“Yes?” she answered and her frail voice bloomed out of the wire,
drenching my sense in a languor of desired peace.
“Mildred,” I said, “doubtless these days you would prefer not to see
me.” She did not answer this. “But something possibly important has
come up: I feel that I should speak to you.”
She hesitated.
“Meet me at lunch, at Sherry’s ... at one-thirty.”
_i_
My work took me. I worked well. Doctor Isaac Stein’s warm voice
startled me at my shoulder.
“You have a fine power of concentration, Doctor Mark. I’ve been here
five minutes watching your immobile absorption.”
I turned and met the gray eyes of the great bio-chemist: of the man
whom of all Americans I admired most.
“It is the contrary of concentration. My brain is split in two. And the
one part does not trouble the other.”
He nodded and frowned.
“It’s the part of your brain which dwells so voluptuously with those
ganglions, that interests me.”
“I stand rebuked, sir.”
“You’ll learn that the other part which you think now so worthily
engaged in speculation and in rhapsody, is merely the part not yet in
solution--not at the point yet of true condensation. When you’re wholly
crystallized, Mark, then you’ll be _whole_.”
“You disapprove of me, Doctor Stein?”
He laughed. “You should know better than that.”
“You have the passion for unity of your race, sir.” I laughed back.
“This faith in unity which your science posits is itself the creation
of a wild mystic rhapsody.”
“It is the premise of every human thought, of every human act.”
“--That has survived, since it fitted into the unitary scheme. But is
there not something arbitrary about that, Professor Stein? Two intense
single-minded peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews, set up a scale
of consciousness based on the Unit, and narrow down the multiverse
to that. Everything that men did or thought must fit that scale of
One, be translated into it: everything that failed was rejected, was
unrecorded, hence intellectually was nonexistent. To-day, after three
thousand years of this sort of selection, we have quite an array
of theory, data, thought, all in the key of One: we have a whole
civilization based on One, a whole set of religions tuned in One, to
which our senses as well as our minds submit and finally conform. What
does that prove beyond the thoroughness of the Greeks and Hebrews? of
their initial will to throw out all contrary evidence, to deny all
dimensions beyond it?”
“Could this premise of the Unity have builded up so wholly the
structure of science, æsthetic, logic ... the structure of human
action, were it but an arbitrary premise that might be replaced by
others at least as valid?”
“The strength of the limited, Doctor Stein: the protection of
exclusion.”
Doctor Stein’s eyes sharpened.
“Very well. Then, does not the success of this premise, which you
call limiting and protective, prove that it expresses perfectly the
human essence? The fact that by means of the premise of unity man is
beginning to master life, does that not prove, besides, that man’s
essence and the essence of being are common terms, permitting a contact
after all between the subjective and objective, between the phenomenal
and the absolute?”
“You are assuming the success, Doctor Stein! And you are assuming that
this thing which man is ‘mastering’ is life: is something more than the
creation of the subjective will which started with the Unit that it
finds everywhere and thereby ‘masters’ ... finding and mastering only
and always itself. You are assuming that every day is not compounded
of events which transcend the powers of unitary logic and unitary
experience even to conceive them. How do we get out of the difficulty?
From these parabola shapes that are the events, perhaps, of every day,
our minds snatch down the fragmentary intersections that touch the
terms of our minds. The rest is ignored. Your ‘success’ of biology,
mathematics, chemistry, physics, æsthetics, mechanics, is simply your
own dream, complacently rounded by your unitary will. Unchallenged,
for the most part, for the simple reason that long ago man’s mind has
lopped off whatever might have challenged.”
“Well, then, even you will admit that the human will is unitary.”
“And what does the will cover? how successful, how potent is the human
will? If it were not deeply at variance with Life, would our will
make mostly for anguish and for failure? Would it not be a bit more
competent than it is? Would history, social and personal, not be a
happier story?”
Professor Stein’s eyes were hot.
“Come up some evening, Mark: any evening when I’m in town: we’ll go
into this.”
He left me.
_j_
Clasping Mildred’s hand in the pied lobby, I touched a warm, proud
sorrow. She was changed ... deepened rather. In her great eyes, a new
limpidity: and more than ever the counterpoint of her bright hard body
and of her spirit, dark and profoundly still, gave to her a beauty
almost beyond my bearing.
I gripped myself. I silenced my clamoring question: “Mildred, Mildred,
did you love him, then?” We sat, touching our food, saying no word,
until I had mastered myself.
When I was able to speak:
“I went to his place this morning, and they let me in.”
Her eyes rose to mine and dwelt there quietly.
“I saw his face, dead. Even in death it was noble. He must have been a
great man, Mildred.”
Her eyes assented, serenely.
I made my eyes see only the loveliness of this girl: but perhaps my
mouth trembled with a jealous pain.
“John,” she answered both my eyes and my mouth, “you are suffering too.
