“They telephoned my father. Papa and he were friends. Philip has been
murdered!”
I saw her, saw above all my transcendant need of her like a new
radiance within her body. The bewildered cloud upon her face of sorrow
was an intruder, a foe.
--You are mine. All else is trampled out in the march of my love....
She would not have it so. She stood there sorrowing. I took her hand,
and her touch said: “He is murdered.” It was a film, viscous between us.
But still I could say nothing. I held her hand: I dared not loose it
just because it said: “He is murdered.” Why should I be downed by that?
Whether it helped or no what did it avail against my mastering need?
But the touch of her limp hand spoke, spoke again. My clasp fought
vainly, drawing in the foe, in the attempt to shut him out. Mildred
withdrew her hand, and left in mine the word of her own:
“Philip is murdered.”
I forced myself to say: “I will leave you, love. I cannot help you
now. You will want to be alone.”
She nodded and her eyes avoided mine.
“It is terrible,” she spoke in a voice strangely casual and high. “Who
could have murdered Philip? Sweet, gentle Philip. Great Philip. I am
all dazed. We spoke of murder in his room, that day.”
“You spoke of murder?”
“Philip said to me: ‘You are the woman for whom man kills. I could kill
for you, Mildred.’”
“Dear, even the past is drawn into the dark design of an event that
sweeps us. Philip was rich----?”
“I know.” She did not like my reasoning. “I am dazed. I want to go to
bed ... and to sleep. Leave me, John.”
Still her eyes kept from my own. She had been glorious in my need of
her. Now shattered and distraught with the shadow on her fragrance, she
was almost ugly. Her arms were thin as she twisted her hands together
and her neck was long: and her eyes drooped heavy down.
--Why is she ugly? I did not love her less. The ugliness I felt was a
pain added to the joy of loving her. And then, a dim sense came. It
was to grow ever less dim.--She is befouled with a thought! And that
thought is my own. She has been fair like a dawn with the dawn of my
love and now my thought clouds her.
--Why is she dark? Because this murder will concern me!... So much I
knew an instant, and forgot. I left her.
_e_
I am home. The lamp reveals my study, sharp: a changeling! White
curtains in the deep-set latticed windows, shelves of books, the couch
right angle to the open hearth, the low gray ceiling ... nothing is
moved yet everything is changed. A glow like fever hushes in the
shadow, the dull familiar things swell with vibrance into a dimension
new like an omen.
I sit down, carefully folding my coat.--No wonder. What a shock! What a
night. I huddle in my dressing gown and greet the smoke of my pipe.--No
wonder. I take my book.
--Better read.
Above my shoulder, as I sit with the lamp close on the plain pine table
is a separate shelf: books on astrology. The book I hold is bound in
ivory parchment, cracked: the Gothic type stands bold on the soft
paper.
I begin to read where only yesterday I placed my mark. Yesterday and
this page: to-day and this page again. How can such difference meet
upon a page? But why so whole a difference? What has happened? Your
parents--nothing definitive there. Nothing is lost there, surely. What
you anticipated was: what is anticipated, is. Make them understand.
There is a way, if not to make them understand, at least to _make_
them.... This sense of an abysmal separateness in your eye trying to
link the words upon the page with words an eye of yours saw yesterday,
could not be born of what happened with your parents. Philip--what of
that? When he was a danger, you did not know of him: now that you know
of him, he is dead. The danger is dead. She did not yet love him. He
made claim upon her, my one rival claim: and life has withdrawn it for
me. A shock--she will need time--but she will recover! Did this murder
shake her whom he loved as much as me who never saw him? Why not be
glad then, if she be not too shaken? Do you want her prostrate? What
folly is this in your will? Are the gifts of event less welcome than
the gifts of nature? Aren’t you glad you have a body and a mind welcome
to Mildred? Don’t you accept whatever vantage they give you? Why not
accept the vantage of events? How can you help accept? John Mark, will
you be morbid, like other men, when the sun and moon of life shine full
on you?... Better read.
--If there is something in all this, this strangeness in you: something
beside the tumult of your love, and the shock of learning how close
to your desire was another hand, hot and touching your own as you
reached--if there is something else, you’ll see it clearer in the
morning. Don’t push your clarity. Let it ripen. Dangerously close his
hand to your own? It is gone.... He may not be dead? ... a wound? No,
he is murdered. And that is forever.
--Mildred is strangely dim. My memory and the note of my taut nerves
tell me best at this moment how I love her. I want to see her. I want
to have her vividly here. To corroborate what? I want to see again that
first time when I saw her....
* * * * *
Evening, a dance. The electric lamps drive a stiff flood of light
through the gold-paneled room. No air--this atmosphere is a harsh
painted substance. Men and women are brittle or are cloying: their
spirit is dark as if no air had ever entered them. The music is a
weave of stuffs contorted, writhed, a hypocritical plea for gayety:
its sinuous lies move through the hall and through the bodies of the
dancers with a false laughter, with a macabre rhythm. Cynic music,
substitute in this world for breath; as are the lamps for light.... And
the coupled forms jerking slow in its rugose waves.
Then, I see Mildred! I have met her before: casually, more than once.
