PH. D.
467
half. How many of them did he need to go through? Carefully he
had kept down the number of volumes to the barest minimum, but
even as it was, he would have to read an amount equal to at least
four times his height, probably much more. He reshuffled the white
index cards, studied them again to see if he might pick up the lost
thread. It was as though something were missing from the stack,
written down on the cards in careful script, and yet as he counted
them again he saw that the amount was exact. Rubbing his forehead,
Auerbach wondered if he had found the best way of attacking the
problem. A touch of his old sinus trouble spread across his eyeballs.
Today for the second time in the week the ache and the dullness
came into him, entered where his thighs joined his stomach and crept
up into his body. He knew he could leave the reading room, go into
the lounge and smoke for a few minutes. It had helped him before, a
cigarette, yet now the thing within him loaded his center, kept him
in the chair. He looked up toward the large window, tried to push
himself back to the
cahiers,
but his eyes remained on the fine dust
that swam in with the sun. It settled on the drab portrait on the wall
in front. Particle by particle it dashed itself against the frame and fell
from visibility.
There was nothing beyond this for him. He had checked and
rechecked his sources, continued his notes and cross-references. The
problem had been simple and fitted well into the rationality of every–
thing he had been taught. The structures crumble, slowly at first,
almost a physical law, when the pressure from .without is unequal
to the pressure within. Auerbach sought now, even as he had written
it in the outline, the forces of historical weathering, the voices that bit
by bit eroded into the mass, carried it away and redeposited it in some
new form. Here was one, as he turned the page, the peasant who
finds himself unable to buy salt, more plaintive than the rest,
begging to know wherein he had sinned. Where was the fear and
where was the sin? After all, what was it, revolution. All right, it was
an abstraction, it begins and it doesn't begin, it ends with a beginning.
It was for him, Auerbach, to rest his hand lightly in the balance, for
as his stomach twisted his breath in for a moment, he remembered
what Crane had said in a seminar to him.
"Avoid it," he said, "avoid at all cost any descent in the mud.
It becomes the end of all history."
It was as though he were standing, watching an old film being
run off. Sitting in darkness he probed the shapes till they grew
dimmer, and then somewhere from the unknown center of the screen
