Kultur. We are proud of our plumbing. It was the ideal for which we
fought. To introduce our plumbing throughout Europe--make a German
bathroom of the world."

A sound of heavier firing in the streets interrupted. The two sat
listening, the baron's face alive with an odd humor.

"_Es lebe die Welt Revolution_," he whispered. "Do you hear it? Only a
murmur. But it starts all over Germany again. Workingmen with guns. You
will see them later. I among them. Stay in Europe, my friend, and see
the ghost of Marat rising from a German bathtub."

"Who are shooting?" Dorn asked.

"Shadows," the baron laughed. "The government wishes to impress the good
burgher that there is danger. So the government orders the soldiers to
shoot at midnight. The good burgher wakes and trembles. _Mein Gott, das
Bolshevismus treibt! Gott sei dank für den Regierung._ ... So the good
burgher gives enthusiastic assent to the increase in the military
budget. Dear God, did he not hear shooting at midnight? But they play
with more than ghosts. Noske's politik will end in another color.
To-night there are only shadows to shoot at. To-morrow ... remember what
I tell you...."

The telephone rang and Dorn answered. A voice in English:

"The gentlemen will have to put out the lights. The Spartikusten are
coming."

"Thank you...."

"What did he say?"

"We must put out the lights."

The baron laughed.

"It is nonsense. Come, your hat. We will go have a look."

They hurried down to the lobby. An iron door had been drawn across the
entrance of the hotel. In the lobby the shooting seemed a bombardment of
the building. A group of American and English correspondents were
lounging in the heavy divans, drinking gin and talking to a trio of
elaborately gowned women. The talk was in French.

"Hello, Dorn," one of the Englishmen called. Dorn approached the table,
von Stinnes following, and whispering, "I will request the porter to
open the gate."

"Baron von Stinnes, Mr. Reading."

The Englishman shook hands and smiled.

"I know the baron, Dorn. Rather old friends, what? Have a drink, damn
it!"

"Later, if you please," von Stinnes bowed stiffly. Reading beckoned Dorn
aside with an air of secrecy. Walking him to another part of the lobby
he began whispering:

"I'd let that blighter alone if I were you, Dorn. I'm just telling you
because you're rather new to these bloody swine."

Dorn nodded.

"I see," he said, and walked back to von Stinnes. Reading resumed his
place with the party.

"Perhaps it was a timely warning," the baron murmured as Dorn drew near
him. The gate had been opened and the two emerged. "I make a guess at
what Reading told you," the baron pursued.

"It is immaterial," Dorn answered. "I engage you not for your honesty
and many virtues, but because you're amusing...."

"Thus you relieve my conscience," von Stinnes sighed.

The wide avenue was deserted. Moonlight lay on the new-fallen snow. A
line of soldiers wheeled suddenly out of the Brandenburger Tor and came
marching quickly toward the walkers.

"_Weiter gehen, weiter gehen_," a voice from the troop called. Two
detached themselves from the ranks and approached rapidly.

"_Ausweise...._"

Von Stinnes glared through his monocle and answered in German, "What is
the matter with you? Are you crazy? I am Baron von Stinnes. My friend is
a member of the American Commission."

Dorn extracted a bit of stamped paper--his special credentials from the
German Foreign Office. The soldier glanced at it without troubling to
read....

"_Sehr gut, mein Herrschaften_," he mumbled. Dorn caught a glimpse of
his face. Its importance had vanished. The line of soldiers marched on.
When they had turned a corner the sound of firing suddenly resumed.

"Shadows again," chuckled von Stinnes.

Snow-covered streets, moonlight, waiting buildings, cold and
shadows--here was reality. The thing under the gay tumult of the cafés.
Under the baron's laughter. They were passing a stretch of empty shop
windows.

"It's cold," Dorn muttered. The baron looked at him with a smile.

"It is cold everywhere in Germany," he said quietly. "Men's hearts are
cold with hunger and fear. Brains are confused. Stomachs empty. The top
has been knocked off. The soldiers in the streets are the sad little
remains of a dead Germany. The new Germany lies cold and hungry in a
workingman's bed. Life will come out of the masses. And I am always on
the side of life. Not so? The old is dead. We drink wine to the new."

The sound of dance music drifted out of a café.

"Shall we stop?" the baron hesitated.

Dorn shook his head.

"Enough cafés. The streets are better. Dark windows."

They walked in silence through the snow, the baron humming a Vienna
waltz as the blurred echoes of machine-gun fire rose in the night around
them.

... Hours later Dorn lay sleepless in his bed. The smoke of wine was
slipping out of his thought.

"I'm alone," he murmured to himself. An emotionless regret came to him.

"There are still years to live." He wrapped himself closer in the
silk-covered quilts. "But how? Does it matter? I have loved, and that
is over. Rachel is ended. Haven't thought of her for weeks. And now, I
am like I was, only older and alone; yet not sad. So people adjust
themselves to decay. Senses that could have understood and wept at
sorrow die, along with the things whose death causes sorrow. Ergo, there
is no sorrow. Wings gone, tears gone, everything gone. Empty again, yet
content. I want nothing.... No desires...."

His brain was mumbling sleepily as the cold wind from the opened window
swept pleasantly through the room.

"Women to divert me. Wine to make me glad. And a companion--the baron.
Droll tragedian! And scenes for my eyes. Yes, yes.... They keep shooting
outside. Still shooting after five years. Shooting each other. The world
speaks a strange language. What imbecility! Yet life is in the masses.
It'll come out, perhaps. From Russia. Russians--a pack of idealists ...
a pack of illiterate Wilsons with whiskers. I'm like the baron. I admire
revolution. Why? Because it diverts."

He closed his eyes for moments. Still no sleep, and his thought resumed,
"Rachel, I once loved you. I can say it now without hurt. Empty memories
now--like drawings in outline. And some day even the outlines will leave
me."

A curious ache came into his heart. "Ah, she still touches me--still a
little. Poor dear one! What a farce! A glorious farce! The nights when
she whispered. Her face, I remember, yes, a little. Ghosts! Your eyes
are the beckoning hands of dream. That was the best sentence.... The
rest were good too--sometimes."

He smiled sleepily on his pillow ... "still shooting. It will be amusing
here. Some day when we're old, Rachel and I will see each other again.
Old eyes questioning old eyes. Old eyes saying, 'So much has died. Only
a little more remains to die.' Sleep ... I must sleep now. To-morrow,
work, work! And forget. But nothing to forget. It forgets itself. It
says good-bye. A sun gone down. What is it old Carl wrote?... 'The past
is a bucket of ashes, a sun gone down ... to-morrow is another
day....'"

CHAPTER V

The detachment vanished. Streets familiarized themselves.

"_Ich steh auf den Standpunkt_," said the politicians; and the racket of
machine-guns offered an obligato.

The new garrulity that had seemed strange to Dorn lost its strangeness.
It became the victrola phrases of a bewildered diplomacy. But the
diplomacy was not confined to frock-coats. It buzzed, snarled up and
down the factory districts, in and out of the boulevard cafés and the
squat resident sectors.

The German waiting for the knife of Versailles to fall was vomiting a
vocabulary of fear, hope, threat, despair. Under cover of a confused
Social Democracy the German army was slowly reorganizing itself.

It was three months after his arrival in Berlin that Dorn wrote his
curious sketch of the German situation. The three months had witnessed a
change in him. He had become a workman--industrious, inquisitive,
determined. Under the guidance of von Stinnes he had managed to
penetrate the heart of German _politik_. Tours through the provinces,
daily interviews with celebrities, statesmen, leaders of the scores of
political factions; adventures under the surface of the victrola phrases
pouring from the government buildings and the anti-government buildings,
had occupied even his introspections. Seemingly the empire had turned
itself into a debating society. Life had become a class in economics.

Three months of work. Unfocused talents drawn into simultaneous
activity. And Dorn arose one morning to find himself an outstanding
figure in the turmoil of comment and commentators about him. Von Stinnes
had wheedled his history out of him for publication in Berlin. Its
appearance was greeted with a journalistic shout in the capitol.
Radicals and conservatives alike pounced upon it. Haase, leader of the
Independent Socialists, declaimed it almost in full before the National
Assembly in Weimar.

Dorn had put into it a passionate sense of the irony and futility of his
day. Its clarity arrested the obfuscated intellect of a nation groping,
whining, and blustering under the shadow of the knife of Versailles.

The writing of it had rid him for the time of Rachel, of Anna, of the
years of befuddling emptiness that had marked his attitudes toward the
surfaces of thought about him. The emotionless disillusion of his nature
had finally produced an adventure for him--the adventure of mental
fecundity.

He had gone to Weimar to write. Here the new government of Germany had
assembled. Delegates, celebrities, frock-coats, strange hair formations;
messiah and magician had come to extricate the nation from its unhappy
place on the European guillotine. The narrow streets stuttered with
argument.... Von Stinnes and a girl named Mathilde Dohmann accompanied
him to the town. The Baron, bored for the moment with his labors, had
immersed his volatile self in a diligent pursuit of Mathilde. He had
discovered her among communist councils in Berlin and naïvely attached
her as a part of Dorn's secretarial retinue.

"She will be of service," he announced.

Dorn, preoccupied with the scheme of his history, paid little attention
to her. Arrived in Weimar he became entirely active, viewing with
amusement the Baron's sophisticated assault upon the ardent-voiced,
red-haired political spitfire whom he called Matty. Alone in an old
tavern room, he gave himself to the arrangements of words clamoring for
utterance in his thought. Old words. Old ideas. Notions dormant since
years ago. Phrases, ironies remembered out of conversations themselves
forgotten. The book was finished towards the middle of March--a history
of the post-war Germany; with a biography between the lines of Erik
Dorn. Von Stinnes had forthwith produced two German scholars who, under
his direction, accomplished the translation with astonishing speed.
Excerpts from the thin red-and black-covered volume found their way
overnight into the press of the nation. Periodicals seized upon the
extended brochure as a _Dokument_. In pamphlet form the gist of it
started upon the rounds of Europe. The garrulity of the day had been
given for the moment a new direction.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

"We will go to Munich. There will be a revolution in Munich. I have news
from secret sources."

Baron von Stinnes, lounging wearily in front of a chess-board, spoke and
raised a cup of mocha to his lips. Dorn, picking his way through a
German novel, looked up gloomily and nodded.

"Anywhere," he agreed. "Munich, Moscow, Peking."

In a corner of the room Mathilde was curled on the luxurious hotel divan
watching through half-closed eyes the figures of the men. The Baron
turned toward her and frowned. In return her face, almost asleep, became
vivid with a sneer. The Baron's love-making had gone astray.

"Matty is going to try to carry a million marks into Munich for the
Communists," he announced.

The girl stared von Stinnes into silence.

"How do you know that?" she asked slowly.

He lowered his cup and with a show of polite deliberation removed his
monocle and wiped it with a silk handkerchief.

"I know many things," he smiled. "The money comes from Dr. Kasnilov and
will be brought to Dr. Max Levine in Munich, and the good Max will buy a
garrison of Landwehr with it and establish the soviet republic of
Bavaria."

"You know Levine?"

"Very well," smiled the Baron.

Mathilde sat up. Her voice acquired a vicious dullness.

"You will not interfere with me, von Stinnes."

"I, Matty?" The Baron laughed and resumed his mocha. "I am heart and
soul with Levine. If Dorn cannot go I will have to go alone. It is
necessary I be in Munich when the Soviets are called out."

"You will not interfere with me, von Stinnes," the girl repeated, "or I
will kill you."

"You have my permission, Fräulein. The logical time for my death is long
past."

Mathilde's sharp young face had grown alive with excitement. She sat
with her eyes unwaveringly upon the Baron as if her thought were groping
desperately beneath the smiling weariness of the man.

"Mr. Dorn," she spoke, "von Stinnes is a traitor."

Dorn smiled.

"If one million marks will cause a revolution, I'll take them to Munich
myself," he answered. "I'm sick of Berlin. I need a revolution to divert
me."

"I fear I am in the way," von Stinnes interrupted. He arose with
formality. "Mathilde would like to unburden herself to you, Dorn. I am,
she will inform you, a secret agent of Colonel Nickolai, and Colonel
Nickolai is the head of the anti-bolshevist pro-royalist propaganda in
Prussia." He paused and smiled. "I will meet you in the lobby when you
come down."

He walked toward the door, halting before the excited face of the girl.

"Ah, Matty, Matty," he murmured, "you will not in your zeal forget that
I love you?"

He bowed whimsically and passed out. Dorn laid aside his book and
approached the divan. In the week since their return from Weimar he had
become interested in the moody, dynamic young creature. The fact that
she had resisted the expert persuasions of the Baron--a subject on which
the nobleman had discoursed piquantly on their ride to Berlin--had
appealed to him.

