The city is a great bubble they have blown. It floats over their heads and grows greater and more dazzling. Slowly it sinks down and engulfs them.
This bubble talks for them. Activities talk for them. It is easier that way. Activities say, "We, the people." This suffices. The vanished ones point with relief to the glitter of activities and repeat, "There are we."
But activities grow too fast and too intricate to understand. The burst of names becomes too violent to grasp. Then the people lost in their bubble become an insupportable mystery to themselves.
Buried beneath activities that grow by themselves, that seem to pulse with mathematical passions and to multiply like a devouring fungus, the vanished ones send up a clamor for whys and wherefores. An official clamor. Life has become an enigma deeper than death. The cry is no longer "Who is God? And where does He live?" But, "Who are We and what are We?"
Surveying themselves they see nothing and demand explanations of this phenomenon. Baffled by their anonymity they demand identifications. They want to be assured that things are all right, that their burial is O. K.
And thus new explainers and identifiers leap daily into existence. These are the bombinators, the dexterous geniuses able to translate the insupportable mystery of life. Life is a mumble mumble, a pointless delirium. People feel this and grow very serious. They feel life is a little breath, a whimsical zephyr capering for a moment through space.
But these are insupportable feelings. It is easy for the fish in the sea to feel like that but in people there is a mania for direction. Out of this mania is born the necessity of illusion--the illusion of direction.
There must be illusion. Life is not a mumble mumble but a clear voice teeming with precisions. Not a pointless delirium but a vast, orderly activity that has names--too many names to count.
As children demand lights in the darkness, grown older they demand illusions in life. Their reasoning is simple. "We are so puny," they think. "There is hardly anything to us. We dare not dream or even think.
Look what would happen if we allowed ourselves to dream. We would begin asking impossible questions of ourselves. Why are we? What lies under our senses? So we must put away dreams and thought. They're dangerous.
But without them we become insufficient to ourselves. We become incomplete. So make us a part of something outside ourselves that we may remain unaware of our insufficiency. Make us a part of laws and ideas, Gods, systems and activities. We are frightened by what we do not know.
And above the highest names on our buildings is a circle of unknowns.
Dispel this circle so that we may be rid of our fear. Give us paths to traverse, goals to struggle toward and make these paths and goals outside ourselves. We dare not adventure inside ourselves because that way is inimical. Inspire us with great outward purposes so that the inward purposelessness of our lives that would devour us in enigmas will be obscured."
The illusion-bringers arise--dexterous craftsmen able to fashion purposes, Gods, ideals. Their work is to create heroic destinations, to invent objectivity. These are the geniuses. They provide the sanities which are the vital solace for terror. They invent masters because masters are necessary since to have a master is to have an objective--servitude. The instinct for servitude is an old, unfailing friend. It represents the clamor for an outward purpose to conceal the inner purposelessness of the vanished ones. And the geniuses are those in whom the instinct for servitude inspires new visions of lovelier masters. Thus is progress made--by increasing and making more definite the demands of masters.
Once the geniuses found their task simple. Now it grows difficult.
Famous masters, famous illusions, famous objectives lose their value.
Their capacity for solace dwindles. The illusion of God grows dim. The illusions that bore the names Zeus, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohamet are fading. The knees of the race have stiffened with vanity and prayer grows difficult. The great Heavens overladen with their angel choirs and hierarchies tumble about the ears of people. Slowly the reservoirs of faith in consoling myths dry up. Epigrams have almost sponged away one of the immemorial deeps of the soul.
The geniuses cast about inventing new masters, masters who will reward and punish and establish paths to traverse and goals to achieve. As the activities increase and as people vanish deeper under the self-growing fungus of finance, industry, government, they develop a paradoxical vanity. A vanity by which they seek to preserve themselves. A vanity becomes necessary that will save them from the knowledge of their inferiority to life.... Their age-old illusion of Gods on High drifts away. The new illusion slowly unfolds. Again the reasoning is simple.
The race speaks.... "There is no longer a God or a Heaven of futures.
