Never hold me in his arms. How beautiful he is. His lips are not like any man's lips could be. But he doesn't love me any more. He loves this in the street below. Men and women in the street."
And here her thinking would begin, a sequel to the preface of sorrow.
Below her moved the face of her rival--the crowd. She must study the thing out carefully so as to be clear in her words when she talked to him. So as to make her words a poison in him that would destroy the passion for her rival.
The night lifted itself far away. Little lights ran a line of yellow at the foot of buildings. Men and women. What were men and women? The blur of faces in the street, moving along every night, what was that?
Something to idealize and give one's soul to? No.
Individuals racing toward their secret destinations and tumbling with a sigh into an inexhaustible supply of graves--that was a phenomenon to be studied separately. Out of that one could locate plots, dramas, humor, tragedy. But here below the window was another story--was a great character that had no name but that her lover worshipped. The crowd ...
this thing in the street he sang of as the crowd was a single creature.
Its face was one, its voice one. It had one soul--the soul of man. A dark thing, alive with inscrutable desires.
"They're not people," she whispered, her eyes staring down, "but traditions walking the street. Accumulations of desires and impulses taking the night air."
She watched it move in silence, buried beneath names and buildings.
The crowd.... It was blind to itself. Its many eyes peered bewilderedly about. Its many legs moved in a thousand directions. And yet it was identical. Faces, different shaped bodies, different colored suits--these were part of a mask. Sentences that drifted in the night, laughters, sighs--these were part of a mask. Under the clothes, faces, names, talk of people, was a real one--the crowd. It had no brain.
And yet this creature that moved in the street below, in all streets everywhere, made laws, made wars, and mumbled eternally the dark secrets of its soul. The crowd ... a monstrous idiot that devoured men, reason and beauty. Now it moved with a purr through the street. It was going somewhere, making love, making plans, diverting itself with little hopes. Its passions and its secrets slept. It moved like a great somnambulist below her window, with a fatuous complacency in its dead eyes. Its many masks disported themselves in the night air. But let hunger or fear, let one of the inscrutable impulses awake it, and see what happened. Ah! Communes, terrors, rivers of blood, heads on spikes, torture and savagery!
She must tell this all clearly to him, explain lucidly to him how the hero-crowd of his singing was a gruesome and stupid criminal blind to itself and afraid of itself and inventing laws to protect it from itself. How it was a formless thing with hungers and desires moulded in the beginning of Time. How it demanded proofs of itself that the darkness of its brain and the savagery of its heart were the twin Gods from whom all wisdom and justice flowed. How the workers, the defeated ones, the under dogs he sang of and loved were like the others--lesser masks envying superior masks. And how the idealisms, Gods and hopes they all worshipped were lies the beast whispered to itself, fairy tales by which the beast consoled itself. Yes, a monster that devoured men who threatened its consolations, a wild fanged beast purring eternally in the path of progress. Reason was a little cap the masks wore that every wind blew off. Her loneliness faded. Seated by her window Doris no longer desired the lips of her lover. There was another elation ... a knowledge of the thing in the street, a certainty that she could make Lief Lindstrum understand.
One evening when he had returned to her after an absence of a month she decided to talk calmly to him of the things she had been thinking. He came in with an air of caution, that frightened her for an instant. She studied him as he took off his coat and hat and sat down. It was autumn outside. Dark winds seemed to have followed him in. This was an old trick of his that had once thrilled her. He seemed always to have come from far-away places, to have risen out of depths with secrets in his eyes. Her heart yielded as she watched him. There was the quality about him she could never resist, the thing her senses clamored for. Not that he wrote poetry--but that he was a poet.
It was almost useless to argue with him, to destroy him. No matter what he said or what he was doing she could see him always as he really was--a silent figure walking blindly over men and buildings, over days and nights; walking with its eyes snarling and its mouth tightened; walking over days and nights after a phantom--a silent figure walking after a phantom. The phantom whispered, "Come" ... and the silent figure nodded its head and followed. That was how she saw him when her heart yielded, when she desired again to throw herself before him, make herself the phantom he was following.
But the obsession in her changed the picture slowly. Not a phantom but a face she knew--the face of the crowd. A wild fanged monster that had cast a spell over her lover and he went walking blindly after it calling words to it, singing lullabys to it, when all these things should have been for her.
Their talk began as she wished it. He was ill at ease. Why had he come?
He was afraid to stay away? Why? She wondered questions as he sat uncertainly in the chair and offered vague gossip and information to explain his presence. Then she said abruptly:
"I'm writing a story. I've decided not to do any more poetry but write a story--a book, maybe."
He nodded.
"What about?" he asked.
"People. About people," she smiled. She noticed his body stiffen and his eyes grow hard.
"Yes, about people," he repeated slowly.
He was cautious when he came to see her now. She had reason to make demands of him. She had given herself to him and he didn't trust her.
