--Oh, there must be a truth to salvage me from chaos. Life is a
whirlwind? Let the Lord which is Truth speak to me then from His
whirlwind.
_c_
Three weeks I lie on my couch and am alone. Three weeks of travail and
unceasing night. And at the three weeks’ end, an infant birth of truth
so frail and so nostalgic of its womb that it scarce wills to breathe,
and every hour I must nurse it forward lest it lapse back into the
sweet Abyss.
The travail has its own life. When it is done, there is the babe of a
truth. And yet how are they joined, this deep volumnear anguish and
this green sprout rising after? My travail is an earth: and from its
dark and secret brood springs a light shoot of knowing....
I am in labor of my vision. I lie locked in a distress spherical,
moveless. My room moves through time, time filters into it, so I can
mark the days. But time does not live in this passionate whirling
Sphere that is the immobile body of my meditation. Or if time, not
thrice seven days but all the years of my life and all the ages of my
roots ere I lived. All the pain of my years and their joys were this
great coil about me: were the bedded soil of my distress. And all my
loves and dreams lived in it like the solved minerals in earth. But
this spheric stuff about me is not my love nor my hate, not memory nor
dream, not pain nor joy: is all of these and mysteriously more....
* * * * *
I am a child in my mother’s arms, and I am grown and from my lips
harsh words berate this passionate woman who is my mother and who has
withdrawn from life, finding it in her pride too painful to be borne.
I am a boy striding with awkward steps beside the magnificence of my
father, and at school facing alone a crisis where he has failed to
follow ... too selfish, too dry to share in my emotion. Thoughts in
serried troops invest my mind, and I live and sleep in a clamor of
science, philosophy and dream. Fragments of verse tinkle in the stream
of studious hours: bones of dissected bodies and sprays of Spring float
together down my youthful way. I am a lover, bringing to the bed of
my beloved nosegays of books and notes. Words rise like birds from
the margin of my mind, and blacken the sky and scream and sink again,
suddenly become the stones of an exploded city crashing to the ground.
Here is a bower redolent of dusk: my hands clasp the waist of a girl
and touch her breast. And in the limpid shadow of the trees, there is
a grave and I must enter it, and study bones: and count the countless
cells that a girl’s breast has moved to ecstasy within me. I sit with
a story book in the old house and watch my father rustle the evening
paper while my mother plays languorous music at the piano. My own hand
rises menacing from my little body: grows: grows immense: crushes
father and mother: shatters the walls of our house. I walk upon a field
that glitters underneath a scarlet sky. Sudden my beloved parents and
the field and all the things of earth, and all the things that live,
lift into sound!
The Universe was music! Pulsant, polyphonous and vast, it slept like
the western plain, it rose like the mountains, it tided like the sea,
it sang like the stars. My heart was music. Life swelled in myriad
atoms, and every one a separate song, and all one voice, rounding,
embodying me....
But once more there is time and I am moving within it. Once more there
is this shut, expanding phase which men call life, and I am bounded by
it.
* * * * *
Some fatal signal of my will has challenged Truth to let me glimpse it,
to let me _use_ it: and we are joined forever. If I am to live, I must
destroy this sin of using Truth for my own life: I must make my life
into a facet of the Truth. Men have done that. (But far more men have
died.) Oh, let me make my human life this glory! In its shallow close,
the air will gleam with a transcendent fire: all these broken surfaces
of being which men call bodies, things, will throb with the divinity
of wholeness. The common deed of spheres beyond man’s flat domain is
Miracle. And it must enter now into my life. Or else I must pass out.
* * * * *
I lie upon my couch and am lifted to the topmost peak of a mountain
solitude. In vaporous essence, all the events of my mind and of my
heart rise from their recondite valleys and are a cloud about me.
Solitude: at last I see your eyes. Deep and inscrutable and without
color they look at me and draw my marrow. Solitude, you are terrible
because you are so full of my own being. No other thing is there to
impede this flow of all my thoughts and all my passions into your
ghoulish void. Solitude, you are a horror because you are my self. And
this ... my self ... the air that I must breathe: and this ... my self
... the flesh that I must eat.
Why has this been my fate? Have I not loved my mother and my father?
How differed my childhood from another’s? Turmoil there is always,
moments of pain, flashes of anger, little understreams of injury
and resentment. I was ambitious. Even as a child, I felt that I
must prevail upon the world. And I was scarce a boy, when I knew my
instrument, and moved forth to fashion it; knowing that I must create
it, ere I could wield it. _To prevail by the truth._ Was that a sin?
Who taught that that was sin? You are at fault, if that is sin ... all
you masters! You Greeks and Hebrews, you noblemen of the mind whose
past words are the body of our world. Why did you mislead me, if it is
sin for a young boy to say: “I will to live to learn, as a man may, the
truth.” ... But perhaps you also, even as now I ... found at the end of
your passage, Hell. Perhaps too late. Perhaps the gate of agony had
clamped you in, before you could send back to us a warning.
The world that I have lost was sweet. Fondly I believed in it, devoutly
I was attached to my belief. The world is not well lost. But it is lost
indeed. How can I doubt that? I have slain and buried more than my
father and my mother. My friends, how can I meet them? And my work: and
the glow that came from work with colleagues and with masters and that
was great part of my delight in work! And all my hopes ... the memory
of comrades and of loves that was so good a promise of loves I might
yet win....
No more may I walk down the casual street and watch with open eyes the
open faces of my brothers. No more may I let my sense move close, sure
in its right, to the woman who calls it forth. No more may I be one of
a group at table, accepting easefully their acceptance.
