Chapter III: Part 3

And again he cried out in anguish. “But I’m _not_ superficial—I may have been wanton, but I’ve not been superficial. I wanted to give up everything, to abandon myself to whatever IT demanded, to do whatever IT directed and willed. But the terrible thing is I don’t know what abandon is. I don’t know when it’s abandon and when it’s just a case of minor calculation.

“The real abandon is not to know whether one throws oneself off a cliff or not, and not to care. But I can’t do it, because I must know, because I’m afraid if I did cast myself off, I should find that I had thrown myself off the lesser thing after all, and that,” he said in a horrified voice, “I could never outlive, I could never have faith again. And so it is that I shall never know, Emma; only children and the naïve know, and I am too sophisticated to accomplish the divine descent.”

“But you must tell me,” she said, hurriedly. “What am I to do, what am I to think? My whole future depends on that, on your answer—on knowing whether I do an injustice not to hate, not to strike, not to kill—well, you must tell me—I swear it is my life—my entire life.”

“Don’t ask me, I can’t know, I can’t tell. I who could not lead one small sheep, what could I do with a soul, and what still more could I do with you? No,” he continued, “I’m so incapable. I am so mystified. Death would be a release, but it wouldn’t settle anything. It never settles anything, it simply wipes the slate, it’s merely a way of putting the sum out of mind, yet I wish I might die. How do I know now but that everything I have thought, and said, and done, has not been false, a little abyss from which I shall crawl laughing at the evil of my own limitation.”

“But the child—what have I been telling Oscar—to love with an everlasting love——”

“That’s true,” he said.

“Kahn, listen. What have I done to him, what have I done to myself? What are we all doing here—are we all mad—or are we merely excited—overwrought, hysterical? I must know, I must know.” She took his hand and he felt her tears upon it.

“Kahn, is it an everlasting but a changing love—what kind of love is that?”

“Perhaps that’s it,” he cried, jumping up, and with a gesture tore his shirt open at the throat. “Look, I want you to see, I run upon the world with a bared breast—but never find the blade—ah, the civility of our own damnation—that’s the horror. A few years ago, surely this could not have happened. Do you know,” he said, turning his eyes all hot and burning upon her, “the most terrible thing in the world is to bare the breast and never to feel the blade enter!” He buried his face in his hands.

“But, Kahn, you must think, you must give me an answer. All this indecision is all very well for us, for all of us who are too old to change, for all of us who can reach God through some plaything we have used as a symbol, but there’s my son, what is he to think, to feel, he has no jester’s stick to shake, nor stool to stand on. Am I responsible for him? Why,” she cried frantically, “must I be responsible for him? I tell you I won’t be, I can’t. I won’t take it upon myself. But I have, I have. Is there something that can make me immune to my own blood? Tell me—I must wipe the slate—the fingers are driving me mad—can’t he stand alone now? Oh, Kahn, Kahn!” she cried, kissing his hands. “See, I kiss your hands, I am doing so much. You must be the prophet—you can’t do less for the sign I give you—I must know, I must receive an answer, I _will_ receive it.”

He shook her off suddenly, a look of fear came into his eyes.

“Are you trying to frighten me?” he whispered. She went into the hall, into the dark, and did not know why, or understand anything. Her mind was on fire, and it was consuming things that were strange and merciful and precious.

Finally she went into her son’s room and stood before his bed. He lay with one feverish cheek against a dirty hand, his knees drawn up; his mouth had a peculiar look of surprise about it.

She bent down, called to him, not knowing what she was doing. “Wrong, wrong,” she whispered, and she shook him by the shoulders. “Listen, Oscar, get up. Listen to me!”

He awoke and cried out as one of her tears, forgotten, cold, struck against his cheek. An ague shook his limbs. She brought her face close to his.

“Son, hate too, that is inevitable—irrevocable——”

He put out his two hands and pushed them against her breast and in a subdued voice said, “Go away, go away,” and he looked as if he were about to cry, but he did not cry.

She turned and fled into the hall.

However, in the morning, at breakfast, there was nothing unusual about her, but a tired softness and yielding of spirit; and at dinner, which was always late, she felt only a weary indifference when she saw Straussmann coming up the walk. He had a red and white handkerchief about his throat, and she thought, “How comic he looks.”

“Good evening,” he said.

“Good evening,” she answered, and a touch of her old gaiety came into her voice. Kahn was already seated, and now she motioned Straussmann to follow. She began slicing the cold potted beef and asked them about sugar in their tea, adding, “Oscar will be here soon.” To Kahn she showed only a very little trace of coldness, of indecision.

“No,” Straussmann said, still standing, legs apart: “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like a word or two with Kahn.” They stepped off the porch together.

“Kahn,” he said, going directly to the point, “listen,” he took hold of Kahn’s coat by the lapel. “You have known Emma longer than I have, you’ve got to break it to her.” He flourished a large key under Kahn’s nose, as he spoke.

“I’ve got him locked up in the out-house safe enough for the present, but we must do something immediately.”

“What’s the matter?” A strange, pleasant but cold sweat broke out upon Kahn’s forehead.

“I found Oscar sitting beside the body of his sweetheart, what’s-her-name; he had cut her throat with a kitchen knife, yes, with a kitchen knife—he seemed calm, but he would say nothing. What shall we do?”

