“There is nothing for you to see. It doesn’t matter. And everything has
been decided.”
... I was in the street. And I had forgotten my words, impetuous,
boastful words that seemed to mean nothing at all. For in my
consciousness there was the knowledge that nothing had been decided:
that my great need of winning Mildred and of having her right was
farther from fulfillment than it had ever been.--Better go back, and
not be proud: win your mother, said my reason. I knew I would not go
back.
_c_
I had left early, too early to rush precipitate to Mildred. There was
time to walk to her, and in the blind congestion of my thoughts the
need of walking.
Spring was a haze within the quiet street. The houses were high gray
walls of emptiness. Their windows told of no life. Life was a fertile
hush dreaming inchoate like a stirless sea against these rocks of
houses. I walked as through some elemental birth, æons anterior to
men and cities; through sleepy and vast densities scarce sparked with
consciousness. A monster too dull to be savage, too close still to the
protoplasmic slime, was this Spring world sprawled upon the stone hills
of the city. And as I walked within its palpable mood, my own thoughts
clashed like cymbals in a night: their strident clarities were like a
wound gashed in its somnolent flesh.
My thoughts stood apart from the city, and from myself, and from
each other. I knew that I had come to a crisis in my years. I needed
Mildred and I needed my work. To forego my impecunious glory upon the
laboratory battlefield meant death. To fail of Mildred seemed to mean
death, also. How could I have them both? I had not even wooed her. Her
brilliant being stood beyond any touch or any claim of mine. Had she
been a woman whom I could bind with sentimental promise or engage with
the zest of fighting with me toward a dim future, she had not been
Mildred. She was alive, gloriously, luminously alive. Like a flame
she spent herself in the day, and she might be gone to-morrow. Even
now, I could not tell but there was possibly another’s love to fuel
her. But even if she could wait, could I? I knew at last the desperate
price of my abstaining years. There was stored up in me a might of
energy, continent, compressed, and the fire touched it. I was fire--a
white totality of active hunger, kindling, devouring in a moment the
years’ accumulated burden. I needed Mildred; and needed her perfectly;
and needed her at once. I could not take her hidden, meanly, without
killing my great need ere its fulfillment. All the ways of an inherited
culture had this night for me their reason. Beauty and amenity of
place, the lovely stuffs wealth has created for its homes and bodies
... I saw them all as acolytes of my essential worship. Mildred stood
helpless like a goddess: no man dared take her without the fullest
raiment and the richest music, and a fair temple built to flesh her
spirit. Such were the exalted symbols of my sense, but my thoughts
were shrewd. This perfect child was of the modern world. To snatch her
away would be to blemish her. What the world could bring to make an
harmonious matrix for her life with me, in no way changing her, was the
instant need. Marriage ... a home. All else had been violence rather
than fruition: a gesture like that of a crazed man who mars his love in
the impotence of desire.
But what hope was there? Why as I walked through the high
Spring-flushed night did I not walk in despair? My mother was the
implacable foe of Mildred and in her hand was a weapon she had already
with sure instinct wielded. And Mildred herself: what reason had I
to believe that she would love me, wed me ... even if the way were
clear? We were friends. I had soon won from her the clear note of her
laughter. But her laughter surely was no hidden grace that I alone
could win.
She herself was the rare thing, and that all life responded to her,
that life’s common stuff was by her alchemied into her gold. Since she
was perfect, why should she receive within herself the transfigurement
of love, the translation of marriage? Mildred must have many friends,
many loves, for she was virginal not by deprival but as a young birch
is white. She was intelligent; her mind had a luminous response to
every phase of the world that touched her own. Her intelligence lived
inseparate within her senses, within her milk-pale skin. But even so,
could I imagine that she would have responded to the mute beginnings of
my glory? What was I in her eyes? A quiet man, young, fair-haired, with
deep gray eyes, not tall: evidently gifted, evidently strong; a man who
stood at the bottom rung of a mysterious ladder that led to esoteric
formulæ about the stuffs and ways of human brains. That much she might
know. Could she, for all her pure intelligence, know how my science
was to be a Dionysian dance: an heroic poem in which I marshaled the
harmonies of nature, as once did Æschylus with his Prometheus, or the
old Jew with his Job? Could she know that? and could I tell her that?
_Psychologist_: what a prosy lie the word would give her! Oh, I had
faith in myself and faith in Mildred. But how could I hope that she was
ready to come to me knowing me her equal, as I knew her my own?
--I should despair, I should despair!
And yet I did not. I walked with bright thoughts through the soft
fluxed night, and the defeat with my parents, the uncertainty of what
lay beyond, did not make me despair. Indeed my chances of battle did
not hold my thoughts. I walked in an exhilarant and scattered mood as
if the battle was already won, and I could disband my army!
--Life is good. Why do I think this now? Because of death. We are at
war with death. In the conflict, misery and hesitancy die. Joy only
lives. Life is good, not because life is good but because we battle
death. Blessed is the foe, for he makes us blessed to ourselves. This
quiet street is quiet because just beyond is the clatter of Broadway.