"Karl is a good fellow," he said, seating himself next to her. "And if
it happens he is employed by Noske and Nickolai it doesn't alter my
opinion of him."

"He is a scoundrel," she answered quietly.

"That is impossible," Dorn smiled. "He is merely a man without
convictions and therefore free to follow his impulses and his employers.
I thank God for von Stinnes. He has made Europe possible. A revolution
alone could rival him in my affections."

The girl remained silent, and Dorn watched her face. He might embrace
her and make love. It would perhaps flatter, please her. She fancied him
a man of astounding genius. She had practically memorized his book.
Thus, one had only to smile humorlessly, permit one's eyes to grow
enigmatic, and think of a proper epigram. He recalled for an instant the
two women who had succumbed to his technique since he had left America.
They blurred in his memory and became offensive. Yet Matty had been of
service and perhaps her moodiness was caused by a suppressed affection.
As an amorous prospect she was not without interest. As a reality,
however, she would obviously become a bore. In any case there was
nothing to hinder polite investigation, mark time with kisses until von
Stinnes brought on his promised revolution. He thought carefully.
Pessimism was the proper note. Dramatize with an epigram the emptiness
of life. His forte--emptiness. Not love but a hunger to live.

"Matty, I regret sadly that you are not a prostitute."

Startling!

"It would save me the trouble of having to fall in love with you, dear
child."

She smiled, a sudden amusement in her eyes.

"You too, Mr. Dorn. I had thought different of you."

"As a creature beyond the petty agitations, eh?"

"As a man."

"It is possible for a Man, despite a capital M, to love."

"Yes, love. It is possible for him only to love. And you do not."

"Much worse. I am sad."

"Why?"

"Perhaps because it is the only emotion that comes without effort."

"So you would fall in love with me to forget that I bore you."

"A broader ambition than that. To forget that living bores me,
Mathilde."

"There is someone else you love, Mr. Dorn."

"There was." He smiled humorlessly. "Do you mind if I talk of love? I
need a conversational antidote."

"And if you talk of love you may be spared the trouble of having to make
love," she laughed quietly. "But I would rather talk of von Stinnes. I
am worried."

"You are young," Dorn interrupted, "and full of political error. I am
beginning to believe von Stinnes. The most terrible result of the war
has been the political mania it has given to women."

Mathilde settled back on the divan and stared with mocking pensiveness
at her shoes. Dorn, speaking as if he desired to smile, continued:

"Do you know that when one has loved a woman one grows sad after it is
ended, remembering not the woman, but one's self? The memory of her
becomes a mirror that gives you back the image of something that has
died--a shadow of youth and joy that still bears your name. It is the
same with old songs, old perfumes. All mirrors. So I walk through life
now smiling into mirrors that give back not myself, but someone
else--another Dorn."

He arose and looked down at her.

"Does that interest you?"

"I understand you."

"There are many ways of making love. Sorrowful phrases are the most
entertaining, perhaps."

"You make me think you have loved too much."

"Yes, it would be difficult to kiss you. I would become sad with memory
of other kisses. Because you are young--as I was then."

"Was it long ago?"

"Things that end are always long ago."

"Then it was only yesterday."

"Yes, yesterday," he laughed, pleased with the ironic sound of his
voice. "And what is longer ago than yesterday?"

She had risen and stood before him, an almost boyish figure with her
fists clenched.

"I have something else I am in love with," she whispered. "I am in love
with----"

"The wonderful revolution, I know."

"Yes."

"And some day in the future you, too, will look into a mirror and see
not yourself but a glowing-faced girl that was in love with what was
once called the revolution."

"But if things end it is only because we are too weak to hold them
forever. So while we are strong we must hold them twice as eagerly."

"Sad. All most deplorably sad, Mathilde. Hands shuffle us into new
combinations, when we would prefer the old. Thus you, too, will some day
listen to the cry that rises from all endings."

"You are designing. You wish to make me sad, Mr. Dorn. And succeed."

"Only that I may contemplate the futility of your love and smile. As I
cannot quite smile at my own. We do not smile easily at corpses."

His hands covered her fingers gently.

"I will give myself to you, if you wish," she whispered.

"And I prefer you like this," he smiled. "If you will come close to me
and lay your head against me." He looked down at her as she obeyed.
"There is an odor to your hair. And your cheek is soft. These things are
similar things. You are almost like a phantom."

"Of her."

"No. She is forgotten. It's something else. A phantom of something that
once lived in me, and died. It comes back and stares at me sometimes out
of the eyes of strange women, out of the sounds of music. Now, out of
your hair."

"And you do not want me, Erik?"

"I want you. But I prefer to amuse myself by fancying that you are
unattainable."

"I've liked you, Erik. The rest does not matter to me. I grew old
during the war, and careless. My father and two brothers died. And
another man."

"So we both need diversion."

"Yes."

"Diversion," he murmured, "the little drug. But what is there to drugs?
No, come; we are lovers now."

"We will go to Munich together."

"Yes."

"And will you carry the money for Levine? They would never search you
and they might recognize and search me. And besides, von Stinnes would
not dare interfere if it was you, even if he is a spy, because he likes
you too well."

Her voice had become eager and vibrant. Dorn smiled ruefully, the faint
mist of a sigh in his thought. The girl had worked adroitly. Of course,
he was someone to carry the money to the Munich radicals.

"It is just an ordinary-looking package. The station will be under a
guard and all the roads coming in, too. They are expecting the
revolution and ..." She paused and grew red. Dorn's eyes were looking at
her banteringly. "You are thinking I have tricked you," she cried, "and
that it was only to use you as a ... as a carrier that I ... Well,
perhaps it is true. I do not know myself. I told you you could have me.
Yes, I give myself to you now ... now.... Do you hear?"

She laughed with bitterness.

"I have never given myself before. I would rather you smiled and were
kind. But if you wish to laugh ... and call it a bargain ... it does not
matter."

She had stepped away from him and stood with kindled eyes, waiting.

"One can be chivalrous in the absence of all other impulses, Mathilde.
And all other impulses have expired in me. So I will take the package.
We will start to-morrow early. And as for the rest ... I will spare you
the tedium of martyrdom."

He moved toward the door. "Come, we'll go downstairs. Von Stinnes will
be getting impatient."

Mathilde came to him swiftly. He caught a glimpse of her face lighted,
and her arms circled his neck. She was looking at him without words. A
coldness dropped into his heart. There had been three of them
before--he, Mathilde, and a phantom. Now there were only Mathilde and
himself.

"She was not tricking," he thought, and felt pleased. "At least not
consciously."

Her arms fell from him and she stared frightenedly.

"Forgive me, Erik. I thought you loved me. And I would have liked to
make you happy...."

He nodded and opened the door.

CHAPTER VI

They sat in the compartment of the train crawling into Munich. The Baron
drooped with sleep. Dorn stared wearily out of the window. Springtime. A
beginning of green in the fields and over the roll of hills. Formal
sunlight upon factories with an empty holiday frown in their windows.

"I hear shooting," he smiled at Mathilde. "We're probably in time."

The girl nodded. Despite the sleepless night sitting upright in the
compartment, her eyes were fresh and alive. The desultory crack of a
rifle drifting out of the town as if to greet them brought an impatience
into her manner. The train was moving slowly.

"Yes, we're in time," she murmured. "See, the white guards are still in
possession."

A group of soldiers with white sleeve-bands over the gray-green of their
uniforms passed in an empty street.

"There will be white guards at the station, too," she went on. "The
attack will come to-night. It must."

She looked intently at von Stinnes who, opening his eyes suddenly,
whispered, "Ah, Mathilde ... there was once another München...."

An uproar in the station. A scurry of guards and soldiers. White
sleeve-bands. Machine-guns behind heaped bags of sand. A halloo of
orders across the arc of the spacious shed. Passengers pouring out of
the newly arrived train, smiling, weeping, staring indifferently.

The officer desired the passengers to line themselves up against the
train. A suggestive order, and confusion. Whispers in the crowd....
"Personally, I prefer the guillotine.... No, no, madame. There is no
danger. These are good boys. Soldiers of the government. You can tell by
the sleeve-bands. White. Merely baggage inspection."

Dorn waited his turn. A group of soldiers approached slowly, delving
into pockets for weapons, peering into opened pieces of baggage. Babble,
expostulation, eager politeness of innocent travelers, and outside the
long crack of rifles, an occasional rip of a machine-gun. The group of
soldiers paused before him.

"I am an American," he spoke in English, "with the American commission."

The announcement produced its usual effect. Bows, salutes, smiles. He
pulled out his passport and foreign-office credentials. An officer
stepped forward and glanced at them.

"Very good," in courteous English, "you will pardon for the delay. We
are having a little trouble here."

He indicated the city with a nod of his head and smiled wryly. In German
he continued sharply, "Gottlieb, Neuman, you will escort this gentleman
and his friends to whatever place they wish to go. Take my car at post
10."

Two soldiers saluted. The officer bowed with a smile. The travelers
moved off with their escort toward the street. Mathilde kept her eyes on
von Stinnes as they entered a gray automobile.

"Von Stinnes and I will sit in the back," she whispered to Dorn.

The Baron nodded.

"Careful of your Leugger," he whispered, "the soldiers will see it. You
can shoot me just as easily if you keep it hidden. I have frequently
fired through my pocket."

In a hotel room a half-hour later, Mathilde, grown jubilant as a child,
was clapping her hands and laughing.

"It was too simple!" she cried.

Dorn drew a small suitcase from under the bed and opened it.

"Here it is," he laughed. He removed an oblong package. His eyes sought
von Stinnes, standing near the window leisurely smoking a cigarette.

"You will find Levine in the Gambrinus Keller," von Stinnes spoke
without turning around. "I advise you to go at once, Matty, before the
streets crowd up."

He wheeled and held an envelope toward the girl.

"Take this. It will make it easier for you to get in. They are very
careful right now. It's a letter of credentials from Dr. Kasnilov."

Mathilde opened the envelope mechanically, her eyes seeking the thought
under the Baron's smile.

"Thanks," she spoke in German. "I will go now. I will see you after. At
dinner to-night. Here."

She walked quickly from the room, the oblong package under her arm.

CHAPTER VII

The thing hiding in the alleys and shops of the world--the dark, furtive
hungers that Russia was thawing into life, emerged on a bright April day
in the streets of Munich. Working men with guns. A sweep of
spike-haired, deep-eyed troglodytes from the underworld of labor.
Factories, shops, and alleys vomited them forth. Farm hovels and
stinking bundles of houses sent them singing and roaring down the
forbidden avenues, past the forbidden sanctuaries of satrap and burgher.

From behind curtained windows the upper world looked on with amazement
and disgust. A topsy-turvy April morning. A Spring day gone mad. Here
were the masses celebrated in pamphlet and soap-box oration. An ungodly
spectacle, an overturning. Grinning earth faces, roaring earth voices
come swaggering into the hallowed precincts of civilization. Workingmen
with guns marching to take possession of the world. An old tableau
decked with new phrases--the underfed barbarian at the gate of the
grainary.

The singing and the roaring continued through the morning.

"_Es lebe die Welt Revolution!_ _Es lebe das Rate Republik!_ _Hoch!_
_die soviet von Bayern_ ... _Hoch!_ _Hoch!_"

From the twisting, blackened streets, "_Hoch!_" Men and women squeezing
aimlessly around corners. Closely packed drifts of bobbing heads. A
crack of rifles dropping punctuations into the scene. "_Hoch!_ _Hoch!_"
from faces clustered darkly about the grimacing, inaudible orators in
the squares.

Red flags, red placards like a swarm of confetti on the walls and in the
air. A holiday war.... The morning hours marched away.

With noon, a silence gradually darkened the scene. A silence of
shuffling feet and murmuring tongues. The revolution had sung its songs.
An end of songs and cheerings. Drifting, silent masses. An ominous,
enigmatic sweep of faces. Red placards under foot in cubist designs down
the streets.

The afternoon waned, the hundred thousands closed in. Darkness was
coming and the pack was welding itself together. Rifles were beginning.
Machine-guns were beginning. Holiday was over. Quieter streets. The
orators become audible. Still faces, raised and listening. The orators
had news to give.... One of the garrisons had gone over to the soviets.
Two garrisons had vanished. Treachery. A long murmur ... treachery. The
armies of General Hoffmann were marching upon Munich ... twenty
kilometers from Munich. They would arrive in the night. ... "We will
show them, comrades, whether the revolution has teeth to bite as well as
a song to sing."