“They’ll say he was a degenerate from the start——”

“Those who live by the flesh—eh?”

“No,” Kahn said, in a confused voice, “that’s not it.”

They stood and stared at each other so long that presently Emma grew nervous and came down the garden path to hear what it was all about.

ANTIQUE

A lady in a cowl of lawn
With straight bound tabs and muted eyes,
And lips fair thin and deftly drawn
And oddly wise.

A cameo, a ruff of lace,
A neck cut square with corners laid;
A thin Greek nose and near the face
A polished braid.

Low, sideways looped, of amber stain
The pale ears caught within its snare.
A profile like a dagger lain
Between the hair.

KATRINA SILVERSTAFF

“We have eaten a great deal, my friend, against the day of God.”

She was a fine woman, hard, magnificent, cold, Russian, married to a Jew, a doctor on the East Side.

You know that kind of woman, pale, large, with a heavy oval face.

A woman of ‘material’—a lasting personality, in other words, a ‘fashionable’ woman, a woman who, had she lived to the age of forty odd, would have sat for long fine hours by some window, overlooking some desolate park, thinking of a beautiful but lazy means to an end.

She always wore large and stylish hats, and beneath them her mouth took on a look of pain at once proud, aristocratic and lonely.

She had studied medicine—but medicine in the interest of animals; she was a good horse doctor—an excellent surgeon on the major injuries to birds and dogs.

In fact she and her husband had met in a medical college in Russia—she had been the only woman in the class, the only one of the lot of them who smiled in a strange, hurt and sarcastic way when dissecting.

The men treated her like one of them, that is, they had no cringing mannerliness about their approach, they lost no poise before her, and tried no tricks as one might say.

The Silverstaffs had come to America, they had settled on the East Side, among ‘their own people’ as he would say; she never said anything when he talked like this, she sat passive, her hands in her lap, but her nostrils quivered, and somewhere under the skin of her cheek something trembled.

Her husband was the typical Jewish intellectual, a man with stiff, short, greying hair, prominent intelligent and kindly eyes, rather short, rather round, always smelling of Greek salad and carbolic acid, and always intensely interested in new medical journals, theories, discoveries.

He was a little dusty, a little careless, a little timid, but always gentle.

They had been in America scarcely eight months before the first child was born, a girl, and then following on her heels a boy, and then no more children.

Katrina Silverstaff stopped having her children as abruptly as she had begun having them; something complicated had entered her mind, and where there are definite complications of the kind that she suffered, there are no more children.

“We have eaten a great deal, my friend, against the day of God,” she had said that.

She had said that one night, sitting in the dusk of their office. There was something inexpressibly funny in their sitting together in this office, with its globe of the world, its lung charts, its weighing machine, its surgical chair, and its bowl of ineffectual goldfish. Something inexpressibly funny and inexpressibly fecund, a fecundity suppressed by coldness, and a terrible determination—more terrible in that her husband Otto felt nothing of it.

He was very fond of her, and had he been a little more sensitive he would have been very glad to be proud of her. She never became confidential with him, and he never tried to overstep this, partly because he was unaware of it, and partly because he felt little need of a closer companionship.

She was a fine woman, he knew that; he never thought to question anything she did, because it was little, nor what she said, because it was less; there was an economy about her existence that simply forbade questioning. He felt in some dim way, that to criticize at all would be to stop everything.

Their life was typical of the East Side doctor’s life. Patients all day for him, and the children for her, with an occasional call from someone who had a sick bird. In the evening they would sit around a table with just sufficient food, with just sufficient silver and linen, and one luxury: Katrina’s glass of white wine.

Or sometimes they would go out to dine, to some kosher place, where everyone was too friendly and too ugly and too warm, and here he would talk of the day’s diseases while she listened to the music and tried not to hear what her daughter was crying for.

He had always been a ‘liberal,’ from the first turn of the cradle. In the freedom of the people, in the betterment of conditions, he took the interest a doctor takes in seeing a wound heal.

As for Katrina Silverstaff, she never said anything about it, he never knew what she really thought, if she thought at all; it did not seem necessary for her to do or say anything, she was fine as she was, where she was. On the other hand it never occurred to him that she would not hear, with calmness at least, his long dissertations on capital.

At the opening of this story, Katrina’s daughter was a little girl of ten, who was devoted to dancing, and who lay awake at nights worrying about the shape of her legs, which had already begun to swell with a dancer’s muscles.

The boy was nine, thin, and wore spectacles.

And of course what happened was quite unaccountable.

A man, calling himself Castillion Rodkin, passed through one Summer, selling Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” Among the houses where he had left a copy was the house of Otto Silverstaff.

Katrina had opened the door, the maid was down with the measles, and the doctor was busy with a patient, a Jew much revered for his poetry.

She never bought anything of peddlers, and she seldom said more than “No, thank you.” In this case she neither said “Thank you,” nor closed the door—instead she held it open, standing a little aside for him to pass, and, utterly astonished, he did pass, waiting behind her in the hall for orders.

“We will go into the study,” she said, “my husband is busy.”

“I was selling Bibles last year,” he remarked, “but they do not go down in this section.”

“Yes,” she answered, “I see,” and she moved before him into the heavy damp parlour which was never unshuttered and which was never used. She reached up and turned on one solitary electric light.