The words eternity and infinity are bottomless and no longer hold us or guide us. But we must have a master, one who will enable us to dream of His recompense since we still dare not adventure in dreams of our own.
And this master must assure us as our old master did--that there are great purposes in life, great rewards. We will make a minor change in our theology. Once it was our desire to think of ourselves as having been created in the image of God--a Superior. This was when we were strong, when we walked the earth and wore our destinies like gay feathers in our caps. Now we have grown diffused and weak. The world is no longer simple enough for us to understand and ignore. We dare not ignore our disappearance from life. Therefore in order to compensate for this disappearance we will create a God in our image and worship Him.
The deeper we sink, the further we vanish, the higher, nobler and more powerful will we make our new God. Come, illusion mongers, we desire a new God. We desire a new Heaven. Make us a Heaven of quicksilver in which we may see not Jehovah who is a myth but our own image glorified, which is closer to reality, and which our dawning intelligence may more easily swallow. In this heaven let us see our civic virtues magnified.
We want for a master an idealization of ourselves, whom we may serve in hope of rewards."
Thus the vanished ones stare aloft and slowly the heavenly mirror spreads itself for them--a mirror of identifications and explanations.
It is all clear--or at least it grows clear--in this mirror; who we are and what we are.... A beautiful image marches across its face. It is the image of the vanished ones, ennobled and deified--become a new illusion, become a God-like creature with flashing eyes. A marvelous, unsurpassable creature whose every gesture is perfection, whose every grimace is unsurpassable perfection. A reassuring God. Whatever their moods, their despairs, their manias--they have only to look up and see them ennobled and deified in the mirror-heaven.
Gazing aloft the vanished ones raise their voices in a cheer of triumph.
"We are confused. We have disappeared. Our activities have devoured us.
But we are not afraid. For behold, whatever we do, we remain God. See our reflection. We are always and consistently perfect. Our stupidities, hysterias, bewilderments shine back at us out of this new Heaven as God-like attributes. Wisdom and victory smile at us eternally out of our mirror. Let the city devour itself and become a jungle of names. Let life lose itself in the labyrinth of activities. Let the buildings devour life until it becomes less than a tiny warmth under huge ribs of steel. These things are no longer insupportable. There is an answer always to 'Who are we and what are we?' We are God. By worshipping ourselves we may now dispel the dawning knowledge of our insufficiency.
The old God is dead. He was an illusion. The new God alone now has the power to punish and reward. We will kneel with fanatical servitude before the image of our virtues and punish ourselves with a terrible justice in order to appear God-like in our own eyes."
Slowly the new heaven above the city grows and the vanished ones with the eyes of Narcissus stare enchanted into its quicksilver depths.
12
In the days that followed her walk with Lindstrum in the park, Doris Basine abandoned herself to her passion for the man. Her body desired him. She dreamed of their coming together as of some transcendental climax.
But the months passed and Lindstrum held himself aloof. She felt certain of herself though. It was only necessary to wait. She could go on dreaming of him and waiting too. To think of him, to remember he was alive, this for the time was happiness enough.
After a number of months they saw each other oftener. He seemed to grow more dependent on the fanatical admiration of her eyes and words. Her flattery stirred an excitement in him that he was learning to utilize in writing. The fact that he was loved made it easier to write. The memory of the things she said, of the desire in her eyes was like music. It was easier to write with music playing in his head. But the more he wrote and dreamed of writing the less he desired her. So her passion became an applause urging him from her.
He would listen trembling to her gradually shameless avowals.
"You're so wonderful. So remarkable. You're the only man in the world that's alive. Your genius is something I can't even talk about. It must be worshipped. I love you."
In the midst of such monologues she would suddenly vanish from Lindstrum's thought. Her beauty and desire were powerless to hold his attention. Her enfevered praise would become a lash that drove him into himself. And, trembling with a passion that her love had aroused, he would leave her. But it would be a passion which demanded possession not of her but of himself.
He would walk excitedly to his room over his father's shop and sit down to write.
