“Mildred, you know that I love you.”
“Yes, John,” was her whisper.
“You are all my life. When I saw you last, this was true and I knew it
for true: and I said this to you. But, Mildred, I could not dream then
how true it was, how true it was going to be.”
Her eyes at once were darker and more bright, filling with her
sympathy. She was thinking of my parents.
“Not alone that,” I said. “Not alone that. Least of all that, dear
Mildred. Everything is gone. I have left the world. I have irrevocably
lost it. For a long time unknown to myself, I was preparing this. Even
when last you saw me, and the time before ... that last time at your
house, when Philip died ... I was, unknown to my feeble consciousness,
slaying the world. And I am all alone. And it is all well lost. Not
that I did not love it. But look, my darling, all of it I love, and all
in it I love, has become you!”
She accepted this as no new thing ... no new wonder.
“You had become all in life that my life needed. And the rest was a
husk ... to be cut ruthlessly out.”
She withdrew her hand from mine. She clasped her hands in her lap and
looked at me in a gesture of peace so far from my turmoiled state, that
my eyes hurt, spanning the abyss between us.
“All of this ... you must listen carefully, for you must understand.
That is my single hope: that you will understand: and all that I am
saying is the truth, weighed as a man of science weighs, beloved ...
all of this was taking place in me not from the moment when I knew
you, but long before. What the world promised seemed good. Faith,
passion, beauty, joy, the comradeship of perfect understanding, love in
peace and in its strife ... all this ... the dangers faced with more
bitterness than hope, the hours when anger cleanses, the quiet ways
through woods, the ceremonials of the sea, day ... night ... the secret
dwelling within the body of the belovéd as in the heart of heaven: all
this the world had to give, and all this I cherished and believed in.
But of all this, the world as I knew it was unworthy. Every jot of
it was a crass imperfection ironically giving birth to a dream. Men
and women were but maimed bits of themselves. Passion and vision were
shreds torn and drooping, not banners across the sky.
“So I withdrew from the world, Mildred, the world’s splendor. That was
before you came. How wonderfully, though I did not know, it was for
your coming!”
I could not read her smile. And yet it moved me, making me defensive
not for me: for her.
“I did not create for myself the image of a woman, and when I met you
like a romantic confound that image with my eye’s. No, my withdrawal
from the world of the world’s splendor was more terrible than that.
For it was absolute. It was designless, and ruthless. It was, because
it had to be. The world could not hold my desire of the world. Let the
world therefore go!” ...
“Dear,” I drew closer to her, “how could I have dreamed that there
would be a morrow ... the morning when I knew you ... by whose light
all that had gone, all that had been dreamed, was darkness?”
What I had now to say no words of mine seemed great enough to bring. I
was kneeling at her side. Again I took her hand ... again she let me.
“Did I know deeply always that I would know you? And the long years of
vigil, of abstinence, were they my need, a wiser than the knowledge of
my mind, to prepare my house for you? I cannot say. I know too well
what infinite ways we go beyond the shallow tracings of our mind, to
doubt that this might be. And yet, Mildred, the morning of my finding
you was bright only as could be morning to a man who had dwelt in
perpetual Night, and who knew not there was such a thing as sun. Can
you picture him amazed, seeing the unknown sun? seeing the crystal
radiance of dew, seeing a sky that is not black and the young clouds
about his head: seeing last of all his lamp that had been his sun, fade
to a blot against the wide magnificence of morning.”
I bent my head and pressed her hands against my brow once more. So,
with eyes shut, I kneeled while the day dimmed, and heard the steadfast
lifting of her breath, and felt her there, and knew not what I felt: so
sweet, so near, so unbearably far she was.
“Mildred,” I whispered, “what would this man do, enamored of his
morning, his first morning ... what would he do, if there was danger
that the morning go, ere he had more than glimpsed it?”
I raised my eyes slowly. She was looking at me. Her eyes did not stir,
meeting mine. It was as if they had begun to see a thing within me, and
were rapt in that deep focus.
“Mildred,” I whispered, “all this that I know and that I tell you now,
I have known only since last I saw you. My mind strove, you know how
purely, to make great my will. It worked better, O terribly better than
I knew. For at the end, my will became so masterful that it ceased to
consult my mind. How long it had been this masterful monstrous thing,
I cannot say. But when there was danger that the dawning sun go or be
clouded: then it worked. And only after what anguish of search, did I
learn what it had done!”
She looked with her deep still gaze within me. Upon her eyes a faint
glaze gleamed and it was hard, this surface of her eyes, hard and
defensive: not like her eyes at all. I talked as if to pierce this
glaze, as if to melt it.
“Perhaps from the beginning my will worked and made a fool of my mind
... a slave and a fool. Perhaps it was preparing from the first day,
for you. Do you think that could be? And all my labors in science
seeking the truth, all the chaste rigors of my life ... do you think
perhaps these were blind ways for the working of my will ... plotting
for you, wanting to possess you?