Castillion Rodkin might have been of any nationality in the world; this was partly from having travelled in all countries, and also from a fluid temperament—little was fixed or firm in him, a necessary quality in a salesman.

Castillion Rodkin was below medium height, thin and bearded with a pale, almost white growth of hair. He was peculiarly colourless, his eyes were only a shade darker than his temples, and very restless.

She said simply, “We must talk about religion.”

And with an awkwardness unusual to him he asked “Why?”

“Because,” she said in a strained voice, making a hurt gesture, “it is so far from me.”

He did not know what to say, of course, and lifting one thin leg in its white trousers he placed it carefully over the other.

She was sitting opposite him, her head turned a little to one side, not looking at anything. “You see,” she said presently, “I want religion to become out of the reach of the few.”

“Become’s a queer word,” he said.

“It is the only word,” she answered, and there was a slight irritation in her voice, “because it is so irrevocably for the many.”

“Yes,” he said mechanically, and reached up to his beard, leaving his hand there under a few strands of hair.

“You see,” she went on simply, “I can come to the point. For me, everything is a lie—I am not telling this to you because I need your help, I shall never need help,” she said, turning her eyes on his, “understand that from the beginning——”

“Beginning,” he said in a loud voice suddenly.

“From the beginning,” she repeated calmly, “right from the very start, not help but hindrance, I need enough hindrance, a total obstacle, otherwise I cannot accomplish it.”

“Accomplish what, madame?” he asked and took his hand from under his beard.

“That is my affair, mine alone, that you must not question, it has nothing to do with you, you are only a means to an end.”

He said, “What can I do for you?”

She smiled, a sudden smile, and under her cheek something flickered. “You can do nothing,” she said and stood up. “I must always do it all—yes, I shall be your mistress—wait,” she said raising her hand, and there was anger and pride in her. “Do not intrude now by word or sign, but tomorrow you will come to me—that is enough—that is all you can do,” and in this word “all” he felt a limit on himself that he had never known before, and he was frightened and disquieted and unhappy.

He came the next day, cringing a little, fawning, uneasy, and she would not see him—she sent word “I do not need you yet,” and he called again the next day and learned that she was out of town, then one Sunday she was in to him.

She said quietly to him, as if she were preparing him for a great disappointment, “I have deliberately, very deliberately, removed remorse from the forbidden fruit,” and he was abject suddenly and trembling.

“There will be no thorns for you,” she went on in a cold abrupt voice. “You will miss that, but do not presume to show it in my presence.”

“Also my floor is not the floor on which you may crawl,” she continued, “and I do not permit you to suffer while I am in the room—and,” she added, unfastening her brooch slowly and precisely, “I dislike all spiritual odours.”

“Are we all strange?” he whispered.

“It takes more than will to attain to madness.”

“Yes.”

Then she was silent for a while, thinking.

“I want to suffer,” he murmured, and trembled again.

“We are all gross at times, but this is not your time.”

“I could follow you into the wilderness.”

“I would not miss you.”

And it was said in a terrible forbidding voice.

“I suffer as a birthright—I want it to be something more my own than that.”

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“Does one ever destroy oneself who is utterly disinterested?”

“I don’t know.”

Presently she said, “I love my husband—I want you to know that, it doesn’t matter, but I want you to know that, and that I am content with him, and quite happy——”

“Yes,” Castillion Rodkin answered and began trembling again, holding on to the sides of the bed.

“But there is something in me,” she continued, “that is very mournful because it is being.”

He could not answer and tears came to his eyes.

“There is another thing,” she said with abrupt roughness, “that I must insist on, that is that you will not insult me by your presence while you are in this room.”

He tried to stop his weeping now, and his body grew tense, abject.

“You see,” she continued, “some people drink poison, some take a knife, and others drown; I take you.”

In the very early dawn, she sat up with a strange smile. “Will you smoke?” she said, and lit him a cigarette. Then she withdrew into herself, sitting on the edge of the mahogany boards, her hands in her lap.

And there was a little ease, and a little comfort in Castillion Rodkin, and he turned, drawing up one foot, thrusting his hand beneath his beard, slowly smoking his cigarette.

“Does one regret?” he asked, and the figure of Katrina never moved, nor did she seem to hear.

“You know, you frightened me—last night,” he went on, lying on his back now and looking at the ceiling. “I almost became something—something.”

There was a long silence.

“Shall the beasts of the field and the birds of the air forsake thee?” he said gloomily, then brightly. “Shall any man forsake thee?”

Katrina Silverstaff remained as she was, but under her cheek something quivered.

The dawn was very near and the street lamps had gone out; a milk cart rattled across the square, and passed up a side street.

“One out of many, or only one?”

He put his cigarette out, he was beginning to breathe with difficulty, he was beginning to shiver.

“Well——”

He turned over, got up, stood on the floor.

“Is there nothing I can say?” he began, and went a little away and put his things on.

“When shall I see you again?”

And now a cold sweat broke out on him, and his chin trembled.

“Tomorrow?”

He tried to come toward her, but he found himself near the door instead.

“I’m nothing,” he said, and turned toward her, bent slightly; he wanted to kiss her feet—but nothing helped him.

