Labyrinth

CHAPTER III

1

Yes, Lewis was getting stouter. He stood before the glass that hung in his room, examining his face with chin thrust forward. "I am getting stouter," he said to himself, and lightly touched the flesh over his cheek-bones. The fact struck him as curious. Since the day he had left the hospital, since that brief and futile reckoning with his anger in Levine's office, nothing in the way of good fortune had befallen him. He had returned unwillingly to Ruth, and taken up the work at Lustbader's as if still under the spell of that first moment when Lustbader engaged him. In all this he felt there was nothing to make him happy ... and yet it was certain that he was getting stouter. He thrust his face closer to the mirror and pinched his cheeks with an angry panic motion. In sudden terror he remembered Biondi, and the loathing that had filled him at the thought of Biondi's flesh ...

Yet it was true, he admitted, that his life at the moment had a sufficiently pleasant rhythm. The work at Lustbader's was not difficult ... he liked the quiet and isolation of the house to which they had moved on the outskirts of the city. He could rise in the morning when he pleased, and stroll through the tidy streets before going to work. Then there was the long trip in the subway with the certainty of the dark and cool theatre at the end. And if he came early enough, there were the few hours when he was alone and played only for himself. With Lustbader, moreover, he was on the best of terms. For one night when the lights of the theatre were out and the building empty, Lustbader, more drunk than usual, had called him into his office, intending, as he said, to give Lewis his most intimate confidences. In the course of their conversation it had developed that Lustbader was the victim of a grave misconception. "You see in me, Antonini," he had said, resting his head on his hand and speaking as though he were about to cry, "a man who has never been taken seriously. And why? Because my hair is red, and my eyelashes are red, and my moustache is red. Yet what's so peculiar about that? Wasn't all the hair on the body meant to match? And suppose it is peculiar ... tell me, does it make me any the less real? Ah, believe me, Antonini, you don't know what it is to be so perfectly matched. It's too much for people. Wherever I go they smile. And the women ... they certainly don't know how to take it." He had lapsed into mournful contemplation, from which he roused himself to beg Lewis to take a more enlightened view. Lewis had reassured him, and after that night Lustbader treated him with special consideration, even suggesting that he organize a quartet in order that he might draw a larger salary. But Lewis had been content with things as they were ... he had desired only that the routine of things continue. Even the thought of Poldy came to him less and less. Tonight, the first time that he stopped to take stock of himself, as if emerging from the shock which had come with his leaving the hospital ... tonight he did not think of Poldy at all.

But it was hot in the room, and he turned away from the mirror and went to the window to look out ... across the level land and low-lying lights, to the place where the buildings of the city were faintly visible ... to the searchlights playing over the river in a perpetual crossing and re-crossing, lifting themselves like the snouts of huge primeval animals lying somewhere below the horizon. He heard faintly a distant murmur from the city, and near at hand the sound of Ruth's footsteps going rhythmically back and forth in the yard.

Sharply and suddenly, as if he were seeing it for the first time, the scene came to him ... he glimpsed it as a vast and quietly-colored canvas, of which he saw the abstract arrangement and balance ... his own dark figure at the window ... Ruth walking alone and thoughtfully below it ... the level field of lights and the far-away fanwise motion of the searchlights. And with this poignant momentary sense of how the whole earth was spread out beneath him, and the masses of things balanced on it, there came the feeling that it was good to be on the earth's surface ... good to be alive and poised on the broad plane of earth; a feeling that he had not known since boyhood, that he thought could never visit him again. In that moment he wished that Ruth would speak to him with some old reassuring word, breaking the silence which had come between them since he returned from the hospital. In his heart he called to her ... understanding that in some way she was part of the moment, of the longing and pleasure that was in it. But she continued to walk back and forth unaware of him, and at last baffled and a little angry because she did not notice him, he turned away from the window and sat down at the piano. He tried a few notes and stopped, and put his elbows softly on the black keys, resting his head in his hands.

How strange, he thought, how strange that this feeling of happiness had come to him ... that for a while he had been able to forget his anger and resentment. There was in it the same pleasure and discomfort that might come from interrupting a habitual motion ... as if a certain gesture of his hands that went on unceasingly had been arrested for a moment. Strange too, this longing for Ruth, a longing which he had just felt so urgently and profoundly that it terrified him. A moment before he had not suspected it was there ... he had thought himself secure from her in his isolation of pain, and the feeling that there was something to be ashamed of. But now for the first time since his return he had glimpsed the chaos in his soul, it had been flashed out from his calm like a complicated landscape flashed out from the sky at night. And now that it was over he was left more bewildered, with the same feeling of terror at what was happening to him that he had felt before, when he stood before the mirror remembering Biondi's flesh.

But why didn't she speak to him? Why was there this silence between them, in which their few words rang out with a cruel and terrible distinctness? He remembered that they had loved each other in the past. In the past their love had been a place where they were intimately together ... yet now they were strangers, often he had the painful feeling that his eyes could not see her clearly. Now they were like two people who have walked by each other on the road, and then look back and find that the road has curved in such a way that they can no longer see each other. Which of them, then, had turned the corner? Whose fault was it ... whose fault, he questioned bitterly, that they could no longer see one another? Yours, something reproached him ... because he had come back to her unwillingly, because he thought she would be ashamed of him, and had countered in his heart with anger and hatred. Yet he knew that secretly he had wanted Ruth to comfort him ... secretly he had hoped that on the first day she would take him to her and say comforting words. If this had not happened ... if the first night had passed and the first day, and all the days after, and she had not spoken, then it was really, true that she was ashamed of him. She had even denied him her body, and it was this that especially confused and humiliated him. For if she repelled him whenever he tried to touch her, how very great must be her shame of him, how loathsome he had become. And at the thought of it Lewis felt his breath come more quickly, he felt his throat tightening again with hatred for her.

