He sat almost oblivious of Tesla. In the back of his brain the city tumbled—an elephantine grimace, a wilderness of angles, a swarm of gestures that beat at his thought. But before his eyes there were no longer the precise patterns of another day. He was no longer outside. He had been sucked into something, the something that he had been used to refer to condescendingly as life. People sitting in a room like this had been furniture that amused him. Now they were alive, repulsive, with a meaning to them that sickened him. Streets had once been stone and gesture. Now they, too, were meanings that sickened. A sanity in which he alone was insane, surrounded him; a completion in which he alone seemed incomplete. Men and women together—tired faces, lighted faces—all with destinations that satisfied them. And he wandering, knocked from place to place by heavy hands, pushed through crowds, dropped into chairs. Time itself a torment into which he kept thrusting himself deeper.
The change in Erik Dorn had come to him with a cynicism of its own. It laughed with its own laughter. A mind foreign to him spoke to him through the day.... "You would smile at life, Erik; well, here it is. Easy for a sleeper to smile. But smile now. Life is a surface, eh? shifting about into designs for the delectation of your eyes. Watch it shifting then. Darkness and emptiness in a can-can. Watch the tumbling streets that have no meanings. No meanings? Yet there's a torment in them that can hoist you up by your placid little heels and swing you round ... round, and send you flying. A witch's flight with the scream of stars whistling through it. Flight that has no ending and no direction ... no face of Rachel at its ending. Burning eyes, devouring eyes ... face like a mirror of stars. There's a face in the world and you go after it, heels in air, tongue frozen, breathing always an emptiness that chokes. Easy for sleepers to dawdle with words and say carelessly life is this, life is that. What the hell's the difference what life is? It means nothing to me. People and their posturings mean nothing. But what about now? A contact, a tying up with posturings, and the streets and crowds tearing you into gestures not your own...."
Aloud he would say, "My love for her has given me a soul and I've become a fool along with other fools."
He did not think of Rachel in words. There were moments of dream when he made plans—a fantastic amorous rigmarole of Rachel and himself walking together over the heads of the world; child dreams that substituted themselves for the realities he demanded. But these were infrequent. He was learning to avoid them as one avoids a drug that soothes and then doubles the hunger of the nerves.
As now in the café, listening to Tesla, watching with dark eyes the scene, there was a turning of heavy hands in him to which he must not give thought. Watch the café, listen to Tesla, talk, eat and spit out a disgust for the things of which he was a part—things from which he demanded Rachel and a surcease to the pain in him. And that only stifled with the emptiness of her.
Out of the wretchedness of garbled emotions that had become the whole of Erik Dorn, his vocabulary arose with a facile paint brush and painted upon his thought. His phrases wandered about looking for subjects as if he must taunt himself with details that forever brought him loathing.
Before he had seen pictures complete, rhythmic pictures of streets and crowds, pleasantly blurred and in motion. Now he saw them as if life was in a state of continual pause—an arrested cinematograph; grotesquely detailed and with the meaning of motion out of it. A picture waiting something to set it moving. This something he could not give it. Helplessly his words continued to trace themselves over the outlines of scenes about him, as if trying to stir them into a life.
This scene consciousness had become almost a mania in the four months. But in the mechanical, phraseological movement of his thought he was able to hide himself. Thus he listened to Tesla and looked at the café. The inn was filled with people—elaborately dressed women and shiningly groomed men—grouped about white-linened, silver-laden tables; an ornamental grimacing little multitude come to the café as to some grave rite, moving to the tables with an unctious nonchalance. Women dressed in effulgent silks, their flesh gleaming among the spaces of exotic plumage, gleaming through the flares of luxurious satin distortions. A company that gestured, grimaced with the charm of lustful marionettes. Flesh reduced to secrecy. Lust, dream in hiding. From the secret world they inhabited, moist bodies beckoned with a luscious, perverse denial of artifice.
The picture of it shot into his eyes, arousing a hate in his thought. He heard Tesla ... "life has changed with the industrialization of society. It is no longer a question of who shall run the court. The court is an atrophied institution, a circus surviving in the backyard of history. It's a question of who shall run the factory. Democracy is a thing that touches only politicians. The factory touches people. Democracy cleared the way but it's not a way in itself. It's still the court idea of government. Steam, gas, and electricity made the French revolution obsolete even before it was ended. This war ... good God, Dorn, blood pouring over toys we've outgrown!..."
Still fawning voiced, but with a bay underneath. Dorn listened and remained elsewhere—among a turning of heavy hands. Yet he thought of Tesla, "He makes an impression on me. I'll remember his words. A man of power, rooted in visions." He replied suddenly, "I'm convinced the weak will rule some day, if that's what you're driving at. The race can survive only as long as its weakest survive. Christianity started it. Socialism will carry it a step further. The fight against the individual. What else is any institutionalism? A struggle to circumvent the biological destiny of man, which is the same as the biological destiny of fish—extinction. That's what we're primarily engaged in. The race must protect its weak, so it invents laws to curb the instincts and power of its strong. And we obey the laws—a matter of adjusting ourselves ludicrously to our weaknesses and endowing these adjustments with high names. Bolshevism will be the law of to-morrow and wear even a higher name than Christianity. Yesterday it was, 'only the poor shall inherit heaven, only crippled brains and weaker visions shall see God.' To-morrow the slogan will have been brought down to earth. Yes, they'll run the factories—your masses. There's the strength in them of logic—a logic opposed to evolution. They'll run the factories as they now run heaven—an Institution nicely accommodated to their fears and weaknesses."