a
THE house stands on the height of a mountain. I am aware of the mountain more than of the house. The room in which I am, in which we are, has a door that opens on a narrow hall: and at the hall’s end there is another room. That is the whole of the house. Along the room’s length there are three French windows giving upon a roofless porch: and the slope of the mountain starts down from the porch.
Our room is lighted by a single lamp that burns on the end wall away from the wall with the door. (I feel that the hall is dark and that the other room is dark and that the mountain is dark, and that the night holding the world is dark save for our lighted room.) The walls of our room are unpainted pine, the rafters break and cast into wild shapes the shadow of the lamp. The long wall opposite the windowsis broken by no window, the lamp’s shadows do not fall there, its wood is white. All about is the night, for the house stands on the very mountain crest. Night has invaded even the hall, even the other room. And all about is silence. The mountain sinks in silence beyond our senses. And our senses like prisoned birds live in this shut room where alone there is not blackness and silence.
We are I and Mildred, lovely in a gown of green that shimmers on her body like an emerald molten by the white flame of her flesh. We are I and Mildred and Mildred’s father, and both my parents, and Philip LaMotte and Doctor Isaac Stein. We are seven: brightly at ease and talking in this silent night upon a mountain top so high that the air about us moves not toward earth but the spaces; so high that these silences are bathed in a celestial prescience free from the marring noises of men. And straight from our room with its solitary lamp weaving deep shadows in the ceiling’s softness, the slope bears down dense into adepth too vast for the penetration even of our thoughts.
Mildred is touching a guitar, and she sings:
“As ye came from holy landOf Walsinghame,Met you not with my true loveBy the way as you came?How should I know your true loveThat have met many a oneAs I came from the holy land,That have come, that have gone?She is neither white nor brown,But as the heavens fair;There is none hath her form divineIn the earth or the air.I have loved her all my youth,But now am old as you see:Love likes not the falling fruit,Nor the withered tree.Know that love is a careless child,And forgets the promise past:He is blind, he is deaf when he list,And in faith never fast.His desire is a dureless content,And a trustless joy;He is won with a world of despair,And is lost with a toy....”
“As ye came from holy landOf Walsinghame,Met you not with my true loveBy the way as you came?How should I know your true loveThat have met many a oneAs I came from the holy land,That have come, that have gone?She is neither white nor brown,But as the heavens fair;There is none hath her form divineIn the earth or the air.I have loved her all my youth,But now am old as you see:Love likes not the falling fruit,Nor the withered tree.Know that love is a careless child,And forgets the promise past:He is blind, he is deaf when he list,And in faith never fast.His desire is a dureless content,And a trustless joy;He is won with a world of despair,And is lost with a toy....”
“As ye came from holy landOf Walsinghame,Met you not with my true loveBy the way as you came?
“As ye came from holy land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?
How should I know your true loveThat have met many a oneAs I came from the holy land,That have come, that have gone?
How should I know your true love
That have met many a one
As I came from the holy land,
That have come, that have gone?
She is neither white nor brown,But as the heavens fair;There is none hath her form divineIn the earth or the air.
She is neither white nor brown,
But as the heavens fair;
There is none hath her form divine
In the earth or the air.
I have loved her all my youth,But now am old as you see:Love likes not the falling fruit,Nor the withered tree.
I have loved her all my youth,
But now am old as you see:
Love likes not the falling fruit,
Nor the withered tree.
Know that love is a careless child,And forgets the promise past:He is blind, he is deaf when he list,And in faith never fast.
Know that love is a careless child,
And forgets the promise past:
He is blind, he is deaf when he list,
And in faith never fast.
His desire is a dureless content,And a trustless joy;He is won with a world of despair,And is lost with a toy....”
His desire is a dureless content,
And a trustless joy;
He is won with a world of despair,
And is lost with a toy....”
Singing her mediæval tune, she is one with it, and one with the silver strings that leap from her songful fingers.
