Part 11

Doris allowed matters to drift through the year. One winter night Lindstrum, invited innocently to occupy the sofa in the studio rather than to tackle the storm-bound transportation outside, consented. He sat reading things he had written until midnight came.

He did not see how it had happened but when he looked up after one of his readings Doris was sitting before the small grate fire. Her face was turned from him and he stared at her. She had undressed and slipped a green silk robe over her body. Her black silk stockings gleamed like exclamation points in the firelight. Her throat and breasts were visible and the shadows mirrored themselves in her white arms.

As he looked at her the warmth of the room seemed to bring her closer. He thought her beautiful and standing up went to her side. His hand sought clumsily to caress the hair coiled on her head. He stood silent, remembering how she loved him. Always the thought excited him. But now he seemed to be thinking about it with a curious calm. There was something about a woman who loved that was beyond words to figure out.

She looked up at him with a smile. A faint odor stirred from her. He found himself drawing deep breaths and staring at her with a heavy pain in his arms. The pain she had always brought to him and out of which he had made his words. Now this was easier, simpler--to reach his arms around her....

* * * * *

... "I belong to you now," she whispered as the dawn lighted the room. The fire in the grate still burned feebly. They had kept it alive during the night.

"You see," she went on, "I was right about not marrying. We can love each other like this without marrying ever. Oh I love you so. You make me so happy."

"Yes," he murmured sleepily, intent upon the whitening room. "Dawn--the white shadow of night," whispered itself through his mind. But he said nothing. After an interval he repeated as if delivering himself of innumerable ideas--"Yes."

* * * * *

... Lindstrum slowly extricated himself from the lure of her passion. For months her love, dissolving rapturously in his embrace, remained a flattery too bewildering to resist. He allowed himself then to yield to the slowly accumulating demands of his mistress. Nevertheless in a month he had lost interest in his own sensations. The thought of impending embraces in the studio failed to arouse him.... There was nothing Doris had to give that was comparable to the delicious elation his own self-seduction held for him.

But although the physiology of sex lost its attraction for him, he remained interested in Doris' submission. Her delight in his caresses and her exclamations of arduous love fascinated him as a species of applause. He grew able to resist the contagion of her sensualism and to make her happy, without essentially occupying himself.

In the second year of their association he gradually undermined her passion. Aware of his complete coolness, Doris fought successfully to suppress the ecstacies he was able to stir in her. Their relations by degrees returned to a platonic basis.

Lindstrum was becoming known. His poetry printed in fugitive labor gazettes was attracting a slight attention. He was being identified as a poet of the masses. The masses, however, unable to understand, let alone appreciate the mystic imagery and elusive passion of his vers libre phrasings remained oblivious to him. They continued to read and swear by the newspaper jinglers celebrating in rhyme the platitudes which kept them in subjugation. His fame was beginning through the enthusiasm of a few scattered dilletantes who abhorred the masses and saw in his work an intense technique and high asthetic quality.

He remained loyal to Doris in one respect, still coming to her for the adulation which somehow quickened his desire to write. But Doris, with the repression of her own desires had grown silent. She appeared to relapse into her former self--the enigmatic and disdainful virgin of the Basine library.

But this simulation included only her mannerisms. As a girl of twenty she had been without thought. Now a strange intellectualism preoccupied her. It developed when she was twenty-three and when Lindstrum was beginning to ignore her again. It began with the knowledge that there were definite preoccupations luring her lover from her. Against one of these she knew herself powerless. This was his desire to write. She had understood this thing in Lindstrum from the first. It had been, in fact, the lure of the man. But now it had taken entire possession of him and had become her rival.

He had grown dumb. His grey eyes no longer smiled or roved. They gazed without movement as if fixed on invisible objects. They seemed without sight, yet there was life in them--an intensity like the anger of blindness. He no longer looked at things. He avoided contact with the visible and imposed a deliberate fog on his vision. He went through his day unaware of details, yet absorbing them; unseeing, yet translating the commonplaces around him into phenomena that tugged at the hearts of his few readers.

Doris knew the futility of combating in her lover the habit of self-seduction now became a vital necessity. She tried to establish a harmony between them by turning to writing herself. The clarity of her mind made poetry impossible. Her thoughts refused to dissolve into magnificent blurs. Her emotions were too definite to find solacing outline in ambiguous pirouettes.

She envied her lover his natural aptitude for poetry. It seemed to her a comforting and satisfying evasion--to write poetry. There were no rules of logic, coherence, technique. There was even no rule of intelligibility.

