“A man so perfect as to murder perfectly would not murder at all.”
“Go on.”
“Not murder Philip LaMotte.”
“Go on.”
“The fact that he needed to destroy a person so noble, so great, proves
his own imperfection: proves that there was a flaw in him; a flaw of
bad thinking, a flaw of impure action. By that flaw you will find him.”
“Mildred, you mean that it is precisely in some act of his which we who
are not murderers would reason could not have been committed, that we
will find him?”
“That you will find him, John.”
“I?”
“I think you will look for him, John.”
“Not we?”
“I cannot look for him, John. But I feel that you will look for him ...
and you are going to find him.”
So quietly she spoke: almost so pleasantly: again I knew how in her
perfection there could be room not alone for no fear, even for no
emphasis. She had the ruthlessness of purity. And I was caught in it:
held now forever in the white fierce light of her exaction. Would I
burn in it? or grow luminous? Would I grow luminous first, and burn at
last?
So quietly she spoke: “I feel that you will find him.”
And I was quiet, too. I had resolved to tell my whole experience: in
the street at the hour of Philip LaMotte’s death, in his room this
morning where his wound had told so mysterious a tale. Her way silenced
me. She did not want to enter, in her own person, this dark threshold.
Was she commanding me to proceed for her, or was she expressing her
impersonal knowledge of what I was going to do? It mattered little. I
knew the event chained me. I knew that she knew what I was going to do.
Perhaps when I saw light I might know also why.
But she was sitting near, and this was real. In her face lay a warm
flush: the glamor of her mouth and of her skin and hair was heightened
by a dark suffusion from her eyes. Mildred was nearer to maturity. A
new reticence held her within herself. There upon her face I saw what
I had seen before upon the face of a woman newly loving, or of a woman
pregnant: a secret pride darkling her glory from the world and giving
to her beauty, whose like I knew not, the magic of apartness.
So full I was of forbidden questioning that I sat silent and watched
her. What in her flesh was this dawn-like pregnancy? Was it love? love
then for whom? If it was love for me would her new fending off have
been against myself? If it was love for Philip--murdered Philip--would
it not glow like sunset rather than like dawn?--You are a mystery, too,
sitting so graciously apart in this harsh public place with its angular
colors and its shallow shapes. Mystery mothers me: I must be born once
more from a mysterious womb.
--I cannot even say: Mildred, I love you. You do not dismiss me but you
hold me off.... Now she chatted. She was in no way broken. And I saw
how great her confidence in me, since she looked with her candid eyes
in mine that would have quailed, had hers found falsehood there.
--No, you believe in me. And chatting here so bright within this
whirling social dust, you sheathe for me a knowing that is tender!
Mildred gives me her hand on the street steps.
“Good-by, John. I hope I shall soon see you.”...
Behind her the day’s Spring fades. The sky is pale blue and the houses
faint softly as she goes, taking my hope along. Hope is not dead, but
it is in her hands. Do her hands know? Is she too a mere symbol like
myself, of this mystery that twirls us? Yesterday I was my center: my
will was a solid thing, impervious and young: a true thing, I, with a
true world for my willing. Now I am snatched like an atom upon some
cosmic dance. Life is a spiraling and a plunging beyond. And all I see,
myself and Mildred clearest, plunges along.
Spring poured its first bold colors down the Avenue. In women’s
dresses and mouths, in the eyes of men, in the taut caper of horses,
in children’s laughter, Spring flowed up and down like a warm stream
between the thawing houses. I went along. But as I walked, it was as
if I went scarce ankle-deep in this shallow human water. My body rose
above the house banks and my head moved dark beyond Spring, beyond
sun....
_k_
At last came an hour when I could bear my room no more. Every moment
not engaged at the Laboratory I had passed there. Mrs. Mahon brought
me food, and barred from me the world of newspapers and visitors and
letters. I ate fruit and drank milk and gave up my tobacco. A gray
cloth hung upon my book shelves, so that the deep associations of the
titles should not distract me. At the Institute, I spoke to no one: I
localized my work to its immediate details and stopped at that. The
eyes of Doctor Stein, warm as soon as they beheld me, studied me first
and then withdrew even from such delicate obtrusion. I was alone with
my thoughts ... whatever they were: alone with myself, whoever that
might be.