In a curious desire to see her, to study her out of his anger, he went to the window and looked out. She was walking near the wall of the house, her head thrust forward, her eyes fixed thoughtfully on the ground. For a moment as he listened her footsteps seemed to be speaking sadly to him ... to be the symbolic language of the thoughts that came to her as she walked alone. And again he wanted to call to her, lifting from his eyes the painful feeling that they could not see her clearly. And the burden of his call, the words of it ... what would that be? "Where are you, Ruth..." he could call to her, "where are you..." And she would hear him and know that he longed for her. But when he waited and she did not look up at him, he remembered that he had come to study her objectively, to put her at a distance by watching. His cue now was to watch her all the time ... as she went about her work in the house ... when she walked in the yard, when she spoke to him. Always to be watching her, and so keep her at a distance ...

But how tall she looked and unreal, pacing back and forth in her long skirt, like a woman out of an old and sad legend. When she passed under the window he could see the glistening blackness of her straight hair, parted in the center and drawn back in a knot. "Italian hair," he said to himself, unexpectedly and dispassionately, as if he were examining a picture. She walked slowly, with a certain queer hesitation, as though the ground might not be firm beneath her feet. He had the curious feeling that she was walking barefoot. And sometimes she was startled by a slight noise, and looked around, seeming bewildered to find herself pacing back and forth.

It did not seem possible that she could be walking so close to him and not feel his presence at the window; yet when he caught a glimpse of her face he saw in it an expression completely turned in on itself ... a strange and brooding look, as if one thought came continually to her mind, which she could not understand at all, yet which had to be turned this way and that and examined again and again, calling for perpetual wonder. In this one thought she seemed to be spellbound, caught in its terrifying strangeness, trying to shake it from her with this trance-like pacing back and forth. And because of it she could forget his presence and everything around her, she was even unaware of the expression on her face ... the strange beauty that it had of something completely absorbed and unconscious of itself. He stood at the window watching, feeling almost afraid of her, of this new wonder of her face. And when she stopped at the far end of her walk and rested with her hand to the wall, he was startled almost to outcry by the intent glance with which she gazed before her ... the intraverted look of a statue whose features have grown to one expression for centuries...

What was she thinking of? What thought was it, he wondered, that held her spellbound, and was so strange and bewildering that since the first moment it occurred to her, all her days had been passed in a stupor of trying to understand it. He remembered times when he came upon her brooding alone, and she would lower her eyes secretively, fix them for a moment in mysterious somnolence ... then lift them with a swift glance of reproach, as if it lay in his power to free her. There would be a bittersweet tumult in his heart at the thought that she brooded over him, and was puzzled and unhappy for the ending of their love. Yet in the next instant he would question it ... why did she not speak to him if this was true ... why was there only question and answer between them, her answers always simple and courteous, like echoes of his question ... and if he did not seek her out with questioning, why was there only silence? And though he recalled from the past the sort of person she was ... one to whom words did not come easily ... yet now there seemed to him a treacherous quality in her silence. In it he heard many things ... her scorn, her censure, her shame. It terrified him now with its infinite meanings...

But now she became aware of him, and stopped under the window and looked up inquiringly. He was irritated because she had spied him too late, after the moment of his longing was over. "Why don't you go to bed?" he said sharply. She answered in a low voice that it was too hot, and stood near the wall with one hand lifted, letting her finger-tips play lightly along the part of her hair. Lewis waited for her to speak further, and when she remained silent he turned away from the window with a gesture of weary finality. The room seemed suddenly too small for his anger. He fled from the room and the house, walking in a trance of speed until he came out of the dark road to the main street. There the number of people made him slacken his pace. He permitted himself to be caught up into the rhythm of their march, losing for a while all the torturing sense of his own identity and the anger that had driven him forth.

On each side as he walked people caught up with him and passed him. He could feel their bodies flowing by with the bobbing motion of debris on a swift stream. But after a few blocks he felt wearied with the constant motion of people passing him and their endless number. There were too many people in the world, he told himself ... too many noises also. Day after day the noises in his head to listen to ... by now he had learned how cunningly they could adjust themselves ... weak and timid when it was quiet, proportioned to the silence. But at other times trying to out-scream the sounds around him, as if they could hear them and felt a hysterical contagion. He longed for only a moment's freedom from them, for only one moment of absolute silence. And it was true after all, he resumed, that his life was hateful to him, and the fact that he was growing stouter was only a trick of his flesh. It was true that he hated the work at Lustbader's ... that he was nauseated with the necessity to sit and play for people who weren't listening, and felt infinitely humiliated each day at the indifferent going of the audience. It would be better to give up the work at Lustbader's and find something else to do, not so intimately associated with his past. Better also to leave Ruth, rather than continue their living together as strangers. For a while he tried to plan this seriously; but the feeling of dizziness that overcame him made him stop short in his thoughts and warn himself ... that these paroxysms were dangerous, that he could not afford to let himself grow discontented. These were the dangerous moments, he warned himself ... when, because of his discontent, he began to desire something more than his life could give him, to long wildly for a new and undefined fulfillment. Then he could see how precarious was the stillness of his mind ... that it was only the apparent stillness of something whirling so fast that no drop could spill ... but if once the motion slackened, if it eased for only a moment, then everything that had been held in balance by it would fly apart. He knew that he must never permit any let-down in this excitement of his mind ... there must always be something, something to keep up its swift motion.

But what would that be, he asked himself? What was there left for him now, exiled from Ruth's love, unable to play any more, unable to hear things clearly? What was there left save to hold fast to the routine of his life, letting the rhythm of it, accumulating from day to day, convince him at last that he was living. It was so for everyone else ... for all these bodies that bobbed past him. They moved in an insect activity, and repeated it in time and repeated it in each other, so that they might feel doubly sure of themselves. They moved daily in an insect migration, and everything they did was automatic, and their love was unclean ... men and women living together, and with too long familiarity and handling of each other's bodies their love became incestuous. He too should be content to live as they did, he should not slacken his pace and be thoughtful on the street ... but even while he hastened his step his throat tightened with hatred for them, for that air of urgency which they always had, which was so skilful an imitation on their part of insect importance. No, he told himself ... it was not so easy for him ... he knew the trick that had been played on him. And his anger seemed to deafen him, so that he heard for a moment the absolute silence that he craved ... and he stopped bewildered, fearing that it was the end of the whirling, the sudden jar of silence that comes when the machinery stops. At first he wanted to shout to them for help, he wanted to lay hold of someone and cry out what had happened. But in that interlude of silence he heard a thought speaking clearly to him ... that he must begin to work on a symphony, and that he would be famous through this work, that through it he would express all that had happened to him, and it would lift him out of the incognito in which he now lived. An incredible lightness of heart came over him, a desire to laugh and embrace the people who passed him ... for it seemed that now he heard the music of his own life again, and could conduct it once more to a triumphant conclusion. He had found too a further recess from Ruth, where she could watch him, puzzled and shut out in her turn. Strange that it had not occurred to him before, that something so obvious should be so slow in coming to him...

