Chapter III: Part ONE: The Man with the White Head (2)

Oh, I am small indeed, small and imperfect: no stronger and no greater than those whirling stars. But if they swing sure (an instant) in balance of the truth, cannot I? Gravitation--it is a phase of will, a phase of fragmentary conscience, making these stars swing true, _one with the other_. Let my thoughts do likewise!

I plunge once more into the symphony of search. We must move (it is the fate of imperfection: that we must seem to move): our hope is to move in unison with all the other parts of God. For the harmonious sum of movements is immobile--is Truth’s still image. Work that seeks not respite, that seeks knowledge, is indeed holy: for it binds pitiful man into this symphony.

I think of the design on a man’s palm. Is the design of the stars a similar chart recording the destiny of man’s brain? Of course, there is rapport here--but of what nature? Man’s destiny, the graph of molecule, cell, electron in man’s brain, and the congeried stars--are they related as will, voice, phonographic record (where then is the Will?), or as simultaneous projections of some body that includes us all? This search is my work. I feel with exquisite anguish how the heavens will help me. The vulgar idea of the phonographic record is unreal. The stamp of voice and the record in the wax are not cause and effect: or rather, cause and effect are but relative revelations to our minds of two facts as simultaneous and organic as the two faces of a coin. Even so the correspondence between braincell and star is organic, integral and formal. Braincell and star are related like the chemic stresses of a body. But our point of reference is the mind, and the mind still thinks alas! in scaffold terms of space, of cause and effect, of time. Hence, the sideral design appears _beyond_ us, and appears always changing. Our limitation paints the human drama. Two infants dropped from one womb meet star-wordings abysmally separate. All--from the plane of the womb to the farthest sideral sweep--has changed to human consciousness and will, in the instant between the births. The brains of the infants are two: the foci of their minds make of the stars two sentences--and of their lives two solitudes forever....

I stand before these clumsy artefacts of the child-seers ... the astrologers ... and behold the stuff of a great thought! Am I not young, exhilarant, equipped? There is the event, threefold expressed for our three-dimensioned mind: the stars speak the event, human life enacts it, histology and biologic chemistry release it. What a _Rosetta Stone_ for the unsealing, not of the written word of dead Egyptians, but of the living word of God! Thought and its chemic symbols in brain and body, act in human history and its wording in the sideral cosmos--they are my materials, and they are docile in my hand! I shall create an Axiom in the science of man: his conscious part in God....

* * * * *

But this is not for to-night. The black type of my book is gray. Other signs fill my room.... Mildred and love, fear and hate and horror. Why not read _them_, since they are clamorous near? Are they perhaps as true as the stars? What is _their_ symbol yonder?

Molecules of brain, and flaming suns aflicker like ghosts through emptiness. Are they will-o’-the-wisps misleading me from emptiness which is perhaps the truth?

I am unhappy. My life which I have given to proud search, it seems to-night that I have cast it away on nothing. Emptiness fills my room. _Between and beyond the stars, is there not Emptiness?_ I have not Mildred. Shall I win her? What else is there to win?

Cosmos is a black cavern zero-cold, and the star-worlds flashing their feeble fires are lost. If they and we embody God, is God not also lost? Infinite cold, infinite blind blackness: vagrant mites spitting their star fire into tiny corners. How do I know these flame-specks are my fate? Why not the vaster spaces in between? the spaces empty, the spaces zero-cold? Perhaps the fate of Philip is a sun, burnt out. And my own, the black void that will never burn.... I lay aside my book. Its arrogant hopes seem childish. Are no men born to utter upon earth the Black that gapes between the closest stars?

Yet why think so? That Black is an illusion. Space does not exist: emptiness is but your ignorance. The void between and beyond the stars is the void within your fragmentary knowledge. And through this fact, the void cannot concern you, since only knowledge longs and only knowledge hurts. But were it even so, why fear the void? What is there to fear in emptiness? Fear is not emptiness. Your fear denies your fear.

* * * * *

--O my beloved: this grandiose lack is only lack of you!

How came I to love you? When my young mind moved toward the mysteries of flesh, it was not your flesh made the search sweet. When my young spirit went upon its journey, knowing there was no end, it was not your spirit made the journey sweet. You have come late upon me: yet all my seeking is dead without you, and all my seeking has come full upon you! When I first saw you, my thought was not to kiss your mouth, but to achieve a knowledge and a power, like your own beauty’s wisdom beyond words. What mystery is this?--And what mystery is my despair to-night? Am I not close to Mildred? Could not a fool see in her luminous candor the dawn of love? There was a danger, and that danger is dead! While it lived....