There was a man named Levine with whom she discussed matters of this sort, exchanging definitions with him of such things as life, love and art. He was a Jew and worked on a newspaper. Lean, vicious-tongued and unkempt, the fantastic skepticism of this man attracted her. He was a man without principles, ideas, prejudices. His attitude toward life she sensed to be a pose. But he had been completely consumed by this pose and the pose was one of superiority. His brain was like a magician. It waved words over ideas or problems and they turned inside out. Or they vanished and reappeared again as their opposites. He appeared to devote himself with a mysterious enthusiasm to proving everyone but himself in the wrong. When he read editorials in the newspapers he would comment, "They say this. But they mean this." And he grew elated explaining the low, sordid motives which inspired the noble-phrased pronouncements in the press and elsewhere.

When she talked to him about poetry one evening he knew her well enough to understand she wanted to talk about Lindstrum. Doris had tried her hand at poetry and the results had been in a measure satisfactory. Poems had come out under her pencil. She compared them coldly with things Lief had written. They were as good and better. She offered them to Levine to read. He nodded after each one and smiled, "Very nice. Excellent. Superb." Then he handed them back to her and added, "I've always known this. Anybody can write poetry. This poetry is quite good. But it remains, you're no poet."

And he recited from memory a few lines of Lindstrum's work.

"You see the difference," he said. "His rings truer. Although yours is much more lucid and beautifully written. The difference isn't between your work and his but between your work and yourself and his work and himself. When Lindstrum wrote that he felt a thrill of satisfaction. He had for a minute completed himself in the poem. Therefore the thing represented a certain perfection. When you wrote you felt nothing after writing it. In an hour the whole thing seemed rather senseless and unworthy of you. You felt no thrill of completion. This shows that no matter if you write a dozen times better than Lindstrum the fact remains that you're not a poet and he is.

"But why write poetry. I have a friend who says that poetry is an impish attempt to paint the color of the wind. He hasn't written any himself yet but he will. But I've warned him. He'll never succeed. Lindstrum will because Lindstrum has the faculty of rising above logic. He can recreate his emotions in words. Emotion is unintelligent, banal, wordless. The trick of being a great poet is to make your mind subservient to your emotion--the triumph of matter over mind, in other words."

He noticed an inattentiveness and stopped. He hoped some day to make love to her but as long as she remained interested in his verbal jugglings he was content with that.

When she was alone Doris took a morbid interest in unravelling ideas and attenuations of ideas. Morbid, because the process seemed to bring a melancholy to her. But she persisted. There was an elation. Thinking was like a game in which one surprised oneself with denouements.

One day while walking she reasoned silently about her situation. Her love for Lindstrum had grown. At times it fell on her like a despair. She would lie in the dark of her room repeating to herself that she would go mad unless he came back to her, unless he loved her.

Walking swiftly she began to think of her plans. Her plans centered upon bringing him back to her arms.

"If I'm going to do this I must first of all be clear about myself," she thought. "I've become interested in lots of things. I must find out why and what's started me."

The answer that came to her was one of the denouements of the game. It repeated, but clearly, that she was chiefly concerned with bringing Lief back to her and that one way to do this was to become keener than he, become brilliant enough to deflate him, to confuse him. And this could best be done by attacking his subject matter, by turning his conceptions of life and people upside down and so throwing him out of gear.

When she got home she was still thinking.

"What I must do, is make him think. He doesn't think. The pictures he sees pass like blurs through his eyes and come out like blurs under his pencil. If I can make him think he'll have to open his eyes. He'll have to defend what he accepts without defenses now--the nobility of the masses, the beauty of life. And if he starts thinking and doubting he won't be able to write because he's not built to write that way. He's built to write out of passion."

The idea became cruelly apparent in her mind. She must destroy Lindstrum in order to possess him. She must beat down the passionate certitude of the man, puncture his blind, roaring egomania, take away from him his genius and then he would turn to her.

Her thought at this point gave itself over to the passion in her. Anger filled her and a strange viciousness as though she had something under her hands to tear to pieces. Her clear-thinking mind was a weapon--a thing she could use to destroy a rival with. And if it destroyed Lief along with the rival, what matter? Slowly the morbidity of her position grew. Levine was an ally. His talk gave her ideas--directions in which to think. She disliked his attitude. The man was an insincerity. There was also something unctuous and cowardly about him. He never stood up for his notions in the face of conservatively indignant people. He capitulated and even denied his beliefs or lack of beliefs. Yet in the nihilism to which he pretended she found a background for her own thinking. Nihilism to Levine was a conversational pastime. To Doris it became a despairing hope for salvation. She poured over books, carefully questioned the secrets of life, not like a philosopher seeking answers but like a Messalina questing for poisons.

Her debates with Lindstrum were at first casual and good-natured. A humility before his genius made her unable to assert herself. He could hurl his mystic word sequences at her and their beauty made her incapable of appreciating their lack of psychologic content.

