... A modest sign ... and a late afternoon at the Institute in Winter.
Four of us in our aprons chatting, smoking, the day’s work done. The
windows are black already with the night, shutting in snugly warmth and
fire with us. Ford, whose work is closest to my own, Ford speaks:
“There’s one of them, of all I’ve tested, just one, has authentic
power. An inscrutable hag from London. No incense, no scenery, no
occult traps. And no sentiment, no gush. That’s why she’s poor, I
suppose. Women pass her up for a picturesque liar. A prophetess who’s
not a prima donna, wherever she is, is in a wilderness. But she is
tremendous. Mrs. Landsdowne, her name.”
A dingy vestibule, a double row of plates, brass on chipped plaster,
woodwork greasy brown.... As I press sharp on the bell ... the gas
light was low in a shade dim with dirt ... I hope there is to be
no answer. No answer. I turned to go. The door clicks like a word,
ordering me about. The hall is black reek. I stumble on the stairs.
At the first triangular landing, crimson carpet strip, two doors formed
the legs. I passed them to mount still higher. The left door opened and
a narrow form stood framed in the gap. I saw a long hand, I saw eyes.
They looked at me and the hand widened the gap of the door. The door
shut me in with blackness and with her whom I knew there beside me.
I could feel her move down the corridor. I followed. Her footsteps were
like gray in the hall’s black hush. I did not hear my own.
A portière parted, we stood in a large room flush with the rails of the
“L”. Between the brown bare floor and the plaster above that dipped
and swelled a bit about the chandelier, the furniture stood sheer:
dimensional impacts within the cave-like air. A long table faced the
windows. On its either side was a chair upholstered red. In the corner
was a piano and on the stool, twirling about to face us, sat a boy. He
was thin and white. He arose. Mrs. Landsdowne twined a boney arm about
his shoulder.
“This is a son of mine,” she broke her silence. The white creature
glanced away from her dark thrust ... passed me ... the portières
seemed not to part for him but to blot him out in an eclipse.
The chandelier was not lighted. A student’s lamp cast a pale flush on
the table. A train, crowding of steel and wheel and wood, avalanched
past: by it the hollow room with its dense things was lifted into
dance, a moment’s frenzy that died down, leaving the room a pregnant
atmosphere for this sharp woman. She drew down the shades, she took the
seat nearer the window; she waved me to face her in the chair across
the table.
I saw her: I asked myself if her protracted silence was designed that I
might see her, or that she see me.
“John Mark,” she murmured, “John Mark. That is clear. And a zigzag
route your coming, strange for a sober and determined man. But you’re
not sober. Drunk with thought and with fasting. Down from a street
that is east to an open Square. What draws you, drives you ... a cloud
on the open Square. Zigzag. West ... north ... east ... north ...
west. Wandering. A crucifix of pain rising from that smoke of the open
Square. North and south, the tree: west and east your arms. You dangle.
Such young flesh! Why did you come here?”
Her arms were folded on her sunken breast. A black silk shawl glossed
the sharp shoulders and was caught in an old breast-pin, garnet and
enamel. Her throat was bare. And from a face, ashen and chiseled close
by all the steels of fate, her eyes now turned on me. Their heaviness
made the brow almost a girl’s, made the mouth a gash with blood dry for
lips. The hair lay a black coil over the brow: hair and eyes burned in
an ashen desert face.
“Why did you come here?” came her voice again.
“You who have found my name must find that, too.”
“Oh, that is a mere ... surface. I have not gone into you, sir. I am
not sure that I care to.”
“Mrs. Landsdowne, you must!”
Her eyes began to focus far behind my own, so that their traversing
mine took on an imperturbable coldness.
“Why have I come here? Surely it was not chance: this zigzag route.”
“You know there is no chance. I have no name for it: I see your mind
tracing a design out of a swarm of myriad living gray things. Strange!
They are like cells of our flesh, but they have space about them. They
swing like stars! You are the sort who knows ... why have _you_ come
here?”
I clasped my hands together. I was very tired. Yet as I looked on this
woman life seemed more bearable to me, than it had been for long. My
clasped hands cupped my falling head. I was very sleepy, and there were
tears in my eyes.
I looked up at last from my sweet indulgence, and a horror in the face
of the woman dried my tears.
“Will you speak, Mrs. Landsdowne, will you speak to me?”
She shook her head.
“Coward!” I cried. “Coward!”
Her hands hollowed and passed over her eyes.
“I am not a coward,” she said.
“I want to know.”
“I am not a coward. But I am afraid.”
“Are you afraid of a murderer, Mrs. Landsdowne?”
She smiled. Her eyes resumed their distant focus and she smiled. She
shook her head. I leaned forward, then:
“Mrs. Landsdowne,” I whispered, “am I that?”
Her lips stirred: the hand above her brow twitched: she was trying to
speak.
“No ... and worse....”
“Mrs. Landsdowne, I must know!”
“You want to know?” And now she was laughing with her blood dark lips:
and her eyes were stiff in amaze.
“What horror is this I have done? How could I?... Have you merely
caught my madness?”
... Her stiff eyes on me.
“How could I murder him with my body absent, with my mind innocent? Are
we both mad, Mrs. Landsdowne? I want to know! God, have I not crucified
myself to know? What have I done?”
“_What are you doing now?_”
The words were terrible to me. They came low and calm, it was as if
her eyes were speaking in their stiff amaze. But her words released a
chaos in my flesh. My nerves in panic rushed in myriad ways, so that my
flesh seemed a delirium of motion.
“_What are you doing now?_”
I arose. Faintness spread like a death from my heart, and I sank back
in my chair.
“What am I doing now?... Will you help me to know? Will you help me to
save me?” I pleaded: my shred of energy forced into voice.
She laid her hands upon the table.
“You will know, John Mark.”
“Tell me, now.”
“I cannot tell you. But I will help you to know.”
“Tell me. Tell me.”
She shook her head: “You will know what you have done. One can know
only that which has been done.”
“How can you be so ruthless? This godless horror----”
“It is not godless, Doctor Mark.”
“I am not godless?”
“Why, no. Of course not, Doctor Mark.”
“But it is horror. It is horror even to you....”
“It is not godless. Go home. You will know.”