I watch Mildred, and Philip LaMotte by my side watches her: Philip LaMotte and I watch each other watching Mildred sing. We three are closest to the other room. At the room’s end away from us, beneath the lamp, sit my parents chatting with Doctor Stein. Close to the central window Mildred’s father plays a game of solitaire.
Doctor Stein sits low in an easy chair with his hands clasped on his knees and listenssmiling to the comfortable converse of my mother. My father leans back: he is enjoying his cigar, and his attention is equal between the heavy rings of smoke that he blows high, and the pleasant words of his wife. Mr. Fayn touches a pensive finger to his brow between each upturn of a card. He is very serious, and unmindful of the talk and of the music.
Mildred sings and ceases: her smile wreathes a balance between us. She sings again. Doctor Stein’s eyes twinkle at the complacence of my mother’s words. My father’s eyes glaze a bit as if the warm lull of the room rocked him toward sleep. Mr. Fayn mixes his cards noiselessly, and lays them out in silence: his feet tap in a toy excitement as the game goes on.
We are at peace and warm: Mildred like a green fountain, sends verdure and dance quietly down the room. Philip and I, knowing each other, quaff her loveliness. We have enough: we are tortured by no passion. From her fingers, from her throat, love jets a coolsource into our lives. And beyond our eager youth sits the maturity of the others: ironic in Doctor Stein, complacent in my mother, dully sensual in my father, childishly earnest in Mr. Fayn.
Mother sends a word, from time to time:
“Mildred, that is a pretty tune. What is it?...” and waits for no answer, remembering some nothing to tell the Doctor. Father frowns, turned desultorily in our direction: but a thick puff of smoke clouds out the frown and he is once more at ease in his flat nirvana.
Mildred sings:
“The winds all silent are,And Phœbus in his chairEnsaffroning sea and airMakes vanish every star:Night like a drunkard reelsBeyond the hills to shun his flaming wheels:The fields with flowers are deck’d in every hue,The clouds with orient gold spangle their blue;Here is a pleasant place—And nothing wanting is, save She, alas!”
“The winds all silent are,And Phœbus in his chairEnsaffroning sea and airMakes vanish every star:Night like a drunkard reelsBeyond the hills to shun his flaming wheels:The fields with flowers are deck’d in every hue,The clouds with orient gold spangle their blue;Here is a pleasant place—And nothing wanting is, save She, alas!”
“The winds all silent are,
And Phœbus in his chair
Ensaffroning sea and air
Makes vanish every star:
Night like a drunkard reels
Beyond the hills to shun his flaming wheels:
The fields with flowers are deck’d in every hue,
The clouds with orient gold spangle their blue;
Here is a pleasant place—
And nothing wanting is, save She, alas!”
“But here the place is better than your song’s. For She is here.”
Mildred laughs at my words.
“What has this place to do with the song? That is dawn. This is night.”
“Perhaps the dawn is coming,” Philip says.
“It is less rare than she. And she is already here.”
“Yes,” he goes on. “Dawn must come where She is.”
“Dawn,” I say, “will be wonderful up here.”
“It will be perpendicular.... Shot up like a flaming arrow from below.”
“And we will watch it fly up toward us, till it kindles the house!” Mildred claps her hands, letting her guitar lie in her lap.
“But,” Philip says, “what will become of the night?”
“The night is the black deep wine in which we have drunk.”
“Day will drink of it, and drink it up, and be drunk.” Mildred laughs at Philip.
“Day will dance,” says Philip, “on the mountain top.”
“Mildred,” I turn to her, “you ought to know. For you are like the day standing upon the tip of the night, and peering down on us.”
“Oh, you two, with your fanciful prose! I have to take refuge in music ... matter-of-fact music.”
She touches her guitar.
“Philip,” I say, “don’t you think we can catch the dawn soon up here?”
He is silent, not knowing.
“John, don’t be foolish,” comes my mother’s voice. “How do you expect to see the dawn at midnight?”
“But the mountain is so high.”
“What difference does that make? Eh, Doctor Stein, what do you think of the foolish ideas of my boy?”