But her determination grew. She must destroy--what? The somber ecstasy which the spectacle of people awoke in him. People ... people ... the word contained the shape and soul of her rival. People ... workers, toilers, underdogs ... he sang of their bruised hearts and their little gropings. Songs of unfulfilled dreams, of moods like ashen baskets that broke under the weight of life. Coal miners, farmers, stevedores, vagrants, desperadoes, drowsy clerks and fumbling factory hands--the dull faces of the immemorial crowd sweating for its living, grunting under its burdens--his phrases hymned their loneliness and their defeats. Beautiful phrases that seemed almost the work of a fantastic word weaver. But she knew better. The little images, the patterns of street scenes, the aloof fragments of idea--these might be to some only decorations. The curve of a pick going through the air, the shake of a great trestle with an overland train thundering across, the glint of a night torch under the eyes of a section gang--these might be only abstractions outlining bits of rhythm and color. But then Lindstrum would not have been a poet.

There was beneath them, buoying them higher and higher like some mysterious, invisible force, a passion. It escaped now and then from between the lines of his work, shaking itself like a fist, holding its arms out like a lost woman. Threats crept out of the placid little images in which fragments of street scenes postured vividly for the eye. A fury loomed suddenly behind the mumble of a hurdy-gurdy piece; a snarl offered itself as invisible punctuation for a fol de rol of city life.

It was a passion that identified itself with, and seemed to fatten upon, the injustices of life. It sought to champion the war of the crowd against man and nature.

"The humble ones ... the humble ones...." it sang, "they are God. The ones life walks upon. The working ones, the cheated ones--here is their song. The oppressed ones, listen to their hearts beating."

It was a passion out of which a great propagandist might have been born. But Lindstrum's mind was too simple to utilize it, even to understand it. He was aware only of a torment that seemed to twist at his heart and bring words like soothing whispers into his thought. A craftsman obsession moulded it slightly. But always the inarticulate excitements that had started him writing remained fugitive among his written words saying neither "I hate," nor "I love," but affirming with a monotonous crescendo, "I am. I am!"

Doris caught by the fanatic lyricism of his songs yielded her intellect to them for a time. The shoemaker Wotans and hobo Christs startled her into an acquiesence. But she was determined. She knew that her praise of his poetry was like an admiration of his infidelity. Yes, he loved people as he might have loved her, blindly with his heart, with his arms around their bodies and his grey eyes looking hungrily through them.

The debates grew less casual. There were abrupt climaxes during which he stared at her with anger. Then it was no longer a debate of ideas but of wills. Here she knew herself powerless and yielded at once, making use of her apology to caress his face or seize his hand.

Alone again she would study the things she had said as she studied from day to day the social, political and spiritual history of her own and other times. Her mind grew to master the phrases which outlined the illusions of the crowd, which revealed the lusts and errors of the crowd. Her thought inspired by the single desire to destroy for her lover the beauty of her rival, rallied continually from its defeats before his anger. Her cynicism became a mystic thing--her adoration of her lover turning into a hatred of life, a contempt of people.

At night she sat in the window of her room overlooking the thinly crowded street. The obsession held her now, occupying her energies entirely. In its excitement, in the mental twistings, she found rest from the desires that burned.

Alone ... she was alone. She would play langorously with this sense of loneliness. She would repeat quietly, "He'll never come to me again. Never hold me in his arms. How beautiful he is. His lips are not like any man's lips could be. But he doesn't love me any more. He loves this in the street below. Men and women in the street."

And here her thinking would begin, a sequel to the preface of sorrow. Below her moved the face of her rival--the crowd. She must study the thing out carefully so as to be clear in her words when she talked to him. So as to make her words a poison in him that would destroy the passion for her rival.

The night lifted itself far away. Little lights ran a line of yellow at the foot of buildings. Men and women. What were men and women? The blur of faces in the street, moving along every night, what was that? Something to idealize and give one's soul to? No.

Individuals racing toward their secret destinations and tumbling with a sigh into an inexhaustible supply of graves--that was a phenomenon to be studied separately. Out of that one could locate plots, dramas, humor, tragedy. But here below the window was another story--was a great character that had no name but that her lover worshipped. The crowd ... this thing in the street he sang of as the crowd was a single creature. Its face was one, its voice one. It had one soul--the soul of man. A dark thing, alive with inscrutable desires.

"They're not people," she whispered, her eyes staring down, "but traditions walking the street. Accumulations of desires and impulses taking the night air."

She watched it move in silence, buried beneath names and buildings.

The crowd.... It was blind to itself. Its many eyes peered bewilderedly about. Its many legs moved in a thousand directions. And yet it was identical. Faces, different shaped bodies, different colored suits--these were part of a mask. Sentences that drifted in the night, laughters, sighs--these were part of a mask. Under the clothes, faces, names, talk of people, was a real one--the crowd. It had no brain.

