“John Mark,” she said. And still her bitter presence mingled in my mind
with Mildred.... Mildred! “I cannot break the body of your way to-night
with words any more than to-morrow can invade to-day. Each has its
place appointed. You will come upon to-morrow waiting your way, and you
will come upon knowledge waiting your way. I am a part of the morrow
of your knowing. I cannot break in. You have been with me, John Mark,
only as a traveler is with the distant town that his eyes behold from a
hill’s height, deep and far on his way within the valley.”
She took my money and placed it in a drawer. I held her hand gently.
“Why is this horror just my life?”
She shook her head, and her free hand touched my brow in a caress.
“There we are all children. That ... the one mystery worth knowing ...
none of us may know. Our eyes can study deep in the ways of life. But
God’s will ... God’s reasons.... There we are all children.”
_m_
Sixth avenue. Unwittingly, perhaps to place myself once more in the
world? I looked at my watch. 9.03. Only 9.03! I have swept out so far
and come back, and my watch says 9.03.
I turn toward home, and my steps hurry me. Why is that? Am I running
from the black apocalypse behind, or rushing toward some blacker
revelation? I do not know: I am encased in darkness, and that is all
that I feel. My power to touch the body of the world, the deeds and
ways of my friends, is gone from me. I move through presentiment of
birth, as in a womb. So different from life, this dank dark mother of
my ignorance. And yet a womb, nourishing me and pressing me toward the
light.
Houses, sky, the shuttling tissue of men and women past me are the dark
wall and dark blood of a womb. I airless and immobile within it, still
believe in Birth.
Doctor Stein ... the revered Doctor Stein, whose interest in me at the
laboratory has so warmed my heart, is coming down my steps. I am beyond
surprise. Within this mothering darkness of my life words and customs
and conventions move quite nimbly. So I greet Doctor Stein. I observe
how his gentle face is a bit clumsied by his embarrassment:
“I just thought I’d drop in. I knew, though I’d said ‘Come,’ you were
not coming to see me.”
“Doctor Stein, I didn’t dare.... I was afraid you’d forgotten that
casual invitation.”
“Just so. So _I_ came.”
“Won’t you come back, Doctor Stein?”
He followed me docilely, and took the chair I pointed out for him,
sprawling a bit with his legs out, priming his pipe, and his eyes
puzzled at the curtains over my book shelves.
“You cover your books, when you need to think deep?” he asked.
“This time I did. I never have before.”
He puffed hard at his pipe, clenching the bowl in his fist. A naïf
discomfort faintly fretted his natural ease. His fine mouth moved, his
gray thick brows lowered over his eyes, and in his eyes there was a
twinkle as if this was a holiday for him, and he a bit rusty at it.
“Oh,” I exclaimed, as the man’s playful candor shone to me not at war
but at one with his limpid mind. “Oh, I am so glad, so glad that you
cared to drop in!”
“I’ve been getting up courage to come, for a long time.” He puffed.
I felt no guilt as he watched me. Let this spirit which had pierced
to the soul of matter and proved its mastery by the act of birth ...
let him see me clear, as he saw everything. He was above judging, he
was a creator! If I was this horrible enigma from which the mankind
in me shrank and for which it had no word, let him see: he who had
captured in a formula the passion of gestation, would know, if he saw
me clear, some law to hold me, some law to put me back into the warmth
of human life. So I faced his eyes with open eyes. And I basked in his
intelligence, as in a sun.
Doctor Stein chatted. He had not come to argue, he had come to play.
He talked of a new composer, of an Irish comedy, of a farcical talk he
had had with the Mayor who had summoned him to serve on some Committee.
By a trick of memory, when he reached the Great Presence, he had
forgotten the purpose of the Committee: and he scanned His Honor’s
words carefully for a hint, and in vain.... I remarked how boyish
was this celebrated man. The slight body was fresh and awkward: the
hair uprose in a flourish that was youth: the eyes were young: the
hands were feminine and young. His mind was like a mellow wine within
him, that with age had grown closer to the sun and the fields. Doctor
Stein was not only young, he was naïf: he was confident and blooming
with his faith. Was this indefeasible verdance a large part of his
greatness?... Doctor Stein wafted a great puff of smoke into the room
and laughed:
“I got so mixed up, what with the Mayor’s allusions and assumptions and
bad metaphors, that I began to defend myself by mystifying nonsense.
