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MORNING and Spring pour into my room.—My room ... my bed ... my self. I have slept in my bed as usual, this is Spring. Bright resilient Spring, you’re a red-cheeked girl laughing into my room! Mysterious Spring, for you are real! Marvel of that: this volute swelling bloom within my window. How wide do you go? How deep?...—At the ruddy heart of Spring a spot gray and harsh. I lie in bed and grow aware of myself as a canker in the morning.—Can we both be real? This carnival of light does not destroy the canker: all gayety sets off a gray moment that is I. Which then is the real I must dwell in, since I know that I am not this Spring?...
—Why am I this gray thing, lying in the Spring?
—What is the matter with me? Where have I been?
—Morning ...John Mark. Does the name construct a world? Oh, there’s a larval world of dream that no sun has scattered. But what is a world of dream against May’s wooing? Spring pearls over larval worlds of dream with its iridescent dance. Yes, there is that darkling realm: let the sun then spill it over ... limekilns and autumnal grass and murder, murdered by the Spring. But they come in! Which now is the dream, which the real? Spring, can’t you reach the canker?... It protrudes, it invades. Murder ...John Mark!
Under the hall door there will be the daily paper. What balm do I seek of that, wanting it now for my eyes? I lie in bed, I seek a balm of denial.
—In the paper you will learn what is real and what is dreamed. Go for your daily paper and watch the dark dream die. It will say “Clear and warm to-day,” and your window says it. Spring there, sitting on your window-sill,says what your paper will say. So Spring is real.What else will it say?
I draw my legs from the covers. Pain.Then that is true?My hand in a search that makes its moving to my ankle a deep rent of some sleep in my mind, touches the swollen flesh of a larval truth.
—That ankle and its pain: the limekiln and the man with the white head: my parents: Philip: Mildred! The low house on the mountain? The other room? How should I know what is true? Perhaps there is no falsity at all. If all is true, will horror go away? Spring tides into my room,my ankle scorched against the limekiln slant. I am John Mark,Philip LaMotte is dead. I love you, Mildred,read what the paper says about the death of your parents.... How many things can there be true at once?
An instant I have lain quiet in my bed. Three volute worlds spin from a spot of my mind in threefold spaces, touching one another only at myself. One world has a surface ofshimmering sunny waves. One world is an opaque clot colored like blood. One world is pale, a white transparency, and at its heart little filaments ultra-violet, fixed, while the misty surface spins.
The instant is gone. Painfully with my swollen ankle, I make a way from the bed to where, under the door of the living room, I see the tip of the paper. I knew then how I had marched that night through the bleak field, away from the limekiln which lived in it like a sultry evil eye: how I had reached a suburb where the houses stood soiled between the night and the day, and how a cab had taken me home.
The black letters spoke to me:
MR. AND MRS. CLAYTON MARKDIE IN STRANGE MOTOR MISHAP
L. I. Garage Man Held
Well-Known Society Leaders Crushed to Deathas Front Wheel Flies Off
Only Son is Dr. John Mark of Institute
Well, John Mark, here is fact, whatever truth lie under.
Mother and father are dead. You’ll no more see them. They are bodies arrogantly aloof from your erectness, from the touch of your longing. The white head man who said: “I am your slave” ... that’s a fact, too ... doomed the car that slew your mother and your father. You possess half a million ... a fact! ... and you love Mildred, you can marry Mildred. Is that the truth? Philip LaMotte is dead. The white head man who said: “I am your slave,” rose ... you saw how he rises ... rose above Philip LaMotte and with your surgeon’s science struck him dead. Philip LaMotte dead, your mother and your father dead: —I can marry Mildred?
... “A little truth. For God’s sake, now, a little truth to season all these facts. Else they’ll stink in your flesh, John Mark: they’ll rot your soul, John Mark. A little truth.”
How strange that I lie bearably in bed! Pleasantly. That ankle is a blessing. Nofracture. I diagnose a strain and a bruise. A fortnight’s rest will doctor it as well as any doctor. A fortnight’s meditation will doctor my mind and my soul. For they are sore in need of healing. —Truth, to ease the chaos of these maddening facts: truth that is harmony like this which holds my body, all of its stress and thrust, to the balance of health!