But here somebody jostled him, and Lewis realized that he had been standing still and staring at the sidewalk. Informally, then, the noises resumed, and he started to walk again, but still with the feeling of lightness in his heart.

2

It did not leave him for many days ... days in which cloud-sweeps of music played about him ... endless panoramas of music that kept merging and separating, folding and unfolding, with the prodigality, the ceaselessness of insanity. Days when he heard terrific and intricate harmonies ... the accompaniment for profound dancing, for the courteous minuet of the worlds. When the noises in his head opened up new vistas, arranging and rearranging themselves in kaleidoscopes of sound, from which he caught an occasional pattern of rhythm and melody, at the undreamed exquisiteness of which he held his breath. When everything was saturated with music, and every object that he looked at gave off musical sound like a property of its matter ... and all the motions of his hand gave off music, as simply as the motion of a whip gives off the swishing sound. All day and even through the thin wall of his sleep he listened, and the meaning of what he heard comprehended all words, was the infinite meaning of things that lies beyond any word that has ever been spoken. Meanwhile he went about pale and absorbed, going through his work with the mechanical gestures of a sleep-walker. People stared at him, who had the expression of someone lost in the nightmare of his own ecstasy. But the end came at last. He sat down one evening to recall what he had heard, his pencil finely-sharpened and poised over the staff.

3

And at times they would come back to him ... themes that moved so inevitably from phrase to phrase, in which he heard so clearly the implicit harmonies, that to record them was only the labor of putting down the notes on the staff. At other times he was baffled, working for days without adding anything ... humming over and over in his mind the parts that were already written, until they grew sterile with the repetition and he could not hear them any more. Then in a sudden impotence he would sit and stare at the notes, believing that they might begin to move around on the page, or that in some mysterious way he could conjure them, as if they were round black symbols on a chart of magic. But when nothing happened and the whole work seemed futile, his nostrils whitened with suppressed fury, he would take his work in his hands with a furious desire to tear it ... or when Ruth was in the room he would turn on her, as if it was her quiet presence in the room or some casual movement of hers that caused his failure. And on nights when this happened sleep was not for either of them, but with careful and crafty questioning he sought to call her to account ... why had she removed the picture of herself that hung in his room ... why had she re-arranged things? And she would answer him obediently, a suggestion of weariness in her slow obedient answers. All night they lay in bed exhausting their words ... until it seemed to Ruth as if their words had become a symbolic intercourse, more exacting and insatiable than the intercourse of their bodies ... and she would lie still and thoughtful in the long interval between his questions, like someone not entirely absorbed by her passion, with much leisure to think in the midst of it. Why had she removed the picture of herself that hung in his room ... and she answered him obediently: how she had noticed that he looked angrily about him when he worked, and she had not wished him to look at her picture in that way. But in that slow obedience of all her answers there was great weariness and indifference, as if it was only a way of disguising her words, the way she had found at last of speaking to him and yet guarding the secrecy of her thoughts. These, now, were more important to her. All day to whatever she did her thoughts were an insistent accompaniment, and in bed they had to be counted again, told over every night like prayers before she could fall asleep....

First, she remembered, there were the days just after his return. From the beginning he had been strange to her, and yet she had not suspected anything, she had been willing to wait. When the newness of things wore off, she had told herself, he would look around once more and remember her. And at first it had been easy to find reasons: it was moving to the new house that pre-occupied him, or the work at Lustbader's ... but when time passed and he did not change she saw how excuses could multiply themselves, how she was put off indefinitely. Then had come a period of panic, when she felt the strangeness settling between them like a stealthy gathering of mist, and was powerless to stop it. When she had tried to snare his attention ... foolishly, in ways that made her ashamed to remember ... placing something new where he would see it ... a vase of green glass or a bright square of silk for the wall. There had been for a moment a magic in everything she bought, a belief that everything must change because this or that was brought into the house. And when these had failed she thought the fault must be in herself. Then what do I need? she had asked, standing in front of the mirror and examining herself. "I am too dark ... too sombre-looking...." and this discovery had filled her with a sense of guilt, she was ashamed because she was not light-hearted...

So everything had ended in shame and confusion. And now that all her thoughts were over, now that she had counted them like prayer beads, what was there left to do save to lie rigid and wait for sleep? Though each night she was conscious of her body and its sweetness going to waste, she knew it was better to lie alone. In the loneliness of her body there was, somehow, a little cause for pride ... there was also hope, an element in their relations that was still in solution. Each night when they lay in bed she felt the separateness of their bodies as a question, and she feared that if she gave herself to him the question would be answered, and there would be no longer any hope for her ... only complete humiliation. Better, then, to lie with her fantasy ... to feel her body as if it were a statue, immobile yet conscious. So in some ancient evil court women were used ... arranged naked as adornments for the corners of the palace, on their knees and under a towering headdress, so that they might be more rigid and unreal. So she thought of herself, a slave-woman whose body was turning into stone, while near her a long and dispassionate intercourse was occurring.

She would lie so long without moving that Lewis would raise himself on his elbow and turn to look at her ... seeing her face white between the lines of its Gothic hair, and her eyes staring upward, gleaming like black stones. Angrily he would repeat his question...

4

But she had put back the picture and arranged everything as it was before. Yet one afternoon when she entered his room, she found Lewis sitting disconsolately over his work, resting his head on his hands and staring before him. He turned on her with unexpected ferocity. "Why did you change things around? Everything is going wrong since then."