Now, for the first time, there is the grace in me to see her!
She is air, open and coursing: she is sunlight. Her solidity is
resilient. She has a body which is a luminous smile, impervious and
ruthless.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her. For her antithesis is so exact
... the velvety music, the slow whining bodies ... that she is clear
like a poem in a world of inarticulations.
“Let’s talk,” she says. “It will be good for you to talk. Your mood is
so heavy.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Where else did you expect to find me?”
“I expected to find you nowhere.”
“Then you don’t know who I am.”
“You are Mildred Fayn. I have seen you: and I have heard of you.”
“Well, then? Did you not hear that I dance, that I motor, that I ride?
Did you not hear that I flirt?”
“Whatever I heard and saw has naught to do with you.”
“You look, Doctor Mark, as if you had made a discovery. And you look
solemn.”
“I am pleased.”
“You are like a child, perhaps? Most solemn when most pleased?”
“Children have the gift of discovery--and of wonder.”
Suddenly she was serious. She had glanced dazzlingly around me. Now it
was as if she came straight forward.
“I’ll dare be ‘serious’ with you,” she murmured.
She looked full at me: her eyes had a crisp tenderness, like some
immortal fruit ever upon the Springlike verge of ripeness. I knew that
she understood, although the words perhaps were not within her mind,
how laughter is oblique: how seriousness is the full face of joy.
We sat in a little bower cut off from the hall by palms. It became a
cool and fluid haven from the hall--from the hall’s synthetic sun.
She was quiet. She folded her frail hands in her lap and raised her
head. A smile flickered at her mouth like a butterfly at a fruit. She
dispelled it.
“It’s hard to sit serious,” she whispered.
“It is so revealing.”
Again, instantly, she understood.
“Yes: we don’t mind being naked when we are in motion. It must be that
motion covers us? The dance, the swim. But being still, and being
seen....”
“Laughter,” I said, “is a shift we wear like motion.”
There was a pause. I illogically broke it: “You are uncovered, yet you
are at ease.”
She laughed: “No! You are wrapping me up in your observations about me.”
“Why do they cover, rather than reveal you?”
“Why? Because they are illusions.”
“Oh!”
“Aren’t they romantic and inaccurate? You see, I _am_ a girl who dances
and motors and flirts.” Her smile was indulgent: as if she invited me,
knowing how hard it was, to candor.
“How can you expect me to know you so swiftly?”
“Why not--swiftly?” she said.
I was aware of her as if she had been naked. I leaned forward in my
chair: she lay back in hers, with an ankle poised upon the other.
She knew my awareness, and was unashamed. There was naught sensual
in my knowing her. She did not challenge my sense: she challenged my
understanding. Her emerald dress gleamed in fluid angles over her hips,
around her waist and breast. She was not naked, after all: she was clad
in a cool flame aura of which her eyes were the measureless sources.
“I am going to leave you here,” I said at last. “I want to see you
again. You will let me see you again?”--Again, again! oh, forever,
shouted my heart. “But not again in that lewd place, with its plush
music and its sticky light.”
“Where?” she asked. My violence was beyond her. She did not think of
the dance as anything but pleasant. And the music was to her the usual
dance music.
“In your home.”
“Come, surely,” she agreed. She gave me her hand.
I had many words, and she had none. My words were my ignorance: her
wisdom was itself, needing no concepts. In that moment, I learned
that also words--like motions--were shifts of incompleteness. I grew
ambitious as I had never been before. Long I had willed to be great as
men are great. And since I had first seen her on this night I had dared
to want her, as man possesses woman. Now I longed more vertiginously
far: I longed to be able to achieve the domain beyond words, beyond
conscious acts--to exert the wisdom of power, somehow, beyond the
articulation of my mind; even as she was wise in the absolute miracle
of her thoughtless body. So fragile, so profoundly luminous she was!
her eyes, her face, her form the entexture of a petal in which all
immensity lay glowing.
--To be a man is misery! Yet to hold her, I must be a man. I understood
the wisdom of beauty, its undimensioned power: and how intellect and
words are its groveling slaves. I envied this girl, I with my man’s
mind. I resolved to equal her in her own high domain....
* * * * *
But now I cannot even see her! Though I recount this scene, it sleeps
pale in my mind. And if she come at all, it is otherwise than in her
relevation of the world beyond our conscious words--it is as I saw her
last, diminished and blemished by a thought of my own!
--Is this why my love of her dims? Tides ... the energy that swells my
love (do not torment yourself) has ebbed into other harbors, for an
hour. Were this not so, life would grow stagnant in my love, and my
love grow foul like a hooded and shut pool. You must understand this,
always, Mildred (what do you not understand?): how the waters of my
life move out from you, and then move in on you replenished with the
verdance of their wanderings....--Better not think of her now, nor of
the man murdered, nor of the hard enameled cheek of mother.--Better
read....
Like all else in my life, the study in the pseudo-science of astrology
is at once joy in my life and design in my work. I strive, as man has
always striven, to drown this anguish of being born a man, within the
stars. I cannot. For the stars are not greater, truer than my passions;
their convolutions do not make my thoughts petty and unrelated; nor
are they closer to God than my own searching will. The solace of lies
is denied me. All my life has battled against the ease of falsity and
sentiment. The solace of the Truth----?