A growl was running through the twilight.... _Es lebe das Rate
Republik!_ A fierce whisper of voices. Workingmen looking to their guns,
massing about the government buildings. A new war minister in the
uniform of a marine, speaking from a balcony. Workingmen with guns,
listening. Women drifting back to the hovels and stinking bundles of
houses. In the cafés, satraps and burghers eating amid a suppressed
clamor of whispers, plans. The foolishness was almost over. The armies
of General Hoffmann were coming ... Twenty kilometers out.... Arrive at
night. The corps students themselves would saber the swine out of the
city....

Night. Darkened streets. Tattered patrols hurrying through mysteriously
emptied highways, shouting, "Indoors! Inside, everybody!" Suddenly from
a distance the bay of artillery. Workingmen with guns were storming the
cannon of the artillery regiment outside the city. A haphazard
cross-fire of rifles began to spit from darkened windows ... an upper
world showing its teeth behind parlor barricades.

In the shadows of the massive government buildings an army was forming.
No ranks, no officers. Easy to drift through the sunny streets singing
the _Marseillaise_ and the International ... to mooch along through the
forbidden avenues dreaming in the daylight of a new world ... with red
flags proclaiming the new masters of earth. Hundred thousands, then. But
now, how many? Too dark to see, to count. An army, perhaps. Perhaps a
handful....

Feverish salutes in the shadows.... "_Gruss Gott, genosse!_"

Was it alive? Did the revolution live? What was happening in the empty
streets? Who was shooting? And the armies of Hoffmann? _Gruss Gott,
genosse._ Under Rupprecht the armies had lain four years in the
trenches. Great armies, swinging along like a single man, that had once
battered their way almost into Paris against the English, against the
French.

"_Gruss Gott, genosse._ _Hoffmann kommt_ ... _Ja wohl, Gruss Gott!_"

Now twenty kilometers away and coming down the highroad against
Munich--against the drifting little clusters of lonely men whispering in
the shadows--the great armies of the Kaiser, an iron monster clicking
down the road toward Munich. Would there be artillery to meet them?
_Gruss Gott, genosse, wer shusst dort?_ No, they had only guns, old guns
that might not shoot. Old knives at their belts.... Darkness and
rifle-spattered silences. Where was the revolution? The shadows
whispered, "_Gruss Gott...._"

The shadows began to stir. A voice was talking in the night. High up
from a window. Egelhofer, the communist. No, Levine. Who? A light in
the window.... Egelhofer, thin-faced, tall, black-haired. Egelhofer, the
new war minister. 'Shh! what was he saying?... "_Vorwaerts, der
Banhoff...._"

Yes, the armies of Hoffmann had come. The shadows stirred wildly.
Forward ... _es lebe die Welt Revolution!_ This time a battle-cry,
hoarse, shaking. Men were running. Workingmen with guns, guns that would
shoot ... _"Der Banhoff ... der Banhoff...."_

The shadows were emptying themselves. A pack was running. Two abreast,
three abreast, in broken strings of men. Groups, solitary figures,
hatless, bellowing. The revolution was moving. The empty streets filled.
An army? A handful? Let God show in the morning. Workingmen with guns
were running through the night. Munich was shaking.... "_Der Banhoff,
genosse, vorwaerts!_"

The revolution was emptying itself into the great square fronting the
station. Little lights twinkling outside the ancient weinstubes began to
explode. There must be darkness. Pop!... pop!... a rattle of glass. A
blaze of shooting. The railroad station was firing now.

"_Es lebe das Rate Republik!_" from the darkness in the streets. A sweep
of figures across the open square. Arms twisting, leaping in sudden
glares of flame. The revolution hurled itself with a long cry upon the
barricades of thundering lead.

In the single lighted window of the government buildings a face still
spoke ... _"Ich bin Egelhofer, ihr Krieg's minister ... Ich komm...."_

Waving a rifle over his head, the war minister rushed from the building.
A marine from Kiel. A new pack loosened itself from the shadows. A war
minister was leading.

Moving swiftly through the streets, Dorn hurried to the seat of the new
government--the Wittelbacher Palais. Von Stinnes was waiting there. He
had been delayed in joining the Baron by the sudden upheaval about the
hotel.

The wave had passed. Almost safe now to skirt the scene of battle and
make a try for the Palais. As he darted out of the darkened hotel
entrance, the thing seemed for a moment under his nose. An oppressive
intimacy of tumult.

"They're at the station," he thought. "I'll have to hurry in case they
fall back."

He ran quickly in an opposite direction followed by the leap of firing.
Several blocks, and he paused. Here was safety. The revolution a good
half-mile off. He walked slowly, recovering breath. The street was
lighted. Shop windows blinked out upon the pavements. A few stragglers
walked like himself, intent upon destinations made serious by the near
sound of firing. An interesting evening, thus far. A stout, red-faced
man with a heavily ornamented vest followed the figure of a woman. Dorn
smiled. Biology versus politics.... "Excuse me, pretty one, you look
lonely...." A charwoman. Black, sagging clothes. Dorn passed and heard
her exclaim, "Who, me? You ask me to go with you? Dear God, he asks me!
I am an honest workingwoman. Run along with you!" The woman, walking
swiftly, drew alongside. She was chuckling and muttering to herself, a
curious pride in her voice, "He asked me, dear God--me!"

The abrupt sound of rifle-fire around the corner startled her. Dorn
halted. The woman turned toward him, puzzled.

"They are shooting a whole lot to-night," she spoke in German.

"Quite a lot," he answered.

She looked back at the red-faced man who had remained where she had left
him.

"What do you think of that dunce?" she whispered, and hurried on.

Dorn followed leisurely in the direction of the Palais.

CHAPTER VIII

A rabble of dictators, ministerial fledglings, freshly sprouted
governors, organizers, departmental heads, scurried through the dimly
lighted corridors of the old Palais. Dorn, with the aid of a handful of
communist credentials that seemed to flow endlessly from the pockets of
the Baron, passed the Palais guard--a hundred silent men squatting
behind a hastily erected barricade of sandbags.

Within he stumbled upon von Stinnes. The Baron drew him into a large
empty chamber.

"We must be careful," he whispered. His voice buzzed with an elation.
"Already two ministries have fallen. There is talk now of Levine. He's
of the extreme left. I thought you would like to see it. It has its
amusing side." He laughed softly. "I was with the men in the streets for
a while. There was something there, Dorn. Life, yes ... yes ... It was
amazing. But here it is different. What is it the correspondents say?
'All is confusion, there is nothing to report.' ... Yes, confusion.
There are at present three poets, one lunatic, an epileptic, four
workingmen and a scientist from Vienna, and two school teachers. They
are the Council of Ten. Look, there is _Muhsam,_ the one with the red
vandyke. A poet. He used to recite rhymes in the Cafe Stephanie."

The red vandyke peered into the room. "Stinnes, you are wanted," he
called. "I have my portfolio. I am the new minister to Russia. I leave
for Moscow to-morrow."

"Congratulations!" the Baron answered.

A tall, contemplative man with a scraggly gray beard--an angular
Christ-like figure--appeared. He spoke. "What are you doing here,
Muhsam? There is work inside."

"And you!" angrily.

"I must think. We must grow calm." He passed on, thinking.

"Landerdauer," smiled the Baron, "the Whitman translator."

"Yes," the vandyke answered, "we have appointed him minister of
education. What news from the station, Stinnes?"

"It is taken."

Dorn followed the Baron about the corridors, his ears bewildered by the
screechings from unexpected chambers of debate. He listened, amused, to
the volatile von Stinnes.

"They are trying for a coalition. Nikish is at the top. A former
schoolmaster. The communists under Levine won't come in. The workingmen
are out overthrowing the world, and the great thinkers sit in conference
hitting one another over the head with slapsticks. Life, Dorn, is a
droll business, and revolution a charming comedy, _nicht wahr?_ But it
will grow serious soon. Munich will be cut off. Food will vanish. Aha!
wait a minute...."

He darted after a swaggering figure. Dorn watched. The baron appeared to
be commanding and entreating. The figure finally, with a surly shake of
his head, hurried off. The Baron returned.

"That was Levine," he said. "He won't come in unless Egelhofer is
ratified as war minister. Egelhofer is a communist. Wait a minute. I
will tell them to make Egelhofer minister. I will make a speech. We must
have the Egelhofer."

He vanished again. Dorn, standing against a window, watched frantic men
scurry down the corridor bellowing commands at one another....

"Yesterday they were garrulous little fools buzzing around café tables,"
he thought. "To-night they boom. Rodinesque. And yet comic. Yes,
comedians. But no more than the troupe of white-collared comedians in
Wilhelmstrasse or Washington. The workers were different. There was
something in the streets. Men in flame. But here are little matches."

He caught sight of Mathilde and called her name. She came and stood
beside him. Her body was trembling.

"Did you spend the money?" he asked softly.

"Yes, but they will buy the garrisons back again. They have more funds
than we. Oh, we need more."

"Who will buy them back?"

"The bourgeoise. They have more money than we. And without the garrisons
we are lost."

She wrung her hands. Dorn struggled to become properly serious.

"There, it may come out very fine," he murmured. "Anyway, von Stinnes is
making a speech. It should help."

"Stinnes...."

"Yes, trying to bring Egelhofer in as war minister. He talked with
Levine...."

"I don't understand," she answered. "He is doing something I don't
understand, because he is a traitor."

She became silent and moved closer to Dorn.

"Oh, Erik," she sighed, "I must cry. I am tired."

He embraced her as she began to weep. Von Stinnes emerged, red-faced and
elated.

"It is settled," he announced. "Hello! what's wrong with Matty?"

"Tired," Dorn answered.

"We will go to the hotel."

They started down the corridor. A group of soldiers emerged from a
chamber, blocking their way.

"Baron von Stinnes," one of them called. The Baron saluted.

"You are under arrest by order of the Council of Ten."

Von Stinnes bowed.

"Go to the hotel with Matty, Dorn. I will be on soon."

To the soldiers he added, "Very well, comrades. Take me to comrade
Levine."

"We have orders...."

"To Levine, I tell you," he interrupted angrily. "Are you fools?"

He removed a document quickly from his coat pocket and thrust it under
the soldiers' eyes.

"From Levine," he whispered fiercely. "Now where is Levine?"

The soldiers led the way toward the interior of the Palais.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

Outside, Dorn supported the drooping figure of the girl. Runners passed
them crying out, "It is over! We have taken the station!"

They arrived at the hotel. The lobby was thronged with people. A
chocolate salesman from Switzerland was orating: "They have erected a
guillotine in Marien Platz. They are shooting down and beheading
everybody who wears a white collar."

The hotel proprietor quieted the crowd.

"Nonsense!" he cried. "Ridiculous nonsense! We are safe. They are all
good Bavarians and will hurt nobody."

Dorn led Mathilde to his room. She threw herself on the bed.

"So tired!" she whispered.

"But happy," he added. "Your beloved masses have triumphed."

"Don't. I'm sick of talking...."

"Too much excitement," he smiled.

They became silent. Dorn, watching her carelessly in the dimly lighted
room, began to think.... "Disillusionment already. The dream has died in
her. A child's brain overstuffed with slogans, it begins now to ache and
grow confused. Tyranny, injustice, seem far away and vague. The
revolution in the streets has blown the revolution out of her heart.
There will be many like that to-morrow. The over-idealized idealists
will empty first. The revolution was a dream. The reality of it will eat
up the dream. Justice to the dreamer is a vision of new stars. To the
workingman--another loaf of bread."

"Of what are you thinking, Erik?"

"Of nothing ... and its many variants," he answered.

"We've won," she sighed. "Oh, what a day!"

He noted the listlessness in her voice.

"Yes," he said, "another sham has had heroic birth. Out of workingmen
with guns there will rise some day a new society which will be different
than the old, only as to-morrow is different than to-day. The rivers,
Mathilde, flow to the sea and life flows to death. And there is nothing
else of consequence for intelligence to record."

"You talk like a German of the last century," she smiled. "Oh, you're a
strange man!"

This pleased him. He thought of words, a ramble of words--but a knock at
the door. Von Stinnes entered. He was carrying a basket.

"Food," he announced cheerfully. "With food in our stomachs the world
will seem more coherent for a while."

He busied himself arranging plates of sandwiches on a small table.

"Mathilde asleep?"

He walked to the bed and leaned over her. The girl's eyes were closed.

"Poor child, poor child!" the Baron whispered. He caressed her head
gently. "We will not wake her up. But eat and leave her food. Do you
mind if we go out for a while? It is still early and it will be hard to
sleep to-night. I know a café where we can sit quietly and drink wine,
perhaps with cookies."

Their eating finished, Dorn accompanied his friend into the street.