I pace my room: back and forth from the recessed windows to the wall where stands a little table with a vase holding a white lily. And I try to think.

--You must see. You must understand.

Yes, yes. I have gone too far to fall back easefully on ignorance.

--You must probe. You must understand.

Yes, yes. I look at my books.

--Not that.

I think of Mildred.

--Not Mildred....

I stand still: a shudder swarms my skin, draws my throat taut, uprises in my hair....

* * * * *

... the white room larded with books: the face noble and reticent, and the swift births of amaze, of pity, of horror ... indecorous death. Pale hands fluttering up like rebellious dreams--and fallen.

* * * * *

My own hands bar my eyes.... How do I know this is not morbid nonsense?

--What then is sense?

I am not so used to murder that this news, passionately close to my love’s life, should not move me.

--I do not blame you, that you are moved.

“_What can I do?_”

I speak these words aloud, and the despair that dwells in them takes shape. Shape of an impulsion. I know already what I am going to do. But I contrive even now to laugh at myself.

--Fine man of science, driven by despair. Illogical, driven man!

I take off my clothes, and though the night is warm, I shiver in my bed.

_f_

I am asleep and dawn is all about me: dawn within me: I am up from bed and I am putting on my clothes. My face in the mirror wakes me. I am half dressed already, and my mind says: “You must not forget to shave.” I see my face. The mirror is by the window, it stands on a highboy in my bedroom. Dawn is a mingling of stirs: whistle of boat in the river fog, rattle of wagon in the gray cool mists turning and twisting, footbeat solitary on the damp hard pavement--this is dawn coming by the window into my room, to my face. I look at my face, and then my face awakes me.

I put a fresh blade in my razor and shave swiftly. I take off the underwear of yesterday that my hands, while I slept, put on: I bathe cold: I dress fast.

The street is not different from the dawn that drenched my room. Stone is solitary, damp: houses are stifled by the night that they hold, that is passing. I buy a _Times_ and a _World_ at the corner stand where the dark hunched man with thick glasses and a bristling beard gazes at me with exaggerated eyes. I do not look at the paper, waiting for the car. As I sit in the car, I read quietly what I expected to find. Here is the substance:

It is a simple case. Mr. LaMotte’s serving man, Frank Nelson, is
implicated and is already in the Tombs. His master gave him the
evening off, and clearly the crime could not have been committed
without knowledge of this and of the fact that Mr. LaMotte was alone.
At about 8.30, a man came to the apartments where Mr. LaMotte has
his chambers and told the colored doorboy, Elijah Case, that he had
an important note to be delivered in person. Elijah phoned up and
Mr. LaMotte responded. Elijah carried the man to the third floor,
pointed out the door, heard the messenger knock, saw him enter ...
and went down. Little time passed before the elevator signal rang
again. Elijah went up, opened the elevator door and the messenger
stepped in.... Elijah recalls him clearly. “How do you happen to be
so certain?” the police asked him. “I dunno. But I is.” He says the
man was dressed entirely in black, and that his head was white. “Do
you mean white like a _white man_?” “Nossah ... I means white lak ...
lak chalk.” “Even his hair?” “I don’ remember no hair. A white head.
Da’s all.” “Even his eyes?” Elijah shuddered. “Yessah. Dey was white,
too.”... The police infer that the colored boy, who is simple-minded
and imaginative, made up his monster after he had learned the event.
In any case, Elijah went back to his little hall office: and shortly
after a call came in, by phone, for Mr. LaMotte. No: Mr. LaMotte
had no private phone. Instructions were, not to say in any instance
whether Mr. LaMotte was at home, to get the name and announce it
first. It was Mrs. LaMotte, the deceased’s mother. She often called,
and although frequently Mr. LaMotte would tell the boy: “Say I am not
at home” ... that doubtless was why he used the house phone ... never
in the three years Elijah had worked at the apartment had Mr. LaMotte
failed to answer his signal, and never had he refused to speak to his
mother. Elijah phoned up, now, and received no answer. This satisfied
the mother who rang off. But it began to trouble Elijah. Mr. LaMotte
never walked down, and also he never left without giving word to the
boy. During all that time, Elijah had not been required to leave his
little office in full view of the hall. Finally, Elijah was scared.
He phoned again. No answer. He went up, and rang, and pounded on
the door. He went down into the Square and found an officer. They
broke open the door, for the pass-key was with the janitor who was
away.... The murdered man was lying on his back in the library, with
a wound in his heart. There was little blood, no weapon, no sign of
a struggle. But the weapon must have been a long and slender knife
aimed with rare accuracy. Nothing seemed to be missing. The small
safe in a recess of a bookcase was shut, no fingerprints were found.
If the object was theft, the valuable stolen is unknown and hence its
loss is still a mystery. Or else the thief was frightened off ...
that happens. A simple case, which leaves the police in confidence of
a quick solution....

