Erik Dorn Part 46

His entrance created a stir of excitement. He had spent the preceding two days arranging with the chief for his return. Barring the Nietzschean who had functioned in his absence, none had expected him.

He pushed open the swinging door with an old gesture, and walked to his desk. Here he sat fumbling casually with proofs and the contents of pigeonholes. An old routine saying, "Pick me up." Familiar trifles rebuked him. The staff sauntered up one by one to greet him. Crowley, Mortinson, Sweeney.

"Well, glad to see you back. We've sure missed you around here."

Handshakes, smiles, embarra.s.sed questions. A few strange faces to be resented and ignored. A strange locker arrangement in a corner to be frowned at. But the rest of it familiar, poignant--a world where he belonged, but that somehow did not seem to fit as snugly as once.

Handshakes in the hall. A faint cheer in the composing-room as he sauntered for the first time to the stone. Slaps on the back. Busy men pausing to look at him with suddenly lighted faces. "Well, Mr. Dorn, greetings! How are ye? You're looking fine...."

His world. It was the same, only now he was conscious of it. Before he had sat in its midst unaware of more than a detail here, a gesture there. Now he seemed to be looking down from an airplane--a strange bird's-eye view of things un-strange.

He returned to his desk. The scene again reached out to embrace him.

Familiar colored walls, familiar chatter and flurry of the afternoon edition going to press. He felt its embrace and yet remained outside it.

There were things in him now that could never be a part of the unchanging old shop.

During a lull in the forenoon he leaned back in his chair and stared into the pigeonholes. Memories like the unfocused images of a dream one remembers in the morning jumbled in his thought. The scene around him made things he recalled seem unreal. And the things he recalled made the scene around him seem unreal. He tried to divert himself by remembering definitely.... "We lay in a moon-lighted room and I whispered to her: 'You have given me wings.' I held a gun and pulled the trigger as he jumped at me.... Then von Stinnes took the blame.... There's a restaurant in Kurfursten Damm where Mathilde and I.... What a night in Munich!... at the Banhoff. What do I remember most? Let me see.... Yes ... there was a note pinned on the blanket saying she was gone and I ...

But there's something else. What? Let me see...."

He tried to evoke clearer pictures. But the sentences that pa.s.sed through his mind seemed sterile, impotent. The past, set in motion by his effort, evaded him. Its details blurred like the spokes of a swiftly turning wheel. He smiled.

"A sinner's darkest punishment is forgetting his sins," he murmured to himself. He thought of the evening before him. "Better not think of that. Read proofs." He had deferred his meeting with Anna until he should be able to come to her from his desk in the office.

As the day pa.s.sed an impatience seized him. The unfinished event brought a fear with it.... "I must put it out of my mind until to-night." But it remained and grew.

In the afternoon he sat for an hour talking to Crowley and Mortinson. He listened to them chuckle at his anecdotes. Their faces beaming with affectionate interest seemed nevertheless to say, "All this is interesting, but not very important. Not as important as sitting in the office here and sending the paper to press day after day."

The words he was uttering bored him. He had heard them too often. Yet he kept on talking, trying to bury his impatience and fear in the sound of his voice. His anecdotes were no longer memories. They seemed to have become complete in themselves, related to nothing that had ever happened. He wondered as he talked if he were lying. These things he was saying were somehow improvisations--committed to memory. He kept on talking, eagerly, amusingly.

The afternoon pa.s.sed. A walk through familiar streets and it was time for dinner.

"I'm not hungry. I'll eat, though."

Yes, the evening ahead was important--very important. That accounted for the tedium of the day. But it would be dark soon. There would be a to-morrow. There had been other important evenings. It was not necessary to get too nervous. He had writhed before in the embrace of interminable hours, hours that seemed never to arrive. Then suddenly they came, looming, swelling into existence like oncoming locomotives that opened with a sudden rush from little discs into great roaring shapes. And once arrived they had seemed to be present forever. But suddenly the roaring shapes were little discs again. Hours died as people died--with an abrupt obliteration. Yet each new moment, like each new face, became again interminable. Time was an endlessness whose vanis.h.i.+ng left its illusion unchanged.

But now it was night.

"At the end of this block is a house. Two doors more. I have no key.

Ring the bell. G.o.d, but I'm an idiot. She'll answer the door herself.

What'll I say? That's her step. h.e.l.lo? No. Walk in. Naturally."

He stopped breathing. The door opened. His legs were made of whalebone.

But there was a new odor in the hallway.... And something new here in her face. He stood looking at the woman with whom he had lived for seven years and when he said her name it sounded like that of a stranger. His features had a habit of smiling. An old habit of narrowing one of his eyes and turning up the right corner of his lips. He stood unconscious of his expression, his smile a mask that had slapped itself automatically over his face.

But they must talk. No, she had him at a disadvantage. Her silence could say everything for her. His silence could say nothing. He reached forward and took her hands.

"Anna...."

She was different. A rigidness gone. When he had left her she was standing, stiffened. Now her hands were limp. Her face too, limp. Her eyes that looked at him seemed blind.

"I've come back, as you see."

That was ba.n.a.l. One did not talk like that to a crucified one. Her hands slipped away and she preceded him into the room. He looked to see his father, but forgot to ask a question about him. Anna was standing straight, looking straight at him. Not as if he were there, but as if she were alone with something.

"You must let me talk first, Erik."

Willingly. It was difficult to breathe and talk at the same time. He sat down as she moved into a chair opposite.

Something was happening but he couldn't tell yet. She was changed. Older or younger, hard to tell. But changed. It was confusing to look at someone and look at a different image of her. The different image was in his mind. When she talked he could tell.

"Did you know that I had gotten a divorce, Erik?"

That was it, then. She wasn't his wife any more. A sort of hocus-pocus ... now you are my wife, now you aren't my wife.

"No, Anna."

"Four months ago."

"I was in Germany...." Mathilde, von Stinnes, _es lebe die Welt Revolution_, made a circle in his head.

"Yes, I know. I'm sorry you didn't find out."

It was impossible. Something impossible was happening. Of course, he had known it would happen. But he had fooled himself. A clever thing to do.

He was talking like a little boy reciting a piece from a platform.

"I've come back to you because everything but you has died. I begin with the end of what I have to say. I came back from Europe ... because I wanted you...."

She interrupted. "I wrote you a letter when I found out about her. I sent it to New York."

"I never got it."

"I'm sorry."

Quite a formal procedure thus far. A letter had miscarried. One could blame the mails for that. And a divorce. Yes, that was formal too ...

"whereas the complainant further alleges ..." He felt that his legs were trembling. If he spoke again his voice would be unsteady. He did not want that. But someone had to speak. Not she. She could be silent.

"Anna"--let his voice shake. Perhaps it would help matters. "You've changed...."

"Yes, Erik...."

"I haven't much right to ask for anything else...."

Why in G.o.d's name could he think clearly and yet only talk like a blithering fool? He would pause and gather his wits. But then he would start making a speech ... four-score and seven years ago our forefathers....

"I'm sorry you came, Erik...."

This couldn't be Anna. He closed his mouth and stared. A dream full of noises, voices, Anna saying:

"We mustn't waste time regretting or worrying each other about things.... It's much too late now."