But first there is the funeral to go to.
The ankle’s an excuse to free you of that. No: be borne in your royal litter, wounded but heir to half a million dollars: borne to the laying away of your slain parents. That is a privilege too rarely human to be missed by you. Such a son, such loving parents: and the muffled friends, looking with veiled envy at your devotion.
THE day of the funeral was a bright laughter. Sun sent its golden peals across the sky that warmed and opened like a wanton girl. The stones of the city as we passed were a half liquid substance, laved and entered and absorbed by the May morning. Asphalt, men and women drab-clothed walking, the strew of wagons and the loom of houses ... all was a texture of imprisoned light. I felt how all this various matter was a whirl, crystallized and bound, of luminous electrons: how all of it was one with the sun’s steep pour and with the sudden jet of my own mind merging with it.
The cemetery was a smile of lawn in which the monuments stood like polished teeth. All of the countryside was a response in laughter to the frolicsome couple of the sun and sky.
We stood beside the Minister. The marble vault opened its bronze grille and as the coffinsslid into their place, a Christian word nodded the act to gayety. Were not the coffins polished? Was not the vault a little elegant smile echoing the brash laughter of the skies? And the solemnity of the group who with bared heads watched the bodies of my parents slide away, was it not thrust across the wanton mood of the morning like a comic strip? Eyes dwelt a moment upon me and read there the conventional bereavement. A subtle counterpoint stirred underneath the elemental laughter. All of us seemed little whirls of dust modeled by a momentary wind: pompously we were acting our droll scene for the gods whose straighter moods shone in the sun and the earth, and who used us for their more intricate and secret humors.
I have lost my mother and my father. How, here, in this laughing farce of Spring, can I dwell with my sorrow? Here all of us are dwarfed too cruelly. Almost, I expected as we walked away, to see the Minister fling offhis mask and motley, to see the mourners caper in relief as at a curtain’s drop: see all of us and the dead bodies of my parents, too, and their so polished coffins, take on the ease of supers when the show is done: pocket their pay and pass....
From the east, a cloud, swollen and purple, voyages upon the sun. The earth shudders as the sun is shut out, and like a festooned ship upon a mournful sea it founders. Moving toward home, I move in a dark element, and it has swallowed all the laughing world. This lawn is a breast of decomposing flesh. The stones of the city are death substantiate, feeding upon the drab-clothed men and women who weave within and without in wistful struggle to escape. Upon my window-sill where Spring sat and pelted me with flowers, an empty breath breathes emptiness.... The true stuff of space in which our cosmos flickers like a fly in a night of storm?
I am on my couch.
—Oh, there must be a truth to salvage me from chaos. Life is a whirlwind? Let the Lord which is Truth speak to me then from His whirlwind.
THREE weeks I lie on my couch and am alone. Three weeks of travail and unceasing night. And at the three weeks’ end, an infant birth of truth so frail and so nostalgic of its womb that it scarce wills to breathe, and every hour I must nurse it forward lest it lapse back into the sweet Abyss.
The travail has its own life. When it is done, there is the babe of a truth. And yet how are they joined, this deep volumnear anguish and this green sprout rising after? My travail is an earth: and from its dark and secret brood springs a light shoot of knowing....
I am in labor of my vision. I lie locked in a distress spherical, moveless. My room moves through time, time filters into it, so I can mark the days. But time does not live in this passionate whirling Sphere that is theimmobile body of my meditation. Or if time, not thrice seven days but all the years of my life and all the ages of my roots ere I lived. All the pain of my years and their joys were this great coil about me: were the bedded soil of my distress. And all my loves and dreams lived in it like the solved minerals in earth. But this spheric stuff about me is not my love nor my hate, not memory nor dream, not pain nor joy: is all of these and mysteriously more....
