made them work right on the edge of the island ... picking up the stones that they have there or laying them down, I couldn't tell which. One slip and they would be in the water, and no one caring to save them. I think that's important, don't you?"

"Important?"

"Yes," David nodded. "It's important that they knew no one would save them. That's what made it so interesting. I ran to the railing and leaned over to see it clearer—"

"Yes, I can imagine that it was highly entertaining."

"Oh no, that was nothing," David retorted. "In fact, the whole thing was rather dull until a wind came up, and then their shirts blew out in back, like big white balloons that they were attached to. And their legs looked so tiny and helpless, you'd think they were bugs being held in the air." David paused, laughing heartily at the picture he conjured up, looking at Poldy for appreciation. "You've seen that, haven't you?"

"Yes ... I recall it now..."

"Now you don't look as though you could balance yourself on wet stones..." He eyed Poldy shrewdly.

"I've never tried, to tell the truth."

"Could you stand on top of a ladder that was steep as a wall, and paint without holding on to anything?"

Poldy considered.

"No, I'm afraid you couldn't," David said severely. "You had a hard time of it in the war ... didn't you..."

Poldy turned on him a wide and troubled glance, but David only looked back innocently. After a while David made a loud clicking sound and bit his under lip, releasing it slowly, letting it slide from his teeth as though he were sucking a delicate flavor from his thoughts. Behind the coarse long hairs of his lashes his eyes shifted back and forth ... Poldy felt he could almost hear them buzzing like insects behind a hedge. He rose to go, feeling a sudden repulsion towards the cripple, and in some way that was not clear to him, degraded by their conversation. Again he had the desire to strike him, but the expert on authority looked back at him with an expression of sad and profound innocence. After a moment David too stood up, and pointed excitedly toward the fountain. "Look ... look," he breathed. And Poldy saw a tatterdemalion fellow followed by a crowd of urchins, who kept their way a little to one side of the main stream of people. The boys were torturing their quarry by the simple device of advancing toward him in a body, and scattering the moment he made a motion to strike them. As the game gained speed the figure in the center became more and more frenzied, striking in all directions with its arms ... until the dark silhouette looked like that of a many-armed god performing for his worshippers. Poldy heard David laughing beside him, a constrained and secretive laugh, as though the peculiar flavor of the joke were known only to him. "Look ... look," he breathed again. "Oh, I can't stand it..." He took the whistle from his pocket and blew it, and the boys dispersed. When the policeman came he seized the man by the collar, and the man, with an obliging motion, ducked his head forward so as to give him a firmer hold. And now that it was over David stretched himself luxuriantly.

"I'll be going too," he announced. "I have a job on for tonight."

"A job?"

"Yes, it's around here. I may get round to it if I'm not too busy. At eight o'clock. Have you my card?"

"It will be a valued memento."

"Will you come to see me sometime? The address is on the card. Come tonight," he added slyly, "and we can go out together."

Poldy hesitated. He did not know whether his strange friend attracted or repelled him, but there was a certain exhilaration that he felt in his presence, a new gaiety that came to him when he could fall in with the other's laughter. Moreover there was the feeling that he was to be made privy to some secret entertainment, they two being the only ones in the whole city to share it. He nodded and they parted on cordial terms. Poldy stood and watched David swinging off towards the eastern side of the park, hitting the posts as he walked and sometimes giving an extra rap to a favored post. And now that he was alone, Poldy saw that the sunset had faded, nothing left of it but an afterglow reflected on the faces of the people who passed ... a pink softness on every face that made it look too naked. Now flesh was revealed as something too weak to stand the caprice of steel with which it was surrounded. "They should have made something stronger than flesh when they invented everything else," Poldy mused. But of a sudden he started to run across the park to the street where he had been walking before. He came to a place that advertised fortune-telling. There was a huge picture of a Hindu in front, and it was just as he had suspected. Under the picture was the word Kuramos.

3

They were collecting money in front of the library. A blanket was spread on the street and people threw in coins or bills. When the blanket had been laid at the beginning, a poor woman stopped and threw down three pennies. After that nobody gave for a long time. Young girls went about shouting shrilly, and a bugler stood by, lifting his horn valiantly and glancing at the empty blanket each time he had to stop and wipe his lips. At last a dollar bill fluttered down from one of the busses, but a wind swept it down the street and a crippled soldier stopped it. Quicker than anyone could bend down he put his knee on it, and held it so until someone stooped down to him and drew the dollar bill out. The soldier smiled up jovially and went on his way. After that the blanket filled rapidly, a fever of throwing money seized those who passed. Those who had never given to beggars, who had never dared to throw a coin from them ... all those to whom the process of giving or taking money was carefully hedged in as though it were obscene, threw all they had into the blanket. They threw it awkwardly and with a look of guilt, because it seemed as if the privacy of things had been violated ... as if, because of this public and shameless giving, the world had changed, and people might stop and void themselves anywhere, and no one would wonder at it.

A crowd gathered, watching a man writing figures on a blackboard, each number higher than the last. But Poldy could not understand it ... the relation between the numbers being written and the bright metal circles and oblong papers that lay in the blanket. He could not recognize them any more as coins and dollar bills. They had become for him color and shape, geometric patterns without value. And after a while he saw that few glanced any more at the numbers on the blackboard; but everyone counted each thing that fell into the blanket, seeing also that it was only a shape and a texture, a sign that someone had given.

At times as Poldy rested on the library steps he passed into a stupor, from which he emerged to see things more intensely, with a sense that he must use his reprieve ... store up the sights and sounds that were on this earth against the time of darkness that threatened him. Sometimes, in the vivid afternoon light, the city seemed like a brightly-figured rug that someone was shaking before him, and he had to catch the pattern of it as it rippled in front of his eyes. Then he wanted to call out, "Don't shake it so fast ... hold it still a moment." And as if he had been heard he would see the tapestry suddenly clear and still before him ... and figures and things would begin to move on it with a slow precision, with a single action that seemed to be the whole story of what they could do.

Now he found himself staring at a man and a woman who were sitting opposite him. The woman's face had three sores on it, rosy and pointed like little nipples. Her hands and her body were swollen, only her lips were finely moulded with the delicacy of pain. The man said nothing to her, only looked at her from time to time. "Well..." Poldy thought, apologetically ... "well, they're not in very good condition, but they could be sold for a pair."

Then it was a beggar woman who was stopping in front of everyone for alms, her palm cringing to her breast and her fingers cupped. "Not because she is afraid," he said, "but to strike more suddenly." And when she came and stood near him, he remembered ... count her fingers, count her fingers. But the sum of her fingers was correct. "Ah, but that won't do. You'll have to be more crippled than that before I give you anything." And he looked deliberately before him, to a place across the street where they were building. There he saw a tent made of two steel beams meeting and filled in with sky, and he saw four men dancing in it ... an archaic dance, their knees charging and their hands lifted to a rope. The men were silent, no cry or song passed between them, no voice of anyone directing. Yet they moved in the unison of a perfect dance, feeling the rhythm from the vibration of the rope against their palms. Poldy watched the step with delight, and leaned forward to see it more clearly, forgetting the beggar woman.

And now a preacher came and mounted the steps to a sufficient distance above the street. People gathered, assembling in different places like well-trained resonators for his voice. Poldy did not notice this swift gathering of the crowd, its rising around him like stealthy water, until he was trapped in it ... standing on the topmost step near the preacher and looking down at them. But the sight of all the faces lifted to him was terrifying, and it seemed that while they were listening to the preacher they were also intently staring at him. A feeling of dizziness came over him, a panic of all his senses, in which he saw everything suddenly distorted and ominous.

First it was the glasses ... The preacher was wearing glasses, and the light splintered them into prisms that kept swarming back and forth over his eyes, devouring them. But sometimes it seemed to Poldy that the prisms stopped in their feasting and stared at him, with a direct and terrible scrutiny. Otherwise nothing was clear. The faces that looked up at him seemed to waver and turn into loosely-tied balloons ... he could feel the strings that held them fastened in his eyes. There were no other faces. The faces had dissolved into a white foam that drifted waywardly over the shoulders of the crowd, that was teased upward by the wind of the preacher's voice. The faces were swinging back and forth over the shoulders of the crowd with an ominous softness, like waters about to spring ...

It was hot on the steps. He had been standing so long that his body was going numb with the heat. He could feel his thighs fusing into a paralysis, and the desire to walk and break their cohesion came over him with physical pain. He wanted to move, he wanted to hide himself from the faces that were swinging back and forth, preparing to spring at him. Yet he was held there against his will ... the voice of the preacher held him, as it went slyly from one pitch to another, like the delicate passes of a hand hypnotising someone. He was held by the preacher's glasses, with the prisms swarming back and forth over them and devouring the preacher's eyes ...

But now the voice asked them a question ... "What was it ... what was it?" Poldy said to himself. He had heard it only a second ago, and now he could not remember it. He saw the preacher's hands spread wide like an echo of it ... he noticed the fingers, how white they were and puffed high between the joints ... and he felt for a moment that he had caught at something to steady him, that he could look at the hand spread high in the air and stay his dizziness. But what was he saying ... what was he saying? Strange that he could not understand words any more ... Everyone understood, everyone was laughing. He saw two women who stood near-by turn and smile to each other with pleased and knowing expressions ... just as if they were hearing a child play the difficult part of his lesson. Then again there was nothing but the tide of faces, and the preacher's glasses drifting on them ... drifting back and forth with the stupid insistence of something floating on water ...

And now he heard an old woman in the crowd murmuring amen. He heard the sound of her amens like timid chirps, and then he saw a bird come and perch on the rim of the fountain. He closed his eyes and listened to the bird chirping ... such faint slow ones ... and after that there came a soft steaming sound, that he knew was being made by the old woman. Right there before the people she threw back her head and let the sound steam softly out of her lips. It was terrible and disgusting. He was afraid to open his eyes and see it. But it stopped at last and he heard instead the voice of a thousand people shouting, ever farther and farther away ... until that too changed and became the preacher's voice, and the voice went on alone, probing the silence like a fine and insistent needle. Yes, it was the voice that was hurting him ... hurting everyone with its dainty probing motions. A mass operation was being performed, and the preacher, by slyly changing his voice, was taking up one fine instrument after another. Somewhere in the crowd a man lifted his hand begging the preacher to stop ... a silly helpless motion, as though the man was under an anesthetic. And still the faces were drifting above the shoulders of the crowd ... teased upward by the preacher's voice, weary of levelness ... looking for someone who would serve as a pillar for them to dance around. But at last the sermon ended, and the choir stood up to sing....

Then there was only a moment. The faces found him ... they leaped upon him in an orgy of whirling, he was the smooth shining cup in the center of their whirling, he was the hollow funnel dancing like a top in the core of a whirlpool. Nothing could save him from the faces dancing closer and closer upon him, from the moment when, in their frenzy, they would close in on the center of their whirling. But just when he thought this would happen, he saw the bird perching again on the rim of the fountain. Its body was tilted to one side like a child's pencil stroke. It was going to fall but it flew away instead, and then, through the roaring sound around him, Poldy heard his own strange thought ... "Birds never fall, because they can spread a net of wings to catch themselves in time..." The bird came back and he saw its eye. The eye was a bubble that had come up to the surface of feathers and stayed there looking out. It was a tiny vortex swirling into bright black immobility. The bird tilted its head and the eye did not spill over ... "A bird's eye does not spill because its axis can balance the waters around it ... I can balance the faces..." At that they receded from him. Here and there, with lazy convergence the foam shaped itself into features, and he looked up to see the preacher bending over him. "Are you all right now?" the preacher asked.

Poldy smiled and suffered them to raise him and help him walk to one of the benches. He was ashamed of himself for fainting, and he turned away, while they regarded him fearfully and sadly. It was over now and the people departed. Only the women lingered on the steps, strolling to and fro, luxuriating in the slowness of their step, in the tenderness of walking arm in arm. The starched ripple of voile and tapping rain of high heels accompanied them. Over that, their voices ... a soft anarchic choir, fluttering up to a crescendo, pausing like subsiding wings. Poldy heard them, and their voices and the motion of their bodies had for him an indescribable beauty ...

Meanwhile the sun was going away. Windows went blind one after another as the sun left them ... the purple shadow of a tall building splayed down into the street, where it rose and flooded the other buildings. The girls walked ever more slowly, their feet on the steps turned outward with an ancient barefoot placidity ... until the sun was gone, and through the noise of the street day and night could be heard together, as two notes of a chord held for a moment in subtle equilibrium. And now one of the women passed him again, walking alone this time, preoccupied and frowning a little. Their eyes met, and Poldy thought she must have come back to speak to him. He rose and stepped toward her, and looked eagerly into her face; and when she turned away he caught her arm, fearful that she would leave him. Seeing this, and the girl's silent struggle to free herself, people gathered around them. Poldy tried to flee, but someone grasped his wrist and held him ... and after that there was a bewildering succession of places and people and voices, until he found himself sitting alone. He did not understand what his offense had been. He sat in his cell staring miserably at the floor, wondering when they would let him out, and whether he would be in time to meet David.

CHAPTER V

1

The news of Poldy's arrest appeared in the papers. Having saved a copy until one Sunday morning when he had time, Levine went to see Lewis with it. Lewis read the notice without much interest; and watching him as he read, Levine thought how well and contented Lewis seemed. He rubbed the flesh between his eyebrows, where his forehead felt as if it was tied into a knot, he touched his cheeks that were taut with nights of sleeplessness. "Yes, we have changed places," he reflected bitterly.

Lewis put the paper aside with a soft chuckle. "But how could Poldy insult a woman?" he asked. "He wouldn't, I think, know what to say."

"It's newspaper parlance," Levine said. "Incidentally, what does he live on?"

"Why he had enough money with him to last a long while. Besides, there's a fortune waiting for him when he appears."

"I suppose some of it should be used in tracing him?"