"It seems as if nothing had happened," he said, as they walked through
the spring night. "People are asleep as usual, and there is an odor of
summer in the dark."

Von Stinnes silently directed their way. After a half-hour's walk he
paused in front of an ancient-looking building.

"We are in Schwabbing now," he said, "the rendezvous of the Welt
Anschauers. I think this place is still open."

He led the way through a narrow court and entered a large,
dimly-lighted room. Blank white walls stared at them. Von Stinnes picked
out a table in a corner and ordered two flasks of wine from a stout
woman with a large wooden ring of keys at her black waist.

They drank in silence. Dorn observed an unusual air about his friend. He
thought of Mathilde's suspicions, and smiled. Yet there was something
inexplicable about von Stinnes. There had been from the first.

"Inexplicable because he is ... nothing," Dorn thought. "A chevalier of
excitements, a Don Quixote of disillusion...."

"You are thinking of me," the baron smiled over his wine-glass, "as I am
thinking of you. Here's to our unimportant healths, Erik."

Dorn swallowed more wine. To be called Erik by his friend pleased him.
He looked inquiringly at the humorous eyes of the man, and spoke:

"You are cut after my pattern."

The Baron nodded.

"Only I have had more opportunities to exercise the pattern," he
replied. "For the pattern, dear friend, is scoundrelism. And I, God
bless me ..." He paused and gestured as if in a hopelessness of words.

"There is quality as well as quantity in scoundrelism," Dorn suggested.
He was thinking without emotion of Anna.

"I have decided to remain in Munich," von Stinnes spoke, "and that
means that I will die here."

"The day's melodrama has gone to your head," Dorn laughed.

"No. There are people in Munich who know me quite well--too well. And
among their virtues they number a desire for my death. In Berlin it is
otherwise. Then too, this business of to-day can't last. It is already
topheavy with thinkers, and will eventually evaporate in a dozen
executions. It may come back, though. I cannot forget the workingmen who
stormed the Banhoff."

He paused and drank.

"Yes, I have decided to stay and play awhile. There will be a few weeks
more. One will find extravagant diversions in Munich during the next few
weeks. I am already Egelhofer's right-hand man. I will organize the
Soviet army, assist in the conduct of the government, try to buy coal
from Rathenau in Berlin, make speeches, compose earth-shaking
proclamations, and end up smoking a cigarette in front of a Noske
firing-squad.... Do not interrupt. I feel it is a program I owe to
humanity. And in addition, I am growing weary of myself."

Dorn shook his head.

"Romantics, friend. I do not argue against them."

"I wonder," von Stinnes continued, "if you realize I am a scoundrel. I
have thought at times that you did, because of the way you smile when I
talk."

"Scoundrels are creatures I do not like. And I like you. Ergo, you are
not a scoundrel, von Stinnes."

The Baron laughed.

"A convenient philosophy, Erik. Well, I was in the German intelligence
and worked in Paris during the second year of the war. Prepare yourself
for a confession. My secrets bore me. And a little cocotte of a countess
betrayed me. It is a virtue French women have. They are not to be
trusted, and love to them is something which may be improved by the
execution of a lover. But there was no execution. To save my skin I
entered the French intelligence--without, of course, resigning from the
German. Thus I was of excellent service to the largest number. To the
French I was invaluable. German positions, plans, maneuvers, at my
finger tips.... And to the Germans, unaware of my new and lucrative
connection, I was also invaluable. Again positions, plans, maneuvers. I
was transferred to Italy by the French and ... But it's a complicated
narrative. I haven't it straight in my own mind yet. Do you know, I wake
up at night sometimes with the rather naïve idea that I, von Stinnes,
who prefer Turkish cigarettes to women, even brunettes ... But I
stammer. It is difficult to be amusing, always. I think sometimes at
night that I was personally responsible for at least half the
casualties of the war."

"Megalomania," said Dorn without changing his smile.

"Yes, obviously. You hit it. A distorted conscience image. Ah, the
bombardments I have perfected. The hills of men I have blown up.
Frenchmen, Germans, Italians. Yes, a word from me ... I pointed the
cannon straighter.... But disregarding the boast ... you will admit my
superiority as a scoundrel."

"It is immaterial," Dorn answered. "If you betrayed the French, you made
amends by betraying the Germans, and vice versa. As for the Italians ...
I have never been in Italy."

Von Stinnes laughed.

"You do not believe me, eh?"

"You are lying only in what you do not say," Dorn laughed.

"Yes, exactly. I will go on, if it amuses you."

"It is better conversation than usual."

"I am now with the English," von Stinnes continued. "They play a curious
game outside Versailles, the English. They have entrusted me with a most
delicate mission." He paused and drained his glass. "It is quite
dramatic. I tell it to you because I am drunk and weary of secrets. Five
years of secrets ... until I am almost timorous of thinking even to
myself ... for fear I will betray something to myself. But--it is droll.
The million marks you so gallantly carried in for Matty, they were
mine, Erik." He laughed. "I gave them to Dr. Kasnilov, and a very
mysterious Englishman gave them to me...."

"Gifts of a million are somewhat phenomenal," Dorn murmured.

"I stole only a hundred thousand," von Stinnes went on, "which, of
course, everyone expected."

"But why the English, Karl?"

"A little plan to separate Bavaria from Prussia, and help break up
Middle Europe. You know feeling between the two provinces is intense.
There was almost a mutiny in the second war year. And anything to help
it along. To-morrow, Franz Lipp the new foreign minister of the Soviets
will telegraph to Berlin recalling the Bavarian ambassador; there _is_
one, you know--a figurehead. And the good Franz will announce to the
world that Bavaria has declared its independence of Prussia. This will
be a politic move for the Soviets as well as England. For the
bourgeoisie in Bavaria dislike Prussia as much as the communists dislike
her. But I bore you with intrigue. We have had our little revolution for
which you must allow me to accept an honest share of credit.... Let us
have another flask."

"An interesting story," Dorn agreed.

"You still smile, Erik?"

"More than ever."

"Ah, then truly, we are of the same pattern."

Von Stinnes stared at him sadly.

"You are my first companion in five years," he added.

"As you are mine," Dorn answered. "Here ... to the success of all your
villainies and our friendship."

"Which is not one of them," the Baron murmured. "You believe me?"

"Of course."

"Ah! it is almost a sensation to be believed ... for speaking the truth.
I feel as if I have committed some exotic sin. Yes, confession is good
for the soul."

"Shall we go back to the hotel?"

The Baron leaned forward and grasped Dorn's hand feverishly.

"I do not wish to joke any more," he whispered. "I have told you the
truth. And you still smile at me. You are a curious man. I have for long
sat like an exile surrounded by my villainies and smiling alone at the
world. But it is impossible to live alone, to become someone whom nobody
knows, whom trusting people mistake for someone else. I have wanted to
be known as I am ... but have been afraid. Ah! I am very drunk ... for
you seem still amused."

Dorn squeezed his hand.

"Yes, you are my first friend," he said. The Baron followed him to his
feet. They were silent on the way to the hotel. Von Stinnes walked with
his arm linked in Dorn's. Before the latter's room he halted.

"Good night, sweet prince," he mumbled drowsily, "and may angels guard
thy sleep."

Alone, he moved unsteadily down the hall.

Mathilde was gone. Moving about the room, Dorn found a note left for
him. He read:

"A man was here asking for you. An American officer. I met him in the
lobby and mentioned there was an American here and he asked your name.
When I told him he seemed to be excited. He said his name is Captain
Hazlitt and he is in the courier service on his way from Paris to
Vienna. I do not like him. Please be careful.

                                                "MATHILDE DOHMANN."

CHAPTER IX

In the days that followed Dorn sought to interest himself in the details
of the situation. The thing buzzed and gyrated about him, tiring his
thought with its innumerable surfaces. Revolution. A new state. New
flags and new slogans.

"I can't admire it," he explained to Mathilde at the end of the first
week, "because its grotesqueries makes me laugh. And I cannot laugh at
it because its intensity saddens me. To observe the business sanely is
to come to as many conclusions as there are words."

Mathilde had recovered some of her enthusiasm. But the mania that had
illuminated her thought was gone. She spoke and worked eagerly through
the days, moving from department to department, helping to establish
some of the innumerable stenographic archives the endless stream of
soviet pronouncements and orders were beginning to require. But at night
her listlessness returned.

"There is doubt in you too," Dorn smiled at her. "I am sorry for that.
It has been the same with so many others. They have, alas! become
reasonable. And to become reasonable ... Well, revolution does not
thrive on reason. It needs something more active. You, Mathilde, were a
revolutionist in Berlin. Now you are a stenographer. Alas! one collapses
under a load of dream and finds one's self in an uninteresting Utopia,
if that means anything. Epigrams lie around the street corners of Munich
waiting new text-books."

They were walking idly toward the café von Stinnes had appointed as a
rendezvous. It was late and the dark streets were deserted. The shops
had been closed all week. The Revolution was struggling in poorly
ventilated council-rooms with problems of economics. Beyond the
persistent rumors that the city, cut off from the fields, would starve
in another two days and that the legendary armies of Hoffmann were
within a stone's throw of the Hofbrau House, there was little
excitement. "My employers," von Stinnes had explained on the fourth day,
"are waiting to see if the Soviet can stand against the Noske armies
from Prussia. The armies will arrive in a few weeks. If the Soviet can
defeat them and thus establish its authentic independence, my employers
in Versailles will then finance the Bavarian bourgeoisie and assist in
the overthrow of the Communists. On the one condition, of course, that
the bourgeoisie maintain Bavaria as an independent nation. And this the
bourgeoisie are not at all averse to doing. It sounds preposterous,
doesn't it? You smile. But all intrigue is preposterous, even when most
successful."

"I quite believe," Dorn had answered. "I've long been convinced that
intrigue is nothing more than the fantastic imbecilities unimaginative
men palm off on one another for cleverness."

Now, walking with Mathilde, Dorn felt an inclination to rid himself of
the week's political preoccupation. Mathilde was beginning to have a
sentimental influence upon him.

"Perhaps if she loved me something would come back," he thought. "Anyway
it would be nice to feel a woman in love with me again."

An innocuous sadness sat comfortably in his heart. Later he would
embrace her. Kiss ... watch her undress. Things that would mean
nothing.... But they might help waste time, and perhaps give him another
glimpse of ... He paused in his thought and felt a dizziness enter his
silence. Words spun. "The face of stars," he murmured under his breath,
and laughed as Mathilde looked inquiringly up at him.

The café was deserted. Von Stinnes, alone in a booth, called "Hello" to
them as they entered.

"We have the place almost to ourselves," he said. "There are some people
in the other room."

He looked affectionately at the two as they sat down, and added, "How
goes the courtship?"

"Gravely and with cautious cynicism," Dorn answered. "We find it
difficult to overcome our sanities."

He smiled at the girl and covered her hand with his. Her eyes regarded
him luminously. They sat eating their late meal, von Stinnes chatting of
the latest developments.... A mob of communist workingmen had attacked
the poet Muhsam while he was unburdening himself of proletarian oratory
in the Schiller Square.

"They chased him for two blocks into the Palais," the Baron smiled, "and
he lost his hat. And perhaps his portfolio. They are beginning to
distrust the poets. They want something besides revolutionary iambics
now. Muhsam, however, is content. He received a postal card this
afternoon with a skull and cross-bones drawn on it informing him he
would be assassinated Friday at 3 P.M. It was signed by 'The Society for
the Abolition of Monstrosities.' He is having it done into an
expressionist placard and it will undoubtedly restore his standing with
the Council of Ten. Franz Lipp, the foreign minister, you know, has
ordered all the telephones taken out of the foreign office building.
It's an old failing of his--a phobia against telephones. They send him
into fits when they ring. He has incidentally offered to sign a separate
peace with the Entente. A crafty move, but premature. And the burghers
have been ordered under pain of death to surrender all firearms within
twenty-four hours."

The talk ran on. Mathilde, feigning sleep, placed her head on Dorn's
shoulder.

"You play with the little one," whispered von Stinnes. "She is in love."

Dorn placed his arm around her and smiled at her half-opened eyes.

A man, walking unsteadily across the empty café, stopped in front of the
booth.

"I've been looking for you," he said. "You don't remember me, eh?"

Dorn looked up. An American uniform. An excited face.

"My name's Hazlitt. Come out here."

Von Stinnes leveled his monocle witheringly upon the interloper and
murmured an aside, "He's drunk...."

Dorn stood up.

"Yes, I remember you now," he said. The man's tone had oppressed him.
"What do you want?"

He detached himself from Mathilde and stepped into the room. Hazlitt
stared at him.

"I owe you something," he spoke slowly. "Come out here."