I am a child in my mother’s arms, and I am grown and from my lips harsh words berate this passionate woman who is my mother and who has withdrawn from life, finding it in her pride too painful to be borne. I am a boy striding with awkward steps beside the magnificence of my father, and at school facing alone a crisis where he has failed to follow ... too selfish, too dry to share in my emotion. Thoughts in serried troops invest my mind, and I live and sleep in a clamor ofscience, philosophy and dream. Fragments of verse tinkle in the stream of studious hours: bones of dissected bodies and sprays of Spring float together down my youthful way. I am a lover, bringing to the bed of my beloved nosegays of books and notes. Words rise like birds from the margin of my mind, and blacken the sky and scream and sink again, suddenly become the stones of an exploded city crashing to the ground. Here is a bower redolent of dusk: my hands clasp the waist of a girl and touch her breast. And in the limpid shadow of the trees, there is a grave and I must enter it, and study bones: and count the countless cells that a girl’s breast has moved to ecstasy within me. I sit with a story book in the old house and watch my father rustle the evening paper while my mother plays languorous music at the piano. My own hand rises menacing from my little body: grows: grows immense: crushes father and mother: shatters the walls of our house. I walk upon a field that glitters underneath a scarlet sky.Sudden my beloved parents and the field and all the things of earth, and all the things that live, lift into sound!
The Universe was music! Pulsant, polyphonous and vast, it slept like the western plain, it rose like the mountains, it tided like the sea, it sang like the stars. My heart was music. Life swelled in myriad atoms, and every one a separate song, and all one voice, rounding, embodying me....
But once more there is time and I am moving within it. Once more there is this shut, expanding phase which men call life, and I am bounded by it.
Some fatal signal of my will has challenged Truth to let me glimpse it, to let meuseit: and we are joined forever. If I am to live, I must destroy this sin of using Truth for my own life: I must make my life into a facet of the Truth. Men have done that. (But far more men have died.) Oh, let me make my human life this glory! In its shallow close,the air will gleam with a transcendent fire: all these broken surfaces of being which men call bodies, things, will throb with the divinity of wholeness. The common deed of spheres beyond man’s flat domain is Miracle. And it must enter now into my life. Or else I must pass out.
I lie upon my couch and am lifted to the topmost peak of a mountain solitude. In vaporous essence, all the events of my mind and of my heart rise from their recondite valleys and are a cloud about me.
Solitude: at last I see your eyes. Deep and inscrutable and without color they look at me and draw my marrow. Solitude, you are terrible because you are so full of my own being. No other thing is there to impede this flow of all my thoughts and all my passions into your ghoulish void. Solitude, you are a horror because you are my self. And this ... my self ... the air that I must breathe:and this ... my self ... the flesh that I must eat.
Why has this been my fate? Have I not loved my mother and my father? How differed my childhood from another’s? Turmoil there is always, moments of pain, flashes of anger, little understreams of injury and resentment. I was ambitious. Even as a child, I felt that I must prevail upon the world. And I was scarce a boy, when I knew my instrument, and moved forth to fashion it; knowing that I must create it, ere I could wield it.To prevail by the truth.Was that a sin? Who taught that that was sin? You are at fault, if that is sin ... all you masters! You Greeks and Hebrews, you noblemen of the mind whose past words are the body of our world. Why did you mislead me, if it is sin for a young boy to say: “I will to live to learn, as a man may, the truth.” ... But perhaps you also, even as now I ... found at the end of your passage, Hell. Perhaps too late. Perhaps the gate of agony hadclamped you in, before you could send back to us a warning.
The world that I have lost was sweet. Fondly I believed in it, devoutly I was attached to my belief. The world is not well lost. But it is lost indeed. How can I doubt that? I have slain and buried more than my father and my mother. My friends, how can I meet them? And my work: and the glow that came from work with colleagues and with masters and that was great part of my delight in work! And all my hopes ... the memory of comrades and of loves that was so good a promise of loves I might yet win....
No more may I walk down the casual street and watch with open eyes the open faces of my brothers. No more may I let my sense move close, sure in its right, to the woman who calls it forth. No more may I be one of a group at table, accepting easefully their acceptance.