“If you went high enough,” smiles DoctorStein, “above the earth, you could catch dawn at sunset.”
My mother tosses her head, tossing the discomfort of the thought away.
Mildred’s laughter peals: “Oh, I shan’t be satisfied till I’ve seen that.”
“We are high up,” ponders Philip.
“I have won!” shouts Mr. Fayn. “Come, look. It’s all clear. Look!”
“But we believe you, Fayn.” My father languidly blows a ring toward the rafters.
“And even if we aren’t so high,” says Mildred, “perhaps we are high enough to catch the dawn at midnight.”
“We are very high,” says Philip.
“Well,” cries Mildred, “why does no one look? It’s midnight now. Instead of arguing, instead of theorizing, why does not someone look?”
She tosses her head up and down.
“Oh, you’re all too comfortable, here, to budge,” she taunts.
“And you, what about you?” says my mother savagely, while she lights a cigarette.
Mildred turns toward me. I arise from my chair.
“I will look for you, Mildred.”
All of them are seated: all of them are laughing at my words, for even as I hear them, my voice is solemn. What nonsense is this? I accept as real and right this comfortable group of laughing persons, dear to me, who mock from the bright assurance of their world matriced in black, my gesture as I rise to seek the dawn at midnight.
“Look at him,” cries mother. “He’s really going to look. Doctor Stein, whatwillwe do with my boy?”
My father sneers in his kindliest way, and Mildred’s laughter like a precious stone says nothing to me. But I am up from my chair.... And I am near the window.
“Will you know,” says Philip, “how to look for it?”
I do not answer.
Mr. Fayn starts another game.
“I’m foolish,” he announces seriously. “You never win twice in one sitting.”
“There’s a good law,” says Doctor Stein, “to break.”
Mr. Fayn shakes his head.
Mildred’s interest pierces me. Philip sits heavy at her side, a little closer since I left my chair.
Before me is the night.—Well, why not look? Behind me, the real, the light: my dear ones. As I move across the floor, my eyes, ere they have looked, are heavy and are strained.
“There is nothing to see.”
The words have come ere my eyes truly saw if there was nothing to see. It is as if my will spoke the words ... lying words?... My mother nods, content. Mildred bends toward Philip. Father smokes and Mr. Fayn taps his foot on the floor.
“Will you know,” the low warm voice ofPhilip, “how to look for the dawn at midnight?”
“You have told us,” Mildred thrums her guitar. “It will rise perpendicular like a flaming arrow.”
“From where?”
“From the deep.”
“From the deep below the mountain.”
“If I see,” said I, “any signs in the blackness, any stirring in the night, will that not be the dawn?”
And as I spoke I knew that I was speaking to help my eyes from having to look. They held back from the night as if my body had shrunk from plunging with them down into a cold black sea.
“It might be another house, if all you saw was a light.”
“No, mother,” I spoke nervously, eager to answer every word that came lest the silence behind me push my eyes indeed into the blackness. “There is no other house.”
“There is one house on the mountain top,” said Mildred.
“No house could live upon the mountain side,” said Philip.
“Oh, what futile conversation,” mocked my mother. “Really, Doctor Stein, is this all your fault?”
“No house could live,” said Philip, “on the mountain side. And no man could hold to it.”
“He would fall back ere he had risen a single step.”
Doctor Stein soothed my mother: “Do not blame me, Mrs. Mark. And do not blame me, either, if someone asks next how we came here ... high up on the impassable mountain.”
Mother smiled and patted his fine hand: as much as to say “No, that foolish you are not, dear Doctor. That foolish none of us is.”
And then, as they all smiled at the Doctor’s jest, there came from all the room what I most dreaded: silence. No more words to pull meback: but silence pressing against the base of my brain, as I stood near the window.
I breathed at ease, for it was really darkness. I began to exult. I prepared my words as if to fling at them in answer to a hostile challenge.
“See—there is no sign of dawn at midnight.”