“You’ve taken everything now, now I cannot feel, I do not suffer——” He tried to look at her—and succeeded finally after a long time.

He could see that she did not know he was in the room.

Then something like horror entered him, and with a soft, swift running gait he reached the door, turned the handle and was gone.

A few days later, at dusk, for his heart was the heart of a dog, he came into Katrina’s street, and looked at the house.

A single length of crape, bowed, hung at the door.

From that day he began to drink heavily, he got to be quite a nuisance in the cafés, he seldom had money to pay, he was a fearless beggar, almost insolent, and once when he saw Otto Silverstaff sitting alone in a corner, with his two children, he laughed a loud laugh and burst into tears.

HUSH BEFORE LOVE

A voice rose in the darkness saying “Love,”
And in the stall the scattered mice grew still,
Where yet the white ox slept, and on the sill
The crowing cock paused, and the grey house dove
Turned twice about upon the ledge above.

THE ROBIN’S HOUSE

In a stately decaying mansion, on the lower end of the Avenue, lived a woman by the name of Nelly Grissard.

Two heavy cocks stood on either side of the brownstone steps, looking out toward the park; and in the back garden a fountain, having poured out its soul for many a year, still poured, murmuring over the stomachs of the three cherubim supporting its massive basin.

Nelly Grissard was fat and lively to the point of excess. She never let a waxed floor pass under her without proving herself light of foot. Every ounce of Nelly Grissard was on the jump. Her fingers tapped, her feet fluttered, her bosom heaved; her entire diaphragm swelled with little creakings of whale-bone, lace and taffeta.

She wore feathery things about the throat, had a liking for deep burgundy silks, and wore six petticoats for the “joy of discovering that I’m not so fat as they say.” She stained her good square teeth with tobacco, and cut her hair in a bang.

Nelly Grissard was fond of saying: “I’m more French than human.” Her late husband had been French; had dragged his nationality about with him with the melancholy of a man who had half dropped his cloak and that cloak his life, and in the end, having wrapped it tightly about him, had departed as a Frenchman should.

There had been many “periods” in Nelly Grissard’s life, a Russian, a Greek, and those privileged to look through her key-hole said, even a Chinese.

She believed in “intuition,” but it was always first-hand intuition; she learned geography by a strict system of love affairs—never two men from the same part of the country.

She also liked receiving “spirit messages”—they kept her in touch with international emotion—she kept many irons in the fire and not the least of them was the “spiritual” iron.

Then she had what she called a “healing touch”—she could take away headaches, and she could tell by one pass of her hand if the bump on that particular head was a bump of genius or of avarice—or if (and she used to shudder, closing her eyes and withdrawing her hand with a slow, poised and expectant manner) it was the bump of the senses.

Nelly was, in other words, dangerously careful of her sentimentalism. No one but a sentimental woman would have called her great roomy mansion “The Robin’s House,” no one but a sentimentalist could possibly have lived through so many days and nights of saying “yes” breathlessly, or could have risen so often from her bed with such a magnificent and knowing air.

No one looking through the gratings of the basement window would have guessed at the fermenting mind of Nelly Grissard. Here well-starched domestics rustled about, laying cool fingers on cool fowls and frosted bottles. The cook, it is true, was a little untidy; he would come and stand in the entry, when Spring was approaching, and look over the head of Nelly Grissard’s old nurse, who sat in a wheel-chair all day, her feeble hands crossed over a discarded rug of the favourite burgundy colour, staring away with half-melted eyes into the everlasting fountain, while below the cook’s steaming face, on a hairy chest, rose and fell a faded holy amulet.

Sometimes the world paused to see Nelly Grissard pounce down the steps, one after another, and with a final swift and high gesture take her magnificent legs out for a drive, the coachman cracking his whip, the braided ribbons dancing at the horses’ ears.

And that was about all—no, if one cared to notice, a man, in the early forties, who passed every afternoon just at four, swinging a heavy black cane.

This man was Nicholas Golwein—half Tartar, half Jew.

There was something dark, evil and obscure about Nicholas Golwein, and something bending, kindly, compassionate. Yet he was a very Jew by nature. He rode little, danced less, but smoked great self-reassuring cigars, and could out-ponder the average fidgety American by hours.

He had travelled, he had lived as the “Romans lived,” and had sent many a hot-eyed girl back across the fields with something to forget or remember, according to her nature.

This man had been Nelly Grissard’s lover at the most depraved period of Nelly’s life. At that moment when she was colouring her drinking water green, and living on ox liver and “testina en broda,” Nicholas Golwein had turned her collar back, and kissed her on that intimate portion of the throat where it has just left daylight, yet has barely passed into the shadow of the breast.

To be sure, Nelly Grissard had been depraved at an exceedingly early age, if depravity is understood to be the ability to enjoy what others shudder at, and to shudder at what others enjoy.

Nelly Grissard dreamed “absolutely honestly”—stress on the absolutely—when it was all the fashion to dream obscurely,—she could sustain the conversation just long enough not to be annoyingly brilliant, she loved to talk of ancient crimes, drawing her stomach in, and bending her fingers slightly, just slightly, but also just enough to make the guests shiver a little and think how she really should have been born in the time of the Cenci. And during the craze for Gauguin she was careful to mention that she had passed over the same South Sea roads, but where Gauguin had walked, she had been carried by two astonished donkeys.

