Darkness about a sullen glow of red, and a voice speaking.
The voice of a man, fevered and in pain, wounded and amidst hardship and
danger, struggling with the unrelenting riddle of his being. Ever and
again when a flame leapt she would see his face, haggard, bearded,
changed, and yet infinitely familiar.
His voice varied, now high and clear, now mumbling, now vexed and
expostulating, now rich with deep feeling, now fagged and slow; his
matter varied, too; now he talked like one who is inspired, and now like
one lost and confused, stupidly repeating phrases, going back upon a
misleading argument, painfully, laboriously beginning over and over
again. Marjorie sat before the stove watching it burn and sink,
replenishing it, preparing food, and outside the bitter wind moaned and
blew the powdery snow before it, and the shortening interludes of
pallid, diffused daylight which pass for days in such weather, came and
went. Intense cold had come now with leaden snowy days and starless
nights.
Sometimes his speech filled her mind, seemed to fill all her world;
sometimes she ceased to listen, following thoughts of her own.
Sometimes she dozed; sometimes she awakened from sleep to find him
talking. But slowly she realized a thread in his discourse, a progress
and development.
Sometimes he talked of his early researches, and then he would trace
computations with his hands as if he were using a blackboard, and became
distressed to remember what he had written. Sometimes he would be under
the claws of the lynx again, and fighting for his eyes. "Ugh!" he said,
"keep those hind legs still. Keep your hind legs still! Knife? Knife?
Ah! got it. Gu--u--u, you _Beast!_"
But the gist of his speech was determined by the purpose of his journey
to Labrador. At last he was reviewing his life and hers, and all that
their life might signify, even as he determined to do. She began to
perceive that whatever else drifted into his mind and talk, this
recurred and grew, that he returned to the conclusion he had reached,
and not to the beginning of the matter, and went on from that....
"You see," he said, "our lives are nothing--nothing in themselves. I
know that; I've never had any doubts of that. We individuals just pick
up a mixed lot of things out of the powers that begat us, and lay them
down again presently a little altered, that's all--heredities,
traditions, the finger nails of my grandfather, a great-aunt's lips, the
faith of a sect, the ideas of one's time. We live and then we die, and
the threads run, dispersing this way and that. To make other people
again. Whatever's immortal isn't that, our looks or our habits, our
thoughts or our memories--just the shapes, these are, of one immortal
stuff.... One immortal stuff."...
The voice died away as if he was baffled. Then it resumed.
"But we ought to _partake_ of immortality; that's my point. We ought to
partake of immortality.
"I mean we're like the little elements in a magnet; ought not to lie
higgledy-piggledy, ought to point the same way, bepolarized----Something
microcosmic, you know, ought to be found in a man.
"Analogies run away with one. Suppose the bar isn't magnetized yet!
Suppose purpose has to come; suppose the immortal stuff isn't yet, isn't
being but struggling to be. Struggling to be.... Gods! that morning! When
the child was born! And afterwards she was there--with a smile on her
lips, and a little flushed and proud--as if nothing had happened so very
much out of the way. Nothing so wonderful. And we had another life
besides our own!..."
Afterwards he came back to that. "That was a good image," he said,
"something trying to exist, which isn't substance, doesn't belong to
space or time, something stifled and enclosed, struggling to get
through. Just confused birth cries, eyes that hardly see, deaf ears,
poor little thrusting hands. A thing altogether blind at first, a
twitching and thrusting of protoplasm under the waters, and then the
plants creeping up the beaches, the insects and reptiles on the margins
of the rivers, beasts with a flicker of light in their eyes answering
the sun. And at last, out of the long interplay of desire and fear, an
ape, an ape that stared and wondered, and scratched queer pictures on a
bone...."
He lapsed into silent thought for a time, and Marjorie glanced at his
dim face in the shadows.
"I say nothing of ultimates," he said at last.
He repeated that twice before his thoughts would flow again.
"This is as much as I see, in time as I know it and space as I know
it--_something struggling to exist_. It's true to the end of my limits.
What can I say beyond that? It struggles to exist, becomes conscious,
becomes now conscious of itself. That is where I come in, as a part of
it. Above the beast in me is that--the desire to know better, to
know--beautifully, and to transmit my knowledge. That's all there is in
life for me beyond food and shelter and tidying up. This Being--opening
its eyes, listening, trying to comprehend. Every good thing in man is
that;--looking and making pictures, listening and making songs, making
philosophies and sciences, trying new powers, bridge and engine, spark
and gun. At the bottom of my soul, _that_. We began with
bone-scratching. We're still--near it. I am just a part of this
beginning--mixed with other things. Every book, every art, every
religion is that, the attempt to understand and express--mixed with
other things. Nothing else matters, nothing whatever. I tell
you----Nothing whatever!
"I've always believed that. All my life I've believed that.
"Only I've forgotten."
"Every man with any brains believes that at the bottom of his heart.
Only he gets busy and forgets. He goes shooting lynxes and breaks his
leg. Odd, instinctive, brutal thing to do--to go tracking down a lynx to
kill it! I grant you that, Marjorie. I grant you that."
"Grant me what?" she cried, startled beyond measure to hear herself
addressed.
"Grant you that it is rather absurd to go hunting a lynx. And what big
paws it has--disproportionately big! I wonder if that's an adaptation to
snow. Tremendous paws they are.... But the real thing, I was saying, the
real thing is to get knowledge, and express it. All things lead up to
that. Civilization, social order, just for that. Except for that, all
the life of man, all his affairs, his laws and police, his morals and
manners--nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. Lynx hunts! Just ways of getting
themselves mauled and clawed perhaps--into a state of understanding. Who
knows?..."