Ruth hesitated whether to speak, and then asked indifferently, "Why, what is wrong..."

"You should never have meddled," Lewis insisted petulantly. "Did I ask you to come in and arrange things? Did I ask you to spy on me?"

Ruth sat down, her arm on the back of the chair, her fingers musingly feeling the part in her hair. At her feet was a pile of papers torn into deliberate tiny scraps. These she stared at and then touched with the tip of her foot. The action infuriated Lewis. He went over to her and caught her wrist, so that she drew away from him with a cry of pain.

"I tell you we can't go on this way," he said bitterly. "It must end. We can't go on with this crime."

"What is the crime?" she asked, with weary automatic curiosity. "Tell me what crime you mean. Have I committed it?"

She fixed her dark eyes on him for a moment, and then turned her attention again to the papers on the floor, shifting them about with the tip of her foot, trying to arrange them into a circle. In this occupation she was profoundly absorbed, hardly aware of him. Only once she frowned. When he said, "It would be better for me to be alone," she frowned as if she could not understand the words, but had caught them between her eyebrows, and would hold them that way to be considered in the future. Meanwhile, with delicate and intent movements of her foot she perfected the circle of papers.

Then she rose and went into the bedroom. For the colloquy that she was going to have it seemed necessary to let down her hair first, and lay the hair-pins carefully away. She leaned forward and stared at herself in the glass, still frowning. "What was my crime?" she asked softly, and lowered her eyes in thought. "Why no, it wasn't that," she reasoned. "Something went wrong with the music. My crime was only to be present." She smiled at this and looked at her reflection triumphantly. "Yes, my crime was that I was present." But immediately she leaned closer, and looked into her eyes that were now large and startled. "But suppose that is a crime," she whispered. Because she did not know what to say ... because there was a terrible finality in that question, she turned away from the glass, and a wave of dizziness and terror swept over her. One thought came to her mind ... flight ... to go away from him instantly, to make the house suddenly empty of her presence. In a moment this became so urgent that she did not stop to do more than comb her hair and brush the dust from her dress. Softly she opened the door, and reassuring herself that she was unobserved, she went lightly down the stairs. Where she was going or what she would do was not clear to her ... she only knew that it was urgent that he be left alone, that Lewis should feel the emptiness of the house at once. She struck out in the direction of open country, unconsciously turning from the street that would lead her among people. Walking so swiftly that she seemed to be moving in a dream, she came to the state road, and not until she had gone far into the country did she stop. Then as if awakening she looked around her. Suddenly tired, she turned back a few paces to the ending of a stone fence, and sat down there, surveying the scene around her with a listless interest in its details.

She saw a field in which the gathered and tented wheat lay in a quiet encampment, and in the stillness she heard the dry rustling of bugs through the stalks. A row of little pines stood near the edge of the field, their trunks no bigger than branches. She looked at them and thought of children standing in a row, stretching on thin legs to see which was tallest. Across the road and a little beyond the place where she sat there was a white farmhouse under dark trees, and she heard the voices of men shouting in the distance. She sat there looking indifferently at the field, or letting her eye travel listlessly over the tall grass and flowers at her feet. For a long time she followed the movements of a white butterfly that caromed against her knees, she sat so still; or noted how, in the least wind, the tall grasses bent toward each other. A loud humming of some insect, sounding near her like a man's voice, made her start. She jumped up hastily and looked around, then seeing what it was she sat down again, smiling self-consciously at her fright. Now she remembered things she had passed on the road. At one house two children had been standing in a doorway, regarding her curiously; and when she looked back the children in the doorway had strangely multiplied themselves into a group of all sizes, all staring at her with one expression of astonishment. Another time she had followed a road that led unexpectedly to a house, and she had turned and walked away quickly, while two old women on the porch called to her, each one holding an egg in her hand, arrested in the act of counting. These details came back to her now, with the strange overtone of something she might have read about in a fairy-tale. And the field of wheat before her and the young pines stretching to see which was tallest seemed unreal as the picture in a child's book. She felt rather foolish now. She had achieved that sudden emptiness of the house which had seemed at the moment of her flight so urgent and precious to her ... but now what to do? Return? No ... she must stay away longer. She bestirred herself and walked on more slowly. But now she felt faint and exhausted and sat down to rest wherever she could find a little shade. At length she came to the end of the state road and faced a country lane, unshaded and desolate-looking. Here a man was working in the fields, and when he saw her he rested on his hoe, watching her as she stood uncertainly at the cross-roads. "Where are you going?" he called. Ruth went over to him. "I don't know..." she began confusedly, feeling the blood mount in her cheeks. "What's off that way?"

"Up there," he said, and seemed to be figuring it out, "up there's the lake, but it's so hot on that road, you'll get cooked."

She considered a moment, thanked him and turned back. One time she stopped and leaned against a tree, laughing and crying at the same time. "You'll get cooked..." she repeated to herself.

It seemed to her as she retraced her steps that there was an eternity of time before she would reach the place where she had rested. Things she had noticed on her way seemed to have moved farther apart, the sky was overcast, and behind her there was a constant rumbling of thunder ... when she reached the white farmhouse heavy drops were falling. In terror of the storm she stood in front of the house, wishing that someone would call to her. But only a huge dog came bounding out, and when she lifted her arms he leaped at her. For a long time she tried to ward him off, standing there in the center of his leaping, swishing her arms back and forth, fearing that at any moment the grotesque duel between them would end. Her breath came in short gasps, she tried to call for help, but her terror prevented her. At last she raised her voice. "Call off your dog," she cried hoarsely, and blushed at the boldness of shouting that way. Two young girls appeared on the porch and called to the dog, and then, after a short consultation with each other, invited her in. The storm broke as they entered the kitchen. There the shades were drawn and the lights turned on, giving the effect of night.