She had been “kind” to Nicholas Golwein just long enough to make the racial melancholy blossom into a rank tall weed. He loved beautiful things, and she possessed them. He had become used to her, had “forgiven” her much (for those who had to forgive at all had to forgive Nelly in a large way), and the fact that she was too fluid to need one person’s forgiveness long, drove him into slow bitterness and despair.

The fact that “her days were on her,” and that she did not feel the usual woman’s fear of age and dissolution, nay, that she even saw new measures to take, possessing a fertility that can only come of a decaying mind, drove him almost into insanity.

When the Autumn came, and the leaves were falling from the trees, as nature grew hot and the last flames of the season licked high among the branches, Nicholas Golwein’s cheeks burned with a dull red, and he turned his eyes down.

Life did not exist for Nicholas Golwein as a matter of day and after day—it was flung at him from time to time as a cloak is flung a flunkey, and this made him proud, morose, silent.

Was it not somehow indecent that, after his forgiveness and understanding, there should be the understanding and forgiveness of another?

There was undoubtedly something cruel about Nelly Grissard’s love; she took at random, and Nicholas Golwein had been the most random, perhaps, of all. The others, before him, had all been of her own class—the first had even married her, and when she finally drove him to the knife’s edge, had left her a fair fortune. Nicholas Golwein had always earned his own living, he was an artist and lived as artists live. Then Nelly came—and went—and after him she had again taken one of her own kind, a wealthy Norwegian—Nord, a friend of Nicholas’.

Sometimes now Nicholas Golwein would go off into the country, trying to forget, trying to curb the tastes that Nelly’s love had nourished. He nosed out small towns, but he always came hurriedly back, smelling of sassafras, the dull penetrating odour of grass, contact with trees, half-tamed animals.

The country made him think of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony—he would start running—running seemed a way to complete all that was sketchy and incomplete about nature, music, love.

“Would I recognize God if I saw him?” The joy of thinking such thoughts was not every man’s, and this cheered him.

Sometimes he would go to see Nord; he was not above visiting Nelly’s lover—in fact there was that between them.

He had fancied death lately. There was a tremendously sterile quality about Nicholas Golwein’s fancies; they were the fancies of a race, and not of a man.

He discussed death with Nord—before the end there is something pleasant in a talk of a means to an end, and Nord had the coldness that makes death strong.

“I can hate,” he would say, watching Nord out of the corner of his eye; “Nelly can’t, she’s too provincial——”

“Yes, there’s truth in that. Nelly’s good to herself—what more is there?”

“There’s understanding.” He meant compassion, and his eyes filled. “Does she ever speak of me?”

It was beginning to rain. Large drops struck softly against the café window and thinning out ran down upon the sill.

“Oh, yes.”

“And she says?”

“Why are you never satisfied with what you have, Nicholas?”

Nicholas Golwein turned red. “One dish of cream and the cat should lick his paws into eternity. I suppose one would learn how she felt, if she feels at all, if one died.”

“Why, yes, I suppose so.”

They looked at each other, Nicholas Golwein in a furtive manner, moving his lips around his cigar—Nord absently, smiling a little. “Yes, that would amuse her.”

“What?” Nicholas Golwein paused in his smoking and let his hot eyes rest on Nord.

“Well, if you can manage it——”

Nicholas Golwein made a gesture, shaking his cuff-links like a harness—“I can manage it,” he said, wondering what Nord was thinking.

“Of course it’s rather disgusting,” Nord said.

“I know, I know I should go out like a gentleman, but there’s more in me than the gentleman, there’s something that understands meanness; a Jew can only love and be intimate with the thing that’s a little abnormal, and so I love what’s low and treacherous and cunning, because there’s nobility and uneasiness in it for me—well,” he flung out his arms—“if you were to say to Nell, ‘He hung himself in the small hours, with a sheet’—what then? Everything she had ever said to me, been to me, will change for her—she won’t be able to read those French journals in the same way, she won’t be able to swallow water as she has always swallowed it. I know, you’ll say there’s nature and do you know what I’ll answer: that I have a contempt for animals—just because they do not have to include Nelly Grissard’s whims in their means to a living conduct—well, listen, I’ve made up my mind to something”—he became calm all of a sudden and looked Nord directly in the face.

“Well?”

“I shall follow you up the stairs, stand behind the door, and you shall say just these words, ‘Nicholas has hung himself.’”

“And then what?”

“That’s all, that’s quite sufficient—then I shall know everything.”

Nord stood up, letting Nicholas open the café door for him.

“You don’t object?” Nicholas Golwein murmured.

Nord laughed a cold, insulting laugh. “It will amuse her——”

Nicholas nodded, “Yes, we’ve held the coarse essentials between our teeth like good dogs—” he said, trying to be insulting in turn, but it only sounded pathetic, sentimental.

* * * * *

Without a word passing between them, on the following day, they went up the stairs of Nelly Grissard’s house, together. The door into the inner room was ajar, and Nicholas crept in behind this, seating himself on a little table.

He heard Nord greet Nelly, and Nelly’s voice answering—“Ah, dear”—he listened no further for a moment, his mind went back, and he seemed to himself to be peaceful and happy all at once. “A binding up of old sores,” he thought, a oneness with what was good and simple—with everything that evil had not contorted.