At the end of fourteen days I faced the chaos of my mind. I had
succeeded in pushing close my nerves to the home of my desire and they
screamed with piercings. I had succeeded in breaking down the barriers
between sense and impulse. The swarming congeries of will within me,
no longer a mute coil, now in each thrust and writhe touched a quick
nerve. This plethora of response that my nerves made to the world was
an unwieldy burden. In a scatter of impulse and desire, my personality
seemed on the verge of dissolution. Still most deeply imbedded in my
swarming wills was the will to remain John Mark: and was the knowledge,
born of the thwarting pause, that the invasion of my conscious senses
into these arcana must cease, if I would not be fragmented and lost.
I was exhausted. I knew that this loosing of the stuffs of my being was
an advance: even if the secret lay still beyond. I had made penetrable
an approach. Nor did I take too seriously the protest of my self,
crying in its impenetralia against my mind’s invasion. After all, what
prize could I put on merely continuing to be John Mark? I needed
knowledge! And if knowledge meant the snuffing out of this ephemeral
phase I named John Mark, so be it.
I had been isolate in my room: reading no word: with windows shut
against the Spring itself save at night when I slept and the invasion
of the street could without harm come to my vagrant mind. But as
the mind’s texture, worn by the constant siege, grew loose and its
conscious and unconscious parts less separate, I found that I had
marvelous contacts with the outer world. Along with the chaos in my
mind whereby sense touched hidden thought, there came an outer chaos
of illumination throwing together outer act with my own inner senses.
Following within myself some vein of instinct, I would come upon a
house miles off where a group of persons were enwrapped in an action
proceeding from a similar desire. It was as if the mental association
of the normal man with me had become incarnate. A scent of leather from
my shoe brought me a vision of a horse loping upon a hill and mounted
by a cowboy. A sudden flare of anger at my fate revealed two swarthy
foreigners in Chatham Square locked in an ugly conflict. Soon I learned
that I could direct these vaultings of my sense to the objective world.
And then, the world of those I knew and loved came to me. But never
deeply! A mere façade it was, of the world outside.
I had no command over the hidden and the intimate deeps. I could not
see Mildred’s thoughts nor better grasp her spirit. But almost without
effort I could know the acts of her body, and her immediate moods.
Mildred was living her usual life: she was reading and dancing and
riding, and considering a trip to Europe. I could not see her thoughts
of me: and from this I knew that her thoughts of me were deep. The men
about her were vague shapes shadowing the envelope of her body, no one
of them piercing, no one of them coming close.
I knew that the newspapers had already ceased, if not to talk, at least
to shout, about the murder of LaMotte. Nelson the serving man had been
released: there was no evidence against him. Dull detectives continued
to shadow him and Elijah Case, the hall boy. And when in my mind I
followed one of these gross forms, at night, I learned along with the
Law that Elijah made mysterious journeys to a downtown office building,
at the small hours of dawn--in order to see his mother who scrubbed
floors.
I saw my parents at their routine of loafing. Often a month passed
without a sign from me; they had no outer cause to worry at my absence,
nor did they worry. But now and then I found a little dart studding my
mother’s breast, the thought of me in my mother: a sharp and painful
and infertile moment, not deep at all since I saw it, which she soon
overcame.
Once, and often then, I saw the gray eyes of my beloved Doctor
Stein--unfleshed and isolate and farther apart than they were in
nature--looking down on me. They were tender, almost like a woman’s
eyes, and a haze of moisture came in them as they strained to focus on
a point too far away or too small. He was thinking of me, but what he
thought I could not reach....