Lewis shrugged his shoulders. "What difference does it make?" he asked brusquely. "He'll come back when he's ready. As for the money, he always felt rather guilty about it. Why ... I don't know. He was one of those people who take everything to heart."

"But you were worried about him in the beginning..." Levine said slowly. "When you left the hospital..."

Lewis fingered his chin and looked at a corner of the room. "Yes, at the beginning ... But you know," he added sharply, "I'm not responsible for him."

They were silent, aware that they were watching each other. Self-consciously Lewis shifted his posture, and Levine glanced about the room with a too deliberate interest in its details. He saw now that the most they could hope for would be short uneasy interludes of conversation, with long silences between. And he decided to leave as soon as he could.

"I suppose Lustbader pays you well?"

"I've left Lustbader's ... Found something better to do," Lewis added, in answer to Levine's look of surprise.

"That's very good, then."

Again there was silence, during which Lewis picked up the paper, and mechanically re-read the notice of Poldy's arrest.

"Where is Ruth?" Levine asked, when he had finished.

"She walks a great deal in back of the house ... that is, when I'm busy here." He made his voice deliberately casual. "You're not looking well..."

Levine nodded. "Bothered ... bothered," he repeated. "Nothing serious, but a few things bother me."

"I read that you resigned from the Konig case."

"Yes, I resigned..."

"And the other rumors..."

"True also," Levine said with a wry smile. While Lewis looked at him eagerly, he heard the words in his head as if they were part of a game. "Changed places ... changed places."

"Are you going to be permanently out of it?"

"I don't know," Levine answered slowly. "There's no way of knowing."

"I don't understand..."

Levine seemed lost in thought, sitting with his head resting on his hands and his fingers stretching the flesh over his eyes as if he would tear it. "No, there's no way of knowing," he burst out angrily, "there's no way of telling what to do. They say there are dreams to guide us, but that's all nonsense. Even then you must ask: What is the purpose of the dream, which part of it shall I believe?"

"If you know what you want to do," Lewis said decisively, "if you want to escape from anything, then you must do it. I left Lustbader's the same day that I made up my mind to do it."

"Ah ... if you know," Levine retorted. "But how can you be sure? They say that there are all sorts of things to guide us, yet nothing is reliable. If a dream comes to you that seems to express the innermost purpose of your soul, even then you must ask yourself in the morning, which part shall I pick out? Here lately I dream constantly that I am going through some elaborate ritual. I can't tell you the queer feeling it gives me, of its being a mysterious and profound ritual, which must be carefully followed in every detail. The purpose of it is never clear to me, but I know that I must watch every gesture I make, or the ritual will be broken and a terrible calamity will follow. There are many people involved, and some of them are in archaic dress, that seems to me to be Persian. And things are handed from one to another, though I cannot tell what they are. And always this fear ... this terrible fear that the ritual will be broken. Every morning at the moment when I wake up I think I know what it means. But then I ask myself, which part of it shall I believe? Is the end, the consummation of the ritual important, or my fear that it will be broken? It would seem simple to choose one or the other. Yet if you do, something says: 'You have only chosen.' No," Levine added, striking the table angrily with his fist. "Nobody can tell what it means. They think they know, but it isn't true. No one can discover the innermost wish of his being."

Lewis regarded him curiously. "I don't understand that..." he said slowly. "I know what my wish is, and I have obeyed it."

"What is it?"

There was a moment's hesitation before Lewis spoke. "I was not made," he said somewhat lamely, "to play the organ at Lustbader's."

"What were you made for?" Levine asked mildly.

"I'm working," Lewis began, lowering his voice mysteriously, "on a symphony, that will mean fame and money in the end..."

Levine drew in his breath with a low whistle. He was about to speak when the sound of Ruth's footsteps interrupted him. She was coming up the stairs, and her steps were slow and faltering, as if she moved with great difficulty. He looked inquiringly at Lewis.

"Yes," Lewis nodded, speaking in a lower voice, "two months ago. But it doesn't mean anything," he added smiling craftily. "One can do that to a woman merely to show one's power over her. It means nothing."

They waited in silence while Ruth made her slow progress up the stairs, pausing often to rest, and breathing heavily. Outside the door she seemed to hesitate a long time; but at last she entered, and, seeing Levine, greeted him with a look of silent recognition. She sat down as one who has intruded and wishes to be unobserved ... her head slightly forward and her eyes downcast in an attitude of listening. Only once did she look up, as though she were about to say something over which she had been pondering. But she did not speak, and her expression of listening and thinking did not change. At last, aware that her presence made them silent, she rose and went out of the room, moving always with a peculiar carefulness in her walk, as if her body must not touch anything. Lewis walked back and forth impatiently until she was gone.

"She pretends," he burst out bitterly, "she pretends. There's no need for her to be so careful. What is she afraid of? What does she think will happen to her?"

"You heard her on the stairs?" he continued after a moment, his nostrils trembling and showing white with anger. "And now, this ... this horrible cake-walk. I know! Of course I know. Well then, what does she expect me to do?"

"Perhaps it has something to do with your leaving Lustbader's," Levine said slowly. "You'll need money."

"No, that's not why she advertises herself that way. It's a game she's playing with me. In case I forget..." he broke off and regarded Levine craftily. "Besides, there'll be more money in the end than Lustbader could ever have paid me. I'll be provided for," he added, clapping his fist against his palm with confident briskness.

While he prepared to go, Levine looked at Lewis shrewdly. "If it's no good?" he asked softly.

"If it's no good..." Lewis repeated and paused. The muscles of his face quivered between a desire to retort, and the impulse to laugh. He finished by laughing needlessly long at the impossibility of Levine's suggestion. Hearing it, Ruth came into the room, and when Levine moved to the door she followed him with unexpected swiftness. "What do you think of it?" she asked in a low voice. "The thing he's working on. Is it any good?"

"It may be..."

"But we have very little to live on. What should we do?"

"I don't know." Levine's voice was impatient. "I don't know what to tell you. It seems necessary to him."

"No, it's not," Ruth said, her eyes flashing with sudden defiance. "I tell you it's not."

"How can you tell?"

"It's not necessary," she repeated stubbornly. "I know that it's not. It's stupid ... the whole business is stupid."

Levine stood uncertainly in the doorway, and Lewis came over and regarded them curiously. "Bannerman wants to know whether you care to take Poldy's pictures," Levine said, raising his voice casually. "Otherwise he'll throw them out. They're in his way."

"I don't want them," Lewis answered. He had not thought of Poldy for a long time. But it was about this time that he began to be haunted by Poldy's face. Often when he walked in the crowded streets he thought he saw it, and then something would compel him to follow until he could catch a better glimpse of the face, and assure himself that he was mistaken.

CHAPTER VI

1

Life was very satisfactory to David Solner. To begin with, he spent a great deal of time away from the shop, delivering bundles of basted coat lining ... a pleasant occupation since it gave him liberty to roam around and observe things. Then he had been specially fortunate some time ago in witnessing the scene on the street, when the police disbanded the gathering around the man who was peddling knives. And lastly he had made the acquaintance of Leopold Crayle, who had been greatly impressed with what he said, had taken his card, and came very often to visit him. Recalling this, David stepped along briskly and smiled to himself, hardly aware of all the complicated machinery of his walking. He felt on playful terms with his leg, and gave it an extra shake while he was crossing the street. But this caused him to loose his balance, and he careened towards a team of horses that was rounding the curb. In terror he glanced at the huge heads tossing above him, he heard an outcry of hoofs and the voices of people shouting. Then he felt himself thrown to the paving, where he lay and waited. But finding that nothing happened, he righted himself with great dignity and sat down at the curb. Slowly he looked around. A crowd had gathered, the driver standing in the foreground, his hands on his hips; and while the driver contemplated him in satirical silence, a street cleaner came, brushed his paste of manure and water under David's legs, walked around him and continued on his way.

All this was very humiliating. The expert on authority looked as though he might burst into tears. He lifted his hands before him, the fingers spread wide, and with an elaborate jerk dropped his head into his outstretched hands. Behind his fingers his eyelids quivered like tiny wings caught behind a screen. At last he parted his fingers a little and looked out. Everyone had gone.

And now it occurred to him that he was late, and that Anna would scold him, and he wished he were alone in a place where he could weep. He wished that Mirelie would see him at this moment, and pity him ... perhaps be kind enough to talk to him. Then they would be friends, and nothing else would matter any more. Yes, if only Mirelie were not afraid of him, if they could only speak to each other, then his whole life would change and he would be happy. And he arose sadly and continued on his way, thinking of her. And now he lifted his arm and held it bent at the elbow, with the hand drooping piteously; and at every step he contorted his face into a grimace of distaste. So Mirelie might see him when he came in, and comfort him at last...

But when he entered the shop it was so dark that he could hardly tell which of the figures sitting and sewing there was Mirelie. He could not see the needles or thread, and the women who were sewing and Anna and Mirelie moved their hands in the air like witches performing a silent spell together. When his footsteps sounded in the doorway, Anna turned her head without looking up; and while he waited for her to speak, David made out the figure of Mirelie. She had put her sewing aside and now looked mournfully toward the window, and by the sad droop of her head and the listless way she held her hands in her lap, David knew that she had been crying. Then the spell had not been a silent one, but done to the rhythm of Anna's scolding ... her voice always balanced on one key, yet with an overtone of hysteria, as if at any moment it might veer away and run amuck over the scale.

"Late, my sweetheart," Anna began. "Two hours late. You take a cripple for an errand boy and that's your reward. A pile of coats waiting to be pressed, and it takes him two hours to run around the corner. Well, turn on the gas..."

David almost skipped across the room, and lit the gas, and set to work as quickly as he could. And now, as he stood on the machine, balancing himself with one foot on the trestle, he could look his fill at Mirelie and notice everything she did. Mirelie was a very thin little girl, with large breasts that swung under her dress every time she moved, and a braid of heavy black hair hanging down her back. Her head always seemed to droop a little, as if she was pulling forward against the weight of her braid; and when she walked on the street she held her thin arms folded in front of her, to hide the swinging of her breasts. Sometimes when he saw her sewing at the table David thought she was a grown woman ... her expression was so serious, her body looked so mature. But there would be a sound on the street ... a hand-organ playing or the whistle of the fire engine, or only the wind ... and she would drop her work and run to the window. And by the way she stood there ... her knees straight and stiff and her hands locked behind her back ... David knew she was still a child. Even now, though he could not hear anything himself, something seemed to startle Mirelie, and she ran to the window listening. "It is good," David said to himself. "She has dreams, even while she is awake."

But Anna had been silent too long. "Look," she said scornfully to the other women, "how fast she runs. A little piece of offal, I tell you, but it has legs."

"Leave off ... leave off, Anna," they whispered to her.

"Now to the window, now to the door, now to that corner, perhaps ... never to the same place twice." She lifted her voice mockingly. "Tell me, Mirelie, is he coming, your sweetheart?"

"Leave off, Anna. There are always things for a child to see."

"Then you don't believe that she has a sweetheart? Listen..." She paused and looked around impressively. "Some day our Mirelie will get married."

At this they all laughed, and Anna nodded her head triumphantly. "What makes her run to the window that way? What does she think about, all the time that she sits there sewing without saying a word? Oh, she's a sly one, keeping him all to herself. But some day she'll fool us all, and come marching in with a husband on her arm. Yes, there's a mate for everyone in this world, even for Mirelie."

The others worked away silently, but Anna was not through yet. She folded her sewing and drew the rocking chair closer to the table, and settled herself comfortably.

"I'll tell you how it is," she began, as if it were going to be a very long story. "All her strength goes into her hair. Hair grows best on deformed things ... I've always noticed that. In the woods near our town there used to be a dead tree. The lightning struck it once and sliced right into the trunk, and it never blossomed after that. But this very tree, mind you, had fine green hair growing out of the trunk year after year ... so long that you could braid it. And everything else in that forest died after a while, except the hair growing out of the tree."

"Really, Anna ... But the hair must have died too."

"No, but it didn't," Anna retorted. "And I remember that there was a dwarf in our town, and he had long hair hanging down his back, just like a girl's. Yes, it's quite true," she added thoughtfully, "hair grows best on deformed things."

Meanwhile Mirelie slipped back to her place, and sat looking at Anna with eyes that seemed hypnotized. She pretended that all the witches from the fairy-tales were sitting around her and sewing, and weaving a spell upon her, and the steady flow of Anna's words was the terrible incantation. She looked furtively at Anna's hands, and saw the balls of her fingers like large full-fleshed petals, and it terrified her that they were so large. It terrified her when Anna laughed, throwing her head far back and letting it fall forward again, as if it was too heavy with laughter. But while she watched this Mirelie pricked her finger, and Anna noticed her sucking her thumb.

"Handy one," she said. "Come here and let me squeeze it for you." Timidly Mirelie extended her hand, and Anna examined it curiously. "No blood ... not enough blood there to flow when she pricks her thumb. Well, never mind the sewing, Mirelie, since you're so good at it. See whether you can sweep."

But as Mirelie took the broom from the corner and began to sweep, tears came to her eyes. Her broom turned up fine white threads that clung to the cracks in the floor, and would not come out unless she stooped down and plucked them with her fingers. It was as if an invisible basting of the floor was being ripped, and she said to herself: "The floor was only basted together and now it will come apart. Let it." And she bent lower to hide her tears.