O warm packed common of the life of man!the pleasant word with the waiter taking my order; the humid confidence of the charwoman who cleans my rooms; the nod to the policeman at the corner; the gossip with the newsman, a dark fellow with eyes great in dark glasses; the community with crowds that I won of my daily paper ... thrilling with clerk and laborer at the latest scandal, shouting at the portentous choice in the election of Tweedledee over his rival Tweedledum; the massed brotherhood at the Polo Grounds, cheering the Giants, booing the Pirates ... the intricate unsung sacrament of moving in a family of men! All of us eat, all of us know what hunger is and love, and sleep, and sleeplessness. All of us have mouths that give forth words, have ears that receive them. Do we not walk in ecstasy so vast none can give thought to it? None, save me, who am barred. Not you, prisoner at Sing Sing. You have comrades. Though they thrust you in solitary, a whole world knows of you, either to pity or to blame ... and both are ways ofhuman intercourse. Not you, dead body rotting in the earth, for you rot with your brothers, you rot with all mankind. I am alone. And there is no fellow to myself in all the anguished and warm spaces of men! Oh, I could sing a pæan to the life of the slave-galleys, since there are fellow-oarsmen, since there is a master. I envy the soldier driven to his death. What warmth in the fellow fate of his brothers, in the intense caress of the enemy who slays him. Yes, the victim falling from a blow knows the passionate caress of his assailant. And the babe unborn presses its blind hands against a womb that loves it....
Common street of the hospitable city. If it be cold, what one of you who walk cannot say “It is cold” and have response? If you hunger, cannot you take your place in the immemorial army of famine and despair, side by side with all the others who know you, who accept you, who salute your right to share in the common want? Oh, if I could undo any tragic search for the Truth that has slainme, that has made me lone as no star in the crowded heavens ... how I would sing your riches, manifold Life: Life, in whom men and women move, signaling one another, touching bodies, sharing pain and laughter! Oh, fool to seek the solitary Truth, when Ignorance is crowded and is warm.
I am alone. Has hope, the latest straggler, that remains even when anguish has departed, whispering: “Peace ... you will die.” ... has hope gone, too?
The faces of mankind are stranger to me. And the city where I live is a cold memory that has forgotten how to greet me. And my work that loved me is a lie too small to hold me. Has hope gone, too?
—You are a sufferer who can say to no one: “I suffer.” You are a sinner and there is no name for your sin. You are too lone to confess: too lone even to be despised....But the word hope must still be there, since you recall it?
God stands so far away: the truth, that God is All and that no life can die, is not a neighbor. Truth sweeps away the nearness of good things. For the things good unto the life of man are they on the bright surface where man crawls: it is the brightness of his need that makes them shine. Blesséd, blesséd man! Fool, when you seek the truth that lies in darkness. Sage when you stone your sages, when you crucify your Christs.
God is too far, and too vast.
But the word hope is there!
Hope ... Mildred ... there?
So came the thought of Mildred, and grew, thriving on hope, hope on her, until the two were one and at last were all. The world were well lost indeed, if Mildred still could be my world. If, knowing what I was, what I had done, how tragically I had been moved to equal her own ruthless, wordless wisdom—if she accepted me, I could accept the truthand master it, and bring it down to our own livable world. What sin was mine, if Mildred still was mine? What loss if all my loss had purchased her? I was no sickly repentant to bewail that my will had forged from the Whirlwind weapons to make its way. I was not weeping because Philip LaMotte lay dead, and my idle parents. No: I wept because my act had slain my world and left me all alone: I wept because of the falsity, the ugliness, the sterility of what my will had done. But if it had won Mildred, if it brought to my life the beauty of Mildred, then indeed my will was mastered by a greater and was good.
Mildred and hope throve on each other so, and grew in my mind: and my body healed. I thought toward the day when she would come at my call and we would consummate a marriage whose like earth had not known.
—What waits on that day? I said at last. Is there not a telephone in your room? Andthough I have used it little these three weeks, have I not a voice?...
Her voice answered mine. And said that she would come.
“This afternoon.”