They permitted her to sit alone on a low stool near the window. When the rain slackened and it grew lighter, the girls raised the shades and turned off the lights, and busied themselves once more with their sewing. Infinitely pleasant to Ruth was the tidy kitchen and the sound of the clock ticking and the rain outside ... a quiet interlude in which she lived for the time the calm house-bound life of the two girls, in which her own unhappiness did not exist. In a desultory manner the girls talked while they sewed.

"Do you think they are coming back here to live?"

"It's hard to say," the taller one answered. "They wrote that they were selling the place."

"And didn't say what they would do after?"

"No, he likes it out there."

The first one who had spoken stooped to pick up a skein of silk from the floor. "I think this red is too bright," she said, holding it up to the light. "Tell me," she continued after a long silence. "Are you ever lonesome here?"

The other hesitated. "No ... not really lonesome," she said thoughtfully. "I have my moods of course, but I'm not lonesome for any particular person, or any place either. It's just..." she sighed and looked down at her work. "But it's very nice here," she added.

From time to time they glanced shyly at Ruth, and becoming conscious of her presence they would be silent. She wished they would forget her entirely, that she could lose her own identity and sit there forever, listening to their quiet dialogue. For there seemed to be something so impersonal in what they said, an indifference in their manner of speaking, that gave her a strange sense of peace. She saw them as beings still content with their world and secure in the little details of it ... still untouched by desire, by the knowledge that would make of the whole world a prison of one person. "Not for any particular person..." the taller one had said. Ruth remembered the words as if they had been spoken for her. There was only one place in the world, she knew, where she could dare to exist, and that was near Lewis. She was not strong enough to be without him ... she would accept any terms, only to be near him. And having made this confession she felt infinitely degraded, she felt that if the two girls could have looked into her heart they would have recoiled with horror. In all that they were yet to learn this would seem to them most terrible ... that they should become so bound, that the whole world should become a prison of one person. And could they not tell what was in her heart? Wasn't it known to them already? Why was she walking alone this way, if not because she was unhappy for someone? Her cheeks flushed with shame at the thought that they understood her ... she wished she could hide from them, feeling too exposed when they looked at her with their swift glances.

But now she realized that they wanted her to go. "It's cleared up," they urged gently. Ruth sighed and rose, and stood for a while glancing around the room, lingering on its neatness, on the shining clock and the pictures, which she saw through their eyes as dear possessions. She looked out and saw that it was clearing, and over the wheat field there was the reddish glow of sunset. "Yes, I'll be going," she said reluctantly. They followed her courteously to the door.

5

Ruth knew, as she walked down the road, that they were watching her go, and while they could see her she kept her head up bravely. But as soon as a turning of the road effaced the house, she sat down and gave way to a passionate angry outburst of tears. There was not so much sorrow in it as anger for all the things that had happened to her, for everything that was yet to occur. She had thought to flee, and had given herself the momentary satisfaction of making the house empty of her presence. But that was all ... that was all she could accomplish. She clenched her hands and beat them against the stone ... "I am not strong enough," she said aloud, with bitter anguish in her voice. "It's true ... I am not strong enough...."

Lewis was standing outside, looking anxiously up and down the street.

"Where have you been?" he asked reproachfully. "I was looking for you...."

She stood in the doorway resting, her hand to her heart. Of a sudden an expression of pain crossed her face. "Lewis," she said faintly, and looked at him, her eyes wide with fear. "Put your hand on my heart. Isn't it beating too fast?" He obeyed her, but the feeling of her heart beating under her wet dress was repulsive to him, as if she had asked him to touch a wound. He forced himself to hold his hand there and shook his head. "Where have you been?" he repeated. "I've been looking for you...."

Upstairs in the bedroom she lay down, feeling her forehead burning hot and the blood beating in it with imprisoned fury. She lay alone for a long time, until the room grew dark and her eyes closed in uneasy slumber. Lewis woke her, bending over and awkwardly touching her forehead.

"Does your heart hurt any more?" he asked.

"No ... I'm all right..." and she turned away from him.

"You have fever, Ruth..."

"No, it's nothing," she repeated sharply. "Let me alone."

But after a while she turned to him, and he could see her face bewildered and pale in the darkness.

"Tell me, Lewis," she said, her voice low and reluctant. "Why do you torture me?"

He pondered her question. "Why no ... that's not true," he said harshly. "We torture each other."

"But why ... why..." The word was repeated with dull insistence, with the unhappy petulant tone of someone who has asked a question too long. And it seemed natural that silence should follow her question, having in it the quality of a profound answer.

Nothing could be more terrible to her than his caress on that night. While there had been the separateness of their bodies, she had felt a little cause for pride. But she knew this for the end of everything, she knew, now, that her degradation was complete.

CHAPTER IV

1

The turning of a corner suddenly thrust Poldy against the march of homecoming workers. He shocked with a squad of young girls walking arm in arm, a taut buoyant line. They giggled and wavered for a moment, unwilling to break the lovely repeated pattern of their arms. Then the line swung away from him like a slackened whip. He walked forward, progressing in a blind zigzag, his eyes closed against the sun. But it seemed to him after a while as if he were no longer walking, but being drawn onward by the suction of all those bodies moving against him ... as if they were mute automatons being moved on the belt of some vast machine, and he was part of the machine that had to move counterwise ... a unique intimate part, articulating with the crowd. "Surely I am not to die yet," he said to himself ... "surely there is a way to be saved." And there came to him a word that he wanted to cry out, a strange word that he had never heard before, which held the secret of all things. Fast as he was walking, the sense of walking was lost to him. He yielded himself passively to the motion, he felt his body in complete subjection to the will of the machine on which they all moved ... and the word within him was urgent as matter that had to be voided, he felt prophetic powers closing upon him, because he was haunted by the impishness of a word. But soon he became afraid because they moved against him too swiftly. He wanted to fling his arms out as children do and call out mischievously, "Stop!" ... to see them storm against his arms, a mute animal terror in their eyes as the huge belt moved on relentlessly, leaving them behind. He wanted to trick them with the word, to fling it into that orderly route ... cry it with his arms stretched straight above him and his fingers spread wide. And at the clang of it panic would spread through them, they would drift confusedly here and there ... a viscous flow of bodies, as if they were held on a plate being tipped different ways. It was no word that he had ever heard before ... a foreign word of three syllables ... and as he groped for it in his mind it came to him. "Kuramos!" he would shout ... "Kuramos...."