I noted the address and left my papers on the foul straw seat of the car. A man with a skull-like head, skin yellow and tough and eyes that bulged with a lost tenderness, reached out for them. Leaving, I was aware of the two mournful rows of humans facing each other like lugubrious birds on swinging perches.... I found the number and flashed my police card at a brown boy who took me up: the wonder in his eyes was mingled with proprietory pride at his connection with a headline murder. At the door stood a policeman. I heard myself say, coolly:

“I am Doctor Mark of the Institute.” I did not show my card.

He understood nothing, and was impressed by me. I was beginning to be impressed by myself.

Alone in the hall, I hesitated.--I need still not go in. Someone was in the room, and he would come, and I could talk with him explaining my personal interest in a friend. Why not go in? What was I doing here? I had come like an automaton sprung by the despair of the distant night. Moving, I lost my agony. Even this single stationary moment in the hall brought to my nerves a starting pain as if to stand still were some unnatural act forced by my will on my body.--Let me go on. The door opened, and a blunt big man scrutinized me with the vacuous stare that doubtless he took for subtlety. I watched myself dispose:

“I am Doctor Mark of the Institute.” I showed him my card, “... and a friend: a family friend.” I did not hesitate. I wore a light top coat, and I took it off.

The man softened and nodded.

“I am Lieutenant Gavegan.” We shook hands. “He’s in there, sir.” He pointed with his thumb in a miracle of reticent grace. There was a pause in which my will must have spoken. For he said, as if in answer:

“I suppose I can leave you alone in there, sir, a few moments. Don’t touch nothing.”

I saw the image of a cigar in his flat mind as he moved toward his friend, the officer at the entrance. I shut the door behind me.

_g_

I knew this room. The regimented books marched high toward the high ceiling: the subtle notes upon the shelves of color and of plastic twisted like flageolets in a bright cadenza down against the stout march of the books. The square room veered roundly, the ceiling vaulted: all was a concave shut and yet wide about this man who lay upon the floor.

I knew the room, and I was not amazed. Casual thoughts....--Mildred was here: you are the woman for whom men kill, a white-faced man killing with shiny boots ... went through my mind as I leaned down: I was unamazed and cool, lifting the sheet that lay upon the body.

The face did not stop me. I opened the white shirt with its solid bubbles of blood, and my sure hands went to the wound. The blade had been struck from a point higher than the breast, so that its angle from above was acute. It had passed through the pectoralis major and minor muscles, through the fourth intercostal space, and into the right auricle of the heart. The ascending portion of the aorta had been severed. Death was immediate and clean. No surgeon with a body prostrate under his hand could have cut better. This body now was prostrate before me. Swiftly, my eyes measured it: it was six feet, possibly six feet two.... I folded back the shirt, and now, as if I had been satisfied, I looked at the face of Philip LaMotte.

I studied the face which, not twelve hours since, had come to me in the apocalyptic street. A white pallor overlaid the rich dark pigmentation. The beard stubble had grown: it emphasized the accurate delicacy of the chin and the tender strength of the lips. The nose arched high. The brow was serenely broad: the black curled hair, like a filet, came low and round. The shut eyes made the vision startling: a Saint of the Chartres Porche.

I saw myself crouched over this slain saint whom death had sculpted into marble. My mind remarked with an aloof surprise, how little my observations and my will at work surprised me. Was I discovering, indeed? or was I appraising? Was I probing a crime that for good cause haunted me, or was I reviewing ... reviewing----?

I was on my knees crouched over the body of Philip LaMotte. I heard the door. I looked up at the figure of Detective Gavegan. With careful grace, I arose.

“Does the boy Case have a good memory of the man’s size, who brought the message?”

“He says: about medium size.”

“How tall is Case?”

“You saw him. He’s a short darkey.”

“If the man’d been Mr. LaMotte’s size, Case would have known it?”

“Six foot, one and a half? Well, I guess.” Gavegan flattened his eyes once more upon me in a simagre of study.

“I know what you’re thinkin’,” he snickered. “They all likes to play detective. How could so short a man have finished him so fine? Size ain’t strength, Doctor Mark: no more than a big man need lack for wits.” Gavegan’s huge form swelled.

I watched him. The hopelessness of making him respond to my discoveries, still so dark to myself, fought against a pleasant call in me that it would be wrong to hide anything from the law.

“Has that message ... has any letter been found?”