And she was always trying to do something to him. He knew this. It was hard to understand her lately but one thing was easy--she was not to be trusted.
"How they come together in crowds," she continued evenly, "and lose themselves in a common identity. How they become a hideous, unreasoning savage--a single savage. I'm going to write a book making this savage the ... the hero."
She paused to look at him. He was inattentive but she knew better.
"You should be interested," she smiled.
"Why should I be interested?" he asked slowly.
"Because you write about people, too."
"Yes."
"Or think you do," she went on. "I'm going to write about people as a crowd--as one savage without a brain. That's the crowd. And this savage is the hero of my story. Without a brain to think he creates out of his savagery the Gods, laws and illusions under which you and I live, Lief.
Do you understand that?"
He looked at her without answer. Her heart grew alive with strength. She knew he was incapable of any answer but anger. His anger could usually defeat her but this time she felt she could laugh at him when he began to scowl. She stood up.
"You," she said softly, "are like they are. Like the crowd. You do not think or reason. You only feel. Words are accidents to you ... crazy hats that rain down on your head. You write out of a hatred for things superior to the beast. You're mad at life because it isn't as beautiful as you'd like it to be. So when you get maddest you begin to sing lies about it."
She laughed at the scowl on his face.
"Yes, I've figured it out, Lief. You're a terrible liar. When you say you love people, the crowd, you're a terrible liar then. You don't love the crowd at all. What is your love of people but a blind infatuation with yourself? You hate them. Whose humanity are you all the time writing about and singing about? Your own. But you're ashamed to admit that. Sometimes people are ashamed to boast of themselves so they boast of something else they've created in their own image--of their Gods.
That's the way you boast of your crowd. You're ashamed to boast of yourself so you fix it up for yourself by giving the virtues you think you've got to people and then singing about them as if you were an altruist and a sympathetic human observer. You're a great liar, Lief.
And the thing you love is a lie you make up. Because people are foul.
And you know it. They're not like you or me. They can't think even as much as a rat thinks. They're as rattle-brained as chickens, as greedy as vultures. And they lie all the time--good God, how they lie. You hate them too. You know all this better than I do. But you keep feeling things and you imagine they're things people feel. You...."
She stopped and looked at him with a smile. She had started to insult him and had ended by pleading with him. His jaws were working as if he were chewing. This was his anger. But she felt no defeat, nothing but a slight confusion. She was disappointed in herself because she could not recapture the thoughts that had filled her during the month. They had been clear at their inception but now they were mixed up with desires for Lief, with a fear of him. They were mixed up so that out of what she was saying there arose no clear image of Lief and his relation to life or of the crowd and its foulness.
"Why don't you answer what I say?" she asked. "Are you afraid to discuss things you are absorbed in? If people are so wonderful let's talk about them."
She felt a triumph. She had destroyed something. She could tell by his eyes. They were becoming wild and unfixed. If she could be certain of destroying it forever, of killing in him the love for her rival ...
then....
"The little finger of one intelligent man is worth the whole of the French revolution," she was saying excitedly. "You're no different from the other cowards who devote themselves to flattering the monster. You know what I mean. The monster rewards liars and flatterers. All you have to do to be great in the eyes of the world is to celebrate the glories of the monster. To make a lickspittle of your genius. It's an old and easy formula. Why don't you think? You stand up with your eyes closed and sing about things that never existed--about the beauty of people and ... and...."
Lindstrum thrust his face close to her. She paused. A desire to laugh came as she stared at the too familiar features of the man. This was the face she had held in her hands and covered with kisses. Nights of passion and adoration had been shared with this face. Now it held itself savagely before her and grew blurred. Something had been destroyed in it. It was no longer familiar. It was somebody else's face....
"People," it said as if it were going to spit at her. "Yes, like you say. Think about them! God damn...."
"Lief," she murmured.
"Don't call me Lief...." He glowered closer.
"Oh! Then you're angry. Well, I didn't expect you to agree." She made her voice tender now. She did not want his face unfamiliar like this as if she had never held it in her hands and covered it with kisses.
But he continued to thrust himself unfamiliarly before her.
"Yes, I agree about the crowd," he answered, his eyes swinging over her head, his jaws still working. "I agree. You got 'em right. Down in the mud of themselves. And me with them, do you hear that! Me singing with 'em. Get me, now. I'm going to tell you."
She moved away from this unfamiliar face but it came closer again.
"I don't want any of your brains. Not for mine. I want to be like I am.
This beast you talk about.... That's me. He can't talk or reason.... All right. He won't then. But he'll do something else. He'll live. He'll go on living. Yes," he raised his voice to a shout, "I agree with you.
Because I'm the crowd. Do you get that ... you dirty ... you dirty fool ... you...."
The oath brought his passion into his head. His hand clenched and his fist shot into her face. She staggered away from him, calling his name.