I WALKED to the door, I opened for her. In the day’s low light, I looked at her. Mildred! the lovely body of my hope. A sharp pang cut across my eyes: I would not question it. I looked at her, moved all my power to know upon her standing there within my room, so free and so near.
The weeks had worn her. Her golden hair strained back from the transparent, faintly throbbing temples. The brow was higher, more pale, with this new way she caught her hair back, almost brusquely, from it. Her body seemed lighter: it was a sheath ever more frail and quick to the fluid of her soul. She stood at ease, and yet a subtle drooping of the shoulders, the clasp of the tapered fingers on her breast, marked a fine tracing of thetime upon her. She was intact, but a rain of circumstance had worn her.
“Mildred,” I said.
She sat down, and watched me. The pang across my eyes was sharper still. She arose again: took off her cape and sitting folded her hands in her lap.
“Mildred——”
What was the cause of this pang? Was she a disappointment to my eyes, that what they saw hurt knife-like? Oh, she is perfect fair. And yet I know, even before I have begun to speak, what is this knowledge pressing and cutting my eyes, which all her fairness, all my words unspoken shall not prevail against.
“Mildred—Mildred.”
I felt the need of touching her, as if to prove that she was there. I came to her and I knelt at her side, and I took her hand ... she let me take her hand ... and I pressedits palm against my brow. The pang is sharp, inside: her hand cannot reach it.
I arose. And my words came as earnestly for me, as for herself.
“Mildred, you know that I love you.”
“Yes, John,” was her whisper.
“You are all my life. When I saw you last, this was true and I knew it for true: and I said this to you. But, Mildred, I could not dream then how true it was, how true it was going to be.”
Her eyes at once were darker and more bright, filling with her sympathy. She was thinking of my parents.
“Not alone that,” I said. “Not alone that. Least of all that, dear Mildred. Everything is gone. I have left the world. I have irrevocably lost it. For a long time unknown to myself, I was preparing this. Even when last you saw me, and the time before ... that last time at your house, when Philip died ... I was, unknown to my feeble consciousness, slaying the world. And I am all alone.And it is all well lost. Not that I did not love it. But look, my darling, all of it I love, and all in it I love, has become you!”
She accepted this as no new thing ... no new wonder.
“You had become all in life that my life needed. And the rest was a husk ... to be cut ruthlessly out.”
She withdrew her hand from mine. She clasped her hands in her lap and looked at me in a gesture of peace so far from my turmoiled state, that my eyes hurt, spanning the abyss between us.
“All of this ... you must listen carefully, for you must understand. That is my single hope: that you will understand: and all that I am saying is the truth, weighed as a man of science weighs, beloved ... all of this was taking place in me not from the moment when I knew you, but long before. What the world promised seemed good. Faith, passion, beauty, joy, the comradeship of perfect understanding, love in peace and in its strife ... allthis ... the dangers faced with more bitterness than hope, the hours when anger cleanses, the quiet ways through woods, the ceremonials of the sea, day ... night ... the secret dwelling within the body of the belovéd as in the heart of heaven: all this the world had to give, and all this I cherished and believed in. But of all this, the world as I knew it was unworthy. Every jot of it was a crass imperfection ironically giving birth to a dream. Men and women were but maimed bits of themselves. Passion and vision were shreds torn and drooping, not banners across the sky.
“So I withdrew from the world, Mildred, the world’s splendor. That was before you came. How wonderfully, though I did not know, it was for your coming!”
I could not read her smile. And yet it moved me, making me defensive not for me: for her.
“I did not create for myself the image of a woman, and when I met you like a romanticconfound that image with my eye’s. No, my withdrawal from the world of the world’s splendor was more terrible than that. For it was absolute. It was designless, and ruthless. It was, because it had to be. The world could not hold my desire of the world. Let the world therefore go!” ...
“Dear,” I drew closer to her, “how could I have dreamed that there would be a morrow ... the morning when I knew you ... by whose light all that had gone, all that had been dreamed, was darkness?”
What I had now to say no words of mine seemed great enough to bring. I was kneeling at her side. Again I took her hand ... again she let me.