* * * * * * *

After a while the two women put their sewing away and went home, and Anna and David and Mirelie had supper. Then David and Mirelie went back to the shop and were alone there, yet they did not speak to each other. It was as if they had started to play a game ... a silent game, in which there was some penalty if they were caught looking at each other. But though this was the rule of the game, Mirelie could tell each minute exactly what David was doing. With sly glances she followed him about the room, watched him when he lit the gas ... turning the jet cautiously at first, so that the flame showed thin and tight as a bud; then with a quick twist of his hand flaring it up into a leaf, and looking at her triumphantly. All evening David was busy pressing things, and she watched him dancing up and down on the machine, and listened to the sound of the boards hissing against each other. If they stayed together for a long time she could hear all sorts of melodies coming from them, and the pressing machine seemed like a queer hurdy gurdy that could play by shutting its lips tightly. But if David noticed her she would look away quickly, and amuse herself by trying to guess what sort of a person it would be to buy each suit hanging in the window. There was one suit especially ... blue with faint gray stripes ... that made her think of David. She could even imagine it was David hanging in the window, with his arms drooping limply at his sides, and the short curve of hanger for his head; and often when she was alone in the shop, she wanted to turn down the cuff of the right trouser, and shake it in the air like David's long leg. But after a while David would look away, and Mirelie could watch him again as he worked and bent his head forward into the light. Then she would notice the long coarse hairs standing out from his eyebrows like the stringy roots of something growing inside his head, and she would try to count them. Most of the time David did not seem to notice her, and went about his work like a blind person who has no need to stop and look around. But there always came one time in the course of the evening ... and always after he had leaped on the machine and was standing there, lightly bouncing his body up and down ... when he would turn and survey the shop with an air of great surprise. And that was the moment when he looked fully at Mirelie and their eyes met, and all their careful playing of the game was spoiled. Seeing her, David would purse his lips and frown. But that only frightened Mirelie. At that moment she was afraid that the machine would suddenly begin to move, and he would ride toward her.

Tonight, however, David seemed especially preoccupied. He kept glancing at the clock or going to the door and looking up and down the crowded street. When at last there was a knock at the door he bounded off the machine. Poldy came in and stood uncertainly in the center of the room.

"I'll be ready for you in a minute," David said gaily, raising his forefinger to Poldy. He leaped up on the machine again and nodded brightly to his visitor. "Sit down on the couch."

Poldy sat down without a word, and after a moment's thought, stretched himself full length and closed his eyes, conscious for the moment before he closed them of Mirelie's solemn scrutiny. Mirelie, noting with pleasure his dark hair and white face, wondered whether this was the lover that Anna had foretold for her. Often she speculated on what it was to be married, and when Anna accused her of thinking of a sweetheart her heart thumped as if they had caught her stealing. Now she sat stealthily watching the stranger; but as soon as David was through with his work she was frightened of his speaking to her, and she rose and slipped out of the room. David went over to Poldy and tapped him on the shoulder, but Poldy did not stir. "Asleep..." David commented, as he bent closer to look into his face. He stood for a while frowning. "Oh, very well, then..." he said, and shrugged his shoulders. He went to the door that separated the shop from Mirelie's room and shut it softly, very softly. And as soon as he had done this anger seized him. All day it had been waiting, and the soft shutting of the door was the cue for it.

2

It burst from the swollen veins of his throat and flooded through his body, and beat against the flesh of his palms. It set his body trembling so that he stood with hands clenched against it, with fingers clenched and defiant, trying to drive back the tide of his rage. Meanwhile they ranged themselves about him ... the beings who seek out mortals to strike bargains with them, wherever there is a ransom to give: disease or deformity or genius ... shadows that he could hardly see in the dark, with the naked bodies of gigantic men; save where a focus of more ancient flesh, still virulent, gave off a wing or a curved fin, or webbed their long toes together. They came and alighted with the rustling motion of birds, and folded their limbs under them, and perched in a semi-circle on the floor ... watching him. And now he thought it must come ... that mysterious accession of strength that he brooded over day and night. Now he felt it was coming upon him, while the potent flow of anger was still in his body ... a wild chaotic strength, to lift terrible weights and hurl them great distances, so that everyone would look with astonishment, and thousands of people would marvel at him and utter his name with fear. "Is it too much?" he whispered scornfully, "is it too much?" But they only shifted their limbs with a noiseless motion, and the tide of his rage recoiled on itself, and flowed back into its secret channels again. He stood there exhausted, peering bewilderedly into the darkness.

After a while an idea came to him. He nodded to himself. "Yes," he said, "I have been too hasty. I have asked for it too openly, and besides I have asked for the impossible. Perhaps they do not know what I mean. Perhaps I can trick them into something else. I will be very reasonable in my demands, and I will appear innocent and take them off their guard."

So he turned on the light and took his ocarina from the box, and sat down on the bed, his feet curled easily round each other ... He began to play ... sad, wayward trills that slipped impulsively from one note to another; and while he played he watched them craftily to see what they did, noticing how they were moved by his music, how they shifted imperceptibly into postures of sadness. To himself, then, he said: "To play so that everyone will listen and be unable to go away ... to play so that they will laugh or weep as I wish; or perhaps..." he added in a conciliatory tone, "let only Mirelie hear, and look at me solemnly. Yes, we will let it go at that ... that only Mirelie should hear." But though he looked towards the door for a long time, though he looked and played, Mirelie did not come in. He ended his playing and remained sitting on the bed, resting his head in his hands.

But now the tallest of the figures perching on the floor ... the one who held the center of the circle and was their spokesman ... sighed lengthily. He had been sitting with his knees drawn up and his head sleeping on his folded arms; but now he raised his head a little so that one bright eye was visible, looking solemnly at David. Brightly it glowed for a long time, yet he did not speak.

"Well?" David asked impatiently.

The eye continued to regard him.

"If you've nothing to say," David began petulantly, "then why are you here? You have no bargains to strike today, I see. No, I wouldn't call you a generous lot. Tell me, must I think of something so small that you will shame yourselves and give it to me? Shall I ask that my nails be rosy or my teeth even at the edges? Such things, I've heard, comfort some people. But thank you. I'm not so easily satisfied."

"Why aren't you?" the spokesman asked lazily, and his eye quivered as if he wanted to go back to sleep.

"A fine question that! Why do you pretend that you don't know?"

The spokesman closed his eye and David thought he had gone off into deep slumber. But at length he remarked drowsily, "The trouble is, David, you're too excited about being a cripple."

David bolted up in bed and shot a reproachful glance at him. The spokesman opened his eye and looked back. "Yes, much too excited," he added. "Look at him..." he pointed to Poldy. "He doesn't want anything any more. He's ended ... positively ended. But you've been too excited all your life."

"Pretending again!" David retorted. "My friend, you ought to be quite a success at shopping. Yes, I've seen how the women sneer at the wares they want to buy, while their fingers itch to be holding them. Why are you here, then, if it's so little to have found me? I suppose others have better ransoms to give. Why not go to them?"

"It's not such a wonderful ransom..."

"Oh, no ... to be the puppet of my legs, to hop along like a child's grotesque toy. They saw it in the window with the other toys, and brought it home because it would make them all laugh. To carry myself down the street turning every face as I pass, leaving a smoke of faces behind me like a peace offering to my deformity. Could I only have had one moment of my life when I could forget that I was different..."

The spokesman's eye opened wider as he listened. "As for your being different," he began at once, "from the very beginning there have been so many weird shapes on this earth that we cannot justly talk of anything being different. Consider the deformity of all men who go about like the trained horses at the circus reared up so as to make a spectacle of the secret parts of their bodies, and who, because of this vainglorious exhibition, have to twist themselves around every time to look at their dung. Now to pursue the subject further ... have you ever been to the circus?"

"Yes, of course..."

"You may have seen there a dog with two tongues, let us say, or a wolf with a curved horn ... some such trifling thing for people to gape at. Well, all that fuss is really quite ridiculous. All that oh-ing and ah-ing with which they tickle themselves from cage to cage. They, of course, cook things up in pots and let them pour to the mould of their dishes, and so they know what to expect. But things were never cooked up in pots to begin with. There's a constant spilling over all the time. Your leg trickled down a little too long. Why be so excited over it?"

"Ah ... that's all very clever. But answer this one: why did it happen to me?"

"What makes you think it happened to you?"

"Oh, come, now..."

"No, don't be impatient. Because if that's what has been bothering you, I think we can arrange it."

"Arrange it?"

"Yes," the spokesman winked solemnly. "If you'll be agreeable, of course, and help me along."

"Very well, go on." David lay down and turned his face to the wall.

"Yes, you sit in the theatre and you think the actor on the stage is looking at you. It's a natural thing now, isn't it..."

"Go on, go on..."

"Now let us assume that it happened to you."

"Nonsense! That's no assumption."

"Well, let us assume that it was meant to happen to you. Is that better?"

"Go on..."

"In that case there had to be somebody to mean it ... to correspond to the actor, let us say."

"Yes..."

"Someone who knew he was looking at you..."

"Yes..."

"And so this glance that the actor gave you is the reason why you are crippled. But if there's a reason for that, then there must also be a reason for the fact, say..."

"That Mirelie has black hair."

"Precisely ... and that Anna has a mole on her face."

"And that Mirelie is thin..."

"Precisely. And that a child was run over the other day."

"In short, a reason for everything."

"Excellent! Excellent! You see it's a game you can never stop. Each thing has a reason, as many reasons as there are separate details which we can comprehend in this world, and yet reasons again for all the infinite happenings that we cannot know about. Ah, but notice. You've cooked, haven't you? You've said: here I shall salt and here and here, until it is all salted. And then the strange thing occurs. You taste it, and nothing is flavored because you have salted everything. Salted, but not salty. And so with your reasons. If everything has a reason..."

David turned around angrily. "Salted but not salty..." he mimicked. "Keep your analogies. Was it my fault that the actor looked at me?"

"Or his fault that you sat where he looked?"

"Clever ... very clever. But I'll tell you my friend. You have never played some of the children's games, and that's the trouble with you. You've never looked at the pattern of the wallpaper, saying to yourself: I can look at it this way, and see spades with hearts between; or this way, and see only the hearts in a row. Yes, if you had ever looked at the pattern of wall-paper both ways, you would know what an old trick it is."

"Very well, then," the spokesman said mildly. "I'm sorry. I just wanted to arrange it."

"Besides, since you talk of cooking so much, I'll take the same liberty. Things must be salted and sugared. And some reasons are salt and some are sweet ... we can tell by the flavor of things. So that all your fine arguments only bring us to restate the question. Why was I, so to speak, made salty?"

The spokesman stared at him ... a little stupidly, David thought.

"Salty?" he repeated.

David laughed bitterly. "Ah ... I see all this talk of cooking won't do. Things were never cooked up in pots to begin with. We'll try again. If there is a person who corresponds to the actor, and if he does look at us while he's acting ... what does he want? It's his old lust for sacrifice, and because he does not know whom to choose, he looks and strikes someone with a sign of difference, and then thinks he has something."

At this the spokesman looked up brightly and began to talk with garbling rapidity. "Ah, sacrifice, to be sure. The bleeding heart torn from the living offering by the forthright fingers of the priest. Fire, or the spike, or the cross, as a background for the gesture of agony. A somewhat morbid emphasis on vivisection, I should say, yet in its way a rather pretty pantomime of the real state of affairs. Well, it's very natural for you to feel that way about it, especially since you have the qualification of suffering; and, as I said, it's the right idea though very crudely expressed."

"Then you admit..."

The spokesman shook his head reproachfully. "Patience," he urged, "we must think this out carefully. Now as I mentioned before, these sacrificial offerings were a rather apt pantomime of the real state of affairs. For the whole idea behind a sacrifice is to maintain a balance. Savages, who practiced it, were still alert enough to feel the precarious equilibrium of the universe, they glimpsed the profound truth that everything is in a state of balance that constantly strains towards disruption. And so they made their infinitesimal contribution to preserving that balance ... a rather superfluous attempt, like blowing over the scales."

David raised himself on his elbow and looked at the spokesman. "What makes you think that all things are in balance?"

"Please," the spokesman began peevishly, "don't behave that way. We have to start with something, don't we? I chose that point of beginning because I thought it would be the least offensive."

"Very well, continue." David lay down again. But the next moment he raised his head and asked: "But why was the attempt superfluous?"

"That's just the point." The spokesman's eye quivered his approval. "Because, when the tension of things was first established, it was not left to the accidental activities of human beings to maintain it. All the time, subtly and imperceptibly, there is an adjustment going on that keeps things in balance. As it applies to the human world, we might state it crudely by saying that human beings pay for each other. Invisible currency passes between them which settles all their debts to each other, voids all their accounts. Savages had some inkling of this, when, realizing that they were the debtors of their living sacrifice, they squared their accounts by calling him a god. A little private bribe, you understand, to put him in good humor. And a great game, really ... this keeping things balanced, and ideally suited as a pastime for eternity; because you can't ever find two things that are equal, and so your left hand and your right hand are both kept busy, forever working the scales with alternate motions. And you can't take a rest for a minute, either..."

"I can just picture it," David said admiringly. "However, instance ... instance..."

"We shall come to that. Now let us say that the souls of people are tiny and intricate stones, with points and facets and hollows ... each stone marvelously small, yet convoluted a thousand different ways. And let us say that each stone contains within itself a unique magnetism, to attract that single other stone with which it can articulate. And so all the souls of the world are held together in a chain, no thread going through the chain and yet it can never fall apart. Love is not necessary. It is only the name for a hysterical fear that the souls may fall apart, the fear of those who do not understand the intimate embrace of these tiny stones, who do not know that their intercourse is more profound than the intercourse of love..."

"Well, continue," David interrupted peevishly. "These fancies put me to sleep. You're an ingenious one."

"Now these stones work on each other with a subtle attrition, and though their surfaces may change, they cannot unlock themselves, because they always change into each other. And sometimes one can feel this silent imperceptible rotation of the stones. Slowly it works, as if they were turning in a profound dream."

"Instance..." David repeated, sighing wearily.

"Oh, very well then. Now what happened here a few days ago?"

"A child was run over."

"You remember it?"

"I saw it. The mother ran to the curb and screamed at the fellow who was driving the truck, and shook her fist at him. He only curled his head around and looked back curiously, but he didn't stop."

"No, he didn't..."