The words were not uttered.... I forgot the cozy room in which I stood. I saw the night. And there was something there by which to see it!
The black of the sky was limpid: a well of blackness, a blackness that received my sight passively, and my sight sank in it and was lost. This sky had no cloud, and yet no moon or star. It was a black thing enfolding me. But the slope of the mountain was a harder blackness: dense and wilful the mountain side struck down athwart the mellow blackness of the sky. My eyes went immensely far, until the vast stroke of the mountain faded, became moltenlyone with the warm night of the sky that folded all about.
Deep down where the mountain melted into space and solid and fluid merged into a blindness, I saw a spot of light. I was silent: and as I held my breath, the spot of light moved up.
I spoke:
“Something is down there ... and it is bright ... and it is moving up.”
But there was no answer in the room. My words seemed naked, almost ashamed: so strange they sounded in the place I held between the room and the night.
I turned around: they had not heard my words. They had forgotten me. They had forgotten their own impulse, their own words which sent me on this errand. Even Mildred. She thrummed her guitar and her emerald body swayed, and her face, its opalescent smile, beamed upon Philip, whose eyes she held in hers. My mother was conversing low with Doctor Stein and my father had taken a chairbeside Mr. Fayn: they were intent together over the cards.
“Something is down there ... bright ... and it moves up.”
My words, first naked, now seemed disembodied.
—They cannot hear my words! Once more I faced the window and the night.
The little light, as it grew larger, changed from a bright glow to a vague gray. It became less like flame, more like some substance through whose translucent stuff a flame ran fragilely. And as it moved up the dense mountain slope, it seemed to limn with its march the vastness of this world upon whose summit stood the house: and at whose depth lay the sky.
The words behind me in the room, the tap of a foot on the floor, and Mildred’s hands merging with the silver strings of her guitar, lay in my ears now evanescent. The thing that was a light, yet grayly swelling, moved up the slope of the mountain. The room with itswords and its music and its laughter became a tinkle of gilt beside this gorgeous silence. And in the silence moved the light thing up.
I see it clear.
“Something was down there ... and is moving up ... something convolved and gray. Some Thing....”
Now they heard me. And in the stillness of their mouths I heard their bodies rise, and move across the floor, take place beside me. I saw on either side of me their eyes, peering with mine into the silent night.
The gray light Thing was flowing up the mountain. It had a simple motion up the slope, simple and straight. Within itself it had another motion, intricate and convolved. In its gray translucence, forms swarmed and writhed upon themselves: contorted, funneling, in permutation. But they were held to a unity of interaction, making them simply one in their approach, like the bewildered parts of some body disarrayed by magic, that writhed and twisted to fall back into measure.
The Thing was a penetrant glow within the night, tracing the night of the slope, tracing the night of the sky. The writhing parts of the Thing writhed closer, moved more sluggish, densened, grew white: a white form merged from the chaotic whirl. The Thing was almost abreast us. It was solid. It was the form, translucent and still with a vaporous glow about it, of a youth.
He moves up toward us. The amorphous maze from which he has condensed is now an aura. He moves up from the right, he crosses the front vision of our eyes. He is very near, bearing leftward toward the house, yet slantwise so that he will not touch our room.
A youth, straight, rhythmic, with his profile sharp and his mouth a shadow in the white of his face, and his eye an impalpable fire. His hair is a tangle of shadows like the last embers in a hearth. Now he is white, dazzlingly crystalline, across the black of the night, across the gaze of our eyes!
He passes bearing toward the left. He disappears.
Mildred speaks:
“He has gone into the other room.”
And all of us, not knowing how we know, know she speaks the truth.
We turn about and see each other, and rejoice seeing ourselves so palpable in the warm, shut room.
“He is in the other room.”
“The hall is long, and the door is shut that leads into the other room.”
My mother moves to the door. As she puts her hand on the key she shudders. It is a terrible thing for me to see the lovely and proud flesh of my mother broken in a shudder. But she turns the key. She moves, as if blown by a wind, back to among us.
“Now it is locked,” she says.