“Religion,” he thought to himself, resting his chin on his hands—thinking what religion had meant to all men at all times, but to no man in his most need. “Religion is a design for pain—that’s it.” Then he thought, that, like all art, must be fundamentally against God—God had made his own plans—well, of that later——

Nelly had just said something—there had been a death-like silence, then her cry, but he had forgotten to listen to what it was that had passed. He changed hands on his cane. “There is someone in heaven,” he found his mind saying. The rising of this feeling was pleasant—it seemed to come from the very centre of his being. “There’s someone in heaven—who?” he asked himself, “who?” But there was no possible answer that was not blasphemy.

“Jews do not kill themselves——”

Nelly’s voice. He smiled—there was someone in heaven, but no one here. “I’m coming,” he murmured to himself—and felt a sensuous giving away in the promise.

His eyes filled. What was good in death had been used up long ago—now it was only dull repetition—death had gone beyond the need of death.

Funnily enough he thought of Nelly as she was that evening when she had something to forgive. He had pulled her toward him by one end of a burgundy ribbon, “Forgive, forgive,” and she had been kind enough not to raise him, not to kiss him, saying, “I forgive”—she just stood there showing her tobacco-stained teeth in a strong laugh, “Judas eliminated.” He put his hand to his mouth, “I have been _There_,” and _There_ seemed like a place where no one had ever been. How cruel, how monstrous!

Someone was running around the room, heavy, ponderous. “She always prided herself on her lightness of foot,” and here she was running like a trapped animal, making little cries, “By the neck!”—strange words, horrifying—unreal——

“To be a little meaner than the others, a little more crafty”—well, he had accomplished that, too.

Someone must be leaning on the couch, it groaned. That took him back to Boulogne; he had loved a girl once in Boulogne, and once in the dark they had fallen, it was like falling through the sky, through the stars, finding that the stars were not only one layer thick, but that there were many layers, millions of layers, a thickness to them, and a depth—then the floor—that was like a final promise of something sordid, but lasting—firm.

Sounds rose from the streets; automobiles going uptown, horses’ hoofs, a cycle siren,—that must be a child,—long drawn out, and piercing—yes, only a child would hold on to a sound like that.

“Life is life,” Nelly had just said, firmly, decisively. After all he had done this well—he had never been able to think of death long, but now he had thought of it, made it pretty real—he remembered sparrows, for some unknown reason, and this worried him.

“The line of the hips, simply Renoir over again——”

They were on the familiar subject of art.

The sounds in the room twittered about him like wings in a close garden, where there is neither night nor day. “There is a power in death, even the thought of death, that is very terrible and very beautiful——” His cane slipped, and struck the floor.

“What was that?” the voice of Nelly Grissard was high, excited, startled——

“A joke.”

Nicholas Golwein suddenly walked into the room.

“A joke,” he said and looked at them both, smiling.

Nelly Grissard, who was on her knees, and who was holding Nord’s shoe in one hand, stared at him. It seemed that she must have been about to kiss Nord’s foot.

Nicholas Golwein bowed, a magnificent bow, and was about to go.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Nelly Grissard cried, angrily, and got to her feet.

He began to stammer: “I—I am leaving town—I wanted to pay my respects——”

“Well, go along with you——”

Nicholas Golwein went out, shutting the door carefully behind him.

PARADISE

This night I’ve been one hour in Paradise;
There found a feather from the Cock that Crew—
There heard the echo of the Kiss that Slew,
And in the dark, about past agonies
Hummed little flies.

NO-MAN’S-MARE

Pauvla Agrippa had died that afternoon at three; now she lay with quiet hands crossed a little below her fine breast with its transparent skin showing the veins as filmy as old lace, purple veins that were now only a system of charts indicating the pathways where her life once flowed.

Her small features were angular with that repose which she had often desired. She had not wanted to live, because she did not mind death. There were no candles about her where she lay, nor any flowers. She had said quite logically to her sisters: “Are there any candles and flowers at a birth?” They saw the point, but regretted the philosophy, for buying flowers would have connected them with Pauvla Agrippa, in this, her new adventure.

Pauvla Agrippa’s hair lay against her cheeks like pats of plated butter; the long golden ends tucked in and wound about her head and curved behind her neck. Pauvla Agrippa had once been complimented on her fine black eyes and this yellow hair of hers, and she had smiled and been quite pleased, but had drawn attention to the fact that she had also another quite remarkable set of differences—her small thin arms with their tiny hands and her rather long narrow feet.

She said that she was built to remain standing; now she could rest.

Her sister, Tasha, had been going about all day, praying to different objects in search of one that would give her comfort, though she was not so much grieved as she might have been, because Pauvla Agrippa had been so curious about all this.

True, Agrippa’s husband seemed lost, and wandered about like a restless dog, trying to find a spot that would give him relief as he smoked.

One of Pauvla’s brothers was playing on the floor with Pauvla’s baby. This baby was small and fat and full of curves. His arms curved above his head, and his legs curved downward, including his picture book and rattle in their oval. He shouted from time to time at his uncle, biting the buttons on his uncle’s jacket. This baby and this boy had one thing in common—a deep curiosity—a sense that somewhere that curiosity would be satisfied. They had all accomplished something. Pauvla Agrippa and her husband and her sister and the boy and Pauvla’s baby, but still there was incompleteness about everything.