You are afraid Philip’s death has given him an advantage over you--a
sort of perfection easier to love than your own struggling life. That’s
not true, John. Would I lunch with you in this gay place to-day, not
twenty-four hours after his death, if I responded in such a foolish way
to life? You are very dear to me, John: I know that also.”
I could not speak. So I took from my pocket the envelope and gave it
her, in silence.
She examined it, turning it about. Her eyes met mine fully:
“How amazing! How amazing!” she whispered. “Where does this come from?”
“I found it on the floor not far from where he lay. It might have been
nearer, or have blown from its place on the desk. For the windows were
open. Why is it amazing?”
“Why? Because it is my hand. And because I did not write it.”
“Mildred, for the sake of our reason, be sure of what you say. You must
have written more than once to Philip.”
She paused: her teeth bit hard in her lower lip, a tremor of resolve
pushed up to her sharp shoulders. Then, in a quiet containment, she
answered me.
“I make no mistake, John. I did write, infrequently, to Philip. I never
sent him a note by messenger. If I needed to communicate with him
quickly, I telephoned, or I wired.”
In her pause, the gilt bustle of the room where we were lunching,
the room itself, became a shallow and unreal line upon some darkling
density about us. Mildred went on:
“This is a fine version of my hand. But it is not my hand. And there
is more superficial evidence than my conviction, that it is not mine.
_Did you notice the envelope_, John?”
Her hand on the table with its débris of crystal and porcelain and
silver was steady: mine, taking the paper, trembled.
I looked, and my soul blanched: my hands seemed to crumple and collapse
about the flimsy paper. I fumbled at the flap. There was the same
lining of green tissue, and the name embossed in tiny letters ...
_Tissonier_ ... the Paris stationer from whom I had bought my stock!
How could I have failed to notice this before? this fine baronial
envelope and the tinted tissue lining which I liked because it gave
to the sheer white linen an undertone of privacy symbolic of what an
envelope should carry.
“It’s my envelope! It’s one of my envelopes!”
I faced Mildred’s eyes: and I was whole again, for in her own there was
no withdrawal, no banal suspicion marring their bestowal. She spoke,
and lightly:
“Could there be some simple explanation?”
“There must be.”
She smiled: for she knew that my response proved I had understood
the caress of her own thoughts. Oh, Mildred, how I loved you at that
moment, how unbelievably pure stood your spirit in my mind, and how I
quailed to think that these mists of blindness and blood should mar
your dwelling in my life and the sweet entrance of my life in yours.
“Let me see,” she was saying while I longed for peace ... peace with
my love: “Let’s put our heads together.... It is my writing, forged.
It is your envelope, stolen. We can dismiss the possibility of someone
else just within our circle having my hand, and having gone to just
that _papeterie_ in Paris for his correspondence paper. I suppose your
stationery is accessible enough?”
“It stands in an open pigeonhole in the base of my table.”
“John, do you know anyone who knows both me and Philip ... some
possible person?”
I had to be equal to her coolness: this was the very wine of my love
that she was perpetually in her moods and acts inspiring me to a new
height of conduct.
“I can think of no one. Of course, that remark is worthless: there
might be such a person without my knowing it. But where would the
motive be in stealing my envelope and forging your script upon it? The
whole complex act strikes me as stupid: a gratuitous elaboration in no
way fitting the simplicity of the murder. Just look, Mildred. A man
announces, when he knows Mr. LaMotte to be alone, that he is the bearer
of a message. He does not say, from whom. He would not be expected to
say: for if the message is confidential, the name of the sender will
not be transmitted over the telephone. What comes next? He is in the
presence of his victim; if he has a letter at all, its purpose is
already fulfilled in the act of handing it over. At that moment must
come the blow. I can see a reason in his having forged your hand.
Mr. LaMotte’s interest would be greater, opening the note. In his
engrossment, the assassin would have an easier field for his work.”
“More than engrossment. Amazement. Philip finds in the envelope no note
at all. He finds a word from me in such strange hands ... and no note.”
“That is true. It would be enough to bewilder: to stun. That is
important. But why my envelope?”
“Well, it _is_ your envelope?” she smiled again.
“I feel certain of it.”
“There must be a reason. Possibly to attach suspicion to yourself?”
“A clumsy way, Mildred. A clumsy thing to do since I never met the man.
Besides, the envelope lies on the floor of a passage where the police
failed even to find it. The murderer would not have bungled there after
his perfect blow. The envelope would have been in the victim’s hand if
it was to serve as a false clew.”
“You are assuming perfection in the murderer, John. That does not
strike me as correct. If he’d been perfect he’d have left no clew at
all ... and he was seen, seen clearly. Therefore, he is not perfect.
Therefore, illogic might enter in: even contradiction--even absurd
elaboration.”
“Yes.” I was thinking of my talk with Doctor Stein. Where had my sudden
words sprung from?--Perfection ... illogic ... contradiction: Mildred
went on:
“You can’t assume that this act is a perfect single whole, with no
excrescence, no alien details.”