After many months Doris began to understand. He brought her poems he had written; poems like night music and passion music. She felt his heart throbbing among their words. Even his body was in them. What she wanted of him he gave to the poems he wrote.
She announced herself at home as tired of her surroundings and dependence. Through the aid of a friend she secured a job as clerk in a large bookstore. One evening she came home to tell her mother she was going to move.
Basine entered the argument that followed. To her surprise he took her side, agreeing with her that a modern young woman had a better chance of realizing herself if she lived alone and made her own way.
Mrs. Basine refused to be convinced. Not about the theories, she explained, but about Doris. When her two children argued with her she felt herself the victim of a conspiracy. Why did Doris want to leave her home? And why did George want her to? The answers didn't lie in the arguments they gave. But because she was unable to determine what the answers were, she assented. Later she thought,
"If I hadn't given my consent she would have done it anyway. This way I've saved her from being disobedient."
Doris took up her life in a two-room apartment on the near north side of the city. The district was alive with rooming-houses, little stores, lovers who walked hand in hand at night, artists who tried to paint, writers who worked as clerks and tried to write, workingmen, artisans, derelicts. Everyone seemed alone in this district and on warm evenings groups of strangers sat stiffly on the stone steps of the houses and stared at the sky.
Doris was able to live on her salary. She made friends and her evenings were devoted to conversations. But they were a curious type of friends.
They were men and women one got to know only by their ideas. One became acquainted with their ideas, then familiar with them, then on terms of intimacy with them.
It had been different at home. At home she knew men and women as they were. They sat around and talked and if you listened to what they said you came close to them. You understood them and when they said good-night you knew where they were going. You knew all about them, where they worked, their family, their homes. They grew into familiars as uninteresting and unmysterious as your own relatives.
But here where Doris had come to live were men and women about whom you never learned anything. They talked and talked but all the while you wondered where they worked, what things were in their hearts. You wondered how they lived and what they did all the time. But you never found out. Such informations were not a part of the talk that went on.
It was all talk about outside things, about politics and women and art.
Everybody in the circle Doris entered became familiar in a short time.
But after they had become familiar there remained this mystery about them. What sort of people were they under their poses and behind their words?
The most curious change her freedom brought Doris was a garrulity that surprised even herself. She became adept in arguments vindicating the emancipation of her sex and proving that the ideals and standards by which women lived were the rose-covered chains forged for their enslavement by man.
But her garrulity did not deceive Doris. She grew more clearly aware of herself. She knew that her entire upheaval, her taking up new ideas, her repudiating conventions had been inspired by a single factor. She wanted to live alone in a room so there would be no difficulty in giving herself to Lindstrum when the opportunity came.
With this in mind she had deliberately converted herself into a "new woman," since an expression of the new womanhood was independence of family and since independence of family meant a room to herself. Of this subterfuge Doris became tolerantly aware. Her hypocricies did not concern her. In her desire for the man she loved the surfaces of her life disappeared like straws in flame.
Lindstrum had visited her in her new quarters with misgivings. When he was alone he often sat thinking of her and repeating her ardent phrases.
This helped him to make love to himself, to seduce the strange companion who lived in the depths of his soul into embracing him. Out of this embrace came words. Out of the ecstacy these hypnotisms induced, he was able to create gigantic phrases, mystic sequences of words whose reading often inspired people with an excitement similar to the emotion that had produced them. Women in particular grew emotional at the contact of his written words. When he read his poetry to some of them who were his friends they closed their eyes and thought he was making love to them.
Lindstrum utilizing the adoration Doris gave him as a means of self-seduction, remained aware of the danger this offered. The danger was summed up in the word "marriage." At twenty-six his sexual impulses found sublimated outlet in the orgies of self-seduction which he called his creative work. Thus his physical nature clamored for no other mate than his own genius, and the lure of marriage as a legalized debauch failed to touch him. His egoism likewise found a more perfect surfeit in his own self-admiration than in that of others. He saw in marriage merely a forfeit of his privacy and an intruder upon his self-love.