You should have heard me. I rolled out great sentences signifying
nothing. I made some wild statement and proved it by half a dozen
mutually contradictory points. And His Honor nodded solemnly, and
agreed. So I went on, more daring, wilder. Once or twice he shook his
ponderous head--the weight is chiefly in the chin and jowl--as if
subtly to dissent. It was rich! As I left, he thrust out his hand as
if it had been a bankroll. I took it humbly. He said: ‘It’s a great
honor to me, Doctor, to coöperate with one of our great American Minds,
and to find that we are so fundamentally in accord!’ The Professor
waved his hands in delight. ‘And you will argue against Democracy, I
suppose, you young pedant. What else but Democracy could put such a
man in a place of power? And what better man for the place could we
hope to find? Surely, such clownish genius is better for the world than
all the efficient solemnity of Germany and England. I tell you: the
American politician is as great a creation as Rabelais or Aristophanes
ever dreamed of. Don’t you dare contradict me. America has the comic
genius.’”
At last he paused, and I could see his mind go out of the window.
“That rain must stop,” he said. “Too heavy to go on.”
I knew then that it had begun to rain immediately after my return. It
was a ponderous downpour, pressure upon stone of a sheeting element
almost as solid. Outside the rain was a world of thought I did not
choose to enter: here in my room was a snug apartness, and I held to
it and to the rain as the cover over us. I held to the Doctor as to
a charm saving our sanctuary. He chatted on, again, and I forgot all
else.
He arose, he emptied his pipe of its ashes and placed it away.
“It’s over,” he said.
Yes: the rain has ceased. And I know the dreaded Threshold which it has
barred from me. Doctor Stein is going away, and the rain has passed,
and soon I shall be _within_. My shoulders shuddered as if already a
swart world clapped them.... Doctor Stein placed his hands upon them,
and looked at me in silence.
“Son,” he said, after the pause--and I could hear my memory of the
rain, so deep did I fear this quiet. “Son, what’s the matter?”
My face broke. I yearned to bury it in his hands: I managed to smile.
“I don’t know ... yet.”
“I like you, Mark. I believe in you. I wish I could help.”
My gratitude was in my eyes. But something else was there, so that I
dared not show my gratitude.
“It is mysterious to me,” I smiled. “I seem to have lost my unity.”
“You are in trouble ... and you talk metaphysics.”
“Oh, if my trouble were some fact!”
The cry of my voice impressed him. I went on:
“You are so intact, so _one_; how can you heal me? You cannot touch
my pain. Even my own mind cannot touch it. My mind, too, like all the
words I can speak, is in the world of one: and the horror is, that part
of my soul seems to have left that world.”
“But you have your mind, John: draw yourself back into the sanity of
its control.”
“Oh, if I could----”
“The other way is dissolution.”
“Dissolution of a lie, perhaps.”
“Dissolution of your personality, of your integrity.”
“Man’s unity perhaps is nothing, and the laws and logic of it: if he is
but a fragment.”
“I can’t follow you, John. I have never seen broken this unity of
matter. I come always nearer to it, the more I see.”
“What could your mind and your eyes behold beyond themselves? What
fragment, feeling over its own domain, could judge itself other than
the whole?”
“Sick,” he whispered to himself. And in silence, he watched me. The
room was gray: the light of the lamp came horizontal to his eyes that
watched me. We were still. I felt the silence that the rain had left.
Then something within his eyes that had searched mine, quailed. A
subtle tremor went through all his body, as if in fear it yearned to be
away. He was in anguish of an impalpable instinct, shuddering him off,
and that shamed him. He held his ground. But his eyes were veiled with
a wistful helplessness.
--Why don’t you go? I thought. I knew he stayed because he would not
give in to the shudder that shamed him: and because he wanted to
understand that shudder.
He held out his hand. I took it, cold and removed. All his body was
cold. Only his eyes were warm, and in them I saw a look kin to what I
had seen in the eyes of Mrs. Landsdowne. Doctor Stein and she ... how
could their eyes have kinship?--They have seen one thing! Two words as
different as themselves are different. But they have seen one thing!
“Will _you_ tell me,” said my eyes, “before you go, what you have seen?”
But he had no word for it. A gray muteness spread upon his face, from
which his eyes stared out.
“John Mark,” he stammered, “your will, John Mark--_what is it
touching_?”