We are solid and warm in the room that is locked.... Mildred is looking at me; I feel her eyes, and do not want to meet them.
I am afraid to meet them.—Mildred, whatnow is in your eyes as in your voice that sent me to spy on the night?
Sudden, from the silence, they all speak ... all save Mildred and me.
“Well, we have locked the door,” my mother says.
“What have we seen?” says father. “I have heard no one say what we have seen. We have seen nothing.”
“Let’s get back,” says Mr. Fayn, “to our game.”
“These phenomena,” warns Doctor Stein, “are beyond our grasp. Doubtless because they are the mere reflections of perfectly clear phenomena. We try to grasp the reflections, and of course we fail.”
They are cool and calm, and determined.
“Well—whatever—we have locked the door.”
Philip is passionate. He has forgotten all else. He is alone with his love.
“Mildred,” I hear him call. I turn, and I meet Mildred’s eyes at last. Philip’s handsclasp her wrists that are tender like the stems of a long flower. Her face is close to his, her body is close to his: but her eyes touch mine.
“Mildred, my love—Mildred!” murmurs Philip. Her wrists lie in his hands and her face is near his lips. But her eyes are steadfast on me.
“In the other room?” I ask, as if corroborating.
Her eyes do not move. I nod. And I say:
“I am going to the other room, to see.”
Philip’s hands do not stir in their tender clasp. But my mother, who was once more seated, jumps to her feet.
“No!”
“Why?” ... The others merely turn and look.
“What folly!”
“And what for?”
Mildred’s eyes are on my eyes. I am happy. Her eyes do not know that Philip’s hands are on her hands. I want only her eyes. Her face is white in its gold maze of curls.
I pass her. I turn the key of the door back in the lock. I face about with my hand upon the doorknob.
—Why do they let me go so easily?
For they have not protested more. Their will is shallow: quickly they are at the end of their will. Mother’s thoughts steal back to her easy chair and to her cigarette and to her badinage with Doctor Stein. Father has pulled two huge cigars from his case which he claps shut: he offers one to Mr. Fayn who takes it. In Philip’s eyes, there is a growing gayety of promise as he looks at the milkwarm skin of Mildred.
The hurt of their shallow will moves me to lightness. It is as if, in asserting for myself the inconsequence of what I am to do, their negative permission will become less cold and cruel.
“I’ll not be long,” I say: my voice sounds high. “I’ll be back ... never fear ... I’ll be back.”
Mildred’s eyes for the first time leave mineas if my words released them. She looks at Philip. She is very close to him, and her face upturns to his. Her little breasts alert in the green sheer of her gown are very close to Philip. Her smile flowers near him. She whispers, and they turn away from me....
I open the door. The light from the room tongues into the dark distance and is lost. I look back. Mother and Doctor Stein are chatting, she takes his cigarette and lights her own from it. Father beside Mr. Fayn suggests a play of the cards. Mildred and Philip are side by side: her guitar lies at her feet.
—They have forgotten me?
I shut the door. I am in the black hall.
There is a blacker dark than that of the starless night, there is a blacker dark than that of the mountain. It is the black of this hall. Those were a dark outside that my sense invaded. This is a dark that is invading me, that will fill me, choke me, if I stay in it long.It will drive out from the frail shell of my mind any light.
Black hall, you must be gone through! I press a finger underneath my brow, against the lashes of my eye: I cannot see it. This dark is immobile, so I must move. No gray tinges it, no stir of light. It is packed density. It fights against my knowledge that it is but a hall ... a hall to be passed through, a hall at whose other end as at the end I have entered, is a door.
My will saves me from the sense that this invading black is infinite. I make my hands fumble along the walls: their path is a white tracing that all my body joyously obeys. I fumble at a door. It opens out. And the compressed immensity of the hall blows me into a room, blows the door shut....
There is one window, and the black of the night pours in, gray. I face this window at the room’s far end, and my eyes drink its grayness with an uncanny thirst. This room seems but a bellying out of the hall. At either sideof me, blank walls. The room is long, for that single window is far away, or it is very small.