Oh, I am small indeed, small and imperfect: no stronger and no greater
than those whirling stars. But if they swing sure (an instant) in
balance of the truth, cannot I? Gravitation--it is a phase of will, a
phase of fragmentary conscience, making these stars swing true, _one
with the other_. Let my thoughts do likewise!
I plunge once more into the symphony of search. We must move (it is
the fate of imperfection: that we must seem to move): our hope is to
move in unison with all the other parts of God. For the harmonious sum
of movements is immobile--is Truth’s still image. Work that seeks not
respite, that seeks knowledge, is indeed holy: for it binds pitiful man
into this symphony.
I think of the design on a man’s palm. Is the design of the stars a
similar chart recording the destiny of man’s brain? Of course, there is
rapport here--but of what nature? Man’s destiny, the graph of molecule,
cell, electron in man’s brain, and the congeried stars--are they
related as will, voice, phonographic record (where then is the Will?),
or as simultaneous projections of some body that includes us all? This
search is my work. I feel with exquisite anguish how the heavens will
help me. The vulgar idea of the phonographic record is unreal. The
stamp of voice and the record in the wax are not cause and effect: or
rather, cause and effect are but relative revelations to our minds of
two facts as simultaneous and organic as the two faces of a coin. Even
so the correspondence between braincell and star is organic, integral
and formal. Braincell and star are related like the chemic stresses
of a body. But our point of reference is the mind, and the mind still
thinks alas! in scaffold terms of space, of cause and effect, of time.
Hence, the sideral design appears _beyond_ us, and appears always
changing. Our limitation paints the human drama. Two infants dropped
from one womb meet star-wordings abysmally separate. All--from the
plane of the womb to the farthest sideral sweep--has changed to human
consciousness and will, in the instant between the births. The brains
of the infants are two: the foci of their minds make of the stars two
sentences--and of their lives two solitudes forever....
I stand before these clumsy artefacts of the child-seers ... the
astrologers ... and behold the stuff of a great thought! Am I not
young, exhilarant, equipped? There is the event, threefold expressed
for our three-dimensioned mind: the stars speak the event, human life
enacts it, histology and biologic chemistry release it. What a _Rosetta
Stone_ for the unsealing, not of the written word of dead Egyptians,
but of the living word of God! Thought and its chemic symbols in
brain and body, act in human history and its wording in the sideral
cosmos--they are my materials, and they are docile in my hand! I shall
create an Axiom in the science of man: his conscious part in God....
* * * * *
But this is not for to-night. The black type of my book is gray. Other
signs fill my room.... Mildred and love, fear and hate and horror. Why
not read _them_, since they are clamorous near? Are they perhaps as
true as the stars? What is _their_ symbol yonder?
Molecules of brain, and flaming suns aflicker like ghosts through
emptiness. Are they will-o’-the-wisps misleading me from emptiness
which is perhaps the truth?
I am unhappy. My life which I have given to proud search, it seems
to-night that I have cast it away on nothing. Emptiness fills my room.
_Between and beyond the stars, is there not Emptiness?_ I have not
Mildred. Shall I win her? What else is there to win?
Cosmos is a black cavern zero-cold, and the star-worlds flashing their
feeble fires are lost. If they and we embody God, is God not also lost?
Infinite cold, infinite blind blackness: vagrant mites spitting their
star fire into tiny corners. How do I know these flame-specks are my
fate? Why not the vaster spaces in between? the spaces empty, the
spaces zero-cold? Perhaps the fate of Philip is a sun, burnt out. And
my own, the black void that will never burn.... I lay aside my book.
Its arrogant hopes seem childish. Are no men born to utter upon earth
the Black that gapes between the closest stars?
Yet why think so? That Black is an illusion. Space does not exist:
emptiness is but your ignorance. The void between and beyond the stars
is the void within your fragmentary knowledge. And through this fact,
the void cannot concern you, since only knowledge longs and only
knowledge hurts. But were it even so, why fear the void? What is there
to fear in emptiness? Fear is not emptiness. Your fear denies your fear.
* * * * *
--O my beloved: this grandiose lack is only lack of you!
How came I to love you? When my young mind moved toward the mysteries
of flesh, it was not your flesh made the search sweet. When my young
spirit went upon its journey, knowing there was no end, it was not
your spirit made the journey sweet. You have come late upon me: yet
all my seeking is dead without you, and all my seeking has come full
upon you! When I first saw you, my thought was not to kiss your mouth,
but to achieve a knowledge and a power, like your own beauty’s wisdom
beyond words. What mystery is this?--And what mystery is my despair
to-night? Am I not close to Mildred? Could not a fool see in her
luminous candor the dawn of love? There was a danger, and that danger
is dead! While it lived....
I pace my room: back and forth from the recessed windows to the wall
where stands a little table with a vase holding a white lily. And I try
to think.
--You must see. You must understand.
Yes, yes. I have gone too far to fall back easefully on ignorance.
--You must probe. You must understand.
Yes, yes. I look at my books.
--Not that.