Watching the man as he approached, Dorn became aware of a rage in
himself. His muscles had tightened and a nervousness was shaking in his
words. The man was a stranger, yet there was an uncomfortable intimacy
in his eyes.

Hazlitt stood breathing heavily. This was Erik Dorn--the man who had had
Rachel. Wine swept a flame through his thought. God! this was the man.
She was gone, but this was the man. Shoot him down like a dog! Shoot him
down! Kill the grin of him. He'd pay. He'd killed something. Shoot him
down! There was a gun under his coat--army revolver. Better than
shooting Germans. This was the man.

"You're going to pay for it," he spoke. "Go on, say something."

Dorn's rage hesitated. A mistake. What the devil was up?

"Oh, you've forgotten her," Hazlitt whispered. Shoot him! Voices inside
demanded wildly that he shoot. Not talk, but kill.

"Rachel," he cried suddenly. His eyes stopped seeing.

Dorn jumped for the gun that had appeared and caught his arm in time.
Rachel--then this was something about Rachel? Hazlitt ... Rachel. What?
A fight over Rachel? Rachel gone, dead for always. Get the gun away,
though....

They were stumbling across the room, twisting and locked together. He
saw von Stinnes rise, stand undecided. Mathilde's face, like something
shooting by outside a car window. And a strong man trying to kill him
... for Rachel. A Galahad for Rachel.

His thought faded into a rage. A curse as the man grabbed at his throat.
The gun was still in the air. His wrist was beginning to ache from
struggling with the thing. This was part of the idiocy of things. But he
must look out. Perhaps only a moment more to live. The man was weeping.
Mumbling ... "you made a fool out of her ... You dirty...."

As they continued their stumbling and clutching, a fury entered Dorn.
He became aware of eyes blazing against him--drunken, furious eyes that
were weeping. With a violent lunge he twisted the gun out of the man's
hand. There was an instant of silence and the man came hurling against
him.

Dorn fired. Down ... "my head ..." He lay still. The body of Hazlitt
sprawled over him. For a moment the two men remained embraced on the
floor. Then the body of Hazlitt rolled slowly from on top. It fell on
its back--a dead face covered with blood staring emptily at the ceiling.

Dorn, with the edge of an iron table foot embedded in his head, lay
breathing unevenly, his eyes closed.

CHAPTER X

The blinds were drawn. Cheering drifted in through the open window.
Mathilde sat in a chair. She was watching him.

"Hello!" he murmured. "What's up?"

"Erik ..."

She fell to her knees beside the bed and began to weep. He lay quietly
listening to her. Bandages around his head. A lunatic with a gun. Yes.
Rachel. The man had been in love with Rachel. Pains like noises in his
ears.

"You mustn't talk...."

"I'm all right. Where's von Stinnes?"

"'Shh...."

He smiled feebly. She was holding his hand, still weeping. A memory
returned vividly. A man with blazing eyes. He had lost his temper. But
there had been something more than that. Two imbeciles fighting over a
thing that had died for both of them. Clowns at each other's throat. A
background unfolded itself. Against it he lay watching the two men. Here
was something like a quaint old print with a title, "Fate...."

"Bumped my head," he murmured. But another thought persisted. It moved
through the pain in his skull, unable to straighten itself into lines
of words. It was something about fighting for Rachel. He would ask
questions.

"What happened, Mathilde? Where'd he go?"

"You mean the man? 'Shh.... Don't talk now."

"Come, don't be silly."

The thinness of his voice surprised him.

"What became of the fool?"

"He's dead."

"Dead?"

"Yes, you shot him. Now be quiet."

"Good God, so I did. I remember. When he jumped at me."

A sinking feeling almost drifted him away. He felt as if he had become
hungry. The man was dead.... "I killed him. Well ... what of it?"

He opened his eyes and looked at the room. It was day--afternoon,
perhaps.

"The doctor says you'll be all right in a few days. But you must be
quiet...."

"Von Stinnes," he murmured. "There'll be trouble. Call him, will you?"

Mathilde turned away. Now the pain was less. He could hear cheering
outside. A demonstration. Workingmen marching under new flags.

"Von Stinnes is under arrest, Erik."

"What for? A new government?" What a crazy business.

"No. Don't talk, please. Later...."

He was too weak to sit up.

"Things will have to be straightened out," he muttered. "The fool was an
American officer. There'll be trouble."

"No, don't worry. Von Stinnes has fixed things."

His eyes grew heavy and closed. Sleep ... and let things, fixed or
unfixed, go to the devil.

When he awoke again the room was lighted. Mathilde, standing by the
window, turned as he stirred.

"Are you awake?"

"Yes, and hungry."

She brought a tray to his bed. He raised himself carefully, his head
unbearably heavy. Mathilde watched him with wide eyes as he sipped some
broth.

"What did they arrest the Baron for?" he asked.

She waited till he had finished, and cleared the bed, sitting down on
the edge. Her face lowered toward him till her lips touched and kissed
him.

"For murder," she whispered. Another kiss. "Now you must be quiet and
I'll tell you. He gave himself up when the police came. We carried you
out first. And then I left him."

"But," Dorn looked bewilderedly into the eyes of the girl.

"It was easier for him than for you. They would take you away for trial
to America. But he will be tried here. And he will come out all right.
Don't worry. We thought your skull was fractured, but the doctor says
it was only a hard blow."

She lowered her head beside him on the pillow and whispered, "I love
you! Poor Erik! He is defenseless--with a broken head."

"You are kind," he answered; "von Stinnes, too. But we must set matters
right...."

"No, no, be still!"

He grew silent. It was night again. In the morning he would be strong
enough to get up. A misty calm, the pain almost gone, veins throbbing
and a little split in his thought ... but no more.

"I will sleep by you," Mathilde spoke. She stood up and removed her
waist and shoes. He watched her with interest. Another woman curiously
like Anna, like Rachel--like the two creatures in Paris. Shoulders
suddenly bare. Possessive, unashamed gestures.... She lay down beside
him with a sigh.

"Poor Erik! I take advantage of a broken head."

"No," he smiled.

They lay motionless, her head touching his shoulder timidly.

"I could live with you forever and be happy," she whispered.

"We will see about forever--when it comes."

"Do you like me--perhaps--now?"

He would have preferred her silent. Silence at least was an effortless
lie. To make love was preposterous. How many times had he said, "I love
you?" Too many. But she was young and it would sound pretty in her ears.

"Mathilde, dear one."

Her arm trembled across his body.

It was difficult, but he would say it.... "Yes, in an odd sort of way,
Mathilde, I love you...."

"Ah! you are only being polite--because I have fed you broth."

"No. As much as I can love anything...."

"Later, Erik. 'Shh! Sleep if you can. Oh, I am shameless."

She had moved against him. He thought with a smile, "What an original
way of nursing a broken head!"

Later, tired with a renewed effort to straighten out words about the
fool and Rachel and himself, he closed his eyes. Mathilde was still
awake.

"I'll see von Stinnes in the morning," he murmured drowsily. "Von
Stinnes ... a gallant friend...."

... Someone knocking on the door aroused him. Dawn was in the room.

"Matty," he called. She slept. He found himself able to rise and his
legs carried him unsteadily to the door. A tall marine, outside.

"Herr Erik Dorn?"

Dorn nodded dizzily.

The man went on in German. "I come from Stinnes. I have a letter for
you."

He took the letter from his hand and moved hurriedly to a chair.

"Thanks," vaguely. The marine saluted and walked off. Mathilde had
awakened.

"What are you doing?"

She slipped out of bed and hurried to him.

"A letter," he answered. He allowed her to help him back to his pillow.
Reclining again, his dizziness grew less.

"I'll read it for you," she said.

"No. Von Stinnes...."

"It may be important."

"I'll be able to read in a moment."

She shook her head and slipped the envelope from his weakening fingers.

"I know about von Stinnes. Don't be afraid. May I?"

He nodded and she began to read:

"DEAR ERIK DORN:

"I write this at night, and to-morrow I will be ended. You must not
misunderstand what I do. It is a business long delayed. But I have made
a full confession in writing for the Entente commission--ten closely
written pages. A masterpiece, if I have to boast myself. And in order to
avoid the anti-climax which your sense of honor would undoubtedly
precipitate, I will put a period to it in an hour. A trigger pulled, and
the nobility of my sad country loses another of its shining lights. I am
overawed by the quaint justice of life. I end a career of villainy with
a final lie. It would really be impossible for me to die telling a
truth. The devil himself would appear and protest. But with a lie on my
lips, it is easy. Indeed, somehow, natural. But I pose--a male Magdalene
in tears. Do not misunderstand--too much. You are my friend, and I would
like to live a while longer that we might amuse ourselves together. You
have been an education. I find myself even now on this auspicious
midnight writing with your words. But I mistrust you, friend. You would
deny me this delicate martyrdom if I lived. For you are at bottom
lamentably honorable. So now, as you read this, I am dead (a sentence
out of Marie Corelli) and the situation is beyond adjustment. Please
accept my service as gracefully as it is rendered. The confession, as I
said, is a masterpiece. It would please my vanity if sometime you could
read it. For in this, my last lie, I have extended myself. Dear friend,
there is a certain awe which I cannot overcome--for the drama, or
comedy, finishes too perfectly. You once called me a Don Quixote of
disillusion. And now, perhaps, I will inspire a few new phrases. Let
them be poignant, but above all graceful. I would have for my epitaph
your smile and the whimsical irony of your comment. Better this than the
hand-rubbing grunt of the firing-squad returning to barracks after its
labors. Alas! that I will not be near you to hear it. But perhaps there
will come to me as I submit myself to the opening tortures of hell, an
echo of your words. And this will bring me a smile with which to cheat
the devil. I bequeathe to you my silver cigarette-case. You are my
brother and I say good-bye to you.

                                     "KARL VON STINNES."

"No postscript?" Dorn asked softly.

Mathilde shook her head. There was silence.

"Will you find out about him, please?" he whispered.

The girl dressed herself quickly and left the room without speaking.
Alone, Dorn lay with the letter in his hand.

He spoke aloud after minutes, as if addressing someone invisible.

"I have no phrases, dear friend. Let my tears be an epigram."

PART V

SILENCE

CHAPTER I

The sea swarmed under the night. A moon road floated on the long dark
swells. From the deck of the throbbing ship Dorn looked steadily toward
the circle of moving water. In the salon, the ship's orchestra was
playing. A rollicking sound of music drifted away into the dark monotone
of the sea.

A romantic mood. A chair on an upper deck. Stars and a moon road over
the sea. Better to sit mumbling to himself than join in the chatter of
the cabin. The gayly lighted salon alive with laughter, music, and
voices touched his ears--a tiny music-box tinkling valiantly through the
dark sweep of endless yesterdays, endless to-morrows that sighed out of
the hidden water. The night was an old yesterday, the sea an old
to-morrow.

A sadness in his heart that kept him from smiling, a strange comedy of
words in his thought, a harlequin with the night sitting on his lap.
There were things to remember. There were memories. Unnecessary to
think. Words formed themselves into phrases. Phrases made dim pictures
as if the past was struggling fitfully to remain somehow alive.... His
good-bye to Mathilde. And long, stupid weeks in Berlin. The girl had
been absurd. Absurd, an impulsive little shrew. With demands. Four
months of Mathilde. Unsuspected variants of boredom. Clothed in her
unrelenting love like an Indian in full war dress. Yet to part with her
had made him sad.

The sea rolled mystically away from his eyes.

"An old pattern," his thought murmured, "holding eternities. And the
little music keeps tinkling downstairs. A butterfly of sound in the
night. Like a miniature of all living. Ah, I'm growing sentimental.
Sitting holding hands with the sea. She was sad when I left her. What of
it? Von Stinnes. Dear friend! No sadness there. He was right. New
phrases, graceful emotions. What an artist! But Warren couldn't write
the story. It has to be played by a hurdy-gurdy on a guillotine."

He let his words wander gropingly over the water until a silence entered
him. Thus life wandered away. The sea beat time to the passing of ships,
changing ships. But always the same beat. It was the constancy of the
stars that saddened him. September stars. The stars were yesterdays.
Yes, unchanging spaces, unchanging yesterdays, and a ship's orchestra
dropping little valses into the dark sea. He opened a silver
cigarette-case--an heirloom with a crest on it. Von Stinnes again.
Curious how he remembered him--a memory neither sad nor merry--but final
like the sea. A phantom of word and incident that bowed with an
enchanting irony out of an April day. The other, the fool with the
gun.... Good God, he was a murderer! He smiled. Von Stinnes, a
melancholy Pierrot doffing his hat with a gallant snicker to the moon.
Hazlitt, a pantaloon. Yet tragic. Yes, there was something in the café
that night--two men hurling themselves drunkenly against the taunting
emptiness of life. The rage had come because he had remembered Rachel. A
sudden mysterious remembering. A remembering that she was gone. It had
torn for a moment at his heart, shouted in his ears and driven him mad.

