Well, John Mark, here is fact, whatever truth lie under.
Mother and father are dead. You’ll no more see them. They are bodies
arrogantly aloof from your erectness, from the touch of your longing.
The white head man who said: “I am your slave” ... that’s a fact, too
... doomed the car that slew your mother and your father. You possess
half a million ... a fact! ... and you love Mildred, you can marry
Mildred. Is that the truth? Philip LaMotte is dead. The white head man
who said: “I am your slave,” rose ... you saw how he rises ... rose
above Philip LaMotte and with your surgeon’s science struck him dead.
Philip LaMotte dead, your mother and your father dead: --I can marry
Mildred?
... “A little truth. For God’s sake, now, a little truth to season all
these facts. Else they’ll stink in your flesh, John Mark: they’ll rot
your soul, John Mark. A little truth.”
How strange that I lie bearably in bed! Pleasantly. That ankle is a
blessing. No fracture. I diagnose a strain and a bruise. A fortnight’s
rest will doctor it as well as any doctor. A fortnight’s meditation
will doctor my mind and my soul. For they are sore in need of healing.
--Truth, to ease the chaos of these maddening facts: truth that is
harmony like this which holds my body, all of its stress and thrust, to
the balance of health!
* * * * *
But first there is the funeral to go to.
The ankle’s an excuse to free you of that. No: be borne in your royal
litter, wounded but heir to half a million dollars: borne to the laying
away of your slain parents. That is a privilege too rarely human to
be missed by you. Such a son, such loving parents: and the muffled
friends, looking with veiled envy at your devotion.
_b_
The day of the funeral was a bright laughter. Sun sent its golden peals
across the sky that warmed and opened like a wanton girl. The stones of
the city as we passed were a half liquid substance, laved and entered
and absorbed by the May morning. Asphalt, men and women drab-clothed
walking, the strew of wagons and the loom of houses ... all was a
texture of imprisoned light. I felt how all this various matter was a
whirl, crystallized and bound, of luminous electrons: how all of it was
one with the sun’s steep pour and with the sudden jet of my own mind
merging with it.
The cemetery was a smile of lawn in which the monuments stood like
polished teeth. All of the countryside was a response in laughter to
the frolicsome couple of the sun and sky.
We stood beside the Minister. The marble vault opened its bronze grille
and as the coffins slid into their place, a Christian word nodded
the act to gayety. Were not the coffins polished? Was not the vault a
little elegant smile echoing the brash laughter of the skies? And the
solemnity of the group who with bared heads watched the bodies of my
parents slide away, was it not thrust across the wanton mood of the
morning like a comic strip? Eyes dwelt a moment upon me and read there
the conventional bereavement. A subtle counterpoint stirred underneath
the elemental laughter. All of us seemed little whirls of dust modeled
by a momentary wind: pompously we were acting our droll scene for the
gods whose straighter moods shone in the sun and the earth, and who
used us for their more intricate and secret humors.
I have lost my mother and my father. How, here, in this laughing farce
of Spring, can I dwell with my sorrow? Here all of us are dwarfed too
cruelly. Almost, I expected as we walked away, to see the Minister
fling off his mask and motley, to see the mourners caper in relief as
at a curtain’s drop: see all of us and the dead bodies of my parents,
too, and their so polished coffins, take on the ease of supers when the
show is done: pocket their pay and pass....
From the east, a cloud, swollen and purple, voyages upon the sun. The
earth shudders as the sun is shut out, and like a festooned ship upon a
mournful sea it founders. Moving toward home, I move in a dark element,
and it has swallowed all the laughing world. This lawn is a breast
of decomposing flesh. The stones of the city are death substantiate,
feeding upon the drab-clothed men and women who weave within and
without in wistful struggle to escape. Upon my window-sill where Spring
sat and pelted me with flowers, an empty breath breathes emptiness....
The true stuff of space in which our cosmos flickers like a fly in a
night of storm?
* * * * *