"She almost stepped on the little girl. Her skirt fell over the child's face, and her foot even touched the flesh of it, but she didn't seem to notice. Then she kept turning around, upbraiding all those who were watching her, because they hadn't stopped the driver. She spun herself round with her arms stretched out under her shawl, and her fingers tearing at the fringes, pleading with them to tell her why no one had stopped him. She only wanted the reason, she said ... that would satisfy her. Then she cursed them because no one had thrown himself in front of the truck to make it stop, and next she asked for the number of the truck, but nobody knew it. They just stood there and looked at her stupidly. And next she caught sight of a little boy who had been playing with her child when it happened..." David broke off and laughed heartily. "You remember those circle games we used to play in kindergarten..." he said. "Somebody stands in the center of the circle and we all sing: 'Come and choose your partner.' For all the world it was just like one of those games." He was silent, chuckling to himself. "Well, suddenly she ran over to this little boy," he resumed briskly, "and stood before him begging him to tell her the number of the truck. The poor little fellow just looked around sheepishly..."

"And the child?"

"Somebody carried it into the house. The mother never seemed to care, though she stopped for a moment and watched the fellow as he picked the little girl up, and fixed her dress and put his hand gently to the back of her head, just as if she were asleep. After a while they brought out a chair and the mother sat down and acted very petulant. If anyone came over to her she shook her shoulders like a peevish young girl. And then—"

"I see that you're a very careful observer," the spokesman interrupted politely. "And can you tell me what's happening on the street now?"

"Why, she's been on the street almost constantly now for the last four days."

"Four days, you say! I must see her."

"No, don't trouble yourself. I can tell you all about it. She's a very important personage now. They say people come from blocks around just to see her."

"Sits and mourns for her child, I suppose..."

"Oh, no, she's forgotten the child entirely. In fact she's quite happy ... looks rosy and bright-eyed. I never thought she could look so pretty. You see, after the child's funeral she went directly to a sign painter, and she had him paint her two large signs. Something to this effect: I shall give a reward to any person who can tell me the license number of the truck that ran over and killed my eight-year-old girl on the morning of ... I forget the date. But she has the date and the place there and the exact time, so that there can't be any mistake. They say that the sign painter composed it for her, and he did a very nice job ... different sized letters, and some letters in red and others in green. The sign is white, I think. And she has these signs attached to her ... one in front and one in back. And all day she parades around near the place where it happened..."

"Mm ... quite a curiosity. It's a liberal reward, I suppose?"

"No, she's poor. Not a thing to give. It's just a figure of speech, this talk of a reward."

"Now that's very interesting ... very." The spokesman nodded judicially. "Her whole case, in fact, hinges on that point. Everything would be different if there was a reward. You see that, I suppose."

"Explain."

"Because," the spokesman said thoughtfully, "if she really wanted to know that license number, there would be a real reward. Which proves, then, that she doesn't want to know it. Looks well, you say?"

"Rises early, fixes herself carefully and dresses in her signs as if she was an actress preparing for her entrance." David paused, suddenly tired of his narrative and feeling very drowsy. He was almost asleep when the spokesman's voice roused him, saying lazily, "Well, now, doesn't that prove it?"

"Prove what..." David asked sleepily. "I've forgotten."

The spokesman's eye narrowed slyly. "That people pay for each other," he said.

"Explain ... explain."

"Now wasn't," the spokesman began in a lazy voice, "wasn't the life of this eight-year-old girl the price that had to be paid first, before the mother could parade herself between her two signs? And didn't the child's death have to come about in just this way? And wasn't it necessary for the driver not to stop? For if he had stopped, then the mother could not have put on her masquerade of signs, and the child would have died for nothing. Now some would say the driver was the villain in the case, but I don't think so, I don't think so at all. Though of course," he added thoughtfully, "it is a rather heavy price for such a trifle. I shouldn't want to argue the point. Though who knows? In the balancing of all things it may not be exorbitant, neither may the mother's parade be such a trifle as it seems."

There was a long silence, but after a while David sat up and looked searchingly at the spokesman.

"It's a lie," he said.

"What is?"

"It's a lie," he repeated angrily, "that people pay for each other. And it's clever, very clever, my friend, since you cannot understand words, but only numbers, to set yourself up in bookkeeping. If you knew the meaning of words, if only one word could be made clear to you, then you would laugh at your pretentious bookkeeping, you would laugh at everything you've said tonight. A number must be balanced all the time by another number. But a word does not need to be balanced. Let us say it was the mother's grief."

"Now don't excite yourself. Let's remain friends. For all I know," the spokesman added blandly, "it may be a lie. But what makes you think so?" His eyebrow moved toward the center of his forehead, to meet the invisible puckering of the other eye, an effect so comical that David had to laugh.

"Well, have you read the fairy tales?" he asked more kindly.

"Which fairy tales? Please be specific."

"All of them ... any one of them ... they're all true, any way. But I was referring to the one where the prince is supposed to go forth on dangerous adventures. But while he keeps in his hand a small round mirror and gazes at his reflection in it, nothing can harm him, neither can he see all the horrors through which he must pass."

"A very magic mirror."

"No, there you're mistaken. For the mirror is an ordinary piece of looking-glass, a broken piece that the goose-girl in his father's palace begged him to take. But still, while he looks into it he does not see the terrors that surround him."

"A charming story," the spokesman yawned. "How does it apply?"

"Why, the mother," David said slowly, "has found a mirror. And while she looks into it, she will not know that her child is dead. It was often a plant that had to be tended..."

"Really?" The spokesman yawned again and closed his eye. "Well, I wanted to arrange it," he said drowsily. "I heard you saying one time, 'They owe me something."

"Ah ... that afternoon ... to him. To that fool who sleeps, and who is, as you say, ended. Wasn't that the word?"

"Precisely..."

"Tell me, did he believe it?"

"Believe what?"

"You know what I mean," David said impatiently. "About my being an expert on authority."

The spokesman opened his eye that quivered with sleepiness. "Do you believe it?"

David was silent, intently regarding him.

"It's confusing now, isn't it..."

David did not answer.

"You pretend to enjoy it, but you don't. And that means you don't believe it. Isn't that so? Isn't it true," the spokesman coaxed, "that if you don't enjoy a thing, then you really don't believe it?"

Still David was silent. At last he spoke softly. "So you too thought of that."

"Oh, yes," the spokesman said cheerfully, "I think of everything. But is it true?" he asked, and looked at David, his eye glistening with eagerness ... "that you need the whole human race for a payment? Now suppose they offered you a sacrifice..."

"Well, what? What would they give me?" David asked sharply.

"You said," the spokesman continued smoothly, "that he strikes someone with a sign of difference, and in that way he chooses a sacrifice. Now suppose you were to try it."

Again there was a long silence, the spokesman's eye closing slowly, so that David wondered whether he had fallen asleep. At last David broke the silence, but his voice sounded far away, as if he too were asleep.

"Yes ... suppose it is Mirelie," he said softly. "Whom you must strike with the sign of difference."

"But Mirelie..." David said, and his voice was troubled. "She is not like others."

"Why not?"

"She is not like others," David repeated, a note of pleading in his voice.

"Do you think she is too bright for you, then? Do you think she is too proud and too free? Yet in every person in the world there is the secret power for shame. There is no one so wilful or proud or free that he has lost it. And in nature there is death. Death was provided, in order that all things might be shamed. In nature there is no bird or insect or flower so bright that it cannot die. Besides," he added craftily, "she belongs to you."

He waited for David to speak, and when there was no answer he continued, his voice low and thoughtful. "She belongs to you. It is you who have the expert knowledge of degradation ... you who have sounded the depths of it and searched through all its intricate disguises. Each person walks before you with his entrails exposed ... a crowded, convoluted circle, like dainties in a box that one sees through a little circle of transparent paper. I tell you that because Mirelie is so bright and free, she can be more humiliated ... she is capable of greater degradation. And then consider," the spokesman finished with a little laugh, "she looked a long time at your friend there. He's attractive."

David only stared at the floor and said nothing.

"Lastly," the spokesman's voice was now so drowsy that David could hardly hear it, "as we said before, people pay for each other. It will balance ... it will balance," the voice sang softly. "She will even love her shame." And as he went off to sleep he mused to himself. "For it must be that the body loves everything that happens to it ... it must be that..."

David thought the spokesman was growing somewhat repetitious, and he was glad when the voice stopped. He rose then and turned off the light. "So you do strike bargains," he observed to the spokesman's sleeping figure. In the dark he went to Mirelie's door and opened it softly.

3

Mirelie lay in bed with her eyes wide open. She saw the bureau where her ribbons hung, and the chair with her clothes folded away, and the white posts of her bed; and she was terrified at the thought that she was seeing these things in the dark, instead of being asleep. Besides, there was a shadow swaying on the floor, that made her heart stop beating whenever she looked at it. "Because," she said to herself, "it might be David standing there."

"Anna," she called, when she could stand it no longer, "I'm not asleep."

"Well, then, turn over on the other side."

Mirelie turned as quietly as she could and waited.

"Anna," she called again in a terrified whisper. "Why can't I sleep?"

Anna's voice sounded angrily from the next room. "Sleep, Mirelie," she said. "Your lover won't come tonight."

After that Mirelie did not dare to speak again, and she lay in bed thinking of the day when she would be married ... wondering why Anna always laughed when she spoke of it. It was true, of course. Some day she would get married, everyone did. Even Anna had once been married. She wore a wide gold ring on her left hand, and whenever she was angry she made a rapping sound with it on the table. There was also the picture of a little man with whiskers in her bedroom....

But in the midst of these thoughts Mirelie heard the sound of music coming from the shop. "That's David playing the ocarina," she said to herself, and she wanted to tell someone about it. She thought it would be a great pleasure just to say aloud that David was playing; and at last, though she was afraid that Anna would scold her, she remarked softly, "That's David playing..." But Anna did not answer.

How mournful it sounded and far away. Things must be very sad for David to make him play that way, and she wished she were not afraid of him, but could go to him and comfort him. But now the music stopped and she heard David walking across the room to put the ocarina away. Only it wasn't really hearing his footsteps. No, she felt each step in her heart, as though her heart had changed its rhythm and kept time with the swaying of David's body ... the same thing that happens when you're walking down the street, and a friend catches up with you, walking faster. Then your feet are confused for a moment, but in the end they go faster too, step for step with your friend. So it was every time Mirelie saw David walking toward her ... her heart had been marching its own way, but after its moment of confusion it kept time with the swaying of David's body.

And now Mirelie wondered whether anyone could tell that this happened. If David knew, what would he think of her? And if Anna knew, she would say that David was her sweetheart. Yes, if she could look into Mirelie's heart and see how it changed step whenever David came near her, she would surely say, "So it is David." Yet why should David be her sweetheart, just because her heart changed step that way? And as Mirelie brooded over this, she understood that David was her sweetheart because she was ashamed of that feeling; and because she could make it come whenever she pleased, even when David was far away; and because it went through her whole body and out at her finger-tips. Thinking of it now in bed, Mirelie felt her cheeks grow red, and she wished she could run away and never see David again.

Then Mirelie dozed off and had a dream of a boy and a girl she had seen that day, jumping rope in front of the shop. They looked at each other all the time as their bodies went up and down in the circling frame of the rope ... and near them was an old man who was stroking his cheeks with one hand, as if he was trying to brush away invisible webs that kept gathering around him. Though she watched him for a long time, never once did he stop stroking his cheeks. "He can't stop it, I suppose," she said to herself, and that made her afraid of the old man. But after a while Mirelie was aware that something terrible was about to happen, and the old man also knew it, and stroked his cheeks faster. Mirelie wanted to cry out ... to warn the boy and the girl who were jumping rope together. But her voice would not come and she could only stand there helplessly watching. And at last she knew it had happened, by the way the old man's fingers stretched themselves ... longer and longer, as long as rulers, and laid themselves daintily and stiffly to his cheek; by the way he smiled at the boy and the girl, and turning to Mirelie, said, "They are married." Then she awoke, trembling and fearful, and saw that the door to the shop was open, and David was standing there. "Mirelie," he called softly, "Mirelie..."

But in that moment she was no longer afraid, neither afraid of David nor of the old man in her dream. She heard David laughing with a strange intense gaiety as he came to her. She lifted her arms to him and felt his face close to hers, and his eyelashes fluttering against her cheek.

CHAPTER VII

1

By slow and laborious stages the symphony that Lewis Orling was working on progressed. Though it was difficult work and baffled him completely at times, he felt it shaping under his hand, he became aware of its meaning. And this was the allegory of the first movement...

There were, first, four notes of a seeking nature ... four notes informed with a profound question, that once stated was asked again, in the endless repetition of the theme, in its intricate weaving about. Yet what was this question and what was it seeking? Who was it that asked? It was the question of an exile, of someone longing for a place once known, yet not for any country in the world or for anything that the world could give. It was the question of a soul smitten with memory and knowing itself for lost ... the memory of its childhood and the knowledge that it was alone and lost in a strange world. For the world is strange to everyone, and everyone is exiled in it ... because in childhood each soul has lived its own civilization, one that was never before known on the earth ... because each childhood that has ever been lived was a different civilization ... and when the memory of it returns, the soul knows itself for lost, the only survivor in a strange world. So the four notes were seeking, turning despairingly on themselves, running here and there with querulous hope ... repeating their question over and over with terrible insistence. But now, instead of one clear instrument asking the question each time, there came an interplay of the instruments, and the question became louder and more insistent, until it shouted with a frenzy of all the instruments. And now it was no longer the voice of one soul, but whole nations seeking, crying out ceaselessly on their past with one despairing voice. The voice of an army trapped in the mountains ... they look up to the distant sky and back on the way they have come, and know themselves caught in a despairing pass...

These were the things that Lewis heard in his music, that seemed to speak from it. And in moments when he heard this, he heard also an overtone ... the sound of multitudes clapping, a vast applause for him because he had said these things. Then his breath would come more quickly, he would feel his body tremble with eagerness to finish it. And wonder filled him, that, sitting alone in his room and with no other means than his pencil and the paper ruled with the staff, he could make such things known. It did not yet occur to him that because of the very simplicity of it, there might be some betrayal here, some form of self-deception.