“Did I know deeply always that I would know you? And the long years of vigil, of abstinence, were they my need, a wiser than the knowledge of my mind, to prepare my house for you? I cannot say. I know too well what infinite ways we go beyond the shallow tracings of our mind, to doubt that thismight be. And yet, Mildred, the morning of my finding you was bright only as could be morning to a man who had dwelt in perpetual Night, and who knew not there was such a thing as sun. Can you picture him amazed, seeing the unknown sun? seeing the crystal radiance of dew, seeing a sky that is not black and the young clouds about his head: seeing last of all his lamp that had been his sun, fade to a blot against the wide magnificence of morning.”
I bent my head and pressed her hands against my brow once more. So, with eyes shut, I kneeled while the day dimmed, and heard the steadfast lifting of her breath, and felt her there, and knew not what I felt: so sweet, so near, so unbearably far she was.
“Mildred,” I whispered, “what would this man do, enamored of his morning, his first morning ... what would he do, if there was danger that the morning go, ere he had more than glimpsed it?”
I raised my eyes slowly. She was lookingat me. Her eyes did not stir, meeting mine. It was as if they had begun to see a thing within me, and were rapt in that deep focus.
“Mildred,” I whispered, “all this that I know and that I tell you now, I have known only since last I saw you. My mind strove, you know how purely, to make great my will. It worked better, O terribly better than I knew. For at the end, my will became so masterful that it ceased to consult my mind. How long it had been this masterful monstrous thing, I cannot say. But when there was danger that the dawning sun go or be clouded: then it worked. And only after what anguish of search, did I learn what it had done!”
She looked with her deep still gaze within me. Upon her eyes a faint glaze gleamed and it was hard, this surface of her eyes, hard and defensive: not like her eyes at all. I talked as if to pierce this glaze, as if to melt it.
“Perhaps from the beginning my will worked and made a fool of my mind ... a slave and a fool. Perhaps it was preparingfrom the first day, for you. Do you think that could be? And all my labors in science seeking the truth, all the chaste rigors of my life ... do you think perhaps these were blind ways for the working of my will ... plotting for you, wanting to possess you?
“For when I saw you, I wanted to possess you. And since I saw so deep, that was a sin. The shallow man may dare to possess. But your body was not enough for me: nor your mind, nor your love. Oh, I wanted them! But I beheld in you what no man can possess. Your mysterious power—the wisdom of your beauty which is so great that it has no words, that it disdains your mind. I wanted to possess that, above all. By equaling it—I with my plodding mind of words and concepts! I became mad in love of your beauty: I wanted to possess, by equaling your beauty.
“Mildred, I must tell you everything. There is a brutal strain in my will. And when the end that it would win is brutal, it does not tell my mind. For my mind is not brutal.
“Mildred, there were obstacles in the way of my will to my life’s final need; obstacles to you. For you must be mine perfectly. Even my mind agreed in that, and suffered.”
Her hand was motionless in mine. It was like a sleeping thing.
“I killed Philip LaMotte, who was in the way of my will.”
Her eyes seemed to be drawing forward from their distant focus to my mouth, as if what they had seen before within was now articulate there.
“My will killed the man whom my eyes had never seen, whose name I did not know, nor whose existence until you told me he was dead. My mind knows that, now.”
I could not bear her hand, this dead thing in my own. I could not let it go.
“There was another obstacle to our perfect marriage. I was poor, Mildred ... and my work was the sort men praise, the sort that nourishes men, but that they do not pay for. I went to see my parents, on that same fatalnight when I was with you, and when my will was slaying my one rival. I told my parents of you: I begged them to give me money, so that I might ask you to become my wife. They refused. Mother, because she loved me selfishly and did not wish me to marry. Father because he loved only his ease.
“... I slew my parents.”
Then I could let loose her hand.
With her other hand she clasped the hand I had held. She felt it: she shuddered. She let it drop to her side.
“My will did away with my parents. I am their heir. I am rich.”
Again she clasped the hand which I had clasped.