At my side I grow aware of vibrance in the dark: a vibrance near my shoulder, and as tall as I. I force my head to turn. My eyes see nothing. They rush back to the small window whose gray they have drunk so greedily. The window is gone! Was it a window, then, whose light I have drunk with my eyes? They turn again. Fear hurries with pricking feet over my flesh. I want to go back. The blackness of the hall would be balm now to my eyes. For there is pillared vibrancy beside me. Fright turns my flesh into myriad scurrying feet. I turn to bolt. The lock in the door snaps shut.
—I am alone: I am locked into this room with that which locked me in.
The vibrance at my shoulder falls. And my eyes descry a gradual human form picked from the blackness. It is a subtle growing, as if individual atoms of the dark were heightenedthere, grew gray, grew luminous, and made a man.
He is looking at me, as the gray of his form whitens. He is smiling at me. He moves in the direction of the door, and I turn with him to hold him in my eyes. He stands between myself and the door he has locked.
His smile holds me. He is all grown, now. I can see him. He is about as tall from the ground as I. He is entirely white. Yet he has features. He has hair, he has hands gently clasped before him. I do not know what power, colorless and faint, sharpens his body to my sense. But even his smile is traced upon me, and his eyes that seem to move with a slow swinging up and down from my brow to my feet.
And still he stands between me and the door.
My fear is gone: it is all burned away in the will to pass him, to pass the hall, to be back in the lighted room. But even fearless,how can I go when he stands between me and the door he has locked?
“Let me pass!”
I have spoken, as my mind blanched at the thought of a word. My voice is throaty and real. His body grows a little dim at the words, and tremors: he has heard. The tremor steadies back into white.
His hand is beckoning me forward. His smile grows more intense, works now in my mind like a cold acid. But all my fear is gone. I step forward. He has not moved. I touch him.
What happens is an instantaneous act, and has no mark upon my sense. It is I who am next to the door: it is he, stands beyond, his white form gray and subtly undulous.
I am all act. I have passed through the bolted door. I lance the hall like a light. I am once more in the lighted room.
My loved ones have grown close since I left them, smiling and saying that I would return.They are not aware that I am back. Mildred and Philip murmur side by side. My father has drawn a chair to the card-table and is playing with Mr. Fayn. In the far corner sit my mother and Doctor Stein, smiling, chatting. I stand at the door and watch them. All six faces are within my eyes obliquely, and they do not see me.
Now instantly, these various faces turn: see me: become one in a shrivel of horror.
I stand still. Their variance has rotted all away. They are one.... Mildred and mother and the others ... in a rigid gaze at me, in a cold terror rising from their sight.
“Well, it is I: only I.” Their faces do not move, they have not heard me.
But their stark death, making them one, moves. They rise to their feet. Mildred and Philip, faces fixed on me, retreat: Mr. Fayn and my father move aside. They huddle together in a single group. Six various bodies crowded close and one, in a shrivel of horror.
I go forward. My hands are forward andI am near to them. They do not stir. With my hand I touch the cheek of Mildred. With my hand I touch the hand of my mother. My hands go forward as through an impalpable light! I sweep with maddened arms about their bodies: my arms, unhindered, draw in on themselves. They stand stark huddled, their eyes fixed upon mine: and my arms thresh through space!
Fear is full gathered in my throat. I shriek. I shriek, and thresh with unresisted arms....
I AWOKE crying out.... Very warm, close-bundled, I cry as with the toothless hollow mouth of a babe. I cry and yet there is no sound. I stop. I am more awake. My opening eyes perceive a world that whirls in mazing colors and threatens to break in. This delirious dance subsides. I am quiet in my bed and the dark air lies quiet all about me. I know my body, I know my sheets and covers, I know my room, my open window: the city, purple and encaverned pours through the window into my room. The room all this time has slumbered quietly while I left it, and have come back to it. Swift fears start still from my muscles and my nerves, like discovered stowaways of that journey whence I am back in my room.