Something had taken Rachel out of him. Time had eaten her image out of
him. He had remembered this in the café. But why had he fired at the
stranger? Because the man's eyes blazed. Because he had become for an
instant an intolerable comrade.

"We fought each other for what someone else had done to us," Dorn
murmured. "Not Rachel but someone that couldn't be touched. Absurd!"
Hazlitt slipped like a shadow out of his mind--an unanswered question.

The throbbing ship with its tinkling orchestra, its laughing, chattering
faces, was carrying him home over a dark sea. At night he sat alone
watching the circle of water. Four vanished nights. Four more nights. He
sighed. The sadness that lay in his heart desired to talk to him. He
struggled to change his thinking. Ideas that were new to him arose at
night on the ship.

"Not now," he whispered. He was postponing something. But the night and
the rolling sea were swallowing his resistance. Words that would tell
him the pain in his heart waited for him.... "Anna. Dear God, Anna! It's
that. But why Anna now? It was easy before."

Words of Anna waited for him. He stared into the dark.

"I want her. I must go back to her. Anna, forgive me!"

A murmur that the darkness might understand. The long rolling sea
listened automatically. Weak fool! Yet he felt better. He could think
now without hiding from words that waited.

His heart wept in silence. The unbidden ones came.... Anna--standing
looking at him. A despair, a death in her face. Something tearing itself
out of her. What pain! But no sound. An agony deeper than sound in her
eyes. He trembled at the memory. The crucified happy one....

Dear God, would he always have to remember now? Other pictures were
gone. They had drifted away leaving little phrases dragging in his
thought. Now Anna had found him. Not a phantom, but the thing as he had
left it, without a detail gone. The gesture of her agony intact. His
thought shifted vainly away. He knew she was standing as he had left
her--horribly inanimate--and he must go back. He would hold her in his
arms, kiss her lips, kneel before her weeping for forgiveness. Ah! he
would be kind. At night he would sit holding her head in his arms,
stroking her hair; whispering, "Forget ... forget! A year or two of
madness--gone forever. But years now waiting for us. New years.
Everything is gone but us. That brought me back. Mists blew away. Dear
Anna, I love you."

He was making love to Anna, his wife. A droll finale. Tears came in his
eyes. There lay happiness. She would move again. The rigid figure that
he had left behind and that was waiting rigidly, would smile again. He
plunged desperately into the dream of words to be. The music from the
salon had ended. Better, silence. Nothing to remind one of the fugitive
tinkle of life. A dark, interminable sea, a moon road, a sigh of rolling
water and a ship throbbing in the night.

"Dear Anna, I love you." And she would smile, her white face and eyes
that were constant as the stars. Constant, eternal. Love that was no
mystery but a caress of sea nights. Forgive him. And her sorrow would
heal under his fingers. It would end all right. The two years--the
halloo of strange sterile things--buried under the smile of her eyes ...
deep, sorrowful, beautiful. Words to be. "Anna we will grow old
together, holding to each other and smiling; lovers whom the years make
always younger." Words that were to heal the strange sadness that had
come to him and start a dead figure into life.

He stood up and walked to the rail, staring into the churn of water
underneath.

"It's slow," he murmured. "Four more days."

Anna's love would hide the world from him. But a fear loosened his
heart. The smell of sea whirled in his veins.

"Perhaps," he thought dreamily, "perhaps there will be nothing. She will
say no."

He hesitated, straightened with a sigh.

"A wife deserter, a seducer, a murderer. I mustn't expect too much, eh,
von Stinnes?"

He smiled at the night. The sound of the Baron's name seemed to bring a
strength into him. He walked toward his berth, his head unnecessarily
high, smoking at his cigarette and humming a tune remembered from the
Munich cafés.

CHAPTER II

There were people in New York who came to Erik Dorn and said: "Tell us
about Europe. And Germany. Is it really true that...." As if there were
some inner revelation--a few precious phrases of undistilled truth that
the correspondent of the _New Opinion_ had seen fit to withhold from his
communications.

The skyscrapers were intact. Windows shot into the air. Streets bubbled
with people. A useless sky clung tenaciously to its position above the
roof-gardens. The scene was amiable. Dorn spent a day congratulating
himself upon the genius of his homeland. He felt a pride in the
unbearable confusion of architecture and traffic.

But in the nine months of his absence there had been a change; or at
least a change seemed to have occurred. Perhaps he had brought the
change with him. It was evident that the Niagara of news pouring out of
Europe into the press and periodicals of the day had inundated the
provincialism of his countrymen. People were floundering about in a daze
of facts--groping ludicrously through labyrinths of information.

It had been easy during the war. Democracy-Autocracy; a tableau to look
at. Thought had been unnecessary. In fact, the popular intelligence had
legislated against it. The tableau was enough--a sublimated symbol of
the little papier-maché rigmarole of their daily lives, the immemorial
spectacle of Good and Evil at death grips, limelighted for a moment by
the cannon in France. The unreason and imbecility of the mob crowned
themselves. Thought became _lèse majesté_.

Dorn returned to find the tableau had suffered an explosion. It had for
some mysterious reason glibly identified as reaction burst into
fragments and vanished in a skyrocket chaos. Shantung, Poland, little
nations, pogroms, plebiscites, Ireland, steel strikes, red armies,
Fourteen Points, The Truth About This, The Real Story of That, the
League of Nations, the riots in Berlin, in Dublin, Milan, Paris, London,
Chicago; secret treaties, pacts, betrayals, Kolchak--an incomprehensible
muddle of newspaper headlines shrieked from morning to morning and said
nothing. The distracted mob become privy for the moment to the vast
biological disorder eternally existent under its nose, snorted, yelped,
and shook indignant sawdust out of its ears.

In vain the editorial Jabberwocks came galloping daily down the slopes
of Sinai bearing new tablets written in fire. The original and only
genuine tableau was gone. The starry heavens which concealed the Deity
Himself had become a junkpile full of its fragments.

"In the temporary collapse of the banalities that conceal the world
from their eyes," thought Dorn, "they're trying to figure out what's
really what around them--and making a rather humorous mess of it."

He went about for several days dining with friends, conferring with
Edwards and the directors of the _New Opinion_, and slowly shaping his
"experiences abroad" into phonograph records that played themselves
automatically under the needles of questions.

At night, he amused himself with reading the radical and conservative
periodicals, his own magazine among them.

"The thing isn't confined to the bloated capitalists alone," he laughed
one afternoon while sitting with Warren Lockwood in the latter's rooms.
"The radicals are up a tree and the conservatives down a cellar. What do
you make of it, Warren?"

"I haven't paid much attention to it," the novelist smiled. "I've been
busy on a book. What's all this stuff about Germany, anyway? I read some
things of yours but I can't figure it out."

Dorn exploded with another laugh.

"You're all a pack of simpletons and bounders, still moist behind the
ears, Warren. The whole lot of you. I've been in New York three days and
I've begun to feel that there isn't a remotely intelligent human animal
in the place. I'm going to retreat inland. In Chicago, at least, people
know enough to keep their mouths shut. I'll tell you what the trouble
is in a nutshell. People want things straight again. They want black and
white so's they can all mass on the white side and make faces at the
evil-doers who prefer the black. They don't want facts, diagnosis,
theories, interpretations, reports. They want somebody to stand up and
announce in a loud, clear voice, 'Tweedledum is wrong. Tweedledee is
right, everything else to the contrary is Poppycock.' Thus they'd be
able to put an end to their own thinking and bury themselves in their
own little alleys and be happy again. You know as well as I, it makes
them miserable to think. Restless, irritable, indignant. It's like
having bites--the more they're scratched the worse they itch. It's the
war, of course. The war has been a failure. The race has caught itself
red-handed in a lie. Now everybody is running around trying to confess
to everybody else that what he said in the past was a lie and that the
real truth is as follows. And there's where the trouble begins. There
ain't no such animal."

"I see," said Lockwood, smiling.

"Yes, you do," Dorn grinned. "You don't see anything. The trouble is ...
oh, well, the trouble is as I said that the human race is out in the
open where it can get a good look at itself. The war raised a
curtain...."

"What about the radicals, though? They seem to be saying something
definite?"

"Yes, shooting one another down by the thousands in Berlin--as they will
some day in New York. Yes, the radicals are definite enough.... The
revolution rumbling away in Germany isn't a standup fight between
Capital and Labor. It's Radical _versus_ Radical. Just as the war was
Imperialist _versus_ Imperialist. One of the outstanding lessons of the
last decade is the fact that the world's natural enemies haven't yet had
a chance at each other, being too busy murdering among themselves. It's
coming, though. Another tableau. All this hysteria and uncertainty will
gradually simmer down into another right-and-wrong issue--with life
boiling away as always under a black and white surface."

"Do you think we're going to go red here?" Lockwood asked pensively.

"It'll take a little time," Dorn went on. He had become used to reciting
his answers in the manner of a schoolmaster. "But it's bound to happen.
Bolshevism is a logical evolution of democracy--another step downward in
the descent of the individual. Until the arrival of Lenine and Trotzky
on the field, there's no question but what American Democracy was the
most atrocious insult leveled at the intelligence of the race by its
inferiors. Bolshevism goes us one better, however. And just as soon as
our lowest types, meaning the majority of our politicians, thinkers, and
writers, get to realizing that bolshevism isn't a Red Terror with a bomb
in one hand and a dagger in the other, but a state of society surpassing
even their own in points of weakness and abnormal silliness, they'll
start arresting everybody who isn't a bolshevist. Capital will put up a
fight, but capital is already doomed in this country. It isn't respected
for its strength, vision, and creative powers. It is tolerated to-day
for no other reason than that it has cornered the platitude market. I'm
telling you, Warren, that when we get it drummed into our heads that
bolshevism isn't strong and powerful, but weaker, more prohibitive, more
sentimental, more politically inefficient, and generally worse than our
own government, we'll have a dictator of the proletaire in Washington
within a week."

Lockwood sighed unhappily and lighted a pipe.

"If you were talking about men and women maybe I could join you," he
answered. "But I got a hunch you're just another one of those newspaper
Neds. The woods are full of smart alecks like you and they make me kind
of tired, because I never can figure out what they're talking about. And
I'll be damned if they know themselves. They think in big hunks and keep
a lot of words floating in the air.... What old Carl calls 'Blaa ...
blaa....'"

The two friends sat regarding each other critically. Dorn nodded after a
pause.

"You're right," he smiled. "I'm part of the blaa-blaa. I heard them
blaa-blaa with guns in Munich one night. And up in the Baltic. You're
right. Anything one says about absurdity becomes absurd itself. And
talking about the human race in chunks is necessarily talking absurdly.
Tell me about that fellow Tesla."

"They deported him to Rooshia," Lockwood answered. "There was quite a
romance about the girl. That was your girl, wasn't it?"

"Yes, Rachel. She wouldn't tag along, eh?"

"No. I suppose they wouldn't let her. I don't know. There was a lot of
stuff in the newspapers."

The novelist seemed to hesitate on the brink of further information. His
friend smiled understandingly.

"It doesn't matter, Warren. Go ahead. Shoot."

"Cured, eh?"

"No--dead."

Lockwood nodded sagely, his mouth half open as if his words were staring
at Dorn.

"Well, there isn't much I know. I met a little girl the other day--Mary
James; know her?"

"Yes."

"She was quite excited. She told me something about an artist that used
to hang around Tesla. It seems that he kidnapped her and carted her to
Chicago. This James girl was all upset."

An interruption in the person of Edwards the editor occurred. The talk
lapsed once more into world problems with Lockwood listening,
skeptically open-mouthed.

Late in the evening Edwards suddenly declared, "You're making a big
mistake leaving New York, Erik. You've got a market now. Your stuff
went big."

"I'm through," Dorn answered. He arose and took his hat. "I'm leaving
for Chicago to-morrow."

He paused, smiling at Lockwood.

"I'm going home."

The novelist nodded sagely and murmured, "Uh-huh. Well, good-night."

Making his way slowly through the night crowds and electrophobia of
lower Manhattan, Dorn felt peacefully out of place. His thought had
become: "I want to get back to where I was." In the midst of the
mechanical carnival of Broadway he caught a memory of himself walking to
work with a stream of faces--of a sardonic Erik Dorn to whom the street
was a pattern; to whom the mysteries tugging at heels that scratched the
pavements were the amusing variants of nothing.