Nothing was ever done; there wasn’t such a thing as rest, that was certain, for the sister still felt that her prayers were not definite, the husband knew he would smoke again after lunch, the boy knew he was only beginning something, as the baby also felt it, and Pauvla Agrippa herself, the seemingly most complete, had yet to be buried. Her body was confronted with the eternal necessity of change.

It was all very sad and puzzling, and rather nice too. After all, atoms were the only things that had imperishable existence, and therefore were the omnipotent quality and quantity—God should be recognized as something that was everywhere in millions, irrevocable and ineradicable—one single great thing has always been the prey of the million little things. The beasts of the jungle are laid low by the insects. Yes, she agreed that everything was multiple that counted. Pauvla was multiple now, and some day they would be also. This was the reason that she wandered from room to room touching things, vases, candlesticks, tumblers, knives, forks, the holy pictures and statues and praying to each of them, praying for a great thing, to many presences.

A neighbour from across the way came to see them while Pauvla’s brother was still playing with the baby. This man was a farmer, once upon a time, and liked to remember it, as city-bred men in the country like to remember New York and its sophistication.

He spent his Summers, however, in the little fishing village where the sisters, Pauvla and Tasha, had come to know him. He always spoke of “going toward the sea.” He said that there was something more than wild about the ocean; it struck him as being a little unnatural, too.

He came in now grumbling and wiping his face with a coarse red handkerchief, remarking on the “catch” and upon the sorrow of the house of Agrippa, all in the one breath.

“There’s a touch of damp in the air,” he said, sniffing, his nose held back so that his small eyes gleamed directly behind it. “The fish have been bad catching and no-man’s-mare is going up the headlands, her tail stretched straight out.”

Tasha came forward with cakes and tea and paused, praying over them also, still looking for comfort. She was a small woman, with a round, wrinkled forehead and the dark eyes of her sister; today she felt inconvenienced because she could not understand her own feelings—once or twice she had looked upon the corpse with resentment because it had done something to Pauvla; however, she was glad to see the old man, and she prayed to him silently also, to see if it would help. Just what she prayed for she could not tell; the words she used were simple: “What is it, what is it?” over and over with her own childhood prayers to end with.

She had a great deal of the quietness of this village about her, the quietness that is in the roaring of the sea and the wind, and when she sighed it was like the sound made of great waters running back to sea between the narrow sides of little stones.

It was here that she, as well as her brothers and sisters, had been born. They fished in the fishing season and sold to the market at one-eighth of the market price, but when the markets went so low that selling would put the profits down for months, they turned the nets over and sent the fish back to sea.

Today Tasha was dressed in her ball-gown; she had been anticipating a local gathering that evening and then Pauvla Agrippa got her heart attack and died. This dress was low about the shoulders, with flounces of taffeta, and the sea-beaten face of Tasha rose out of its stiff elegance like a rock from heavy moss. Now that she had brought the cakes and tea, she sat listening to this neighbour as he spoke French to her younger brother.

When they spoke in this strange language she was always surprised to note that their voices became unfamiliar to her—she could not have told which was which, or if they were themselves at all. Closing her eyes, she tried to see if this would make any difference, and it didn’t. Then she slowly raised her small plump hands and pressed them to her ears—this was better, because now she could not tell that it was French that they were speaking, it was sound only and might have been anything, and again she sighed, and was glad that they were less strange to her; she could not bear this strangeness today, and wished they would stop speaking in a foreign tongue.

“What are you saying?” she enquired, taking the teacup in one hand, keeping the other over her ear.

“Talking about the horse,” he said, and went on.

Again Tasha became thoughtful. This horse that they were speaking about had been on the sands, it seemed to her, for as long as she could remember. It was a wild thing belonging to nobody. Sometimes in a coming storm, she had seen it standing with its head out toward the waters, its mane flying in the light air, and its thin sides fluttering with the beating of its heart.

It was old now, with sunken flanks and knuckled legs; it no longer stood straight—and the hair about its nose had begun to turn grey. It never interfered with the beach activities, and on the other hand it never permitted itself to be touched. Early in her memory of this animal, Tasha had tried to stroke it, but it had started, arched its neck and backed away from her with hurried jumping steps. Many of the ignorant fisherfolk had called it the sea horse and also “no-man’s-mare.” They began to fear it, and several of them thought it a bad omen.

Tasha knew better—sometimes it would be down upon the pebbly part of the shore, its head laid flat as though it were dead, but no one could approach within fifty feet without its instantly leaping up and standing with its neck thrust forward and its brown eyes watching from beneath the coarse lashes.

In the beginning people had tried to catch it and make it of use. Gradually everyone in the village had made the attempt; not one of them had ever succeeded.

The large black nostrils were always wet, and they shook as though someone were blowing through them—great nostrils like black flowers.

This mare was old now and did not get up so often when approached. Tasha had been as near to it as ten paces, and Pauvla Agrippa had once approached so near that she could see that its eyes were failing, that a thin mist lay over its right eyeball, so that it seemed to be flirting with her, and this made her sad and she hurried away, and she thought, “The horse had its own defence; when it dies it will be so horrifying perhaps that not one of us will approach it.” Though many had squabbled about which of them should have its long beautiful tail.

