Dorn paused. He was not thinking. People said things. An automatic box of phrases in him released answers. Tesla was replying, not so fawningly, the bay beneath his soft words mastering his sycophantic tones. Let him talk. He had something to talk about. He saw something. There was a new tableau in Tesla's brain. Let him keep murmuring things about it—suavely, unctuously letting off steam.
Like a man returning drearily to his game of solitaire, Dorn fastened his eyes again upon the scene. Looking at things would keep him from thinking. To think was to cry out. He had learned this. His eyes, dark and heavy, fastened themselves upon the walls of the inn lost in shadows, painted with nymphs and satyrs sprawling over tapestried landscapes. He devoured their details, his heart searching in them for the mystery of Rachel and finding only a deeper emptiness—insistently naked bodies of nymphs lying like newly bathed housemaids amid stiff park sceneries. Miracles of photographic lechery. Would people about him look like that naked? Thank God they were dressed! An ankle in silk was better than a thigh in sunlight. An old saw ... beauty lay in the imagination. Women removed their beauty with their clothes. The nymphs on the wall reminded one chiefly that they were careful to scrub their legs all the way up.
He sighed and watched the eyes of diners look at the walls. Her face—a mirror of stars. What else was there but her face? Other faces, of course. A revulsion of other strange faces. Men studying the naked figures on the walls with profound but aloof interest, eyeing the women near them shrewdly as they turned away. Women with serious, unconcentrated eyes upon the paintings, turning tenderly towards their escorts. He would die of looking at faces that were not hers. A love-sick schoolboy. God, what an ass! Tesla was becoming an insufferable bore. What in God's name did he have to do with masses raising their skinny arms from a smoking field and crying aloud, "Bread!" Tesla had a lot to do with it. The skinny arms, the smoking field, and the balloon with the word "bread" in it were Tesla's soul. But his soul was different—heavy hands turning.
Dorn drank wine from his glass. Anna, dancing with a plump, laughing stranger, flitted through the distance. A deeper turning over of iron in his heart at the glimpse of her. The scene no longer could divert him. The thought of Anna dropped like a curtain upon a picture. What could he do? What? At night he grew sick lying beside her. It wasn't conscience. There was nothing wrong about loving someone else. But there was an uncanniness about it. Lying beside a woman who didn't know what was in his mind. He would lie thinking, "Oh, Rachel, I love Rachel," repeating almost idiotic love words for Rachel in his mind. And Anna would smile patiently at him, unaware. That was the most intolerable thing. The fact she didn't know. And also the fact that he must remain inarticulate. He must sit with his heart choking him and his head in a blaze, and keep stuffing words back down his throat. Through the day he tormented himself with the thought, "I must tell her. I can't keep this thing up any longer." But when he saw her it was impossible to tell her. A single phrase would end it. He held the phrase on his lips—as if it were a knife balanced over Anna's heart. "I love Rachel." That would end it. But it was impossible. He couldn't say it. Why? He sat, trying to get a glimpse of her dancing again and tried to avoid answering himself. It was something he mustn't answer. He must get away from his damned thought. His eyes fastened themselves upon the fountain in the center of the room. It was Anna that tormented him, not Rachel. Anna ... Anna.... The tension broke. He was looking at the fountain surmounted by a marble nude crouched in a posture of surprise; probably disturbed by her nudity. It was necessary for nudity to be disturbed by itself. Did virgins eyeing themselves in mirrors blush with shame? Unquestionably. The nude peered into the water of a large tiled basin. A gush of water over her managed to veil her unsuccessfully in an endless spray. Water filled the air with an odorless spice.
" ... the first blow will come out of Russia, Dorn. The Russians have not been side-tracked into the phantasms of democracy. They still think straight. Civilization hasn't crippled them with phrases. They are still what you would call biological. And dreams live in them. Yes, I know what you'll say ... heavy dreams. But here in America there are no dreams—yet. Nothing but paper. Paper thoughts. Paper morals. Everything paper. Russia will send out fire to burn up this paper. Destroy it. Leave nothing behind—not even ashes."
True enough. Why answer it? But what difference did it make if paper burned? Was man after all a creature consecrated to institutions, doomed to expend himself upon institutions? A hundred million nervous systems, each capable of ecstasies and torments, devoting themselves to the business of political brick-laying. Always yowling about new bricks. Politics—a deformity of the imagination; a game of tiddledy-winks played with guns and souls.
He breathed with relief. Abstractions were a drug. But his thinking ended. Blue electric lights cast an amorous glow—an artificial moonlight—upon tables surrounding the fountain. Beneath the cobalt water of the basin, colored fish gliding like a weaving procession of little fat Mandarins. The remainder of the room also blue from shaded lights. That was why they dubbed it the Blue Inn. Blue lights made the Blue Inn. The air was heavy with the uncoiling lavender tinsel of tobacco smoke. A luxurious suppression as about some priapic altar ... artificial shadows, painted lights, forlorn fountain ripplings.
"Oh, Erik, I've been dancing. This is Mr. Meredith. I once told you about him. The music is simply wonderful here."
Tesla, flabby-eyed and almost maliciously polite, as if he would expose the innate absurdity of politeness, tipped over a water glass in his floppings. Anna, still alive with the joyousness that had come to her, seated herself beside her husband. Her hand rested eagerly on his arm. He must love her ... must. Must. It had been only a nightmare she'd invented. Oh, God, did anything matter as long as they loved each other?
"Tired, dearest?"