Erik Dorn

falling asleep. It was crude and misshapen, and leered at her, fill

Brusov, Tolstoi. Her reading failed to remove her repugnance to the touch of life. Instead, it lured her further from realities. She did not like to meet people or to hear the

the evening staring out of the window at the darkened city and thinking of people. There was an endless swathing of people, buildi

f. One had only to be frank and women vanished. But this same frankness, she found, had an opposite effect upon men. Insults likewise served only to interest men. They would become gradually m

ttle silence. A melancholy would darken her heart. It wasn't because she was afraid of people. It was somethi

as a silence about her like a night mist. She seemed in this silence preoccupied with something that did not concern them. Men found the recollection of her more pleasing than her presence. Something they remembered of her seemed always to be missing when they encountered her again. Lonely evening fields and weary peasants moving toward the distant lights of their home

Dorn. The long stroll had given her an aversion toward work. She glan

face. Her eyes, usually asleep in distances, had

ecome silence. The great crowds were packed away in little rooms. Sitting before the window, unconscious of herself, she laughed softly. Her black hair felt tight a

ered herself as in a dream. There had been another Rachel who used to sit in this chair looking out of the window. A

nd canvasses and clothes, and the bed in which she slept, half hidden by the alcove curtains. But they were different. She began to hum a song. A tune had come back to her that men sang in Little Russia trudging home from the wheat f

e was a difference. She smiled. Of course, it was Erik Dorn. He had pleased her. The things he had said returned to her mind. They seemed very important, as if she had said them herself. She wou

A year ago he had discovered her again in Chicago. The discovery had excited him. He was a young man with proprietary instincts. He had at once devoted them to Rachel.

her presence he always felt a rage against what he called her neurasthenia-a word he frequently used in drawing up bills for divorce. He regarded neurasthenia not as a disease to be condoned like the mumps, but as a deliberate failing-particularly in Rachel. The neurast

alone. His presence frequently became a nausea. Her enfevered senses had come to perceive in the conventionally clothed and spoken figure of the young attorney, a concentr

with him. By thinking of him she was able to keep the memory of him an impersonal one, and to convert him from an emotionally unbearable influence into an intellectually insufferable type. A conversion by which Hazlitt profited, for she tolerated him more easily as a result of her ruse. She thought of him. His youth was fast entrenching itself in platitudes and acquiring the vigor and directness that come as a reward of conformity. Life was nothing to wonder at or feel. Life shaped itself into definite images and inelas

r. His proselyting consisted of vigorous denunciations of the things which contributed to the neurasthenia of his beloved. He declaimed his notions in round, rosy-chee

t, he saw her as something bewilderingly clean, different-vividly different from other women, with a difference that choked and saddened him. There was a virginity about her that extended beyond her body. This and her fragility haunted him. His yout

us, fugitive, neurasthenic-established normally across a breakfast table, smiling a normal good-bye at him with her arms normally about his neck, was a contrast that sharpened his desi

nocking-loud. She hurried eagerly forward, wondering at an unfinished thought ...

minutes," he announced. "I he

nice to talk to someone. She smiled. This was surprising and she shook her head as if she were carrying on a

e," she greeted h

er that required an extreme of determination. He had come pre

but I won't now. If you'll sit down

im and that she was different now. At least for the moment. He understood nothing

d her. She was beautiful. He admitted it with less belligerency than usual. He sat thinking, "what the deuce has happened to her. She said she was glad to see me." He was afraid to start an inqui

ed, and struggled to avoid the

ould follow her mood, whatever it w

If you hadn't come I would ne

g the matter. His eyes stared at her furtively as she returned to her work. "There's something the matter," his thought cautioned him. Rachel resumed h

their hair and go in for savage colors! Sometimes I get to feeling that

Particularly Rachel. A direct and vigorous Hazlitt concluded that Rachel had succumbed to his superior guidance. There was nothing else to explain her tolerance. He called it tolerance, for he was still wary and her eyes shining eagerly, hungrily at him might be no more than a new kind of neurasthenia. He let her talk on without interruption. She would l

uess that c

ts that had happened during his day. But he became silent. She didn't mind that. She desired to sit as she was, her emotion a dream that escaped her though

ed of his voice. Rachel saw his face light with an unu

ighed. "I don't know why.

ich Hazlitt had often raged. But now her words-flurried, breathless, begrudging as always-stirred him. Th

could be glad to

Rachels, different from this one, who was glad he had come. But the beauty of her burned away uncomfortable memories. She was the Rachel of his loneliness. Out of Ge

ut protest within his. He had never touched her before. She had been a symbol and a dream. Now he fel

her heart. It was sad. The night and the room were sad. She could feel sadness opening little wounds in her breast

t her to stand up? His body touched her and she heard him gasp. Her heart seemed adrift. She was unreal. There was ano

had fallen asleep and was dreaming something that was sad. But his face wa

e go,

failed to understand his resistance.

in a dream and a rapture could only grimace a child's protest out of his stare. He hadn't kissed her. But that would come soon. N

want to see you again. I'

were in

Oh, God, I can't stan

w and then he found himself alone, looking into a night that was haunted with an image of her. He remembered her going,

Her eyes had blazed with it. He sickened and his thought grew faint. Then the night came before him and the ec

had looked at him with love. Love ... but he had dreamed that. What was it, then? Her eyes burning toward him had told him he was l

lf, mumbling as if the words were a pai