“Page wrote it--Curtis Hidden Page, I think. Well, it was that bit of
verse that gave me the clue. One day, in the window-seat near the big
piano--you remember how she could play? She used to laugh, sometimes,
and doubt whether it was for them I came, or for the music. She called
me a 'music-sot' once, a 'sound-debauchee.' What a voice he had! When
he sang I believed in immortality, my regard for the gods grew almost
patronizing and I devised ways and means whereby I surely could outwit
them and their tricks.
“It was a spectacle for God, that man and woman, years married, and
singing love-songs with a freshness virginal as new-born Love himself,
with a ripeness and wealth of ardour that young lovers can never know.
Young lovers were pale and anaemic beside that long-married pair. To
see them, all fire and flame and tenderness, at a trembling distance,
lavishing caresses of eye and voice with every action, through every
silence--their love driving them toward each other, and they withholding
like fluttering moths, each to the other a candle-flame, and revolving
each about the other in the mad gyrations of an amazing orbit-flight!
It seemed, in obedience to some great law of physics, more potent than
gravitation and more subtle, that they must corporeally melt each
into each there before my very eyes. Small wonder they were called the
wonderful lovers.
“I have wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found
a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's
Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and
there I read:--
“'So sweet it is to stand but just apart,
To know each other better, and to keep
The soft, delicious sense of two that touch...
O love, not yet!... Sweet, let us keep our love
Wrapped round with sacred mystery awhile,
Waiting the secret of the coming years,
That come not yet, not yet... sometime...
not yet...
Oh, yet a little while our love may grow!
When it has blossomed it will haply die.
Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep,
Bedded in dead denial yet some while...
Oh, yet a little while, a little while.'
“I folded the book on my thumb and sat there silent and without moving
for a long time. I was stunned by the clearness of vision the verse
had imparted to me. It was illumination. It was like a bolt of God's
lightning in the Pit. They would keep Love, the fickle sprite, the
forerunner of young life--young life that is imperative to be born!
“I conned the lines over in my mind--'Not yet, sometime'--'O Love, not
yet'--'Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep.' And I laughed
aloud, ha, ha! I saw with white vision their blameless souls. They were
children. They did not understand. They played with Nature's fire and
bedded with a naked sword. They laughed at the gods. They would stop
the cosmic sap. They had invented a system, and brought it to the
gaming-table of life, and expected to win out. 'Beware!' I cried. 'The
gods are behind the table. They make new rules for every system that is
devised. You have no chance to win.'
“But I did not so cry to them. I waited. They would learn that their
system was worthless and throw it away. They would be content with
whatever happiness the gods gave them and not strive to wrest more away.
“I watched. I said nothing. The months continued to come and go, and
still the famine-edge of their love grew the sharper. Never did they
dull it with a permitted love-clasp. They ground and whetted it on
self-denial, and sharper and sharper it grew. This went on until even I
doubted. Did the gods sleep? I wondered. Or were they dead? I laughed
to myself. The man and the woman had made a miracle. They had outwitted
God. They had shamed the flesh, and blackened the face of the good Earth
Mother. They had played with her fire and not been burned. They were
immune. They were themselves gods, knowing good from evil and tasting
not. 'Was this the way gods came to be?' I asked myself. 'I am a frog,'
I said. 'But for my mud-lidded eyes I should have been blinded by the
brightness of this wonder I have witnessed. I have puffed myself up with
my wisdom and passed judgment upon gods.'
“Yet even in this, my latest wisdom, I was wrong. They were not gods.
They were man and woman--soft clay that sighed and thrilled, shot
through with desire, thumbed with strange weaknesses which the gods have
not.”
Carquinez broke from his narrative to roll another cigarette and to
laugh harshly. It was not a pretty laugh; it was like the mockery of a
devil, and it rose over and rode the roar of the storm that came muffled
to our ears from the crashing outside world.
“I am a frog,” he said apologetically. “How were they to understand?
They were artists, not biologists. They knew the clay of the studio, but
they did not know the clay of which they themselves were made. But this
I will say--they played high. Never was there such a game before, and I
doubt me if there will ever be such a game again.
“Never was lovers' ecstasy like theirs. They had not killed Love with
kisses. They had quickened him with denial. And by denial they drove him
on till he was all aburst with desire. And the flame-winged lute-player
fanned them with his warm wings till they were all but swooning. It was
the very delirium of Love, and it continued undiminished and increasing
through the weeks and months.
“They longed and yearned, with all the fond pangs and sweet delicious
agonies, with an intensity never felt by lovers before nor since.
“And then one day the drowsy gods ceased nodding. They aroused and
looked at the man and woman who had made a mock of them. And the man and
woman looked into each other's eyes one morning and knew that something
was gone. It was the flame-winged one. He had fled, silently, in the
night, from their anchorites' board.
“They looked into each other's eyes and knew that they did not care.
Desire was dead. Do you understand? Desire was dead. And they had never
kissed. Not once had they kissed. Love was gone. They would never yearn
and burn again. For them there was nothing left--no more tremblings and
flutterings and delicious anguishes, no more throbbing and pulsing, and
sighing and song. Desire was dead. It had died in the night, on a couch
cold and unattended; nor had they witnessed its passing. They learned it
for the first time in each other's eyes.
“The gods may not be kind, but they are often merciful. They had twirled
the little ivory ball and swept the stakes from the table. All that
remained was the man and woman gazing into each other's cold eyes.
And then he died. That was the mercy. Within the week Marvin Fiske was
dead--you remember the accident. And in her diary, written at this time,
I long afterward read Mitchell Kennerly's:--
“'There was not a single hour
We might have kissed and did not kiss.'”
“Oh, the irony of it!” I cried out.
And Carquinez, in the firelight a veritable Mephistopheles in velvet
jacket, fixed me with his black eyes.
“And they won, you said? The world's judgment! I have told you, and I
know. They won as you are winning, here in your hills.”
“But you,” I demanded hotly; “you with your orgies of sound and sense,
with your mad cities and madder frolics--bethink you that you win?”
He shook his head slowly. “Because you with your sober bucolic regime,
lose, is no reason that I should win. We never win. Sometimes we think
we win. That is a little pleasantry of the gods.”