“For when I saw you, I wanted to possess you. And since I saw so deep,
that was a sin. The shallow man may dare to possess. But your body was
not enough for me: nor your mind, nor your love. Oh, I wanted them! But
I beheld in you what no man can possess. Your mysterious power--the
wisdom of your beauty which is so great that it has no words, that it
disdains your mind. I wanted to possess that, above all. By equaling
it--I with my plodding mind of words and concepts! I became mad in love
of your beauty: I wanted to possess, by equaling your beauty.
“Mildred, I must tell you everything. There is a brutal strain in my
will. And when the end that it would win is brutal, it does not tell my
mind. For my mind is not brutal.
“Mildred, there were obstacles in the way of my will to my life’s final
need; obstacles to you. For you must be mine perfectly. Even my mind
agreed in that, and suffered.”
Her hand was motionless in mine. It was like a sleeping thing.
“I killed Philip LaMotte, who was in the way of my will.”
Her eyes seemed to be drawing forward from their distant focus to my
mouth, as if what they had seen before within was now articulate there.
“My will killed the man whom my eyes had never seen, whose name I did
not know, nor whose existence until you told me he was dead. My mind
knows that, now.”
I could not bear her hand, this dead thing in my own. I could not let
it go.
“There was another obstacle to our perfect marriage. I was poor,
Mildred ... and my work was the sort men praise, the sort that
nourishes men, but that they do not pay for. I went to see my parents,
on that same fatal night when I was with you, and when my will was
slaying my one rival. I told my parents of you: I begged them to give
me money, so that I might ask you to become my wife. They refused.
Mother, because she loved me selfishly and did not wish me to marry.
Father because he loved only his ease.
“... I slew my parents.”
Then I could let loose her hand.
With her other hand she clasped the hand I had held. She felt it: she
shuddered. She let it drop to her side.
“My will did away with my parents. I am their heir. I am rich.”
Again she clasped the hand which I had clasped.
“There was a deeper reason for my deeds--a better reason. My will, in
these ruthless acts, proved itself equal to the power of your beauty:
equal to the power in you which had called forth my love. These were
sacrifices to you, Mildred: to the Goddess within you! Sacrifices to
prove your lover as terrible, as ineffable, as strong as was my love,
and as was the power in you that made me love you.”
Mildred arose. Her hands quavered up to her brow.
“John ... are you mad!”
I smiled, and feared to smile lest the smile be horrible to her. Her
hands clasped her brow. Then suddenly she let them fall. Her face
hardened an instant, a glaze of resolution around its tender bloom. She
sat down.
“John, can you explain what you have said?”
She seemed wholly woman. Could it be that my words diminished her? What
I had to say was unreal and strange, now she seemed wholly human.
But I told her my story. And as I spoke, slowly, with care, I bled with
agony. For this was fire I was pouring all about the flower of my love.
How would she emerge? Transfigured to be my mate, wedded by fire to
fire? Or ash?
So I went on, and told my story....
“Whence does he come, this larval man whom my will summoned, whom
my will endowed with all the cunning of my learnéd brain, to slay,
perfectly, surely? Is he gone forever? In that moment at the limekiln,
when my intelligence had challenged my will’s deed and we stood locked
in conflict ... the larval creature of my will, and my self of the
light ... did I do him away? I think he is gone forever. He could live
only when my mind slept: and now it is awake. That is why he strove to
murder me. To drag me by the dark roots of us both into the boil of the
limekiln. And he failed. Had he not been desperate, surely he would
not have tried to kill his master by whose darkness he lived. My mind
won in that electric moment! My mind leaped with my body, to the other
side. He will lurk no more, murder no more. For my soul knows him....
But he has seared my soul.”
Her hands did not cease from moving while I spoke. Now, in my silence,
they moved. They clasped in anguish on her breast. They went to her
brow. They tremored at her side. They were like flowers tremulous in a
flame. She sat, swaying gently, like an agéd woman.
I was silent. Her head turned, and she saw me. The glaze in her eyes
grew as what she knew was measured with her sight. Her body was rigid.
Her pain was freezing her. She swayed no more. And her hands were
lifeless.
I knelt before her. But I did not dare to touch her. I put forth my
hands, but they remained suspended. For I did not dare to touch her.
“Mildred,” I said, “save me.”
She watched my hands, as if she wondered what these suppliant palms
were going to do.
“There is power in me, Mildred. And power, if it is happy, is divine.
Do you now know how I have needed you? Have I not won you? Save me!”
She watched my hands. They covered my face an instant. I stood up. And
I stood over her.
“Mildred, I have been ruthless. Yes. More ruthless than my mind would
ever have conceived. Is that a weakness in me? I loved my parents. They
were the only human beings in my life. I was ruthless, because I was
in love with Beauty. I have used truth ... as it was revealed to me,
vastly beyond our miserable sphere ... I have used truth, because I was
in love with Beauty.”
Her face was blanched as if some fire had seared it. Her eyes were like
stones. Her beauty was a mask.