O warm packed common of the life of man! the pleasant word with the
waiter taking my order; the humid confidence of the charwoman who
cleans my rooms; the nod to the policeman at the corner; the gossip
with the newsman, a dark fellow with eyes great in dark glasses; the
community with crowds that I won of my daily paper ... thrilling with
clerk and laborer at the latest scandal, shouting at the portentous
choice in the election of Tweedledee over his rival Tweedledum; the
massed brotherhood at the Polo Grounds, cheering the Giants, booing the
Pirates ... the intricate unsung sacrament of moving in a family of
men! All of us eat, all of us know what hunger is and love, and sleep,
and sleeplessness. All of us have mouths that give forth words, have
ears that receive them. Do we not walk in ecstasy so vast none can give
thought to it? None, save me, who am barred. Not you, prisoner at Sing
Sing. You have comrades. Though they thrust you in solitary, a whole
world knows of you, either to pity or to blame ... and both are ways
of human intercourse. Not you, dead body rotting in the earth, for
you rot with your brothers, you rot with all mankind. I am alone. And
there is no fellow to myself in all the anguished and warm spaces of
men! Oh, I could sing a pæan to the life of the slave-galleys, since
there are fellow-oarsmen, since there is a master. I envy the soldier
driven to his death. What warmth in the fellow fate of his brothers, in
the intense caress of the enemy who slays him. Yes, the victim falling
from a blow knows the passionate caress of his assailant. And the babe
unborn presses its blind hands against a womb that loves it....
Common street of the hospitable city. If it be cold, what one of you
who walk cannot say “It is cold” and have response? If you hunger,
cannot you take your place in the immemorial army of famine and
despair, side by side with all the others who know you, who accept
you, who salute your right to share in the common want? Oh, if I could
undo any tragic search for the Truth that has slain me, that has made
me lone as no star in the crowded heavens ... how I would sing your
riches, manifold Life: Life, in whom men and women move, signaling one
another, touching bodies, sharing pain and laughter! Oh, fool to seek
the solitary Truth, when Ignorance is crowded and is warm.
I am alone. Has hope, the latest straggler, that remains even when
anguish has departed, whispering: “Peace ... you will die.” ... has
hope gone, too?
The faces of mankind are stranger to me. And the city where I live is a
cold memory that has forgotten how to greet me. And my work that loved
me is a lie too small to hold me. Has hope gone, too?
--You are a sufferer who can say to no one: “I suffer.” You are a
sinner and there is no name for your sin. You are too lone to confess:
too lone even to be despised.... _But the word hope must still be
there, since you recall it?_
God stands so far away: the truth, that God is All and that no life can
die, is not a neighbor. Truth sweeps away the nearness of good things.
For the things good unto the life of man are they on the bright surface
where man crawls: it is the brightness of his need that makes them
shine. Blesséd, blesséd man! Fool, when you seek the truth that lies in
darkness. Sage when you stone your sages, when you crucify your Christs.
God is too far, and too vast.
But the word hope is there!
Hope ... Mildred ... there?
* * * * *
So came the thought of Mildred, and grew, thriving on hope, hope on
her, until the two were one and at last were all. The world were well
lost indeed, if Mildred still could be my world. If, knowing what I
was, what I had done, how tragically I had been moved to equal her
own ruthless, wordless wisdom--if she accepted me, I could accept the
truth and master it, and bring it down to our own livable world.
What sin was mine, if Mildred still was mine? What loss if all my
loss had purchased her? I was no sickly repentant to bewail that my
will had forged from the Whirlwind weapons to make its way. I was not
weeping because Philip LaMotte lay dead, and my idle parents. No: I
wept because my act had slain my world and left me all alone: I wept
because of the falsity, the ugliness, the sterility of what my will had
done. But if it had won Mildred, if it brought to my life the beauty of
Mildred, then indeed my will was mastered by a greater and was good.
Mildred and hope throve on each other so, and grew in my mind: and my
body healed. I thought toward the day when she would come at my call
and we would consummate a marriage whose like earth had not known.
--What waits on that day? I said at last. Is there not a telephone in
your room? And though I have used it little these three weeks, have I
not a voice?...
Her voice answered mine. And said that she would come.
“_This afternoon._”
_d_
I walked to the door, I opened for her. In the day’s low light, I
looked at her. Mildred! the lovely body of my hope. A sharp pang cut
across my eyes: I would not question it. I looked at her, moved all my
power to know upon her standing there within my room, so free and so
near.
The weeks had worn her. Her golden hair strained back from the
transparent, faintly throbbing temples. The brow was higher, more pale,
with this new way she caught her hair back, almost brusquely, from it.
Her body seemed lighter: it was a sheath ever more frail and quick to
the fluid of her soul. She stood at ease, and yet a subtle drooping of
the shoulders, the clasp of the tapered fingers on her breast, marked
a fine tracing of the time upon her. She was intact, but a rain of
circumstance had worn her.
* * * * *
“Mildred,” I said.
She sat down, and watched me. The pang across my eyes was sharper
still. She arose again: took off her cape and sitting folded her hands
in her lap.
“Mildred----”
What was the cause of this pang? Was she a disappointment to my eyes,
that what they saw hurt knife-like? Oh, she is perfect fair. And yet
I know, even before I have begun to speak, what is this knowledge
pressing and cutting my eyes, which all her fairness, all my words
unspoken shall not prevail against.
“Mildred--Mildred.”
I felt the need of touching her, as if to prove that she was there. I
came to her and I knelt at her side, and I took her hand ... she let me
take her hand ... and I pressed its palm against my brow. The pang is
sharp, inside: her hand cannot reach it.