"Eddy."

"Yes, dear."

"I have some news for you."

The round, smiling face of Eddy Meredith that refused to change with
age, beamed at Anna.

"Erik's back."

The beam hesitated.

"He wrote. He's coming to see me."

"Anna...."

"Yes, dear, I know. It sort of frightens me, too. But," she laughed
quietly, "there is nothing to be frightened about. He didn't give any
address or I would have written him telling him."

"He must know you're divorced," Meredith spoke nervously.

"I don't know if he does, Eddy."

She reached her hand out and placed it over his, her eyes glancing at
the figure of Isaac Dorn. He was asleep in a chair.

"Please, dearest, don't worry," she whispered.

"It'll be hard for you."

Meredith's face acquired an abnormal expression.

"Maybe you'll feel different." He sighed, and Anna shook her head.
"When's he coming?"

"To-morrow night."

"Did he say anything in the letter?"

She stood up and went to a desk.

"Here it is." A smile touched her lips. "He always wrote curious
letters. Words and words when there was nothing to say. And a single
phrase when there was something." She read from a sheet of paper--"'Dear
Anna, I am coming home. Erik.'"

In the corner Isaac Dorn opened his watery eyes and stared at the
ceiling.

"Are you awake, father?"

"Yes, Anna."

"Did I tell you I'd heard from Erik?"

The old man mumbled in his beard.

"He'll be out to-morrow night," she said, smiling at him. He nodded his
head, stared at her, and seemed to doze off again.

"Father is failing," Anna whispered. Meredith had arisen. His face had
grown blank. He walked toward the hall, saying, "I'll go now."

Anna came quickly to him. Her hands reached his shoulders and she stood
regarding him intently.

"There's nothing any more, dear. It all ended long ago. Perhaps I'll be
sad when I see him. But sad only for him."

Meredith smiled and spoke with an effort at lightness.

"Remember, I don't hold you to anything. I want you only to be happy. In
your own way. Not in my way. And if it will mean happiness for you to
... for you to go back, why ..." He shrugged his shoulders and continued
to smile with hurt eyes.

"Eddy...." Her face came close to his. He hesitated until her arms
closed tightly around him. He felt her warm lips cling and open.

"You've never kissed like that before, Anna." There was almost a fear in
his voice.

"Because I never knew I wanted you," she whispered, "till now--till this
minute; till you said about my going back."

Her face was alive with emotion. A laugh, and she was in his arms again.
They stood embraced, murmuring tenderly to each other.

Later in her bedroom Anna undressed slowly. Her thoughts seemed to be
quarreling with her emotions, her emotions with her thoughts. This was
Erik's room--ancient torture chamber. Something still clinging to its
walls and furniture. Ah, nights of agony still in the air she breathed.
Her words formed themselves quietly. They came to peer into her
heart--polite visitors standing on tiptoe before a closed cell that hid
something.

"Is there anything?" she murmured. "No. I'm different."

She thought of the day she had come out of a grave and resumed living.
It had seemed as if she must learn to walk again, to breathe, to
discover anew the meanings of words. At first--listless, uncertain. Then
new steps, new meanings. Her mind moved back through the year. She had
wept only once--on the night of the divorce. But that was as one weeps
at an old grave, even a stranger's grave. The rest had been Eddy.

"I've changed. And I've been happier in many ways."

She was talking to herself. Why? "I'm a different Anna." But why think
of it? It was settled.

She lay in the bed and her eyes opened at the darkness. Here was where
she had lain when she had died. Each night, new deaths. Here the lonely
darkness that had once choked her, torn at her eyes and made her scream
aloud with pain. Things on the other side of a grave. Memories become
alien. Things of long ago, when the whisper of the dark came like an
insanity into her brain. "Erik gone! Erik gone! Gone!" A word that beat
at her until she died--to awake in the morning and stumble once more
through a day.

Now she regarded the dark quietly. Black. It had no shape. It lay
everywhere about her. But it did not burn nor choke. A peaceful,
harmless dark that could only whisper as if it were asking something.
What was it asking? Long arms of night reaching out for something. But
there was nothing to give, even if she wanted to. Not even tears.
Nothing to give, even though it whispered for alms. Whispered, "Erik ...
Erik!" But there was no little memory. No big memory. Dead. Torn out of
her. So the dark whispered to a dead thing in her that did not stir. A
smile like a tired little gesture passed over her. "Poor Erik, poor
Erik!" she murmured. "He must be thinking things that are no more."

She grew chill for an instant.... The memory of agonies, of the screams
her love had uttered as it died.

"Poor Erik!"

She buried her cool cheek restlessly in the pillow.

CHAPTER IV

Everything the same as it had been. As if he had stepped out of the
office for a walk around the block and come back. But a sameness that
had lost its familiarity. Old furniture, old faces, intensely a part of
his consciousness, yet grown strange. It was like forgetting suddenly
the name of a life-long friend.

His entrance created a stir of excitement. He had spent the preceding
two days arranging with the chief for his return. Barring the
Nietzschean who had functioned in his absence, none had expected him.

He pushed open the swinging door with an old gesture, and walked to his
desk. Here he sat fumbling casually with proofs and the contents of
pigeonholes. An old routine saying, "Pick me up." Familiar trifles
rebuked him. The staff sauntered up one by one to greet him. Crowley,
Mortinson, Sweeney.

"Well, glad to see you back. We've sure missed you around here."

Handshakes, smiles, embarrassed questions. A few strange faces to be
resented and ignored. A strange locker arrangement in a corner to be
frowned at. But the rest of it familiar, poignant--a world where he
belonged, but that somehow did not seem to fit as snugly as once.
Handshakes in the hall. A faint cheer in the composing-room as he
sauntered for the first time to the stone. Slaps on the back. Busy men
pausing to look at him with suddenly lighted faces. "Well, Mr. Dorn,
greetings! How are ye? You're looking fine...."

His world. It was the same, only now he was conscious of it. Before he
had sat in its midst unaware of more than a detail here, a gesture
there. Now he seemed to be looking down from an airplane--a strange
bird's-eye view of things un-strange.

He returned to his desk. The scene again reached out to embrace him.
Familiar colored walls, familiar chatter and flurry of the afternoon
edition going to press. He felt its embrace and yet remained outside it.
There were things in him now that could never be a part of the
unchanging old shop.

During a lull in the forenoon he leaned back in his chair and stared
into the pigeonholes. Memories like the unfocused images of a dream one
remembers in the morning jumbled in his thought. The scene around him
made things he recalled seem unreal. And the things he recalled made the
scene around him seem unreal. He tried to divert himself by remembering
definitely.... "We lay in a moon-lighted room and I whispered to her:
'You have given me wings.' I held a gun and pulled the trigger as he
jumped at me.... Then von Stinnes took the blame.... There's a
restaurant in Kurfursten Damm where Mathilde and I.... What a night in
Munich!... at the Banhoff. What do I remember most? Let me see.... Yes
... there was a note pinned on the blanket saying she was gone and I ...
But there's something else. What? Let me see...."

He tried to evoke clearer pictures. But the sentences that passed
through his mind seemed sterile, impotent. The past, set in motion by
his effort, evaded him. Its details blurred like the spokes of a swiftly
turning wheel. He smiled.

"A sinner's darkest punishment is forgetting his sins," he murmured to
himself. He thought of the evening before him. "Better not think of
that. Read proofs." He had deferred his meeting with Anna until he
should be able to come to her from his desk in the office.

As the day passed an impatience seized him. The unfinished event brought
a fear with it.... "I must put it out of my mind until to-night." But it
remained and grew.

In the afternoon he sat for an hour talking to Crowley and Mortinson. He
listened to them chuckle at his anecdotes. Their faces beaming with
affectionate interest seemed nevertheless to say, "All this is
interesting, but not very important. Not as important as sitting in the
office here and sending the paper to press day after day."

The words he was uttering bored him. He had heard them too often. Yet he
kept on talking, trying to bury his impatience and fear in the sound of
his voice. His anecdotes were no longer memories. They seemed to have
become complete in themselves, related to nothing that had ever
happened. He wondered as he talked if he were lying. These things he was
saying were somehow improvisations--committed to memory. He kept on
talking, eagerly, amusingly.

The afternoon passed. A walk through familiar streets and it was time
for dinner.

"I'm not hungry. I'll eat, though."

Yes, the evening ahead was important--very important. That accounted for
the tedium of the day. But it would be dark soon. There would be a
to-morrow. There had been other important evenings. It was not necessary
to get too nervous. He had writhed before in the embrace of interminable
hours, hours that seemed never to arrive. Then suddenly they came,
looming, swelling into existence like oncoming locomotives that opened
with a sudden rush from little discs into great roaring shapes. And once
arrived they had seemed to be present forever. But suddenly the roaring
shapes were little discs again. Hours died as people died--with an
abrupt obliteration. Yet each new moment, like each new face, became
again interminable. Time was an endlessness whose vanishing left its
illusion unchanged.

But now it was night.

"At the end of this block is a house. Two doors more. I have no key.
Ring the bell. God, but I'm an idiot. She'll answer the door herself.
What'll I say? That's her step. Hello? No. Walk in. Naturally."

He stopped breathing. The door opened. His legs were made of whalebone.
But there was a new odor in the hallway.... And something new here in
her face. He stood looking at the woman with whom he had lived for seven
years and when he said her name it sounded like that of a stranger. His
features had a habit of smiling. An old habit of narrowing one of his
eyes and turning up the right corner of his lips. He stood unconscious
of his expression, his smile a mask that had slapped itself
automatically over his face.

But they must talk. No, she had him at a disadvantage. Her silence could
say everything for her. His silence could say nothing. He reached
forward and took her hands.

"Anna...."

She was different. A rigidness gone. When he had left her she was
standing, stiffened. Now her hands were limp. Her face too, limp. Her
eyes that looked at him seemed blind.

"I've come back, as you see."

That was banal. One did not talk like that to a crucified one. Her hands
slipped away and she preceded him into the room. He looked to see his
father, but forgot to ask a question about him. Anna was standing
straight, looking straight at him. Not as if he were there, but as if
she were alone with something.

"You must let me talk first, Erik."

Willingly. It was difficult to breathe and talk at the same time. He sat
down as she moved into a chair opposite.

Something was happening but he couldn't tell yet. She was changed. Older
or younger, hard to tell. But changed. It was confusing to look at
someone and look at a different image of her. The different image was in
his mind. When she talked he could tell.

"Did you know that I had gotten a divorce, Erik?"

That was it, then. She wasn't his wife any more. A sort of hocus-pocus
... now you are my wife, now you aren't my wife.

"No, Anna."

"Four months ago."

"I was in Germany...." Mathilde, von Stinnes, _es lebe die Welt
Revolution_, made a circle in his head.

"Yes, I know. I'm sorry you didn't find out."

It was impossible. Something impossible was happening. Of course, he had
known it would happen. But he had fooled himself. A clever thing to do.
He was talking like a little boy reciting a piece from a platform.

"I've come back to you because everything but you has died. I begin with
the end of what I have to say. I came back from Europe ... because I
wanted you...."

She interrupted. "I wrote you a letter when I found out about her. I
sent it to New York."

"I never got it."

"I'm sorry."

Quite a formal procedure thus far. A letter had miscarried. One could
blame the mails for that. And a divorce. Yes, that was formal too ...
"whereas the complainant further alleges ..." He felt that his legs were
trembling. If he spoke again his voice would be unsteady. He did not
want that. But someone had to speak. Not she. She could be silent.

"Anna"--let his voice shake. Perhaps it would help matters. "You've
changed...."

"Yes, Erik...."

"I haven't much right to ask for anything else...."

Why in God's name could he think clearly and yet only talk like a
blithering fool? He would pause and gather his wits. But then he would
start making a speech ... four-score and seven years ago our
forefathers....

"I'm sorry you came, Erik...."

This couldn't be Anna. He closed his mouth and stared. A dream full of
noises, voices, Anna saying:

"We mustn't waste time regretting or worrying each other about
things.... It's much too late now."

He wanted to say. "It is impossible that you do not love me because you
once loved me, because we once lay in each other's arms ... seven
years." But there was no Anna to say that to. Instead, a stranger-woman.
An impulse carried him away. He was kneeling beside her, burying his
face in her lap. It didn't matter. There was no one to see. Perhaps her
hand would move gently over his hair. No, she was sitting straight.
Still alone with something. She was saying:

"I'm sorry. Please, Erik, don't."

"I love you."

"No. No! Please, let's talk...."

He raised his face. It was easier now that he was crying. He wouldn't
have to be grammatical ... or finish sentences.

"I understand, Erik. I was afraid of this. For you. But you mustn't.
'Shh! it's all over."