“There was a deeper reason for my deeds—a better reason. My will, in these ruthless acts, proved itself equal to the power of your beauty: equal to the power in you which had called forth my love. These were sacrifices to you, Mildred: to the Goddess within you! Sacrifices to prove your lover as terrible, asineffable, as strong as was my love, and as was the power in you that made me love you.”
Mildred arose. Her hands quavered up to her brow.
“John ... are you mad!”
I smiled, and feared to smile lest the smile be horrible to her. Her hands clasped her brow. Then suddenly she let them fall. Her face hardened an instant, a glaze of resolution around its tender bloom. She sat down.
“John, can you explain what you have said?”
She seemed wholly woman. Could it be that my words diminished her? What I had to say was unreal and strange, now she seemed wholly human.
But I told her my story. And as I spoke, slowly, with care, I bled with agony. For this was fire I was pouring all about the flower of my love. How would she emerge? Transfigured to be my mate, wedded by fire to fire? Or ash?
So I went on, and told my story....
“Whence does he come, this larval man whom my will summoned, whom my will endowed with all the cunning of my learnéd brain, to slay, perfectly, surely? Is he gone forever? In that moment at the limekiln, when my intelligence had challenged my will’s deed and we stood locked in conflict ... the larval creature of my will, and my self of the light ... did I do him away? I think he is gone forever. He could live only when my mind slept: and now it is awake. That is why he strove to murder me. To drag me by the dark roots of us both into the boil of the limekiln. And he failed. Had he not been desperate, surely he would not have tried to kill his master by whose darkness he lived. My mind won in that electric moment! My mind leaped with my body, to the other side. He will lurk no more, murder no more. For my soul knows him.... But he has seared my soul.”
Her hands did not cease from moving while I spoke. Now, in my silence, they moved.They clasped in anguish on her breast. They went to her brow. They tremored at her side. They were like flowers tremulous in a flame. She sat, swaying gently, like an agéd woman.
I was silent. Her head turned, and she saw me. The glaze in her eyes grew as what she knew was measured with her sight. Her body was rigid. Her pain was freezing her. She swayed no more. And her hands were lifeless.
I knelt before her. But I did not dare to touch her. I put forth my hands, but they remained suspended. For I did not dare to touch her.
“Mildred,” I said, “save me.”
She watched my hands, as if she wondered what these suppliant palms were going to do.
“There is power in me, Mildred. And power, if it is happy, is divine. Do you now know how I have needed you? Have I not won you? Save me!”
She watched my hands. They covered my face an instant. I stood up. And I stood over her.
“Mildred, I have been ruthless. Yes. More ruthless than my mind would ever have conceived. Is that a weakness in me? I loved my parents. They were the only human beings in my life. I was ruthless, because I was in love with Beauty. I have used truth ... as it was revealed to me, vastly beyond our miserable sphere ... I have used truth, because I was in love with Beauty.”
Her face was blanched as if some fire had seared it. Her eyes were like stones. Her beauty was a mask.
I feared what I saw in her, for it was the worst of myself.
“We must go on, now, Mildred. We dare not stop. You and I together with truth at our command, to create Beauty. To make Beauty live.... Mildred, will you save me?”
Still she did not speak. She watched me from her place below me as I stood. But she watched my eyes. And her eyes were limpid again, and warm; their glaze had melted.
“I have learned that Truth is cold. It is acold that burns: terribly and relentless. Truth cares not for man, and man in love with it is like a moth who would possess the sun. Oh, have I learned too late! Man cannot live with Truth. And yet he loves it. So by a miracle, he turns it into Beauty. And he dwells with Beauty. Save me! Save me!”
Her face broke, and her hands covered it. She wept.
“My love, my love,” I said, “do you not understand? I want to be a man. And I have glimpsed the terrible face of truth. That is the curse of my will. Love, I want to be a man again ... to live ... to live in your love ... to live in Beauty. Save me!”
She wept silently. Little waves of anguish welled with her breast, rose to her neck and her arms.
She wept long. I knelt beside her. She knew me there. I did not touch her, but she knew me there. Would her weeping cease, and would her hands come to mine?