Meanwhile he was hardly aware of Ruth. He did not seem to see her, or rather he saw her only in a curious oblique way. When she was in the same room with him, he was oblivious to her presence, as if all the senses by which he might perceive her had suddenly gone blind. And yet when he happened to think of her, or when he saw anything that suggested her, his heart would begin to beat violently, and then he himself did not know whether it beat with love or hatred. Though often he questioned it, this oblique way of seeing her remained a mystery to him ... a transference that kept its secret, too obscure and cunning to reveal its meaning. Yet one day, catching sight of her unexpectedly, he was surprised to see how well she was looking, how well her advancing pregnancy agreed with her. He pretended now that the impulse which had drawn him to her that night was only curiosity to see her pregnant, a desire to show his power over her. He tried to forget his moment of panic when she returned ill from her flight, and the feeling of guilt in his heart, which he had sought to expiate by the most immediate means. He did not think of their child. The reality of her pregnancy did not exist for him, except as a symbol of his power.

And it was true that Ruth seemed happier than she had ever been before. Often now as she went about her work she hummed to herself, with lips tightly shut and thoughtful face. It was a weird and toneless humming, yet there was about it an intense gaiety. In those days too she was very much out-of-doors, lying on the sparse grass in back of the house, feeling the sun penetrate her flesh, and the hard earth beneath her body ... giving herself to the sun and wind, that touched her without passion. Then her brain passed into a coma, its placidity was almost a trance, in which the power to think, the power to use words left her. But there was meanwhile the profound thinking of her body, and she arose each time with a feeling of renewed contentment. It was also part of her ritual each day, whenever Lewis was out, to take the book of music that he worked on from his desk, and to sit down near the window, holding it on her lap. She would try to decipher the notes; with her finger she would count off the intervals on the staff and then look up thoughtfully, as if singing it in her mind. And one time when she was through with this, she closed the book and tore it in half, then laid the two halves together and tore them, and continued with it until the scraps in her hands were too thick to be torn together, and she had to take them separately. This she had done automatically, with no more sense of what she did than if she had been reading an unimportant letter, intending to tear it up at the end as a matter of course, and tearing it with her mind already on other things. She disposed of the scraps and sat down at the window to wait, feeling there would have to be some explanation ... but feeling also impatient because so simple and obvious a matter should require explanation ... as if she were waiting for a child who was going to be unreasonable for the loss of some casual toy.

But Lewis did not return until very late, and it was not until the next day, when she was clearing the dishes away from their supper that he came into the kitchen and signalled to her mysteriously, and she followed him back to his room.

"Where is it..." he asked.

She leaned in the doorway watching him. "Where is what?" There was in her voice the emphasis of complete bewilderment.

"Where is the book that was here?" Lewis repeated, his words sounding slightly breathless, his hand sweeping through the pigeon-hole as if the thing he looked for might materialize there.

"I sent it away," she said slowly.

"Where did you send it?"

Ruth came in and sat down, and considered her answer for a long time. "Why, I asked Levine where it could be sent ... that time he was here. He told me someone to send it to. Because," she added, lifting her eyes to him with their expression of innocent wonder, "you wanted that, didn't you?"

He looked at her and moved towards her with calm precision, the threat of an attack in his deliberate approach. But near her he stopped and put his hand to his forehead as if recalling himself. Against the unnatural pallor of his face his hand showed dark and grotesque. He tried to speak, but there was only an insane sucking motion of his lips. "Why did you do that?" he asked at last.

Ruth made a slight movement of impatience. "I've told you, haven't I?"

"Why did you do that?" he repeated querulously, and then, coming close to her, he lowered his voice to a whisper and thrust his face into hers. "You must get it back..."

She leaned back to escape the nearness of his face, and looked up at him from under her lowered-eyelids, half smiling. "Why should you want it back?"

"You must get it back," he repeated weakly.

"But why ... Tell me why you want it back..."

He did not answer, and suddenly, with unexpected agility, she slipped from him and went to the door. Lewis made as if to call to her, but instead there was only that insane sucking motion of his lips. The words were wrung from him, a strident harshness in his voice. "Because it's no good..."

She turned then, smiling to him from the doorway. "Why, then, so much the better," she said with cheerful finality. But Lewis followed her and resumed his questioning ... his voice weak and petulant now, his face twisted into an abstracted frown.

"To whom did you send it?"

"I forget ... I forget..."

"You must get it back..."

"I can't, I tell you ... not yet." She gathered up the table-cloth with angry swiftness, and shook it out on the floor. "Because I tore it up," she added, in a voice deliberately casual. Lewis stared at the crumbs that scattered from the cloth, and waited until they ceased rolling and lay still in a haphazard pattern on the floor before he spoke again. "You see," he said patiently, watching her fold the cloth, "they will laugh at me."

It struck her that there was something stupid in the way he repeated this, and she motioned angrily with her arm to be free of him. But he caught hold of her elbow and she had to stand there, a little in front of him, holding the table-cloth ceremonially in her hand, and feeling his words breathed on her cheek. A vivid flash of their position came before her, and she burst out laughing. The sound seemed to awaken Lewis from his trance, and he looked at her ... his expression changing slowly from its abstracted frown to one of grave wonder.

* * * * * * *

Lewis went back to his room. In the short transit between the kitchen and his room he had a strange duality of vision, seeing himself walking through the narrow hallway, entering the room and going to the window ... seeing an aura of his body moving with him in whatever he did, as when the finger is pressed to the eyeball, and each thing appears with double reflection. Standing at the window, he saw that it was raining, and he noted that everything was glistening wet ... the boards in the fence, and the trees and every leaf of the trees. And this fact, simple and irrefutable, that when it rained nothing that was exposed could escape from becoming wet, seemed to be revealed to him for the first time. He saw the drops of water on the pane, how each drop was suspended on a fine thread of rain, and he saw that some of the drops rolled all the way down, and others stopped midway and others were arrested near the top. For a long time he studied this, trying to discover some law that determined it; but wearying of this he went back to the desk and put his hand once more into the pigeon-hole, sweeping it with his fingers as if he was not certain that it was empty...

Meanwhile he was conscious of a feeling of wonder. He was waiting for something ... he was waiting for something to snap within him. And yet it seemed as if this first moment of calm was not to end after all ... it was stretching itself infinitely, and he was watching it, a little breathless and surprised, as if it was a conjuror's trick. Or was this calm, he asked himself, the end of the whirling, that moment he had foreseen when the motion of his mind would slacken ... and all things that had been held in place by the whirling fly apart? But how, then, if this had happened, could he reason about it ... how could he be aware of it? Or was there something else here ... something more terrible than madness that had come to him? Was there a profound confession in his calm ... an admission that he had failed in his work ... and was this his relief at its being destroyed? But though he felt these questions vaguely, he did not yet dare the answers. Best not to be sitting alone now and thinking ... best to bestir himself, he said, to find some diversion that would tide him over this bewildering moment...

CHAPTER VIII

1

The room that Lewis entered was crowded and noisy. Everything seemed to give off sound ... the smoke floating densely overhead, the men's glistening shirt fronts, like so many instruments for percussion. Standing in the doorway, too bewildered by the lights to see clearly, Lewis tried at first to pick out a familiar voice. Someone was rapping on the piano and shouting: "Ladies and gentlemen, a duet ... a duet, ladies and gentlemen," and Lewis tried to follow the rest of it for a while, holding to a special thread in the crazy pattern of noise. Soon that was too much effort. He shut his eyes and listened to the voices. They fused at some far-off point into one chord, and he could hear that chord always on the verge of dissolving; yet endlessly dragging on, swelling and diminishing endlessly—as if someone who had fallen asleep were directing it, with slow senseless motions of the baton. He had almost gone to sleep listening to it, when the sound of feet scuffling nearby roused him. He opened his eyes and saw Poldy struggling to free himself from his friends. His face was wet with perspiration, he kept flapping his elbows backward and turning from one to the other, pleading with them in the high-pitched hysterical voice of a child who is ready to cry. "Listen, Jel, I just want to ask him. What harm can it be if I ask him? Jel, will it hurt you if I ask him?"

"But Poldy! That's the eighth person you'll be asking tonight."

Poldy looked at him in alarm. "I don't remember," he muttered. He stopped struggling and stood quietly between them, frowning at the floor. After a while Jel nodded to his friend, and they released him. "Go on, then," Jel said and pushed him gently forward. "Ask."

Poldy walked unsteadily. At one time he almost toppled forward. He blushed then and looked back quickly at his friends. When he was close to Lewis he put his arm on his shoulder, and peered into his face with troubled eyes.

"What time is it, Lewis?" he whispered.

"Ten minutes to nine, I think."

Poldy nodded and looked off into the distance, wrapped in profound calculations. At length he roused himself and turned to Lewis. "Thank you ... thank you..." he said briskly, and walked away. Lewis wanted to speak to him further, but Poldy was gone too quickly. He turned inquiringly to Poldy's friend.

"Oh, don't mind him," Jel said cheerfully. "He's just a little upset. Thinks he's made a great discovery. He says it takes longer for an hour to pass than it used to. Claims he's the only one who notices it, but he says soon everyone will feel it. Now you haven't noticed it, have you?" Jel looked suspiciously at Lewis. "No, of course not..." he laughed nervously. "Poldy's so clever, you know, I thought there might be something in it. But say ... suppose it did take longer for an hour to pass ... can't see how it would, but suppose it did ... it wouldn't matter anyway, now would it?"

"Why wouldn't it matter?"

"Oh, we could get all the clocks to working faster ... or slower. Say, which is it? Would they have to go faster or slower? Oh, hell! It's an awfully mixed up business, and poor Poldy thinks he's got it all figured out. Just look at him..."

Poldy was standing alone in the center of the room. He had opened his coat and hooked his right thumb into his vest pocket. In his left hand he held a watch, and stared at it with a harassed expression. And as Lewis watched, the feeling came over him that all the people in the room were behaving with strange detachment ... each one, like Poldy staring at the watch, wrapped in a special insanity of talking or laughing or walking about or staring ... and when they seemed to be aware of each other it was only incidental to their madness. And now he heard an ominous undercurrent of speed in the voices, a quickening up to a hysterical tempo. "Ladies and gentlemen, a duet..." The man at the piano rapped away with greater frenzy, his voice climbed to a high whining note. "A duet, ladies and gentlemen, listen to the duet." He stopped and snatched a large napkin from the table, fixed it on his head like a nurse's peaked cap, and continued shouting. Nobody listened, and the man's face grew red, he glared angrily at everyone near him. In one corner of the room Lustbader was performing tricks with a handkerchief cocked over his fist. Somebody tried to snatch the handkerchief away, and others lifted the tails of his coat to see whether he had anything hidden there. The magician's face contorted with rage. He stuffed the handkerchief into his pocket and turned on the offenders. "So! You don't believe me!" he shouted. "Look! I will undress before you." He took off his coat and collar, and was about to undo his belt, when one of the men snatched a scarf from the piano, and wrapped it over Lustbader's shoulders, and led him away, his face simpering with elaborate modesty. At the piano two musicians were improvising a duet. They banged out a series of wild arpeggios, paused and leaned toward each other with maudlin ecstasy, then fell furiously on the keys again. Now and then they embraced, and with wracking sobs congratulated each other on the state of harmony existing between them. One of them had a round flat face with spectacles attached, and while he played his face seemed to float over the music, buoyed up by its two circles of glass. Near-by was a group of artists arguing excitedly and drawing imaginary pictures in the air. A fat man stood by, his hands on his hips, looking earnestly at that portion of the air which they had chosen as their canvas, as if the pictures all remained there in one crazy design. But one of the painters, waving his arm too freely, upset the victrola that was painfully and asthmatically unwinding a symphony on the edge of the piano. It fell to the floor and the record broke. The red-faced man with the napkin on his head stooped and picked up a small segment of the symphony, looked at it curiously and then slipped it into his pocket. From time to time as he rapped on the piano he took the piece out and consulted it, as if it was his watch. But nobody noticed this either.

But now Lewis distinguished Bannerman's voice cutting its way through the others with its peculiar nasal resonance. "You can't escape..." it was saying angrily, "you can't escape." He went in the direction of the voice, and saw that Bannerman, slightly drunk and balancing himself perilously on a sofa, was holding forth to a large audience. The orator kept glancing about incessantly while he spoke, trying to catch the eye of everyone in his audience, so that his features ... small and finely chiseled, and mounted on a liberal map of flesh ... looked more like a traveling exhibition of a face, than an actual part of him. There was also a faint air of sniffing about Bannerman's face ... it may have been the way he kept glancing about, or perhaps the peculiar modeling of his nostrils that was more apparent as he stood on the sofa elevated above the others ... the nostrils not sufficiently raised from the upper lip, slanting back too precipitously. Lewis hovered on the outskirts of the group, trying to listen. There were others there whom he knew ... Clandon, who had the habit of listening to every argument with an intent and ghoulish expression, until the moment when he could snap up an opinion and bottle it and label it. And Levine was there, his head bent forward in an attitude of listening, unconscious that Lewis was present and watching him.

"No, there's no escape," Bannerman repeated, raising his voice and looking around self-consciously. "Go through all the frenzies of experiment that you please, ladies and gentlemen. I tell you, you won't escape the female nude. Haven't I seen them ... the bunch of mad artists jumping through all the isms, like a pack of clowns going through the hoops. And what was the end? The damned bitch just stood around, waiting until they could stop and look at her."

"Cubism! Cubism!" he cried, after a moment's pause. "Even that can't shake her. Ever notice how the cubist canvases break out into violins and vases? Regular eruptions of them. And why? Because a violin is one of the instruments that happens to approximate the female figure. It has the hips..." he glared around, waiting for the laughter to subside. "And a vase ... well, look!" He took pencil and paper from his pocket, and holding it up for all to see, sketched a typical cubistic design on it. This he rapidly converted into a group of plump nudes languidly conversing.