He shook his head wisely. “No: nor there won’t be. The final examination is this morning. That’s why the body ain’t yet been removed. But there won’t be. That letter was mere pretext.”

“This looks a simple case to you?”

“Plain motive. Theft. How do you know what Mr. LaMotte was carryin’ in his pocket just last night? The butler knew. Mebbe a jewel for a girl. Or a bundle of securities. Surely a wad of bills, and he preparin’ for a journey.”

“Oh, he was preparing for a journey?”

Gavegan gave me a gentle look of pity.

“Come over here,” he beckoned with his head. On a small teak-wood desk between the windows, lay a diary pad bound in black levant. It was open to this day. There was one note, scrawled small in pencil:

“_Gr Ct M 10.30_”

I fingered the pad. There were almost no other entries.

“What do you think that means?”

Gavegan loomed. “Grand Central Station. Train at 10.30. And meetin’ there with ... M.”

“Plausible,” I said, and was unsure if I agreed or if I mocked. “I suppose you know already who is ‘M’?”

He eyed me with omniscience. “That we don’t give out, sir. Even to a distinguished friend.”

“But the wound, Gavegan! Have you looked at the wound?”

He was stupid. I prepared to tell my thoughts. Was it because or despite that he was too stupid to receive them?

“The wound might puzzle you, I think, if you had studied more anatomy. The man who dealt it did so from above, for it struck the right auricle of the heart at an angle of less than forty-five degrees! How could a short man do that to a man six feet one and a half? And how could any man murder LaMotte like that, if LaMotte were not literally _baring his breast_: parting his arms, even raising his arms (the muscle wound shows that, besides) in order to receive the blow?”

The image of a victim coöperating with his slayer was too much for the law. The discomfort of my analysis struck Mr. Gavegan as an impertinent invasion. He barred it with laughter. I could see his thought in his mouth and his eye.

“--These scientist cranks.”

I went on: not knowing, again, if my motive was to convince or was bravado in the certainty that my man was beneath convincing.

“Gavegan, have you ever noted the subtle stigmata of the hypnotic trauma?”

Gavegan grumbled.

“I’m afraid, sir, I’ll be havin’ to let you go. The Coroner’s cormin’ again. We always likes to be hospitable to the big doctors at the Institutions, whenever we can help ’em in their studies.” He pulled a huge silver timepiece from his vest, and went to the window, and looked out.

I was immersed so fully, that even now my action did not make my mind break in amaze from the rhythm of events. The big man was at the window looking out: for he believed he had heard the Coroner’s car, and doubtless this meant that his night’s work was over and he could go to his wife. I moved unhesitant to an open door that led into a little passage. A strip of blue carpet covered the floor. And naked-clear there lay on it a white envelope which I picked up and put into my pocket.

I thanked Gavegan: gave him two cigars, and left.

_h_

When I reached my rooms, Mrs. Mahon was there with my breakfast tray, and wondering what could have taken me out so early. Mrs. Mahon was the Italian widow of an Irish policeman. I sat down to my fruit, and her ample and unsubtle beauty was pleasant to my mood, so that I held her with words. Mrs. Mahon loved to talk with me: but in her sense of my state she was shrewd, and she had never intruded her wide hard rondures and the brash clarities of her mind upon my silence. She stood over me now, with her bare arms crowding her bosom, and told me of the latest misdeeds of her lover. Mrs. Mahon was beautiful, and to me entirely without charms. Her head was small, the black hair massed low on the blandness of the forehead, and her nose was Roman. Her eyes bore out my fancy of the moment, that she was not flesh; for in their heavy facets was no expression. The mouth was long and quiet. Its sensuality seemed a deliberate trait, somehow not born of her own flesh but of the will of the artist who had made her. Finally, her body as I could sense it under the loose white fabric of her gown, was an arrangement of obvious feminine forms: high breasts, stomach and hips subdued: and yet to me devoid of the mystery of her sex. She was the body unlit, goodly and functioning: the sacrament of flesh without the spirit. So this day it was cool nourishment to look at Mrs. Mahon, to drink in her clarities, to convince myself that she was not sculpture, quite the opposite: _real_.

The tang of the grapefruit, the earthy pungence of the not too fresh eggs, the bite of the coffee, merged with Mrs. Mahon: and I was happy in a deep forgetfulness. I was sleepy. The thought came:--You have had a bad dream. Your visit to the body may be real: but you can wipe it out like a dream. It need have no consequence in the real world. And that is the trait of the dream, is it not? the one trait that shuts dream out from other planes of life? And I chatted with Mrs. Mahon, and gave her advice.