She lifted her head. She did not look at me. She rose. I, kneeling, waited. Then, her eyes came down.
I knew that I had lost her.
I understood the pang across my eyes when first she came into the room: I knew that I had known that she was lost.
She stood there before me kneeling: her skirt touched my face. She was turned toward the door, and her eyes were upon me. They were far away.
I drank her beauty like an immortal wine within a cup of death.
... O sweet beyond song is woman at her Spring! You are life, you are the wrung essence of all life. For you I have made myself an ashen path through the splendor of gardens. For you I have denied my soul all their flung radiance. That I might drink you perfectly. And I am all athirst. My ashen way has dried my mouth, and opened my desire. I am all thirst for you. And I have lost you?
—Mildred, will you see this longing in my mouth, and go?
—Mildred, will you see this death in my eyes, and go?...
—You have gone already. And I am alone.
I have told my story. And, reader, though it has no moral, and though it may have brought you more bewilderment than joy, it has served its primary purpose. It has enabled me once more to live among you. Take the most anguished page, the blackest with my despair; it has been joy for me to write that page, for in the writing I relived it. And where I am, even the darkest human hour in memory is bright. If I suffered, it was because I still could strive: if I despaired it was because I still knew hope. Such are the jewels of man’s world. For man’s world is a playground whither the drab cosmic angels come for holiday. Strife, pain, suspense, anguish of heart and flesh, sacrifice and crime ... these are the raiments of Love. These are the joyous motley of the angels when they make feast on earth.
... I see an evening earlier in my life. I had just returned from my exhilarant years in Europe. It was June, and I was staying with a friend who lived with his wife in the Berkshire Hills of New England. They had been called to a nearby town: I declined their invitation to go along with them. I supped alone in their house. There was cheese redolent of meadows and manure; there was honey that smelt of clover; there were vegetables lightly cooked so that the resilient air of April and of May still lingered in their green.
I sat on the porch alone, smoking my pipe, and watched the sun fall through the scattered hedge of fir trees and dogwood, copper-beech and locust. The air was alive with the acacia scent and with the song of birds. Their voices swarmed the leafage: oriole and grackle, virio, thrush and thrasher. Impudent red-breasts marched across the green: a catbird with its stridence set in tune the melodious symphony of the sweeter birds.
The evening was alive. From the croppedgrass of the lawn, the trees rose sheer: the trunks were columns of the earth; the branches, whelmed by leaf and shadow, made a firmament beneath the sky. I sat and was happy in this singing dusk. The shadows and the dying sun, the pied shrill chatter of the birds, came to me as a single happiness, ripe for my mood.
And then, in a flash, the veil had lifted, and I saw.
This lovely scene that soothed my weariness and made me happy, bringing to my lips soft sentimental phrases, was a shambles! In a spruce that bowered from my porch, I watched a brown thrasher wheel and screech about a branch in which an owl, ensconced, brooded over its young. The little bird was delirious with fear. It threshed its wings and screamed: it pecked at the robber owl and flew away. It wheeled, screamed up its courage, shot in and pecked again. Robins were devouring worms. A handsome woodpecker massacred wood-slugs on the boll of a beech. No single creaturein that gentle dusk, but was engaged in bitter desperate war. And I sat, idle, burning my tobacco, slaying the mosquito that dared to buzz within the reach of my majesty.... All the world was murdering or murdered. Was it less fair for that?
My time was to come. And I, like these humbler creatures of the lawn, knew my hours of crisis, knew the heartbreak of desire, the black shrouds of failure. Was my time less fair for that?
O reader, if you must glean a moral from my story, let it be this! I lean back over the Precipice of Time, and greedily relive those hours which you call hours of anguish: relive those days of failure, since they were living days. Was it not then that my heart beat highest, that passion coursed most free, that I was most alive?
Out of the ash that you call history, rises the eternal flame of Love. Warm yourselves there, my brothers and my sisters. For the time will come when you will watch Love’sdistant gleam, desperate and nostalgic like a winter moth which beats on the frosted window trying to get in where the light burns, which beats and beats until it falls emaciate in the snow....
THE END
1923-1924