But now the lust for something unknown swept over the people; and because there was a man on the street selling something, who was so short that he could not be seen from the outside of the crowd, they thought that there was the miracle ... in that mysterious axis around which the crowd was ranged. And those on the outside began to ask, "What is it?" and to conjecture what it was. And the question spread, some hearing it with joy and others with terror, each one answering it according to his desire. Soon the street was blocked, and those on the outside fought with those who were nearer; and each one who came in contact with the fighting could not withstand it, until everyone was struggling with his neighbor, wrestling blindly with the thing that opposed him ... and the little man in the center stopped flourishing his knives and looked at them with terror. He climbed up to his wagon and lay on it with his belly to the boards, and reached down to draw up his signs and his satchel; and they closed in on the space where he had been standing.

Just then it was that Poldy saw a figure standing quietly in the turmoil, a man with a face that was indescribably narrow, the eyes and mouth switched about as if they were trying to adjust themselves lengthwise. The face smiled and blew hard at a whistle. Policemen came running from all sides, as though they had been lying in wait for the cue. Their clubs sputtered in the crowd, and there followed an insane waving of arms as those who were fighting tried to clutch at the clubs, still bucking their heads at those who were near them. The man lying in his wagon curled himself up in the farthest corner of it. And he did not dare crawl down again until they were all dispersed, moving once more away from the sun in an orderly rout. Poldy touched his forehead. It was bleeding and his mouth ached. The fellow who blew the whistle was coming toward him, smiling apologetically.

2

On closer inspection Poldy decided that it was not so much the narrowness of his face which had twisted the eyes and mouth. The nose too was slightly out of focus, and it seemed to act like an axis on which the other features were turned. The result was an expression of perpetual slyness, a winking-off to someone in the distance. The fellow had one leg longer than the other, and it was only when he tried to walk fast that this sly expression of his face changed. Then his whole face was contorted ... his mouth hung open, too much of the lower lip exposed, and his eyelids quivered, his whole body seeming to shake with inward laughter. He came close to Poldy, stood at attention and clicked his heels. But in order to do so he had to bend back a little and sideways, a swaggering pose with a hint of pugnaciousness in it, as though he were preparing to leap forward and attack.

"I saw you being clubbed," he announced, and bowed very courteously. "My card."

Poldy took it mechanically. He was still wiping blood from his forehead and felt in no humor to speak. He pocketed the card and was about to go away, when the cripple caught his arm and begged him to read it. It was elaborately printed: "David Solner, Expert on Authority."

"A very original title," Poldy remarked politely.

The fellow threw his head back and burst out laughing. "I thought it was." He jerked his thumb at the policemen. "They don't know who I am, of course."

"No ... I suppose not."

"They always play right into my hands. Oh it's too easy, much too easy. But just then..." He drew nearer and put his hand on Poldy's shoulder with great good fellowship. "Just then I had real action."

"I'm glad you were not disappointed," Poldy said in his best manner. "However, I must be going." But he had gone only a few steps when he felt a tugging at his arm. The expert on authority's face had elongated itself as if it were elastic, there was a look of consternation at the prospect of Poldy's departure. And this look poised paradoxically above the swaggering pose of his body made him seem so forlorn that Poldy had not the heart to turn away. He suffered himself to be led into the park, where they settled themselves on one of the benches around the fountain. The cripple's walk registered his joy, growing so ecstatic with all its elaborate bending and twisting, that it seemed to be all a mimicry ... as if he were only clowning it for the children, and might turn around any minute and say, "How did you like that? Now watch this one." When he sat down he crossed his legs and swung his long foot with a delicate rhythmic motion, almost maidenly. At last he turned to Poldy.

"As you see, I'm a cripple," he began in a very matter-of-fact voice. "Cripples very often are beggars. Is that right?"

Poldy nodded.

"But sometimes you see a beggar who doesn't seem to be crippled. Is that right?"

Again Poldy nodded. The catechism seemed to have been memorized and rehearsed many times, and he felt that the safest answer was a silent one.

"But in that case," the fellow continued, "what do you do?"

Poldy was confused. "I forget where we were at," he said humbly. "If you'll only repeat..."

David began again with stern emphasis. "If you see a beggar who is not crippled, what should you do? ... What should you do?" he repeated, leaning forward and regarding Poldy slyly. Poldy hesitated. "Really, now, I don't know," he said. "I've never thought of the situation."

"Think ... think..."

Poldy frowned and pursed his lips, making an elaborate display of thinking. His decision seemed to be of great importance to the cripple, who was regarding him with an expression of challenging slyness. At length Poldy ventured an opinion.

"I might count his fingers," he said slowly.

"Right!" and David slapped his thighs gleefully. "Count his fingers. Right! Now I know that you're a man I can talk to. Yes, I can trust you. In fact I knew it the moment I saw you in the crowd, but I never talk to anyone until he can answer that question. Because, of course, there may not be the correct number of fingers. You have to be clever to find that out. Well, you're one of the clever ones, I see. I can trust you. But now it's your turn. Ask me any question."

"Well now..." Poldy thought for a moment. "Of course," he observed briskly, "you have other work besides ... beside your work as expert on authority?"

David spread his hands in negation. "A cripple!" he sighed. "How can I work? ... Well, I do run errands."

"Your work as an expert on authority doesn't pay, then?"

"No ... oh, no. It's a labor of love." He turned to Poldy with a challenging look, a hint that he desired further questioning. But Poldy was silent, and finally David was forced to talk.

"I make toys, too..."

"Indeed."

"Oh, yes. You should see them." He brought out a little cardboard figure from his pocket, the face drawn in with the regularity of a child's drawing, a fringe of hair on the forehead to heighten the stupid expression. Little red strings were tied to the head and arms and legs, terminating in an intricate knot whose loops were kept apart by pins. David held it nonchalantly in his hand for a while, to let the intricacy of it register on Poldy. Then with a rapid movement of his thumb and forefinger he manipulated the pins. The cardboard man began to dance, an insane ecstatic dance.

