_a_
I am John Mark, M.D. I title myself so, even in my dreams: for it is
a new title and for long it was dream. I worked hard for it. I do not
want you to think that I am dull, so that the winning of that not rare
degree was difficult. No: I am above the average in intelligence--but
in ambition also. Even as a student I did not aim at becoming a mere
doctor. John Mark, M.D., was to have a higher connotation. It was to
stand not for the usual empiric healer: but for the leader, for the
creator. I am on the way.
I am twenty-eight, and a citizen of New York, where I was born and
where my mother was born: my father is of an old family from Vermont.
For three years upon a small income inherited from my mother’s father,
I studied in Vienna, in Zurich, in Paris, in Saint Petersburg. What
there was of theory to learn in my especial field I learned with ease
and no great exhilaration. (It was little, after all.) What inspired
and nurtured me was the personal contact of half a dozen men, masters
whom I had read and reverenced for years from a humble distance.
They received me: they showed interest in my work. They came to look
upon me, subtly I felt this, as a potential equal. And I, harvesting
the ripe treasure of their science, grew to recognize that their
superiority was not one of stuff or spirit, but of years and labor.
I found that my own impulse was very close to theirs: my power to
abstract phenomenal data equally intense: my capacity to associate my
findings, to link them up and to transcend them in intuitional concepts
possibly as great. I was no epigone to these masters. They learned that
they could speak with me in that shorthand of intimate understanding
which is the one articulate language. I was one of them: part of their
fuller to-morrow! I came back to my city, glowing.
And almost at once I attained the post I needed at the Institute.
The Laboratory was mine: I stood at a delicious dawn of intellectual
action: I tasted the ecstasy of the hour in which my will and the
world’s will, my means and the world’s tools seemed one.
My salary scarce paid the rent of a snug two-room flat. But my
little income met the rest of my needs. I asked nothing of my
father who was rich, and he asked nothing of me. Books were my one
extravagance--Gothic tomes and palimpsests where mediæval mystics had
imposed their swelling dreams upon the flat clarities of Rome. I knew
myself for a sociable and a sensual man. But my work, like an expanding
empire, had gradually absorbed the time and energy whereby youth
spreads itself. The companionship of a few men, students like myself or
masters as I meant to be a master, gave me a deeper satisfaction than
the common social fare. And although my desire for woman was great,
it was painfully involved with my intelligence and with the difficult
measure of my nerves. I was less drawn by the sweet flesh than repelled
by the dullness and unchastity of women.
Indeed, for five years I had lived without women altogether--almost
without casual intercourse of any kind. From month to month I saw
my parents. From hour to hour I dwelt within my work: finding it
a realm so various that no mood of my waking and no dream of my
sleep were quite outside it. The delights of leisure are those of
wandering and surprise and repetition. In my work I had them. Easy
love and comradeship bring ecstasy, because in their otherness we
lose ourselves, with passion or with service. My work possessed these
qualities as well. I was as full in its embrace as any woman in a happy
love. And beyond all fulfillment, I had the joy of tempering my desire.
My work was indeed limitless: I looked on my good mood as limitless,
also.
_b_
That mood is behind me in this April dusk, as I walk through the city
streets to dine with my parents. Behind me, in the sense of a wide
illusion hiding the sun of reality like mist, and by the sun wiped out.
I have still my work: I enter still this inexhaustible day of discovery
and thought. But I have found a woman whom I love! And in my love for
her, I understand the years of continence and solitude: they were
preparation for this love; they were the articulate presentiment that I
would love indeed; they were a threshold, in passionate void, for this
great filling passion.
I have been repelled by the unchastity of women ... now it is clear!
... because I looked and longed for a woman who was chaste. I refer
not to prostitutes. Indeed, a low chastity is at times the one quality
they possess. Prostitutes did not repel, they bored me: they are
impersonal, domesticated creatures, like certain dogs in whom the
individual will has been displaced by the alien will of man. Their one
offering ... relaxation ... I had not aged enough to welcome. No: it
was women of my own world whom I found unchaste. And now I understand,
thinking of Mildred, by what previsioned measure I had mysteriously
judged them.
... The girls toward whom I was drawn by a clear physical desire and
whose response, that should have been as limpid, was confused by fear
of the Morrow and the Moral. The married women whose lush fields
invited pleasaunce, and whose unchastity was still more complex. For
in them, the passional was entered and deformed by the possessive; a
chaos of morals, poesy and economics weeded their warm beauty. I was
attracted, when at all, to sensuous women. And sensuousness that is
not sheer becomes a tepid water: weak idealizing, smug and slavish
exaltation of the ego muddies it. Such had been my conclusions,
measured, though I knew it not, by the revelation that I was awaiting.
Now she is there--fulfilling all my world whose unfulfillment I had
sensed, not consciously, but as a larva longs for its own birth. I have
loved my work, like a woman, because I knew that there should come a
woman worthy of my work. I have been faithful to my work, in faith of
this woman who was to come to crown it; who was to come, in spirit and
in flesh, to equal its high dream. Unwitting I have labored in a dream:
and behold, it is fecund of this fleshed perfection: Mildred chaste
as thought, Mildred deep as discovery, Mildred remote and imminent as
truth!
I have met her: and although my continence, my solitude and my devotion
were a pæan of my prescience, yet she exceeds them as the flaming day
the chill night’s sleepy vision of the dawn. I have loved her. But on
the sacrament of winning her and making her love me, I have not yet
entered.
