_h_
When I reached my rooms, Mrs. Mahon was there with my breakfast tray,
and wondering what could have taken me out so early. Mrs. Mahon was the
Italian widow of an Irish policeman. I sat down to my fruit, and her
ample and unsubtle beauty was pleasant to my mood, so that I held her
with words. Mrs. Mahon loved to talk with me: but in her sense of my
state she was shrewd, and she had never intruded her wide hard rondures
and the brash clarities of her mind upon my silence. She stood over me
now, with her bare arms crowding her bosom, and told me of the latest
misdeeds of her lover. Mrs. Mahon was beautiful, and to me entirely
without charms. Her head was small, the black hair massed low on the
blandness of the forehead, and her nose was Roman. Her eyes bore out my
fancy of the moment, that she was not flesh; for in their heavy facets
was no expression. The mouth was long and quiet. Its sensuality seemed
a deliberate trait, somehow not born of her own flesh but of the will
of the artist who had made her. Finally, her body as I could sense it
under the loose white fabric of her gown, was an arrangement of obvious
feminine forms: high breasts, stomach and hips subdued: and yet to me
devoid of the mystery of her sex. She was the body unlit, goodly and
functioning: the sacrament of flesh without the spirit. So this day it
was cool nourishment to look at Mrs. Mahon, to drink in her clarities,
to convince myself that she was not sculpture, quite the opposite:
_real_.
The tang of the grapefruit, the earthy pungence of the not too fresh
eggs, the bite of the coffee, merged with Mrs. Mahon: and I was happy
in a deep forgetfulness. I was sleepy. The thought came:--You have had
a bad dream. Your visit to the body may be real: but you can wipe it
out like a dream. It need have no consequence in the real world. And
that is the trait of the dream, is it not? the one trait that shuts
dream out from other planes of life? And I chatted with Mrs. Mahon, and
gave her advice.
“His misdeeds,” I said, “save you from ever being bored by him. You
should be thankful.”
She smiled: “Oh, I guess he’s a man: and I guess I’m a woman. I suppose
I get him sore, too, sometimes, just because my ways are them of a
woman. And yet, if I wasn’t a woman, and if he wasn’t a man----”
“Precisely, Mrs. Mahon. What you’ve just said is philosophical and
deep.”
She shook her head at my solemn words which, I judged, tickled her
as the prickings of a poignard might titillate an elephant. She went
out with my tray, and the thought “Rome” came to me as I watched
her perfect carriage: the low spacing of her feet, the swing of her
hips, the breadth of her back, and the little head so rightfully
proportioned, like a rudder steering the life that dwelt within her
body.
--Rome. How far I am from Rome. How sweet Rome would be, with its sure
shallow strength.
I lit a pipe. Melancholy and the hint of an old anguish wiped out Mrs.
Mahon.--This anguish is what moves me, moves me toward what seems the
cause of the anguish. A paradox that is a common law. Look at love: how
pain of unfulfillment moves us upon the loved one, and as we come ever
closer, ever deeper and more absolute grows the pain of unfulfillment.
If I could analyze what this is that has taken me: if I could only know
where it began.... But I know that it must first fill out its life ere
my mind measure it. What did my poor analysis avail me? How wisely I
announced: “Your anguish moves you toward the source of your anguish.
You cannot stay still because you must fulfill your own beginning.” And
how blindly I moved!
I reached into my pocket and took out the envelope that I had not yet
examined, and that Mrs. Mahon had helped me to forget. It was addressed
_Philip LaMotte, Esquire_
_By Bearer_
and it was in the straight high script of Mildred Fayn!
It was empty.
I tapped it against my open palm and wondered why I felt that it had
any bearing on the case. There was no proof that this was the alleged
letter of the fatal messenger. On the contrary, how could I entertain a
thought that would implicate Mildred in this horrible affair? What was
I trying to find, or to think? I was abhorrent to myself. Doubtless,
Mildred had written more than once to a man so close. My reason flayed
my miserable thoughts: but did not break them: did not avail against
their issuance in deed.