"It's marvelous ... marvelous," Poldy said. "But what is it for?"

David nudged him with his elbow and looked well pleased. "I knew it, I knew it," he crowed. "I knew you would ask. Clever, isn't it?"

"Exceedingly."

"It took me almost two years to make it. Some people would say it shows real inventive power, wouldn't they..."

"And not be far from the truth."

"Here ... see if you can do it."

Poldy touched the doll gingerly. Its staring mechanical face affected him almost with terror. He remembered a man he had once seen at a fair ... standing in one of the booths, his face painted so that it looked like a doll's, and another man lecturing on him ... now ladies and gentlemen, step inside and you will see them cut Bimbo in two. And with that the man had been given a hearty push, and he stumbled a few steps, never once relaxing the doll-like expression of his face. Then he recovered his balance, and raised his hands again with marionette rigidity. Poldy had felt sick at heart at this mummery, at the man's degradation before the crowd. Unwillingly he manipulated David's toy, while the owner looked on approvingly. "Do you know, I had a model for that head?"

"Yes ... it's very lifelike."

"Oh, no ... it's not lifelike at all. I don't call myself an artist. This fellow who was my model used to come into the hospital. He moved his head just the way that the doll does ... all day, mind you. Wait..." He fumbled nervously in his pocket, but only a crumpled piece of paper was forthcoming.

"I can't find it," he said forlornly.

"Isn't it on the paper?"

"No..." He threw the paper away and turned his back to Poldy and stared morosely at the pavement. He even stopped swinging his leg. Poldy tried to rally him.

"Why do you carry it ... the doll?" And David at once rewarded him with a grateful glance, the leg started to swing again, he clasped his knees and held his elbows rigid with delight.

"I was waiting for you to ask. Listen. When I was in the hospital I had nothing to do. So I decided to figure out how many times this fellow wagged his head, by the minute, you understand. That's what I was looking for. I thought I had the paper in my pocket with the figures on it. So one morning I said to the nurse, 'Give me your watch.' 'What do you want it for?' she asks. 'I want to count my pulse.' 'No ... that's not what you want it for.' 'I want to see what time it is.' 'Well, I'll tell you the time.' 'I want to see what kind of a watch it is. I used to fix watches...'"

"Really! You're expert in many ways, I see."

"No, not in the least. I only told her that."

"And did she give you the watch then?"

"Oh, no. She wouldn't give it to me for that reason either. So at last I said to her: 'Well, I want to count the number of times a minute that Joe wags his head.' She didn't believe that at all, so she laughed and gave me the watch. Then I called Joe over to my bed. 'Joe,' I said, 'come talk to me....' and I held the watch in my hand and counted it by the minute hand, just as the doctor counts your pulse."

"A very interesting experiment. And the result?"

Once more David flashed him an approving look. He searched his pocket again, but this time nothing was forthcoming, and an expression of alarm came over his face, unfolding down from his forehead like a mask. First the eyebrows elevated themselves, making the apex of a triangle, the nostrils distended, the lower lip dropped. He held the expression for a moment, then switched it off. "I can't find it," he announced sadly.

"Perhaps you remember?"

"No ... no ... But tell me, what do you think?" His face brightened and he looked at Poldy anxiously. "Perhaps I never did it?"

"Oh, it's altogether likely..."

But this accommodating answer had an electric effect on David. He jumped away from Poldy to the end of the bench, and lowered his eyes sullenly. "Ah ... I knew I couldn't trust you ... I knew it," he muttered, and he would not talk to Poldy for a long time.

"But you started to tell me why you keep that doll," Poldy coaxed.

"Oh, that," his mood changed again and he flashed an appreciative smile at Poldy, as if he had a bright pupil who was asking the right questions. "I'll tell you. After I got that idea about Joe, I decided to figure out how many times a day I swing to one side. Now allowing sixteen hours to the day, since there's nothing doing while I sleep, and about thirty-one swings a minute, it gives you sixteen times sixty times thirty-one, which is twenty-nine thousand seven hundred and sixty. But allowing three hours when I'm standing still and two hours when I work at the press—I press clothes in a shop—I subtract five times sixty times thirty-one, which is nine thousand three hundred, leaving ... do you follow?"

"Continue, continue."

"Oh, there's nothing to continue about," he ended sullenly. "Don't you see it now?"

"I confess that I don't."

"You can guess, can't you?"

"I'm not good at guessing."

"Well, never mind," David said sulkily. "I knew I couldn't trust you."

"I'd like to know...." Poldy said with great humility.

David leaned closer toward him and tapped off his words in the manner of one closing a deal. "Now don't you think I deserve something for all that?" he whispered.

"Of course ... of course."

"There you are!" He sprang back and raised his voice briskly. "Did they get you? Tell me, did they get you?"

"I don't know what you mean..."

David burst out laughing. "The war ... the war. You had to go?"

"I had to go."

"Mmm ... I thought so. But tell me, didn't you foresee it?"

"Foresee it!"

"Yes, of course. Tell me now," his voice became smoothly argumentative, he eyed Poldy in the manner of a storekeeper who has to persuade a difficult customer, "Tell me, what did you expect? Now if you had been crippled, say ... if something had been the matter with you then ... well, that would have been different, wouldn't it..." Poldy felt an impulse to strike him, but David seemed to divine the trembling in his arm, and rebounded to his former position. "Well, never mind," he said airily. "Strange title that, on my card. Don't you think so?"

"It's very strange."

"You saw me blow the whistle..."

"Yes, I saw you."

"That's part of my job."

"Indeed."

"Wherever people," David began with strongly marked accents, "wherever people are being bullied ... I'm there! I watch it! If things are too slow I blow the whistle. It's a delicate matter too, knowing when to blow it. But it's quite all right, you see. I'm in it myself. Now this leg, you might say," he stretched it grandly, "bullies me all the time. It's my authority. 'Swing,' it says ... I swing. That's why I figure that I have a right to enjoy myself. They owe me something for this, I say."