I come this evening to my parents, illumined in my love and in my
knowledge that after dinner I shall see her ... whatever happens here,
soon I shall be with Mildred: and I come also tense with resolution,
dark in a presentiment of its failure. I want this very night to speak
to Mildred: I want to propose our marriage. How can I do this with my
pittance of salary and income? I have resolved to ask my parents’ help.
“Can’t we dine up here?” I say, as I meet them in their drawing-room
at the hotel. “I want to speak seriously with you of a serious matter.
Downstairs in the dining-room, it would be hard.”
I see my mother’s face and I know her intuition: “My son is in love.”
And I understand, by looking at her face, the gloom that has dwelt with
my glow upon this undertaking.
My mother is tall. She is going to a theater and she is dressed in a
simple gown of jet and lace from which her blonde hair and her strong
clear features rise in a beauty that is almost stern. My mother loves
me and does not want me to marry. She would buy my dependence on her
with all her fortune, if she knew how. But she does not know how. Her
love has become that most sensual and most possessive of all passions:
an abstract love, a love that by no living deed, no contact of service,
no exchange of will, reaches the world of spirit. She begrudges me no
fame, no luxury, no vice. She asks of me no hours and no secrets. Her
place in my life, since my life to her is an aura of her own, is secure
so long as no one filling it destroys it.
“Of course we can dine here. Clayton, will you ring for the waiter?”
She is silent, incurious, decorous: knowing already and asking of me no
question.
How against her will that mothered mine can I be eloquent for her enemy?
My cause is good. I have propounded subtler and more recondite
problems. I am twenty-eight. With a power that is rare I have excluded
from my life all the warm nurtures of friendship and of love. My needs
have not died; it is as if they have in my austere years gone forth
from me and gathered to one mastering presence: Mildred. When I saw
her so it was with me. Every sense, long denied, called for her: every
need of my body and my soul, as waking from a trance, fused in a single
passionate direction: moving toward Mildred, drawing Mildred to me.
But my work is not the sort that the world pays for. That is no reason
to abandon it. I cannot bring to Mildred a man wrecked of his place in
the world. It is John Mark, scientist, who needs her. It is Mildred
Fayn, as she lives now in her high artistry of leisure, whom I need.
I cannot make of her splendor a cook or a drudge. Nor can I live with
her splendor as she must be lived with, outside of my career of pure
abstracted thought.
How clear it is! and how awkwardly I speak! this evening at table with
my parents. I had despaired before I began. Why did I come? What else
was there to do?
Their refusal was as vague as my pleading for what my mind knew as the
crucial cause of my life. Even as I spoke, I criticized and marveled at
my weakness.--What is the matter with you? You don’t lack persuasion,
nor power, nor weight of will. For a hundred lesser causes you have
done hundredfold better. What is the matter?...
Mother put me off.
“Dear, there’s no hurry,” she said. “Wait and see. You’re at the
beginning of your career. Don’t you need all your energy for that? If
Miss Fayn is truly the woman you should have, she’ll wait for you:
she’ll give up a few fur coats to have you.”
Her black eyes blazed. In them I saw:
“If I had you really--you, my boy and my body!--I should be happy,
living in a kitchen.”
But her mind and her senses were, each, the slave of the other. Her
senses did not dare to be happy. In all her life, she had foregone the
arduous and heroic way of happiness. So now, she suppressed her avowal.
She knew nothing about it. But for this intimate death, she prepared
to take revenge on her son whom she loved, and on her son’s loved woman.
My father lighted his cigar, and as usual sagged into the ease of his
wife’s will.
“I put you through eight years of college,” he began. He examined his
Corona. He moistened a finger and applied it to a crack in the rich
black leaf. “Some day you’ll get all we have. If you want some cash--up
to five thousand--it’s yours. What more have you got the right to ask?
If you marry, like every other married man, you got to look out for
yourself.” He puffed slowly: more rapidly, as a thought at last came to
his assistance. “I suppose your mother and I should move to a shoddy
flat, so you and Harry Fayn’s daughter can live in a swell one? You’ll
buy our motor, I guess?... Why, when I was your age, my father----”
I did not argue. I did not point out to him the false exaggeration
of his picture. I did not show him that at my age his work had been
to help his father invest his money so that neither of them should
ever need to use their minds: that indeed neither of them had ever
used their minds, and that the fair consequence had been ... so far
beyond the ugliness of their thoughts ... that I was able wholly,
passionately, greatly, to give all my mind, all my life to the white
flame of intellectual creation. But even this flame needed its
nourishment: was it logical to bring this light to being and then let
it die? The gross man is nourished with gross food: the indifferent
man with any food at all. My high work called for high fuel. Not for a
drudge, not for a harried woman, nor a pretty one, nor for promiscuous
pleasures. For Mildred! the essential Mildred! Nothing less. And the
proof was that ere I had found the perfection of her love, I had not
been nourished at all. Rather than blemish the fine growth of my life,
I had lived on myself, until I had found my equal....
Of all this, I said naught. I kissed my mother’s accurately rouged
cheek: I touched my father’s hand, its soft complacence gave me a
savage turn. I went quickly to the door.
My mother stopped me.
“John, I want you to come back. Are you free Saturday? ... in the
afternoon? I’ll stay at home. Nothing has been decided. You must not be
hasty. I want to see----”
I saw them: so impervious and healthy.--From their stubbornness, my
will: from their sheer animal strength, my mental power.... So flashed
my thought, but not in irony: a cool constatation.