"There you are! There you are!" he shouted, flourishing the drawing. "Shut one eye and you have what they call the breaking up of objects into planes. Shut the other, and you see what's really itching them. An evasion ... pure and simple. Everything new in art is an evasion ... trying to evade the nude. But take my word for it," he bent down and tapped Levine solemnly on the chest ... "take my word for it, Levine, it won't work."

Levine removed the finger gingerly. "A rather old obsession ... the female figure," he said drily.

"Oh, Lord..." someone whispered ecstatically, "did you see Lustbader shutting one eye and then the other?"

"And once an artist has realized that," Bannerman finished grandly, "then everything else is superfluous."

"Clothes..." they suggested.

"Why, of course," the speaker continued with belligerent agreement. "Now clothes!" he said impressively, and then stopped and began to search through his pockets with an expression of great anxiety. Having brought forth several objects that seemed to surprise him by their presence in his pockets, he at length extracted four golden thumb tacks. These he put into his mouth, withdrawing them as they were needed to tack his paper on the wall. "Now clothes," he resumed, when the drawing was successfully hung, "are a big hoax. Started by the pretty women, because they couldn't compete with the ugly ones in the nude."

"Really, now!" the tall girl who was reclining on the couch turned and looked up at him with mock surprise. "Do you know," she said, addressing the audience, "Banney's an awful strain on me..."

"Ladies and gentlemen, listen to the duet!..." the voice rose in a frenzy of appeal.

"Fancy having to be jealous of the ugly women," the girl continued in an indistinct sleepy voice. "There are so many more of them." Her hair was too closely cropped, only a little yellow crest of it rising unexpectedly from the top of her head; and her face was too prognathic, shaped as if she might begin whistling any moment. Bannerman looked down at her thoughtfully, and then turned his mildly glaring eye once more on his audience. "I'll take an ugly woman for my model any day," he challenged. "Beauty doesn't belong ... makes the body insipid."

"But say, Bannerman," a curly-headed fellow on the outskirts of the group spoke in a high excited voice. "What the devil has all this got to do with saving the world? That's what we're after, you know."

"Everything, Twinem, everything," Clandon assured him. "Didn't you hear? 'We can't save the world until we understand the naked—which, of course, means female—body.' Now stand by, everyone, and Bannerman will show us how to do it."

The numbers around Bannerman increased, and others in the room glanced curiously in his direction. Lustbader, who had seated himself at the chess board rose, and scouted around for a while to see what was happening. "Oh, it's nothing," he reported disgustedly to his partner. "Bannerman's helping them to understand the naked body or something like that."

"Drunk, probably..."

"Go on, Bannerman, continue," Clandon urged. But as soon as the lecture began again he seemed to cease listening, waiting for the moment when with practiced sleight-of-hand he could pounce on an argument and label it. Levine only locked his hands in back and smiled to himself. Uttering a prodigious "Now!" and clearing his throat professionally, Bannerman began once more. But happening at the same moment to come too near the edge of the sofa, he pitched forward. His body stiffened as they caught him, and he was rotated up again into place with the rigidity of a statue. "Now the first thing to remember," he continued, looking down at them and frowning severely, "is that you fellows know nothing about it ... you fellows with your prurient snooping around museums and peeking into the studios. You can't understand the human body, I say, until you're steeped in nudity ... steeped in it, mind you. And not the picayune nudity you see in the pictures. You have to see collective nakedness ... many women sitting around together unconscious of their bodies, so that the poses they take are ancient and instinctive..."

"Ancient and instinctive ... that's pretty good."

"Yes," Bannerman retorted, "flesh takes its own poses, like stone and wood."

"Well, continue, anyway."

"Yes, go on, Bannerman."

"Stone and wood..." Bannerman repeated, and then stopped with a look of extreme alarm. "Levine!" he bent down to him and lowered his voice to a whisper. "Where were we at? No ... no ... never mind. I remember now." He lapsed into a contemplation of space, and then finished sententiously. "Then, and only then, ladies and gentlemen, do you feel the reality of nakedness, so much so, in fact, that nakedness no longer exists for you!"

"Hm ... the reality of nakedness. I like that."

"Well, is that all?"

"Ladies and gentlemen, listen to the duet."

"How was it? How was it?" Lustbader called, and receiving no answer he came trotting from his chess game and looked excitedly from one to the other. Seeing that the lecture was in danger of ending he started to applaud for more, a presumption which Bannerman quickly ended by an imperious motion of his hand. "And then ... then," he began fluently, and once more found himself looking around confusedly. "Say, where were we at, Levine?" But here the tall girl on the sofa rose with a look of disgust, and Bannerman danced three involuntary steps. "Levine," he said pitifully, "hold my hand. And then, ladies and gentlemen, you feel a power of fertility ... the same as you feel in the woods on a damp day..."

"I do not," Clandon said sternly.

Bannerman looked at him reproachfully, and continued with added dignity. "But you never think of stamens and pistils when you're walking in the woods, do you? Because, of course, we know there is plant intercourse. Now plant intercourse," he mused ... "queer thing. And in the same manner, so to speak, you feel that men have nothing to do with this fertility. It's a different thing, older than sex ... and then..."

But his audience was growing restive, and Clandon leaped up on the sofa to prevent a dispersal. "One minute, please," he signalled. "We're at the power of fertility now. Has everyone got that? Very well, then, continue."

"Oh, there's nothing to continue," Bannerman finished sulkily. "They don't want to listen, anyway. But my last point was that then you understand the livingness of flesh, and then you can't kill anything, because..."

"Ah! Just as I thought," Clandon interrupted triumphantly. "It all comes down to the sanctity of human life. Just as I thought."

"Say, Bannerman, that's jolly." It was the curly-headed young man called Twinem. "You know, it's always fascinated me, this idea of saving the world, because there are so many ways of doing it. No end to them, really. This one's great. Naked women hanging around all the time, so that we feel the what-do-you-call-it? ... sanctity of human life. Awfully ingenious, don't you think?"

Laughter greeted his outburst, and Bannerman stepped down with a final and completely-balanced dignity.

"Well ... amuse yourselves," he muttered.

"Bannerman's right! Absolutely!" It was Lustbader calling from the chess table, as he set up the pieces with rapid plump fingers. "Haven't I thought of it myself?" He gave the lecturer a consoling wink. "Haven't I thought of it though!"

He rose and planted himself in the center of the room, his face flushed and ecstatic. "All the women ... all the women," he began. "No ... that won't do. Watch me. I'll make a beginning." He made a rapid survey of the room, then rubbed his Punchinello nose meditatively. Finally he turned and stared at one corner, at Marah who was half-reclining in a large chair, and listlessly watching the proceedings. He advanced to her on tiptoes, pedalling the air with his fingers. And this stealthy advance caused a sudden silence in the room, everybody turned to watch it. Marah did not move, but observed him with wide and curious eyes, her whole attitude suggesting infinite curiosity for his touch. He came close to her and tried to lift his hands to her face, but unable to bring himself to it, he wheeled himself round in a temper. "Can't we do without that music?" he snapped, turning his red face to the musicians. The music stopped abruptly, and for the moment there was a complete hush, during which Lustbader walked unsteadily back to the chess table, and began to set up the pieces again. Levine, who had been watching Marah intently, turned away with a faint suggestion of contempt in the shrug of his shoulders.

"Bannerman," he said loudly, "that confirms my theory."

"Really ... how?" Bannerman's round face flushed with pleasure.

"Every human being ... every human being," Levine began emphatically.

"Yes, yes, go on..."

"Has a favorite form of intoxication. Let me congratulate you on the extremely original form of yours."

"I don't understand."

"Well, you don't have to. The trouble with you, Bannerman, is that you're such a confounded sensualist. And you think everyone can remain on that high plane of sensuality on which you generally exist. But that's asking a little too much. The average person isn't equal to it. Besides, that's just where the big mistake lies ... in this idea of the sanctity of life. Civilization is a nightmare of safety because of it."

"Oh, come, Levine, don't be fantastic again."

Levine looked at Clandon with innocent eyes. He shook the invisible drop of water from his thumb and forefinger before speaking. "Anthropology," he continued, "teaches us that a condition of such abnormal safety as we suffer from now, never before existed. We know, for instance, that primitive man had innumerable chances for calamity ... at least while geology was a going concern. Mountains and rivers, glaciers and even continents, cavorting around like kittens. And that's what we need nowadays, that's what we miss ... the sense of extreme terror, which is really the most profound and religious of human emotions. When primitive man had to pick up his household goods and keep running, always just a few strides ahead of the glaciers, looking back at the green wall of ice, and feeling the chill on his—"

Clandon burst into uproarious laughter. "Lord! What a tableau!" Hearing it, Lustbader came to the surface again from the depths of his chess game. "Where ... where's the tableau?" he inquired eagerly.

"Oh, very well, then, he didn't run in front of the glacier. It is, as you say, only a tableau. However," Levine continued more seriously, "we may safely posit a more liberal distribution of catastrophe in primitive times, and it is, as I said, the whole trouble. Civilization is a nightmare of safety."

"Say, Levine, how about the Day of Judgment?" Twinem asked earnestly. "That'll be an awful time, won't it?"

"The Day of Judgment," Levine repeated thoughtfully. "No, too far off. Besides, only an article of faith. Not sound geology."

Twinem looked crestfallen. "I never hit it right," he said.

"No, come to think of it, Twinem, there is something to that. We may safely say that the Day of Judgment supplied a great deal of the necessary emotion of fear in the Middle Ages. Yes, come to think of it, it was very efficient in satisfying that nostalgia for terror, as we might call it. Only nowadays we're too practical for it, we know too much. We can't, I'm afraid, get much of a thrill from brooding over the Day of Judgment."

"Lack the imagination, don't we..."

"Right, Twinem."

"Need something active ... real. War, I should say."

"Twinem, you're a genius." At this verdict, Jel embraced his friend and they marched fraternally towards the refreshments. Poldy tried to follow them, but something stopped him on the way. And now, for the first time, it seemed that a quality of silence came into the voices, they slackened their rhythm. Two girls were conversing across the room by means of signals, and the quick weaving of their fingers seemed to make an area of silence around them. Lustbader devoted himself to his game, and his spongy little hand suspended over the board looked like a mute held there to dull the vibrations in the air. But this lasted for only a little while. Without warning Lustbader jumped up from his chair, upsetting the board with his violence.

"I have it ... I have it!" he shouted. He picked up a queen that had fallen to the floor, blew a speck of dirt from it, and began to polish it with his sleeve. "Any war that begins can be ended in fifteen days ... fifteen days at the most. Everybody's been looking for a way to do it, but nobody ever thought of this."

"Well?"

"All the soldiers ... all the soldiers," he said impressively, "should be made to strangle each other to death."

"And then what...?" Clandon asked.

"Why in fifteen days, fifteen at the most," he sputtered, "it would be over. They can't strangle each other forever, can they? They'd get tired. Killing should be work, hard work."

Nobody seemed impressed, and somewhat forlornly Lustbader turned away. But seeing Poldy standing near him, he took him aside and continued to develop his idea more confidentially. "Why, where I was in the country this summer," he said rapidly, "there were three pigs, and the farmer's boy used to say: 'You'll never kill that one ... she's too hard to kill.' And that's how it is. Now in fifteen days..."

Poldy had been following the motions of Lustbader's hands as if they were new and fascinating toys. As soon as it was over he began to cough, putting his hands to his mouth and looking around stealthily. It had started as a forced artificial cough, but in a few seconds his face was red, tears streamed from his eyes and his throat kept trembling convulsively each time he tried to stop. The others stood by helplessly, while Poldy backed into a chair, always holding his hands to his mouth with the dainty gesture of a bunny.

"Stop it!" Levine commanded. He caught Poldy's wrists, and drew his hands away from his mouth. The coughing stopped, and while they were still standing around Poldy, awkward and self-conscious, they were startled by the noise of a deafening explosion. It began with a tearing sound, as of bricks bursting apart, and ended in a series of long detonations. It seemed to come from the heart of the city, and the room trembled with the impact of it. Transfixed with terror, they stood and glanced at each other, and nobody dared to move until it was over. Then with a concerted movement, they rushed to the windows and looked out. In subdued voices at first, but later growing more secure and controversial, they gave their conjectures. There were two theories ... one, that it was only the ordinary dynamiting in the course of erecting a building; and the other that one of the skyscrapers had collapsed.

"But steel..." someone said. "Steel buildings don't collapse."

"Ah ... how do you know? They haven't been up long enough for anyone to know."

They were silent for a while, considering this and noting the paleness still on their faces.

"The framework of steel buildings," a low and thoughtful voice was heard to observe, "is said by some authorities to be undergoing a hidden but certain process of rotting away."

"That," Clandon said sententiously, "seems to me stupid."

"How..."

"Why, it just seems inconceivably stupid to me that we should be putting up buildings that were doomed."

"Why, yes," Twinem said eagerly, "we can't imagine our engineers doing anything so stupid."

"Or a whole civilization, for that matter," somebody added. "Why, our whole civilization is founded on steel, and one can't imagine our being wrong about it."

"On the contrary," Levine cut in, commanding silence by the seriousness of his voice, "it seems to me that every civilization must have in it the seeds of its own dissolution. It seems to me that at the heart of every civilization there must be some colossal stupidity. It must be there, or there would be no guarantee that the civilization was to end."

"And is that important?"

"For it to end? Yes."

"Why ... can you tell us why, perhaps?" Clandon said angrily.

Levine shrugged his shoulders and turned away from him. "Study the history of Greece or Rome, and it will prove what obvious stupidities these civilizations harbored within themselves. Perhaps this faith of ours in the eternity of steel, this frantic erecting of buildings that are rotting away within, is the stupidity that we are furnishing for the future to marvel at."