"And do you find many diversions?"

"Oh, I know where to look," he said mysteriously. "Did you read in the papers the other day of a meeting here in the square? I follow the papers and so I know where to go. There was a riot here and one man was killed. The club hit him wrong ... they can't always be careful about such matters. You should have seen his head wobble before he fell, just as if he was saying, 'This is all wrong, all wrong.' Besides, wherever they build."

"Build, you say?"

"Yes, build ... put up buildings. There's generally a chance there of seeing somebody killed. They fall down. Now have you ever watched a man trying to balance himself on a beam a hundred feet in the air?"

"No, not particularly..."

David nudged him ecstatically. "There's something, now ... The way he has to dance around ... that's authority, too. Do you see it now?"

"It grows clearer to me."

"Now, have you ever noticed a crowd being driven back when they want to see something?"

"I seem to remember it..."

"They walk backwards. Strange thing, isn't it, to see people all walking backward." He mused for a time, and resumed in the manner of someone pleasantly reminiscing. "I had a great show once when I was riding on the ferry. They had some soldiers on the island that they were punishing. Made them work right on the edge of the island ... picking up the stones that they have there or laying them down, I couldn't tell which. One slip and they would be in the water, and no one caring to save them. I think that's important, don't you?"

"Important?"

"Yes," David nodded. "It's important that they knew no one would save them. That's what made it so interesting. I ran to the railing and leaned over to see it clearer—"

"Yes, I can imagine that it was highly entertaining."

"Oh no, that was nothing," David retorted. "In fact, the whole thing was rather dull until a wind came up, and then their shirts blew out in back, like big white balloons that they were attached to. And their legs looked so tiny and helpless, you'd think they were bugs being held in the air." David paused, laughing heartily at the picture he conjured up, looking at Poldy for appreciation. "You've seen that, haven't you?"

"Yes ... I recall it now..."

"Now you don't look as though you could balance yourself on wet stones..." He eyed Poldy shrewdly.

"I've never tried, to tell the truth."

"Could you stand on top of a ladder that was steep as a wall, and paint without holding on to anything?"

Poldy considered.

"No, I'm afraid you couldn't," David said severely. "You had a hard time of it in the war ... didn't you..."

Poldy turned on him a wide and troubled glance, but David only looked back innocently. After a while David made a loud clicking sound and bit his under lip, releasing it slowly, letting it slide from his teeth as though he were sucking a delicate flavor from his thoughts. Behind the coarse long hairs of his lashes his eyes shifted back and forth ... Poldy felt he could almost hear them buzzing like insects behind a hedge. He rose to go, feeling a sudden repulsion towards the cripple, and in some way that was not clear to him, degraded by their conversation. Again he had the desire to strike him, but the expert on authority looked back at him with an expression of sad and profound innocence. After a moment David too stood up, and pointed excitedly toward the fountain. "Look ... look," he breathed. And Poldy saw a tatterdemalion fellow followed by a crowd of urchins, who kept their way a little to one side of the main stream of people. The boys were torturing their quarry by the simple device of advancing toward him in a body, and scattering the moment he made a motion to strike them. As the game gained speed the figure in the center became more and more frenzied, striking in all directions with its arms ... until the dark silhouette looked like that of a many-armed god performing for his worshippers. Poldy heard David laughing beside him, a constrained and secretive laugh, as though the peculiar flavor of the joke were known only to him. "Look ... look," he breathed again. "Oh, I can't stand it..." He took the whistle from his pocket and blew it, and the boys dispersed. When the policeman came he seized the man by the collar, and the man, with an obliging motion, ducked his head forward so as to give him a firmer hold. And now that it was over David stretched himself luxuriantly.

"I'll be going too," he announced. "I have a job on for tonight."

"A job?"

"Yes, it's around here. I may get round to it if I'm not too busy. At eight o'clock. Have you my card?"

"It will be a valued memento."

"Will you come to see me sometime? The address is on the card. Come tonight," he added slyly, "and we can go out together."

Poldy hesitated. He did not know whether his strange friend attracted or repelled him, but there was a certain exhilaration that he felt in his presence, a new gaiety that came to him when he could fall in with the other's laughter. Moreover there was the feeling that he was to be made privy to some secret entertainment, they two being the only ones in the whole city to share it. He nodded and they parted on cordial terms. Poldy stood and watched David swinging off towards the eastern side of the park, hitting the posts as he walked and sometimes giving an extra rap to a favored post. And now that he was alone, Poldy saw that the sunset had faded, nothing left of it but an afterglow reflected on the faces of the people who passed ... a pink softness on every face that made it look too naked. Now flesh was revealed as something too weak to stand the caprice of steel with which it was surrounded. "They should have made something stronger than flesh when they invented everything else," Poldy mused. But of a sudden he started to run across the park to the street where he had been walking before. He came to a place that advertised fortune-telling. There was a huge picture of a Hindu in front, and it was just as he had suspected. Under the picture was the word Kuramos.

3

They were collecting money in front of the library. A blanket was spread on the street and people threw in coins or bills. When the blanket had been laid at the beginning, a poor woman stopped and threw down three pennies. After that nobody gave for a long time. Young girls went about shouting shrilly, and a bugler stood by, lifting his horn valiantly and glancing at the empty blanket each time he had to stop and wipe his lips. At last a dollar bill fluttered down from one of the busses, but a wind swept it down the street and a crippled soldier stopped it. Quicker than anyone could bend down he put his knee on it, and held it so until someone stooped down to him and drew the dollar bill out. The soldier smiled up jovially and went on his way. After that the blanket filled rapidly, a fever of throwing money seized those who passed. Those who had never given to beggars, who had never dared to throw a coin from them ... all those to whom the process of giving or taking money was carefully hedged in as though it were obscene, threw all they had into the blanket. They threw it awkwardly and with a look of guilt, because it seemed as if the privacy of things had been violated ... as if, because of this public and shameless giving, the world had changed, and people might stop and void themselves anywhere, and no one would wonder at it.