And then I knew my Dream, and my mind was stripped of space and time as I tried to face it.
—There is revelation in the Dream! Of that I was convinced. Let me explore its strangely shifting realm. But my mind could not enter. There, stript for action, it pounded at the gate, and it could not enter. I am inside the revealing realm of my Dream. But what good is that, since my mind cannot enter?
I lie in this agony of confusion, holding within my hand the key to the mystery that has distraught my world: and surely my eyes are good, yet when I strain to see, they veer, they tangent off. I cannot see what I hold!
From this turmoil there must be release. My body is moving. I do not know how long I have lain in bed, breaking in vain at the gate of my Dream. Not very long, for the night is still there murmuring like a hollow sea outside and sending in breakers at my open window. There have been no other thoughts, no fancies at all. The Dream is palpable and I within it, and my mind thatmust rejoin me, knocking, beating. That is all.
Then, sudden I am moving! I am getting up, and calmly with the certainty of custom I put on my clothes: I shut the house door: I am in the street.
Faint vestige of dawn. In sparse gray filaments dawn threads through the night: a gradual loom of light that will thicken, that will converge, that will become a texture.... On the street, at the door as I step out, is a man.
He is waiting for me. He is clad in black, he stands in the black shadow of the house: all that emerges of him is his head which is round and white.
All of his head is white: it has a plastic and smooth pallor like the form of certain larvæ: it is a color inhuman and yet deeply fertile. He sees me and nods his head and I feel the black-clad body stir in the gloom of my house. I make no sign: I begin to walk. At my rear I feel him walk apace with me.He is behind and quiet, but he is leading me by an invisible pressure which he holds upon the nape of my neck, the cortex of my brain.
The city has that flaccid impenetrance which comes before dawn. The rush of a car, the pelt of horses’ hoofs, the stride of a man, the flutter of a woman, quiver like darts against the night and fall away. Night is this impenetrable hide about the city.... We are outside the city. A ferry-boat plethorically heaves us across the River. I stand at the forward rail, and the white head man, lost in a shadow of drays and draymen and slowly stamping horses, holds still his palpable pressure on my brain.
—What if I turn about?
I look at the little waves ... the night is windless ... thridding and skipping about the hull of the boat. Their cool tips carry dawn, between the night of the sky and the night of the black waters.
—What if I leap in?
Will the waves hold me? They will part, treacherous and careless, and let me sink at once to the night they dance against. I know in an acceptance weary like age, that I can not leap into the River, and that I cannot turn about. I feel: this guiding pressure upon the cortex of my brain, if it were in my eyes, that it might blind me.
... We are walking in a field. This field is very clear to me, as if its rugose stretch and its barren saliences had already picked their measure in my brain. The coarse grass is dry and gray like autumn, on this sultry April night. As my feet press through, the grass rustles. The earth breaks into warty mounds, grass tufted, and falls to sudden hollows slakish with caked mud. I walk, and though I have not seen his form save for that moment at the door of my house, I know the white head man following at my rear, and leading, keeping pace with my feet so that the sound of his steps is lost in mine.
The field is wide and long: no light of habitationflecks its sallow gloom. But the rathe filaments of dawn swirl in its air with more abundance: a gray flush lies close to its black furrows, catches in the grass and brings to it a tremorous stir as if it was a mouth feebly in voice. I walk. The field is wide and long. The field’s horizons lip darkly down, making this murmurous silence of the field a shut dank thing, and I and the white head man imprisoned in it.
He still prodding me on, prodding upon the quick of my brain: he who is behind and who is silent....
The ground looms a little ahead. And as it rises, the dead grass ceases underneath my feet. My feet tread sterile clay: they strike on it hard as if the clay were frozen, and yet the air of the field is wet and sultry.... My feet stop.
I am at the top of the little loom of the ground. Straight before me an empty shadow. The ground cuts precipitous at my feet. It wreathes about into a semicircle. Below mein the black lies a slakish gleam: a sort of slime within the night: far below. And beyond that, above this bottom of the circling pit yet lower than the crest where I stand, the field goes on over a clutter of broken rocks and stone.
