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.