And yet this creature that moved in the street below, in all streets everywhere, made laws, made wars, and mumbled eternally the dark secrets of its soul. The crowd ... a monstrous idiot that devoured men, reason and beauty. Now it moved with a purr through the street. It was going somewhere, making love, making plans, diverting itself with little hopes. Its passions and its secrets slept. It moved like a great somnambulist below her window, with a fatuous complacency in its dead eyes. Its many masks disported themselves in the night air. But let hunger or fear, let one of the inscrutable impulses awake it, and see what happened. Ah! Communes, terrors, rivers of blood, heads on spikes, torture and savagery!

She must tell this all clearly to him, explain lucidly to him how the hero-crowd of his singing was a gruesome and stupid criminal blind to itself and afraid of itself and inventing laws to protect it from itself. How it was a formless thing with hungers and desires moulded in the beginning of Time. How it demanded proofs of itself that the darkness of its brain and the savagery of its heart were the twin Gods from whom all wisdom and justice flowed. How the workers, the defeated ones, the under dogs he sang of and loved were like the others--lesser masks envying superior masks. And how the idealisms, Gods and hopes they all worshipped were lies the beast whispered to itself, fairy tales by which the beast consoled itself. Yes, a monster that devoured men who threatened its consolations, a wild fanged beast purring eternally in the path of progress. Reason was a little cap the masks wore that every wind blew off. Her loneliness faded. Seated by her window Doris no longer desired the lips of her lover. There was another elation ... a knowledge of the thing in the street, a certainty that she could make Lief Lindstrum understand.

One evening when he had returned to her after an absence of a month she decided to talk calmly to him of the things she had been thinking. He came in with an air of caution, that frightened her for an instant. She studied him as he took off his coat and hat and sat down. It was autumn outside. Dark winds seemed to have followed him in. This was an old trick of his that had once thrilled her. He seemed always to have come from far-away places, to have risen out of depths with secrets in his eyes. Her heart yielded as she watched him. There was the quality about him she could never resist, the thing her senses clamored for. Not that he wrote poetry--but that he was a poet.

It was almost useless to argue with him, to destroy him. No matter what he said or what he was doing she could see him always as he really was--a silent figure walking blindly over men and buildings, over days and nights; walking with its eyes snarling and its mouth tightened; walking over days and nights after a phantom--a silent figure walking after a phantom. The phantom whispered, "Come" ... and the silent figure nodded its head and followed. That was how she saw him when her heart yielded, when she desired again to throw herself before him, make herself the phantom he was following.

But the obsession in her changed the picture slowly. Not a phantom but a face she knew--the face of the crowd. A wild fanged monster that had cast a spell over her lover and he went walking blindly after it calling words to it, singing lullabys to it, when all these things should have been for her.

Their talk began as she wished it. He was ill at ease. Why had he come? He was afraid to stay away? Why? She wondered questions as he sat uncertainly in the chair and offered vague gossip and information to explain his presence. Then she said abruptly:

"I'm writing a story. I've decided not to do any more poetry but write a story--a book, maybe."

He nodded.

"What about?" he asked.

"People. About people," she smiled. She noticed his body stiffen and his eyes grow hard.

"Yes, about people," he repeated slowly.

He was cautious when he came to see her now. She had reason to make demands of him. She had given herself to him and he didn't trust her. And she was always trying to do something to him. He knew this. It was hard to understand her lately but one thing was easy--she was not to be trusted.

"How they come together in crowds," she continued evenly, "and lose themselves in a common identity. How they become a hideous, unreasoning savage--a single savage. I'm going to write a book making this savage the ... the hero."

She paused to look at him. He was inattentive but she knew better.

"You should be interested," she smiled.

"Why should I be interested?" he asked slowly.

"Because you write about people, too."

"Yes."

"Or think you do," she went on. "I'm going to write about people as a crowd--as one savage without a brain. That's the crowd. And this savage is the hero of my story. Without a brain to think he creates out of his savagery the Gods, laws and illusions under which you and I live, Lief. Do you understand that?"

He looked at her without answer. Her heart grew alive with strength. She knew he was incapable of any answer but anger. His anger could usually defeat her but this time she felt she could laugh at him when he began to scowl. She stood up.

"You," she said softly, "are like they are. Like the crowd. You do not think or reason. You only feel. Words are accidents to you ... crazy hats that rain down on your head. You write out of a hatred for things superior to the beast. You're mad at life because it isn't as beautiful as you'd like it to be. So when you get maddest you begin to sing lies about it."

She laughed at the scowl on his face.