Pleasanter and more willful journeys my inchoate mind took also to
the outer world. On an evening when the rain fell sweet outside and I
was shut with my siege, I laid my arid body on a lawn, under a tree,
and drank the evening full. I was hungry, and there in my formless
consciousness was Sherry’s and a rich menu succulently complete in
flavor, color. But these relaxed and personal excursions of my will
could not bring Mildred. I could not lunch with her, I could not sit
with her beneath a tree. There was no even superficial act possible
with my beloved: for her soul’s presence, as soon as I was there beside
her, dwelt in my depth ... my hidden depth: I could see her, only with
others: lunching, or laughing. I could see her strong limbs press
the flanks of a horse as she galloped in Long Island. But since I was
excluded, these visions hurt and I did not seek them. I confined my
trace of my beloved to making sure that she was there, and well.
By deduction I plumbed my way ever deeper, ever closer to the node
of myself: and I learned by elimination, what lived most essentially
within me. All of Mildred, save her bright surfaces; all of myself
in intercourse with Mildred. I was incapable of a shallow act with
Mildred--or with my mother. Hidden, also, the mysterious history of
Philip’s murder. Could this be that my connection with his world was
after all a morbid, sentimental, subjective nothing? But I could not
see even Mildred’s thoughts about Philip! No: my knowledge of his life
and death dwelt in the kernel of myself: it was the Secret: it would
not give up to my shrewd siege. And therefore all that was enwrapped
with it ... all deep and dear ... was also barred from my invading
sense.
I struggled, and I failed. Failed utterly. I wore myself out with
struggling. But what I saw, down there, was not black darkness. I
seemed, rather, to peer into a stormy water. Something is there! But
great waves shiver every image from beneath, and when I plunge my
eyes into the turmoil, the image goes, because my eyes are whelmed. A
looming Presence deep in the node of myself! It is not myself, and yet
it is not another. When I draw down to fix it, my mind ... John Mark
... shatters and scatters, and I must rise to air, like a man half
drowned.
This way I knew was dissolution. But I could not know if the Presence
which I felt and sought was other than the dark womb of Chaos.
* * * * *
Fourteen days.... And now this hour of dusk when I can bear my room no
longer. The siege on the Secret may be a failure, or so nearly won
that there is no more cause for my stark pressure. I do not know. All
I have fought to know is hidden still, though I have broken down many
approaches. I must move: and I have no sense if I am going toward my
goal or if I am retreating.
But to sit still another hour is impossible. Perhaps I am to die:
perhaps I am to admit that I have failed: perhaps I lay my hand at last
on a Secret deadlier than death! All these things may be, this alone
surely: that I must get out of my room!
_l_
Spring is a grimace when one’s heart is gray.... Men and women coming
from work: in eyes and mouths the sprites of Spring peer forth at
the white clouds. Washington Square is a well of muddy life, and its
trees are young girls dancing at the brink ... dangerously close their
tinkling hands to the suck and grime of the depths. Sixth Avenue is
a long and hollow passage where flows the bilge of New York. Spring
cannot hunch low enough to enter. I choose Sixth Avenue. For when one’s
heart is gray, Spring is a grimace....
I am almost cheered by this contrast. I am hungry. I turn east once
more: in the Brevoort café I order a good dinner. I cannot eat. The
mirrors, the hard floor, the so deliberately joyous guests are not
Spring, are brittle pasts of Spring, specimens of Spring long dead,
preserved in alcohol. Spring hurts, yet it is fecund: it may come
nearer to my exiled heart if I am not afraid to be hurt.
I walk back toward Sixth Avenue. My long siege of myself seems to be
over and to have left me nothing. I am a little light of head, being
so light of stomach, but my mind is taking on its normal compartmental
tightness, its normal limits: its normal weakness: even its normal
satisfactions.
--Is the spell over? And have I dreamed that Mildred sent me on a crazy
quest? _I could see her to-night!_ And if a ghost of that horror still
remained, would we be aware of it, warm in the sweet flesh of our
love?--O Mildred, I am weary, and I hunger. Take me. Wrap me away. Make
me wholly man by being wholly woman.
I know this pang of will against its own inevitable surge. I have
passed a phase. But Mildred is not yet there: nor can I reach her heart
save through the heart of myself. I must go on.... The Secret!
Sixth Avenue. Rattle of trains like dry words in a mouth obscene with
secrecy. Why do I walk Sixth Avenue again, since I was going to dare
the hurt of Spring? I stop, a small sign in a second-story window
holding me: