O the misty plaint of the Unconceived! O crystal
incuriousness of the monad! The faint swarming toward the
light and the rending of the sphere of hope, frustrate,
inutile. I am the seed called Life; I am he, I am she. We
walk, swim, totter, and blend. Through the ages I lay in the
vast basin of Time; I am called by Fate into the Now. On
pulsing terraces, under a moon blood-red, I dreamed of the
mighty confluence. About me were my kinsfolk. Full of dumb
pain we pleasured our centuries with anticipation; we
watched as we gamed away the hours. From Asiatic plateaus we
swept to Nilotic slime. We roamed in primeval forests, vast
and arboreally sublime, or sported with the behemoth and
listened to the serpent's sinuous irony; we chattered with
the sacred apes and mouthed at the moon; and in the Long Ago
wore the carapace and danced forthright figures on
coprolitic sands--sands stretching into the bosom of the
earth, sands woven of windy reaches hemming the sun.... We
lay with the grains of corn in Egyptian granaries, and saw
them fructify under the smile of the sphinx; we buzzed in
the ambient atmosphere, gaudy dragon-flies or whirling motes
in full cry chased by humming-birds. Then from some cold
crag we launched with wings of fire-breathing pestilence and
fell fathoms under sea to war with lizard-fish and narwhal.
For us the supreme surrender, the joy of the expected....
With cynical glance we saw the Buddha give way to other
gods. We watched protoplasmically the birth of planets and
the confusion of creation. We saw hornéd monsters become
gentle ruminants, and heard the scream of the pterodactyl on
the tree-tops dwindle to child's laughter. We heard, we saw,
we felt, we knew. Yet hoped we on; every monad has his
day.... One by one the billions disintegrated and floated
into formal life. And we watched and waited. Our evolution
had been the latest delayed; until heartsick with longing
many of my brethren wished for annihilation....
At last I was alone, save one. The time of my fruition was
not afar. O! for the moment when I should realize my
dreams.... I saw this last one swept away, swept down the
vistas toward life, the thunderous surge singing in her
ears. O! that my time would come. At last, after vague
alarms, I was summoned....
The hour had struck; eternity was left behind, eternity
loomed ahead, implacable, furrowed with Time's scars. I
hastened to the only one in the Cosmos. I tarried not as I
ran in the race. Moments were precious; a second meant æons;
and crashing into the light--Alas! I was too late.... Of
what avail my travail, my countless, cruel preparations? O
Chance! O Fate! I am one of the silent multitude of the
Frustrate....
When she had finished reading this strange study in evolution she
awaited criticism, but with the air of an armed warrior.
"Really, Mrs. Vibert, I am overwhelmed," I managed to stammer. "Only
the most delicate symbolism may dare to express such a theme." I felt
that this was very vague--but what could I say?
She regarded me sternly. Arthur, catching what I had uttered at random,
burst in:
"There, Ellenora, I am sure he is right! You leave nothing to the
imagination. Now a subtile veiled idealism--" He was not allowed to
finish.
"Veiled idealism indeed!" she angrily cried. "You composers dare to say
all manner of wickedness in your music, but it is idealized by tone,
isn't it? What else is music but a sort of sensuous algebra? Or a vast
shadow-picture of the emotions?... Why can't language have the same
privilege? Why must it be bridled because the world speaks it?"
"Just because of that reason, dear madame," I soothingly said; "because
reticence is art's brightest crown; because Zola never gives us a real
human document and Flaubert does; and the difference is a difference of
method. Flaubert is magnificently naked, but his nakedness implicates
nothing that is--"
"As usual you men enter the zone of silence when a woman's work is
mentioned. I did not attempt a monument in the frozen manner of your
Flaubert. Mr. Goddard believes--" There was a crash of music from the
piano as Arthur endeavored to change the conversation. His wife's fine
indifference was tantalizing, also instructive.
"Mr. Goddard believes with Nietzsche that individualism is the only
salvation of the race. My husband, Mr. Vibert, believes in altruism,
self-sacrifice and all the old-fashioned flummery of outworn creeds."
"I wonder if Mr. Vibert has heard of Nietzsche's 'Thou goest to women?
Remember thy whip'?" I meekly questioned. Ellenora looked at her husband
and shrugged her shoulders; then picking up her manuscript she left the
room with the tread of a soldier, laughing all the while.
"An exasperating girl!" I mused, as Vibert, after some graceful
swallow-like flights on the keyboard, finally played that most
dolorously delicious of Chopin's nocturnes, the one in C sharp minor.
That night in my studio I did not rejoice over my bachelorhood, for I
felt genuinely sad at the absence of agreeable modulations in the
married life of my two friends.
I thought about the thing for the next month, with the conclusion that
people had to work out their own salvation, and resolved not to visit
the Viberts again. It was too painful an experience; and yet I could see
that Vibert cared for his wife in a weak sort of a way. But she was too
overpowering for him and her robust, intellectual nature needed
Nietzsche's whip--a stronger, more passionate will than her own. It was
simply a case of mismating, and no good would result from the union.
Later I felt as if I had been selfish and priggish, and resolved to
visit the home in Harlem and try to arrange matters. I am not sure
whether it was curiosity rather than a laudable benevolence that
prompted this resolve. However, one hot afternoon in May, Arthur Vibert
entered my room and throwing himself in an easy-chair gave me the news.
"She's left me, old man, she's gone off with Paul Goddard." ...