"That is," Clandon corrected, "if they are rotting away."

Levine did not answer, and they were silent, lingering uncertainly near the window or looking uneasily into the street. In this silence they heard a voice speaking for the first time that evening, coming in meditatively though somewhat late, like a clock that strikes pompously after the hour.

"Bannerman's right now..." the voice said. "I know what he means." The words were slightly muffled by the process of mastication. They looked into the other room, and saw a short gray-headed man standing alone at the table, plying the sandwiches and drinks. It had been a systematic and lengthy procedure, to judge by the extensive ruins of food around him, and not even the sound of the explosion had interrupted it. The speaker was eating now with a profound expression, his round gray eyes always looking at the next object to be attacked, thus keeping up an uninterrupted campaign.

"Sintz, my child, eating again?" Clandon wagged his finger playfully. He was usually called Sintz because nobody could remember his real name, except that it was very long and contained that syllable somewhere; and "my child" was added because his rosy little mouth and clear gray eyes made him look like a little boy burgeoning out into his first rotundity.

"Yes, Bannerman's right," Sintz repeated, and wiped away the crumbs that trickled down his chin. "I know what he means. Now when I was a boy we were starving most of the time. But there were some crusts of bread so old and so moused-at that we had to throw them away. And I remember that every time I threw one of those old crusts away it hurt me ... here..." he applied his wine-glass to his heart. "I couldn't kill anything, either. No, not even to wipe a roach off the wall, though God knows we had enough of them. Now why have I lost that feeling? Often I ask myself: how did it happen?"

He stopped and looked around, like a confused little boy who realizes that an ominous silence has fallen on his elders. Clandon winked to the others and stepped over to the table.

"Couldn't throw a crust of bread away, you say..."

Sintz nodded.

"Well, Sintz my child, what do you call that?" He pointed severely to the remains of food.

"Yes, what?" Sintz repeated cordially, and looked at the table.

"Phew! Look how much you've eaten. You contemptible little—breadbox!" Clandon lunged forward as if to tickle his stomach, but Sintz caught his arm and held on to it tightly.

"Yes, what do you call that? Look ... just look at that ... A fine exhibition ... to eat like a garbage can. I eat and eat. Whenever I see food, I eat. But that's not the worst of it. If it were only that I wouldn't be so worried. You don't know what I'm capable of." He whipped himself round to the others. "Yes, you don't know what I'm capable of," he continued solemnly. "My mother had a little white dog once called Pierrot. And one day she comes into my room and folds her hands and says, 'Pierrot is dead.' Do you know what I did? I burst out laughing. She just sat there and looked at me. Now was it right to laugh?" he asked sadly.

A solitary chuckle exploded from Clandon, and Sintz fixed him with a long puzzled stare. "Well, I can see why you laugh," he said slowly. "You don't know what I used to be. That's the whole trouble."

He was silent, munching his sandwich and regarding them thoughtfully. But in the midst of it he darted towards Clandon, caught at his lapel, and lifted his face to him imploringly. "Listen, Clandon, I'll prove it to you. Only tell me what you want me to do, set me any task and I'll do it here before all these people. Anything you say, to show you what I'm capable of..."

Clandon screwed up his eyes and tightened his lips, tasting beforehand the special flavor of the cruelty he would choose. After long thought he shook himself loose from Sintz with an angry gesture. "Hang it all, Sintz," he said irritably, "I can't think of a thing. I believe you all right, if that's what you want. But damned if I can think of any way of being specially cruel."

"Look here, Sintz..." it was Twinem, speaking with paternal good-nature. "I think we could arrange it. I've been awfully curious ever since I can remember to know how it feels to have drops of water falling on your forehead at long intervals. Heard about it once in a book when I was little, as a pet form of torture somewheres in the East ... China, I guess. And then I got a few boys to try it on me, only they didn't have the patience to do more than a few drops, and did them too quick. I even put my head under the faucet, once when it was dripping a little, to see how long I could stand it. But the water stopped altogether, and I couldn't regulate it again. Now, if you're willing..."

Sintz regarded him fearfully, like a child that is a little suspicious of the new game.

"Would you, now? That's right. Clandon, old boy, dive into the medicine chest and get an eyedropper or ear syringe or some suitable instrument."

Twinem placed a chair in the center of the room, tucked a large napkin under his chin, sat down and shut his eyes. The others gathered round as if they were about to witness an operation. But Clandon signalled them away and took charge of it. He looked at Sintz critically, and announced, "He needs gloves." Someone furnished a pair of gloves that were too big for him and drooped at the finger-ends, giving an appearance as if all his fingers had been broken at the tips. Sintz looked at his hands in alarm. He flourished them about and when he saw that this caused everyone to laugh he gave a few extra flourishes, folded his short arms in front of him, and looked at Clandon defiantly. "He needs a mask," Clandon said. Lustbader produced his handkerchief, and tied it tightly over Sintz's nose and mouth.

"You have to turn him around and see which way he faces when he's through."

"He ought to have an apron."

"Right. We'll turn him."

"Why?" Sintz's voice was muffled and alarmed behind the handkerchief.

"Never mind why," Clandon answered. "It's always done." He raised Sintz's gloved hands in an attitude of astonishment and whirled him around. But in the midst of his gyration Sintz caught at Clandon's arm, and they almost fell together with the effort to steady themselves. "Sure this isn't a trick on me?" Sintz asked in a terrified whisper. The handkerchief began to vibrate over his mouth as if a tiny white muscle were set in motion there. "Take it off, Clandon," he pleaded. "I can't breathe."

Again Clandon put his head on one side and regarded him critically. "Twinem, I've an idea," he announced solemnly. "The water must be hot."

"Oh, I say, Clandon, that's ridiculous." Twinem raised his head and opened his eyes. "You're not going to heat the water specially, are you?"

"Why not?"

"Because it's ridiculous ... heating water specially..."

"Why is it ridiculous?"

Twinem removed the napkin and rose angrily. "It's absurd, that's all. Besides, I never heard that the water was hot."

"That may be," Levine said. "But then consider, Twinem. A man devoted his whole lifetime to being killed, in those times. But no one would think of wasting time that way nowadays. We've just got to hurry it a little."

"Oh, all right then, go ahead. Only it's carrying things a little too far." He sat down sullenly and put his head back, whistling up at the ceiling until they were ready.

Sintz took the eye-dropper with trembling hands. He brushed the curls back from Twinem's white forehead and stared at it, as if it had turned into a strange object.

"How can I do it when his eyes quiver that way?" he burst out at length. "Make him stop moving his eyes that way."

"Now, Sintz, I'll count three..."

The little white muscle over Sintz's mouth began to vibrate frantically. He flashed an imploring look at Clandon, poised the eye-dropper over Twinem's forehead, and ended by dusting it lightly with the loose finger-tips of his left hand.

"One." Clandon scored it off by raising his forefinger.

"It makes me nervous ... his eyes quivering that way."

"Two."

"I'll do it, the minute he stops screwing up his eyes that way."

Clandon wagged two fingers in the air, and was about to declaim the last number, when Sintz turned to him. "Do you know what..." he said quietly, as if it had just occurred to him. "I can't do it. I can't do it ... that's all." He put the eye-dropper away and took off the handkerchief and gloves. His forehead was wet with perspiration, and he fumbled nervously for his handkerchief. "Lustbader, can I use yours?" he asked humbly.

"It's a damned messy business," Twinem announced, sitting up with a disgusted grimace. There was water trickling down from his forehead and he wiped it hastily with the back of his hand. "Takes too long anyway. Thank God, we kill people much quicker."

"We do ... we do!" Lustbader hugged himself gleefully. "I said that was the trouble. Now in fifteen days ... fifteen days at the most, if everything is done by strangling. That's the only condition I make ... all killing to be done by strangling. Oh Lord, how simple." He picked up the chess board and waltzed around with it, while the pianist accompanied him with a furious scherzo. "Stop it!" Lustbader commanded breathlessly from the midst of his whirling. "How can I keep up with that?"

But here the man who had been rapping on the piano raised his voice in a final effort. "Ladies and gentlemen, a quartet. Clear the floor for the quartet."

* * * * * * *

The players were old and German-looking. They played with curious indifference, looking as if they were half asleep over their instruments. Only the second violinist looked up alertly each time that a new instrument came in. He had a sharp archaic profile, the full eye almost completely visible in profile; and the sculptured down-turning mouth that gave a slight sourness to his expression. Whenever one of the instruments was due to make its entrance he would look at the player watchfully, almost suspiciously, until the new motif was merged with the others. While the others plied their strings in enchanted detachment, he seemed to have a secret joy in the playing from his foreknowledge of the moves, from being part of the intricate mechanism of the music.

For the first time since he had entered the room Lewis was able to look around him and to take stock of his confused impressions. He realized that he had been avoiding Poldy, that there was something offensive to him in the green pallor of Poldy's face, and that he felt in some way degraded by Poldy's presence. He remembered too that several times in the course of the evening Levine had fixed his eyes on him with grave thoughtfulness. Now he was conscious of a painful buzzing in his head, and though he felt unnaturally hot, his forehead was damp and cold when he touched it. He tried to listen to the music, but he was too weary to follow it as melody and rhythm. He was only vaguely aware of its turnings, of the weaving in and out of musical patterns ... he had the feeling of watching dancers from a great distance, seeing faintly the joining and parting in a long and tireless dance. But there were times when he seemed not to hear at all, when he found himself staring at the players until they took on the appearance of a quaint instrument working with a symmetry of arms.

But now, on the high note of its long obbligato, the cello came to an abrupt stop, and the rest of the music spilled over suddenly into silence, little odds and ends of sound tumbling after it.

"What's the trouble?" the man at the piano asked impatiently. "You were doing fine."

"No, I can't play with him any more," the cellist began, rising wrathfully and pointing his bow at the second violinist.

The second violinist looked at him in consternation. "Why, what have I done? Roth, you're crazy."

"You look at me as though you were afraid I didn't know it was my turn. It's humiliating."

"I ... I look at you..."

The cellist loosened his bow and shook the hairs violently. "No, I won't worry you any more," he said bitterly. "Get some one you can trust." He picked up his instrument and stalked out of the room.

"Isn't that too bad," the man at the piano said sadly. "I thought they were doing so nicely."

But now there was a commotion at the door, and they saw Poldy trying to get out, Jel struggling with him and trying to save his cigarette at the same time. At last he had Poldy pinned to the wall. With his free hand he signalled for help.

"Damned fool!" he said. "Now he wants to run down on the street. He says the first person he meets..."

Poldy nodded. "Yes, the first person I meet," he repeated solemnly.

"What about it ... what about it?" Levine put his hands on Poldy's shoulders and spoke with hypnotic rapidity.

"The first person he meets will save him, he says."

"Can I go?" Poldy looked at Levine, his lips trembling.

"Yes, go," Levine said gently.

"Where's my hat, Jel?"

"I don't know ... How should I know where you put it?"

"I need my hat."

"Well, where is it?"

Poldy turned to Levine. "I need my hat," he whispered.

They found one that was too small for him, that perched absurdly on his head. Lustbader burst out laughing. "O God ... O God, that's clever," he gasped. "The first person he meets—will be a woman."

They heard the door close and a silence fell on them. Some stood awkwardly at the door, others ran to the window.

"Well, what do you see?" Levine snapped.

"Wait ... wait," Lustbader called gleefully. "I made a bet with Jel that the first person he meets will be a woman. Sure enough ... sure enough! He's passing up the men. God! but that was clever."

"Where's he going?"

"Heading for the park, now."

"No, he's standing still."

"He'll be run over."

"Going to pieces that way ... I always thought Poldy had more—" Jel stopped with a low horrified whistle. "Well, if that wasn't a close one!"

"Look! Look!" Lustbader flung his arms out ecstatically. "He's going up to a woman ... he's talking to her. Hell! But that was clever. 'The first person I meet...' What a game!"

"That was my hat," someone said thoughtfully.

"No, she's walking away. Wouldn't have him. Now what is he waiting for."

"A peculiarly Biblical obsession," Levine observed drily. "To take the first person one meets as a sort of godhead. Business of Jephtha's daughter."

"But you know, I think there's something in it." Bannerman settled himself in an easy chair and lit his cigarette with luxuriant slowness. "It came over me, once. A hot evening, I remember, when I was sitting in my studio and seeing all the people passing my window, and somehow I began to feel sorry for them. And it came over me with overpowering strength that I should rush out and follow the first person I met, and be content to serve that person all the time. I don't know what it was. A sort of desire to love all the people in the world by—"

"Wallowing in one," Levine finished.

"Wallowing?"

"Yes. You're such a subtle nature, Bannerman, that you have to wallow in the coarseness of other people ... or rather in their ordinary-ness. Besides, you wouldn't choose an ordinary person at all."

"Ah ... but that's where you're wrong. The whole secret of the feeling lies in that ... that I'd follow the most ordinary person. One who—"

"Picks his teeth?"

Bannerman frowned, nettled. "Well, why not? Picks his teeth or his—"

Levine laughed heartily. "Oh, that. Just as I thought. So that's your idea of an ordinary person."

"Why not? Why not?" Lustbader called from the window. "Suppose he picked any part of his body..."

"Now tell me, Bannerman. Is Lustbader an ordinary person?"

"Well, now ... yes. I've seen him pick his nose."

"Again just as I thought! No, Bannerman, you don't know what an ordinary person is. A person's being ordinary you consider a great curiosity, and you ask for a visible sign of it ... a token. It's a prurient interest, peculiar to people of your kind ... withdrawn, oblique natures—"

Sintz's bright round eyes had been looking from one to the other. "Now I once followed a man on the street," he observed importantly.

"There you are!" Bannerman triumphed.

"No, wait ... not so fast. Now, Sintz, tell us ... why did you follow him?"