His voice became low and clear.
"Understanding spreading like a dawn....
"Logic and language, clumsy implements, but rising to our needs, rising
to our needs, thought clarified, enriched, reaching out to every man
alive--some day--presently--touching every man alive, harmonizing acts
and plans, drawing men into gigantic co-operations, tremendous
co-operations....
"Until man shall stand upon this earth as upon a footstool and reach out
his hand among the stars....
"And then I went into the rubber market, and spent seven years of my
life driving shares up and down and into a net!... Queer game indeed!
Stupid ass Behrens was--at bottom....
"There's a flaw in it somewhere...."
He came back to that several times before he seemed able to go on from
it.
"There _is_ a collective mind," he said, "a growing general
consciousness--growing clearer. Something put me away from that, but I
know it. My work, my thinking, was a part of it. That's why I was so mad
about Behrens."
"Behrens?"
"Of course. He'd got a twist, a wrong twist. It makes me angry now. It
will take years, it will eat up some brilliant man to clean up after
Behrens----"
"Yes, but the point is"--his voice became acute--"why did I go making
money and let Behrens in? Why generally and in all sorts of things does
Behrens come in?..."
He was silent for a long time, and then he began to answer himself. "Of
course," he said, "I said it--or somebody said it--about this collective
mind being mixed with other things. It's something arising out of
life--not the common stuff of life. An exhalation.... It's like the
little tongues of fire that came at Pentecost.... Queer how one comes
drifting back to these images. Perhaps I shall die a Christian yet....
The other Christians won't like me if I do. What was I saying?... It's
what I reach up to, what I desire shall pervade me, not what I am. Just
as far as I give myself purely to knowledge, to making feeling and
thought clear in my mind and words, to the understanding and expression
of the realities and relations of life, just so far do I achieve
Salvation.... Salvation!...
"I wonder, is Salvation the same for every one? Perhaps for one man
Salvation is research and thought, and for another expression in art,
and for another nursing lepers. Provided he does it in the spirit. He
has to do it in the spirit...."
There came a silence as though some difficulty baffled him, and he was
feeling back to get his argument again.
"This flame that arises out of life, that redeems life from purposeless
triviality, _isn't_ life. Let me get hold of that. That's a point.
That's a very important point."
Something had come to him.
"I've never talked of this to Marjorie. I've lived with her nine years
and more, and never talked of religion. Not once. That's so queer of us.
Any other couple in any other time would have talked religion no end....
People ought to."
Then he stuck out an argumentative hand. "You see, Marjorie _is_ life,"
he said.
"She took me."
He spoke slowly, as though he traced things carefully. "Before I met her
I suppose I wasn't half alive. No! Yet I don't remember I felt
particularly incomplete. Women were interesting, of course; they excited
me at times, that girl at Yonkers!--H'm. I stuck to my work. It was fine
work, I forget half of it now, the half-concealed intimations I
mean--queer how one forgets!--but I know I felt my way to wide, deep
things. It was like exploring caves--monstrous, limitless caves. Such
caves!... Very still--underground. Wonderful and beautiful.... They're
lying there now for other men to seek. Other men will find them.... Then
_she_ came, as though she was taking possession. The beauty of her, oh!
the life and bright eagerness, and the incompatibility! That's the
riddle! I've loved her always. When she came to my arms it seemed to me
the crown of life. Caves indeed! Old caves! Nothing else seemed to
matter. But something did. All sorts of things did. I found that out
soon enough. And when that first child was born. That for a time was
supreme.... Yes--she's the quintessence of life, the dear greed of her,
the appetite, the clever appetite for things. She grabs. She's so damned
clever! The light in her eyes! Her quick sure hands!... Only my work was
crowded out of my life and ended, and she didn't seem to feel it, she
didn't seem to mind it. There was a sort of disregard. Disregard. As
though all that didn't really matter...."
"_My dear!_" whispered Marjorie unheeded. She wanted to tell him it
mattered now, mattered supremely, but she knew he had no ears for her.
His voice flattened. "It's perplexing," he said. "The two different
things."
Then suddenly he cried out harshly: "I ought never to have married
her--never, never! I had my task. I gave myself to her. Oh! the high
immensities, the great and terrible things open to the mind of man! And
we breed children and live in littered houses and play with our food and
chatter, chatter, chatter. Oh, the chatter of my life! The folly! The
women with their clothes. I can hear them rustle now, whiff the scent of
it! The scandals--as though the things they did with themselves and each
other mattered a rap; the little sham impromptu clever things, the
trying to keep young--and underneath it all that continual cheating,
cheating, cheating, damning struggle for money!...
"Marjorie, Marjorie, Marjorie! Why is she so good and no better! Why
wasn't she worth it altogether?...
"No! I don't want to go on with it any more--ever. I want to go back.
"I want my life over again, and to go back.
"I want research, and the spirit of research that has died in me, and
that still, silent room of mine again, that room, as quiet as a cell,
and the toil that led to light. Oh! the coming of that light, the uprush
of discovery, the solemn joy as the generalization rises like a sun upon
the facts--floods them with a common meaning. That is what I want. That
is what I have always wanted....
"Give me my time oh God! again; I am sick of this life I have chosen. I
am sick of it! This--busy death! Give me my time again.... Why did you
make me, and then waste me like this? Why are we made for folly upon
folly? Folly! and brains made to scale high heaven, smeared into the
dust! Into the dust, into the dust. Dust!..."
He passed into weak, wandering repetitions of disconnected sentences,
that died into whispers and silence, and Marjorie watched him and
listened to him, and waited with a noiseless dexterity upon his every
need.