Lights there jerk in a shallow panic, therefore this strip of sky
between the houserows deepens its gray blue. And the man who passes:
he is a soft and reticent word of flesh because he is within stone
lips of houses, because he moves from clamor.... Mildred: what will I
say to her to-night? ... why have I thought of death? I go to Mildred
whom my life loves; and I think of death, and I learn that it is the
strangeness and the nearness of death which makes life real!
I see a baby boy: he is in the street, he has been struck and badly
hurt by a stone. His sister, scarcely larger than himself, leads
him across the gutter, screaming, homeward. Toddling howling mite!
His tears hold rage, fear, protest, pain--no thought of death, no
questioning of life. No, he is wholly alive: life is not good to
him, nor does he love it: fatefully and wholly he accepts it. For he
thinks not of death. Life may be anger and agony and hunger, but it
is everything.--Why then does life seem marvelous to me, save that
death must be near? Mildred...? What if she is death and wooing her,
life wooes its end? and this be the reason why in love life seems so
marvelous good? O Mildred, if this is death, let death enfold me. If
you are death, hurry me to your flame-nothing beside which life--green
hills and creatures swarming in the sun--is a gray sleep. You are not
death, my love. You are the golden trumpet calling me to life.
I see other things. Walking toward Mildred, I see the city. Mildred
colors the whole strange story: that I am alive, that I am I, now
strange! And being strange, all is real, all is inevitable. The real is
mysteriously new! Mildred in everything. She has unfolded and become
the world. Yet in this ecstasy of clearness, I cannot even know if she
is life--or death!
But I do know how this city is a shell: how life floods beyond it: a
cracked shell, the city, so that in little eddies life seeps in.
My vision seeps in, also. I am in a maze of pictures. Mildred has
released me from herself to a bewildering freedom.
I can fly where I will, and enter where I want. I see myriad women’s
arms, suddenly free and fragile like their hair. Women’s arms wave,
like hair, in a great wind. A wind sweeps my maze of images: I see
streaming men and children and women. Each is crouched close to
another. They do not see how they, are streaming, streaming. They
think of themselves as fixed, all else as moving.
But I am moving. Something in me is fixed, and something in me is
moving!...
* * * * *
This is a pleasant room, and I am in it.
What room? Perhaps I am in my house with Mildred, and I am to have a
study generous like this one. Am I in my own future, then? Where am _I_
if this is my own book-lined study? Where is Mildred? Let me look sharp
and wait. Someone is there....
The room is high and long. Two windows in one wall let in the budding
tree-tops of a square. The other walls rise in dark shelves, open with
books. Against the black of the wood, the plaster wall is white.
A Tanagra spots it: a Chinese painting: a little rustic jar that
seems Etruscan or may be from Peru. Someone is there. Not I. I am not
looking, in this torrent maze, on my own future. For the man is not I.
He is dark. The lamp, blue Persian with a silk turret-shade clouded
like ivory, shadows half his face, a long and from the forehead
tapering face, and lights an eye that looks up now from his book.
The black hair curls on the forehead in a rounded bang: like one of
the saints on the great Porch at Chartres. A noble face: the nose is
straight and the mouth warm-lipped and large. Brow and curled hair give
saintliness, the nose is resolute and the mouth is subtle. A variance
of authority. He rises. He is tall. His eyes become attentive and less
thoughtful. A regal man, now at his ease in his home, in the negligee
of a moire braided jacket. There is someone else just come into the
room. The clear blue of the eyes is questioning. Can this someone else
be I? What folly! Yet, if I can see this meditative man, why should
he not see me? What a vague mass is the newcomer. I feel, rather than
know it for another man. If I look square for this new presence, I
shall lose the master of the room.--_Watch the master close!_ The sharp
question in his eyes hardens at this other in the room, as at some
ominous intruder. Immobile his face: he reaches out a hand. His eyes
do not lower to what is in his hand. I feel his hand flex and relax and
drop what was in it. Only his eyes are clear, gazing at this other in
the room: and yet straight at me, as if they gazed at me! The eyes fill
with bitterness, with horror that grows fixed and leaves his eyes....
They die in resignation ... and their horror creeps now over my own
flesh. His hands fly above his head: so very empty, so very white and
tremulous his hands. A knife in his breast. And all is gone....
* * * * *
... Flowing rivers of faces, of lives saying: “We are steadfast, we are
solid,” as they stream and faint. Now, the familiar blank before my
eyes. The normal street ... I smile at my fancy. I laugh aloud, walking
now commonly. I call to my relief my easy rational knowledge.
“No wonder if to-night you suffer from an erratic gush of energy.
Hyperæsthesia. Here is Mildred’s house. This confidence ... call it
euphoria, for that talk with your parents was a blow, no doubt. Go
ahead. A mastering passion is right to admit no doubt. Bad names can’t
spoil the splendor of my sureness. Go ahead. Win her. What lies beyond
this radiant mist? _Go on._”