"No, Anna. It can't be. You are still Anna."

"Yes. But different."

He stood up.

"Really, Erik," she was shaking her head and smiling without expression,
"everything is over. I would rather have written it to you. I could have
made it plain. But I didn't know where to reach you."

He let her talk on and stood staring. Her face was limp. There was
nothing there. He was looking at a corpse. Not of her, but somehow of
himself. There in her eyes he lay dead--an obliteration. He had come
back to a part of him that had died. It was buried where one couldn't
see, somewhere behind her eyes.

"I have nothing more to say, Erik. But you must understand what I have
said. Because it means everything."

He listened, staring now at the room, remembering. They had lived
together once in this room. There was something beautiful about the
room. A face that held itself like a lighted lamp to his eyes. "Erik,
Erik, I love you. Oh, I love you so. I would die without you. Erik, my
own!" The walls and books and chairs murmured with echoes. The familiar
slanting books on their shelves. The large leather chairs under the
light. He must weep. The little things that were familiar--mirrors in
which he saw images and words ... a white body with copper hair fallen
across its ivory; white arms clinging passionately to him; a voice,
rapturous, pleading. He must weep because he had come back to a world
that had died, that looked at him whispering with dead lips, "Erik, my
beloved. Oh, I'm so happy ... so happy when you kiss me ... my
dearest...."

He closed his eyes as tears burned out of them. Anna in a blur. Still
talking quietly. Embarrassed by his weeping. He was offering her his
silence and his tears. He had never stood like this before a woman. But
it was something other than a woman--an ending. As if one came upon a
figure dead in a room and looked at it and said without surprise, "It is
I."

"So you see, Erik, it's all over. I can't tell you how. It took a long
time, but it seemed sudden. I don't know what to say to you, but it will
be better to leave nothing unsaid. I'm trying to think of everything.
I'm going to be married next month. Remember, I'm not the Anna you knew.
She isn't getting married again. I'm somebody totally different. I feel
different. Even when I walk. You never knew me. I can remember our years
together clearly. But it seems like a story that was once told me. Do
you understand, Erik? I am not bitter or sad, and I have no blame for
you. You are more than forgiven...."

No words occurred to him. Somewhere behind the smooth face of her he
fancied lived a woman whose arms were about his neck and whose lips were
hungering for him.

"It's all very clear to me, Erik. I've thought of it often. You made me
a part of yourself and when you deserted me, you took that with you, and
left me as I am; as I was born...."

"Will you play something on the piano for me, Anna?"

"No, Erik."

He seated himself slowly and remained with his head down. There was
nothing to think.

"I'll go in a few minutes," he muttered.

Anna, standing straight, watched him as if she were curious. He felt her
eyes trying to acquaint themselves with him, and failing. He was growing
angry. Better leave before he spoke again. Anger was in him. It was she
who had been the unfaithful one. He could smile at that. He stood up
then, and smiled. This was a part of life, to be felt and appreciated. A
handshake, a smile that von Stinnes would have applauded, and he would
have lived another hour.

"On the boat I made love to you," he said softly, "and I am not unhappy.
It is only--my turn to weep a bit."

He regarded her calmly. Yes, if he wanted to ... there was something
waiting.... Even though she thought it dead. If he wanted to, there was
a grave to open, slowly, with tears and old phrases.

She let him approach her. He felt her body grow rigid as he placed his
arms around her. His lips touched her cold cheek.

"It was to make sure that you were dead," he whispered.

She nodded.

... Another hour ended. He had returned. Now he was going away again and
the hour was a disc whirling away, already lost among other discs.

The street was chilly. He walked swiftly. His thoughts were assembling
themselves. Words that had lain under the tears in the room thawed out.

"She will marry Meredith and the old man will come to live with me. I
should have gone upstairs and said hello. But he was probably asleep.
I'll take my books and furniture. She won't need them with Meredith.
Get an apartment somewhere. How old am I? About forty. Not quite.
Changed completely. Curious, I didn't want her after she'd talked about
it. I suppose because I didn't really come for her--for somebody else.
Conrad in quest of his youth. Lost youth. How'd that damn book end?
Well, what of it, what of it? Things die without saddening one. Yet one
becomes sad. A make-believe. That's right. No matter what happens you
keep right on thinking and breathing as if it were all outside. Yes,
that's it--outside; a poignant comedy outside that talks to one. Death
is the only thing that has reality. We must not take the rest too
seriously. If I get too bored I can remember that I killed a man and
develop a stricken conscience. Poppycock!... The old man'll be a
nuisance. But he's quiet, thank God! Well, well ... I'm too civilized. I
suppose I made an ass of myself. No.... A few tears more or less...."

His thought paused. He walked, looking at things--curbings, houses,
street trees, lights in windows. He resumed, after blocks:

"Good God, what a thing happened to her! To change like that. An
awfulness about it. Death in life. Have I changed? No. I'm the same. But
that's a lie. I was in love once ... a face like a mirror of stars. The
phrase grows humorous with repetition. It doesn't mean anything. What
did it mean? Like trying to remember a toothache ... which tooth ached.
But it only lasted ... let's see. Rachel, Rachel.... Nothing. It was
gone a week after I came to her. The rest was--a restlessness ...
wanting something. Not having it. Well, it doesn't matter now."

In his hotel room he undressed without turning on the lights. He felt
nervous, vaguely afraid of himself.

"I might commit suicide. Rather stupid, though. I'll die soon enough.
Maybe a few more things left to see and feel and forget. Who knows? I'll
have to look up some of the ladies."

He crawled into bed and grew promptly sleepless.

"If I'm honest I'll be able to amuse myself. If not ... oh, Lord, what a
mess! No. Why is it? Life runs away like that--hits you in the eye and
runs away."

He closed his eyes and sighed. Like himself, the world was full of
people who lived on. Things ended for them and nobody could tell the
difference, not even themselves. Being happy--what the devil was that?
Happiness--unhappiness--you slept as soundly and ate as heartily.

"I'm a little tired to-night." An excuse for something. He was afraid.
He reached over to the small table near the bed and secured a cigarette.
Lighting it, he lay on his back, blowing smoke carefully into the dark
and watching the tobacco glow under his nose.

"Damn good thing I'm not an author. End up as a cross between
Maeterlinck and Laura Jean. One could write a volume on a cigarette
glowing in the dark."

He puffed until the tobacco was almost ended. He placed the
still-kindled stub on the table and sighed:

"Yes, that's me. Life has had its lips to me blowing smoke and fire out
of me. And now a table top on which to glow reminiscently for a moment.
And cool into ashes. Apologies to Laura Jean, Marie Corelli--and God."

CHAPTER V

Rachel, removing her heavy coat, walked briskly to the grate fire
burning in the rear of the studio. She stood looking into the flames and
rubbing the cold out of her hands.

"Well, I kept the appointment, Frank."

Brander, the artist, sprawled on a cushion-littered couch, sat up
slowly. His heavy eyes regarded her.

"We had quite a talk. You know his wife has remarried."

"That so?" Rachel laughed.

"Mr. Dorn sends you his regards."

"That'll be enough."

"I must say he's much cleverer than you, Frank."

"What did you talk about? Soul stuff, eh?"

"Oh, not entirely."

She came over to the couch and patted his cheeks.

"My hands--feel how cold they are."

"Never mind your hands. What did our good friend have to say for
himself?"

"Oh, talk." Her dark eyes glanced enigmatically from his stare.

Brander swore. "I want to know, d'you hear?"

"Dear me! Soulmate bares all." She laughed and walked with a sensual
swing down the long room.

Brander, without stirring, repeated, "Yes, everything."

Rachel's face sobered.

"Why, there's nothing Frank--of interest."

"Hell, I've caught you crying over him."

"Well, what of that? A woman's tears, you know, a woman's tears, don't
mean anything."

"They don't, eh?"

"No." The sight of him hunched amid the cushions seemed to appeal to her
humor. A large, strong monkey face against blue, green, and yellow
pillow faces. She laughed.

"Well, I'll tell you something. There's going to be no soul stuff in
this. You're mine. And if you start any flapdoodle hand-holding with our
good friend, I'll knock your heads together into a pulp."

He raised his large shoulders and glowered majestically. Rachel, paused
beside a canvas, regarded him with half-closed eyes and smiling lips.

"He sent his kindest wishes to you."

Brander left his seat and strode toward her.

"That's enough."

"And asked us to call. And if we couldn't come together, I might call
alone," she spoke quickly. Her eyes were mocking. An oath from Brander
seemed to amuse her.

"You're in love with him," he muttered, his fingers tightening about
her wrist. "Come, out with it! I want to know."

"Yes." Rachel's eyes grew taunting. "He is the knight in shining armor,
fairy prince, and the man in the moon."

"Never mind laughing. I want to know."

"Well, listen then." Her voice grew vibrant as if a laugh were talking.
"His eyes are the beckoning hands of dream. Poor Frank doesn't know what
that means."

Brander swung her toward the couch. She fell amid the cushions with a
laugh. He stood looking at her and then walked slowly.

"Don't touch me. Don't you dare!"

A grin crossed the artist's face.

"I know you and your kind," he answered, "mooney girls. Mooney-headed
girls. I've had 'em before."

"Keep away...."

Her face as he bent over her glowed with a sudden terror.

"Mooney girls," repeated Brander.

His hands reached her shoulders and held her carelessly as she squirmed.

"You're hurting me."

"I'll hurt you more. Talk out now. Are you in love with that loon?"

"Yes."

"More than me?"

"Yes."

Brander's face reddened. His hand struck her chin. Rachel shut her eyes
to hold back tears.

"Are you still?"

"Yes. Always." Her teeth clenched. "Go on, hit me, if you want to. I
love him. Love him always. Every minute. As I did. Do you hear? I love
him."

She opened her eyes and shivered. He was going to kill her. He tore at
her clothes, beating her with his fists until her head rattled on her
neck.

"I'll fix your love for him," Brander whispered. The pain of his blows
and shakings were making her dizzy.

"Frank ... dear, please...."

"Do you love him?"

"Yes."

She tried to bury her head in her arms, but he untwisted her gesture.
His hands, striking and clawing at her, made her scream. A mist--he had
seized her.

"Frank! Frank!"

"Do you love him now?"

She opened her eyes and stared wildly into Brander's face. It grinned at
her. Her arms clutched his body.

"No, no!" she cried, her mouth gasping. "Don't talk. Don't ask
questions. Love ..." she laughed aloud eagerly, brazenly. Her thin arms
tightened fiercely about him. "I love this."

CHAPTER VI

Isaac Dorn was sitting in a chair beside the gas-log fire in his son's
apartment. His thin fingers lay motionless on his knees. His head had
fallen forward.

It was early evening when his son entered the room. Dorn paused and
looked at the silent figure in the chair. The old man raised his head as
if he had been spoken to and muttered. "Eh?"

He saw his son and smiled. He would like to talk to him. It was lonely
all day in the house. And things were beginning to fade from his eyes.
It was hard even to see if Erik was smiling. Yes, his face was happy.
That was good. People should look as Erik did--amused. Wait ... wait
long enough and it all blurred and faded gently away.

"What made you so late, Erik?" he asked. Now his son was laughing. That
was a good sign.

"A lot of work at the office. The Russians are at it again. And I met an
old friend this afternoon. A dear old friend. Old friends make one
sentimental and garrulous. So we talked."

He noticed the old man's eyes close but continued addressing him.

"We discussed problems in mathematics. How many yesterdays make a
to-morrow. That gas-log smells to high heaven."

He leaned over and turned out the odorous flames. He noticed now that
the old man had dozed off again. But his talk went on. It had become a
habit to keep on talking to his father who dozed under his words. "She's
going to drop around and visit us. And we will perform a gentle autopsy.
Stir a little cloud of dust out of the bucket of ashes, eh? And perhaps
we will come to life for a moment. Who knows? At least, we shall weep.
And that is something. To be able to weep. To know enough to weep. Her
name is Rachel."

He paused and walked toward the window.

"Rachel," he repeated, his eyes no longer on the old man. "Her name is
unchanged...."

He opened von Stinnes's silver case and removed a cigarette. He stood
gazing at the snow on roofs, on window ledges, on pavements. Crystalline
geometries. Houses that made little puzzle pictures against the stagnant
curve of the darkening sky. A zigzag of leaden-eyed windows, and windows
ringed with yellow light peering like cat eyes into the winter dusk. The
darkness slowly ended the scene. Night covered the snow. The city opened
its tiny yellow eyes.

A street of houses before him. A cigarette under his nose. An old man
asleep. Outside the window the snow-covered buildings stood in the dark
like a skeleton world, like patterns in black and white.