I have stopped short at the edge of a limekiln! My feet have held firm!
There is rage in me.
“So this is where you led me? to my death? to this ridiculous death? I, after Philip LaMotte, after my mother and my father! My death was to be at once more secret and more horrible. No trace of me was to remain. Well: come and push me in. It’ll take more than the pressure of your eyes.”
My feet hold firm. The pressure on my cortex fades with my rage, I step back a little and dig a heel into the clay. Then I turn about.
The man is closer than I knew: a little below, for I am at the top of the field’s rise.
I stare at him and my rage makes a thrustfrom my eyes down to his beetling form. I challenge him, silent. He is clearer now. I can make out in the dawn the smooth black cloth of his coat tight on his muscular body. I can see well the blind and larval rondure of his face.
My rage thrusts at him.
He rises from the ground.... “So this is how you dealt your tall man’s blow at Philip LaMotte?” ... and like a bird of prey he planes low up toward me, over my head. I whirl about and facing the kiln I see him slowly plane into its slime.
His face remains free and his face is turned toward me.
The silence is a texture of half-uttered words: thick, the humid air and the shut field and the kiln make for a silence bulging into sound.
The white head is motionless above the kiln. What I hear is his word. But the night speaks it, the night’s silence is the word of this man.
“Come down. The white one whom you met in the other room ... he is here. Come down. Join him. For it is he you seek, if you are in earnest in your seeking. Come down. You can’t quite see him: your eyes are too gross. I am all of him that you can see. But he’s here. Come down: and join him. Do not touch him again. What good is there in touching? Come down and join the white one who is you, in the other room.... Here, if you will but come, you and he are one. And I will be released. For I live in the edge, the jagged, cutting edge of the difference between you. And I am weary with your biddings, I have done them well, I am weary. Come down. And I will be released.”
My eyes go down into the kiln below my feet, to meet the eyes of the man. My knees hurt with a sudden strain. It grows. With the tendons and muscles of my body I am resisting the pull of the man inside the kiln.
There he floats, immersed save his head:and his smooth face shining at me ... pulling, pulling.
The grip of my will upon my muscles weakens. I hunch a little looking down from the height. The man is smiling at me now. It is as if he reads this hunch of my body down toward him as the first step of my defeat. He smiles. The strain of my legs shoots upward to my back. Pain. The round head in the kiln beckons in a horrid caricature of bidding. I am growing weak. Anguish. My knees are bent. My neck is forward and my arms thrust out. Torture racks my body: my muscles are corrupted. They press and shriek to tumble in the kiln. My will and my mind fight naked on the other side ... stript of strength, stript of body ... to defend me against the pull of the man within the kiln.
I am at the end. All of my body urges down and forward. The muscles of my back no longer hurt: they are numb, they are sheer urgency to leap. Pain lives now only in my forehead: my body is dead as if already ithad joined the man in the slime of death. But my brow holds back. It is a flame of resistance: it is molten pain, knowing that it must fight, knowing it must be shrewd to cheat my body of its enamoured death.
My body is about to plunge within the kiln. My body is a single clamor to be done. The smile of the white head is a bland broad smile. The head thrusts back, beckoning, ghastly at ease.
My body is about to plunge into the kiln. My mind is very shrewd at this threshold of death. Beyond the kiln, the field goes on upon a lower plane, over the clutter of broken rocks and stone. In an ecstatic moment, as my legs flex to leap, my will possesses them.
I leap. My body in that instant is the essence of my will. I leap high. I leap far. Not the kiln, the rocks beyond the kiln are in my eyes....
I have leaped over the kiln. My body crumples on the rocks. I embrace their harshnesswith caressing hands: my lips tear, grateful, on their sharpness. This fierce pain in my ankle, twisted as it struck, is sweet to me.
I lift myself, and turn. The kiln is behind me: and there is no one in it.