Pauvla Agrippa’s husband had finished his cigar and came in now, bending his head to get through the low casement. He spoke to the neighbour a few moments and then sat down beside his sister-in-law.

He began to tell her that something would have to be done with Pauvla, and added that they would have to manage to get her over to the undertaker’s at the end of the headland, but that they had no means of conveyance. Tasha thought of this horse because she had been thinking about it before he interrupted and she spoke of it timidly, but it was only an excuse to say something.

“You can’t catch it,” he said, shaking his head.

Here the neighbour broke in: “It’s easy enough to catch it; this last week three children have stroked it—it’s pretty low, I guess; but I doubt if it would be able to walk that far.”

He looked over the rim of the teacup to see how this remark would be taken—he felt excited all of a sudden at the thought that something was going to be attempted that had not been attempted in many years, and a feeling of misfortune took hold of him that he had certainly not felt at Pauvla Agrippa’s death. Everything about the place, and his life that had seemed to him quite normal and natural, now seemed strange.

The disrupting of one idea—that the horse could not be caught—put him into a mood that made all other accustomed things alien.

However, after this it seemed quite natural that they should make the effort and Tasha went into the room where Pauvla Agrippa lay.

The boy had fallen asleep in the corner and Pauvla’s baby was crawling over him, making for Pauvla, cooing softly and saying “mamma” with difficulty, because the little under-lip kept reaching to the upper lip to prevent the saliva from interrupting the call.

Tasha put her foot in the baby’s way and stood looking down at Pauvla Agrippa, where her small hands lay beneath her fine breast with its purple veins, and now Tasha did not feel quite the same resentment that she had felt earlier. It is true this body had done something irrevocable to Pauvla Agrippa, but she also realized that she, Tasha, must now do something to this body; it was the same with everything, nothing was left as it was, something was always altering something else. Perhaps it was an unrecognized law.

Pauvla Agrippa’s husband had gone out to see what could be done with the mare, and now the neighbour came in, saying that it would not come in over the sand, but that he—the husband—thought that it would walk toward the headland, as it was wont.

“If you could only carry her out to it,” he said.

Tasha called in two of her brothers and woke up the one on the floor. “Everything will be arranged for her comfort,” she said, “when we get her up there.” They lifted Pauvla Agrippa up and her baby began to laugh, asking to be lifted up also, and holding its little hands high that it might be lifted, but no one was paying any attention to him, because now they were moving his mother.

Pauvla Agrippa looked fine as they carried her, only her small hands parted and deserted the clef where they had lain, dropping down upon the shoulders of her brothers. Several children stood hand in hand watching, and one or two villagers appeared who had heard from the neighbours what was going on.

The mare had been induced to stand and someone had slipped a halter over its neck for the first time in many years; there was a frightened look in the one eye and the film that covered the other seemed to darken, but it made no objection when they raised Pauvla Agrippa and placed her on its back, tying her on with a fish net.

Then someone laughed, and the neighbour slapped his leg saying, “Look what the old horse has come to—caught and burdened at last.” And he watched the mare with small cruel eyes.

Pauvla Agrippa’s husband took the strap of the halter and began plodding through the sand, the two boys on either side of the horse holding to all that was left of Pauvla Agrippa. Tasha came behind, her hands folded, praying now to this horse, still trying to find peace, but she noticed with a little apprehension that the horse’s flanks had begun to quiver, and that this quiver was extending to its ribs and from its ribs to its forelegs.

Then she saw it turn a little, lifting its head. She called out to Pauvla Agrippa’s husband who, startled with the movement and the cry, dropped the rope.

The mare had turned toward the sea; for an instant it stood there, quivering, a great thin, bony thing with crooked legs; its blind eyes half covered with the black coarse lashes. Pauvla Agrippa with her head thrown a bit back rested easily, it seemed, the plaits of her yellow hair lying about her neck, but away from her face, because she was not supported quite right; still she looked like some strange new sea animal beneath the net that held her from falling.

Then without warning, no-man’s-mare jumped forward and plunged neck-deep into the water.

A great wave came up, covered it, receded and it could be seen swimming, its head out of the water, while Pauvla Agrippa’s loosened yellow hair floated behind. No one moved. Another wave rose high, descended, and again the horse was seen swimming with head up, and this time Pauvla Agrippa’s hands were parted and lay along the water as though she were swimming.

The most superstitious among them began crossing themselves, and one woman dropped on her knees, rocking from side to side; and still no one moved.

And this time the wave rose, broke and passed on, leaving the surface smooth.

That night Tasha picked up Pauvla Agrippa’s sleepy boy and standing in the doorway prayed to the sea, and this time she found comfort.

SIX SONGS OF KHALIDINE

_To the Memory of Mary Pyne_

The flame of your red hair does crawl and creep
Upon your body that denies the gloom
And feeds upon your flesh as ’t would consume
The cold precision of your austere sleep—
And all night long I beat it back, and weep.

It is not gentleness but mad despair
That sets us kissing mouths, O Khalidine,
Your mouth and mine, and one sweet mouth unseen
We call our soul. Yet thick within our hair
The dusty ashes that our days prepare.