"He picked up a cigarette butt from the street," Sintz began reminiscently, in the manner of a very important witness, "and put it in his pocket, and I followed him."

"But I object," Bannerman said. "The cigarette butt means nothing."

"Did you see him smoke it?"

"Did I!" Sintz slapped his thigh. "What did I follow him for?"

"Exactly," Levine nodded. "The first thing you know, Bannerman, that very ordinary person you were following would have to commit murder or suicide or incest, or you'd lose interest in him. Smoke the cigarette butt, so to speak. Yes, even if his being ordinary consisted merely in sporting a pimple on his face, you'd have to get thrills of horror every time you looked at it. Now isn't that true?"

"The most average person ... the most average..." Bannerman repeated weakly.

"Ah ... again ... the most average. Take it from me, Bannerman, your real wish, that you're not aware of, is to patronize some form of abnormality. And if your person isn't abnormal, you console yourself by saying he's at least the most average. But then, being most average is a form of abnormality in itself."

Bannerman yawned and looked towards the window.

"How's Poldy?" he asked. "Damn him, why doesn't he come back? We can't wait here forever."

"Oh, he'll come back," Lustbader said disgustedly. "Couldn't decide which was the first person he met."

Lustbader turned away from the window, and after a moment's profound thought, he took out his handkerchief and tied it over his eyes. They watched, expecting a trick.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, mimicking Poldy's voice. "The first person I meet ... the first person I meet, I shall..."

He advanced slowly as he had done before, walking on tiptoes and pedalling the air with his fingers. First he made for the wall, but there he turned abruptly and pedalled himself to the corner where Marah was sitting. He stood before her, and after looking down at her with his blindfolded eyes, he lifted his hands to her face and felt it with stiff, heavy movements of his palm. She did not move or close her eyes, her features were frozen in an expression of curiosity about which there was something more abandoned than desire. And at last, baffled by her immobility, Lustbader tore the handkerchief from his eyes and wheeled himself around, and walked heavily back to the chess table. His face was red and he avoided looking at anyone.

"Well, I think I'll be going," Bannerman said. He signalled to the tall girl reclining on the couch, and she rose and followed him out of the room. Jel and Twinem marched about in a loose but affectionate embrace, looking for Poldy's hat. The man who had to wear it found that it was too big for him, and he walked out scowling, nothing visible of his face but the indignant nostrils and compressed lips. Sintz slipped away, looking unhappy and forlorn. When they thought he had gone he reappeared in the doorway and said timidly, "Coming, Clandon?" Soon there were only a few people in the room, and the chairs were visible in their various attitudes ... some close to each other for private dialogue, some in groups, or some off by themselves, looking like the negative of a picture.

And now Levine went over to Marah, and bent down to her and spoke in a low voice. "Why did you let him?" he asked earnestly. "Why did you let him, Marah? Weren't you afraid?"

She looked up at him a long time before answering. "And if I wanted that ... if I wanted to be afraid?" In the slow smile that curved her lips there was a suggestion of triumph and challenge.

"I know what she wants to be afraid of," Lustbader called loudly from his game of chess. He was playing with himself this time, trying to keep his left hand directly opposite him so that it might move like a separate entity.

Levine's voice rang with unhappy reproach. "But Lustbader ... Lustbader..."

"Why not?" she countered lazily.

"Then that counts me out?" He looked at her with a stupid protracted smile.

Marah nodded.

"You're afraid, perhaps, that you will forget yourself again? Perhaps I have become too desirable, and because of your pact..."

But she rose and stretched herself, an angry muscular stretching of her arms, hands clenched. "I don't know..." she said with sudden petulance. "I only wish I could be happy. The only thing I know is that I am not happy."

"But you were happy that time with me, Marah," he urged in a low voice. "You said you were."

She stood uncertainly before him, her gray eyes searching his face with an expression in which there was both hope and weariness. "No," she said sharply, "I don't think it's true."

In the confused moment that followed, Levine tried to speak, tried to lift his hand and touch her. But he finished by clapping his palm and fist together, with the gesture of having concluded an important transaction. "So be it," he said, bowing ceremoniously. "It only confirms my theory..." his face, raised to look at her while his body was still bowing, seemed dwarf-like and malicious ... "that all women insist on remaining virgin. When they lose the gross virginity of the body, they find themselves a new way to be inviolate. I think," he added, standing erect and looking directly at her, "that you will continue to remain unhappy. Well, I wish you joy of him."

But when he had reached the door she ran to him swiftly, and laid her hand on his arm. "Are you going?" she asked in a low incredulous voice, her lips suddenly tremulous.

"I think, Marah, I had better go," he said gently. "It's really..." he hesitated, looking away from her with a twisted smile ... "it's really no use. I knew it wasn't, from the beginning."

Simultaneously with Levine's shutting the door, Lustbader set up a clicking motion of the tongue and surveyed the game more intently.

* * * * * * *

For a long time Poldy remained sitting in the park. A woman came and sat down next to him, and when he did not speak she turned and peered curiously into his face. "Is that the dipper?" she asked, pointing up at the sky, and bursting into a laugh at her own question. But Poldy looked in the direction of her finger without speaking.

Meanwhile Lewis Orling and Levine walked through the deserted streets. Lustbader and Marah went home together. Marah was crying softly to herself, and Lustbader glanced at her unhappily, wondering what he could do.

CHAPTER IX

1

It was near morning when Lewis awoke. Still drowsy with heavy sleep he lay on the couch, aware of the morning light on the window, of the pleasant rumbling of wheels in the street below. As yet the light on the window was not the sun. Too still and pale, it was only the intimation of sunlight, and gave to his drowsy senses the feeling of the whole earth still asleep, yet stirring in its sleep with a mysterious premonition of morning. In a part of the room that was still in shadow he saw Levine. He sat with his head resting on his hand, perhaps asleep. Or, if he was not sleeping, it was the attitude of one who had come to the end of all his thoughts, and found there was nothing to do, nothing left but to remain motionless, keeping automatically the posture of thinking. Without turning his head, as if divining that Lewis was awake, Levine spoke to him. "You slept well," he said.

"And you?" Lewis asked softly.

Levine shook his head. He turned his face for the first time and his eyes showed dark and haggard. "I have forgotten how. For me," he added with a wry smile, "sleep is a lost art."

Scarcely hearing Levine's words, too preoccupied with the well-being of his own awakening, Lewis stretched himself and rubbed his eyes. It did not surprise him that he was fully dressed. He remembered now what had happened ... how, after hours of walking, they had come to Levine's apartment, and he had flung himself down on the couch, too exhausted to hope for sleep; and how, between one word and the next sleep had overtaken him ... so swiftly and skilfully, like a surgeon who has done with it in one quick pass of his hand. Now he lay awake remembering it, and in that wilfulness of his being that had betrayed him into sleep, he felt there was something to gladden him ... something that stirred in him an obscure sense of gratitude. Yes, he had slept well, and he had slept long. He had lived intensely in his sleep, living out part of his life in a profound symbolism. And though now there was nothing he remembered from it, he knew this part of his life was done with. Like actors whose gestures have too profound an import to be played before the audience, all the desires of his being had hidden themselves from him, and acted it out. And in this awakening there was also the strange sense of convalescence, a feeling of recovery from all the years which he had lived so intensely in his sleep. Lightly his body lay on the couch, scarcely aware of its own weight. And every movement that he made was strange with an unaccustomed lightness; and whatever he looked at showed with a brilliance of line, as if the edges were ablaze from their contact with light.

He lifted his hand before him, and studied his palm as though it was strange to him, and spread his fingers apart and closed them again. And what of Ruth? he asked himself.... What of his work? Strange that he did not feel anger for her, that in this moment he longed for her without reserve. At the thought of returning to her there was the old tumult in his heart, but now he understood its meaning ... it was revealed to him as the baffled speech of his body that had loved Ruth all the time. He would return to Ruth and he would be happy with her. As for his work, it was good that it had been destroyed. He was free from it. Henceforth the routine of his days would be sufficient, now he understood that it was possible to live without ecstasy. And though at this moment there was no cause for him to rejoice, yet a sense of well-being came over him, a strange and unreasonable happiness; and in this he recognized again the wilfulness of his being ... the wayward and laughing will, that like a perverse child, was not impressed by anything that had befallen him.

And for the future? It would be hard at first.... He would feel as if he were standing in an empty room, in which there is still the memory of things that have been there, and he would make painful, baffled gestures toward them ... but it was nothing he could not get used to. But here Levine's voice roused him, sounding thoughtfully in the quiet room. He had risen from his chair and was standing at the window, looking down into the city.

"But there is one thought," he was saying, "that you must not have when you lie awake ... the way the world is being re-arranged by those who are sleeping. Every night when I can't sleep, I think of the strange world that is being created by all the dreams of people who are sleeping. And I feel as if I were alone in a madhouse, the only sane person there. Only," he paused and shaded his eyes from the light, "I wish I could join them."

"It is too much to ask," he added, his voice trembling with suppressed bitterness, "that one should always be sane. It is too much to have only reality. I am sick of my reality. I wish I could tear it apart, wrench it ... distort it hideously. I wish I could enter their madhouse and dream something so filthy that it would turn my brain." He checked himself with an ugly laugh. "No, this won't do," he finished sharply. "This isn't the way to talk, Joseph Levine. You've been thinking too long..."

"I've been thinking too long," he continued, in a voice that was again calm and self-contained. "And besides," he added, a faint ironical smile hovering about his lips, "it isn't so bad. I've discovered at least that something is over for me. There isn't much else to believe, but I think this is left. We can always say..." the words were chanted in a grotesque sing-song, "something is over ... something is over."

To Lewis the words took up the burden of his own thoughts. "Something is over for me, too," he said softly. He raised himself on his elbow and leaned forward eagerly. "Do you remember that night I came to you when I left the hospital? Do you remember when I came bleating to you? Yes, that is the word," he insisted with a delighted involuntary laugh. "I came bleating to you. But I can't understand now why I did it. Will you forgive me?"

"If you wish it, yes," Levine said with ironical kindness.

"But it was wrong ... it was wrong," Lewis insisted. "I can't understand it. I can't understand what I wanted. I wanted to whistle for the world ... I thought the whole world would come to my hand if only I whistled for it. But now all that is over. I think that now," he continued musingly, "I am content. Perhaps I shall be able to live without ecstasy, without forgetfulness..."

Levine sat down again, resting his head on his hand and staring at the floor. "Content ... content..." he mimicked. "No ecstasy, no passion, no forgetfulness ... the negative litany of our day. Well, I too am content. Yes, why should I complain? Something is over. Why should one complain," he asked with bitter indifference, rapping his forehead, "if there is still enough resilience here to feel that something is over?"

Lewis did not answer and there was a long silence in the room. The light on the window grew brighter, and sounds of stirring came up from the street. Then he dozed off, a light and dreamless slumber, from which he was awakened by the sound of Levine's footsteps going back and forth on the carpet.

"There's news for both of us in the paper," Levine said gently, pausing near the window and nodding his head toward the paper that lay next to Lewis on the couch. Lazily Lewis turned to read. "So Konig confessed..." he said.

"Yes, it seems he was guilty." And Levine added with a constrained smile, "That makes me a fool."

After a while Lewis sat up, his eyes bright with their intuition.

"And Poldy?" he asked.

"Poldy is dead," Levine began in a low voice. "There's a suicide reported that corresponds to him."

Lewis lay down again, staring up at the ceiling. "It should have happened right away," he said slowly. "It was best." He took the paper to read, but the next moment put it away from him. "No, I won't read it now..."

They were silent, listening to the sounds that came up to them from the awakening street ... from a great distance they seemed to hear them ... the muffled beat of a hammer, the rumbling of wheels, footsteps ringing out on the pavement. And while they listened the sounds became for them a primitive language, speaking with a profound utterance that they heard and tried to understand.

2

The shadow of the wind running through the leaves was on the floor. Under the scraps that lay there ... silk and cotton and wool that were all colors ... it ran more swiftly than anything she had ever known. "What is swifter than the shadow of the wind running through the leaves?" she said to herself, and fell to wondering how it would look in a place where there were many trees instead of only one. Soon the sun came out. Then the sun and the leaves lay together on the floor in a still mosaic of gold and gray. Watching it, Mirelie forgot the machines and the coat she was sewing, and Anna's scolding voice ... she thought it was a very quiet spot in the woods. Meanwhile the tip of her needle looked up at her through the cloth, like the bright watchful eye of an insect ... and Anna began to scold her.

"Only look at her now ... staring at the floor," she said. "Three stitches and she's through." And, "Say, Mirelie, what have you lost?" someone else called.

"Go ... go to the door," Anna commanded. "Be busy. Look for David. Perhaps he will come."

So she went to the door and stood looking out. At first there was nothing to see ... only a boy and a girl jumping rope in a place where the sidewalk was clear, facing in the circling frame of the rope, looking at each other while their bodies went up and down. And an old man was standing near, who was stroking his cheeks all the time as if thin fine webs kept gathering around them. But soon she felt there was something swaying on the street. In and out of the people it went, bending to one side like part of a machine that has to move in a different way, walking behind its shadow that kept swinging wilfully away from it. Then her heart changed its step, but she was no longer ashamed of it ... she was no longer afraid of the old man who had said in her dream, "They are married."

"What is it that sways on the street and is not the shadow of a tree?" she riddled to herself, and looked eagerly among all the people to the place where she could see it again. And now she saw David clearly, walking very fast and looking toward the shop, and there was a faint smile on his face. She could tell, now, how it was: sideways for his long right leg, up again for the other ... so all the way down the street, until he had to stop at a place where it was too crowded to pass. So she added to her riddle: "And stands this way?" and she bent her body a little to one side, like the branch of a tree when it has a premonition of wind. And now David was near the shop, looking eagerly ahead to see whether Mirelie was waiting for him. And now he was at her side, touching her hand.

"Mirelie," he whispered, and he laughed softly to himself.