“His misdeeds,” I said, “save you from ever being bored by him. You should be thankful.”

She smiled: “Oh, I guess he’s a man: and I guess I’m a woman. I suppose I get him sore, too, sometimes, just because my ways are them of a woman. And yet, if I wasn’t a woman, and if he wasn’t a man----”

“Precisely, Mrs. Mahon. What you’ve just said is philosophical and deep.”

She shook her head at my solemn words which, I judged, tickled her as the prickings of a poignard might titillate an elephant. She went out with my tray, and the thought “Rome” came to me as I watched her perfect carriage: the low spacing of her feet, the swing of her hips, the breadth of her back, and the little head so rightfully proportioned, like a rudder steering the life that dwelt within her body.

--Rome. How far I am from Rome. How sweet Rome would be, with its sure shallow strength.

I lit a pipe. Melancholy and the hint of an old anguish wiped out Mrs. Mahon.--This anguish is what moves me, moves me toward what seems the cause of the anguish. A paradox that is a common law. Look at love: how pain of unfulfillment moves us upon the loved one, and as we come ever closer, ever deeper and more absolute grows the pain of unfulfillment. If I could analyze what this is that has taken me: if I could only know where it began.... But I know that it must first fill out its life ere my mind measure it. What did my poor analysis avail me? How wisely I announced: “Your anguish moves you toward the source of your anguish. You cannot stay still because you must fulfill your own beginning.” And how blindly I moved!

I reached into my pocket and took out the envelope that I had not yet examined, and that Mrs. Mahon had helped me to forget. It was addressed

_Philip LaMotte, Esquire_

_By Bearer_

and it was in the straight high script of Mildred Fayn!

It was empty.

I tapped it against my open palm and wondered why I felt that it had any bearing on the case. There was no proof that this was the alleged letter of the fatal messenger. On the contrary, how could I entertain a thought that would implicate Mildred in this horrible affair? What was I trying to find, or to think? I was abhorrent to myself. Doubtless, Mildred had written more than once to a man so close. My reason flayed my miserable thoughts: but did not break them: did not avail against their issuance in deed.

I telephoned to Mildred.

“Yes?” she answered and her frail voice bloomed out of the wire, drenching my sense in a languor of desired peace.

“Mildred,” I said, “doubtless these days you would prefer not to see me.” She did not answer this. “But something possibly important has come up: I feel that I should speak to you.”

She hesitated.

“Meet me at lunch, at Sherry’s ... at one-thirty.”

_i_

My work took me. I worked well. Doctor Isaac Stein’s warm voice startled me at my shoulder.

“You have a fine power of concentration, Doctor Mark. I’ve been here five minutes watching your immobile absorption.”

I turned and met the gray eyes of the great bio-chemist: of the man whom of all Americans I admired most.

“It is the contrary of concentration. My brain is split in two. And the one part does not trouble the other.”

He nodded and frowned.

“It’s the part of your brain which dwells so voluptuously with those ganglions, that interests me.”

“I stand rebuked, sir.”

“You’ll learn that the other part which you think now so worthily engaged in speculation and in rhapsody, is merely the part not yet in solution--not at the point yet of true condensation. When you’re wholly crystallized, Mark, then you’ll be _whole_.”

“You disapprove of me, Doctor Stein?”

He laughed. “You should know better than that.”

“You have the passion for unity of your race, sir.” I laughed back. “This faith in unity which your science posits is itself the creation of a wild mystic rhapsody.”

“It is the premise of every human thought, of every human act.”

“--That has survived, since it fitted into the unitary scheme. But is there not something arbitrary about that, Professor Stein? Two intense single-minded peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews, set up a scale of consciousness based on the Unit, and narrow down the multiverse to that. Everything that men did or thought must fit that scale of One, be translated into it: everything that failed was rejected, was unrecorded, hence intellectually was nonexistent. To-day, after three thousand years of this sort of selection, we have quite an array of theory, data, thought, all in the key of One: we have a whole civilization based on One, a whole set of religions tuned in One, to which our senses as well as our minds submit and finally conform. What does that prove beyond the thoroughness of the Greeks and Hebrews? of their initial will to throw out all contrary evidence, to deny all dimensions beyond it?”

“Could this premise of the Unity have builded up so wholly the structure of science, æsthetic, logic ... the structure of human action, were it but an arbitrary premise that might be replaced by others at least as valid?”

“The strength of the limited, Doctor Stein: the protection of exclusion.”

Doctor Stein’s eyes sharpened.

“Very well. Then, does not the success of this premise, which you call limiting and protective, prove that it expresses perfectly the human essence? The fact that by means of the premise of unity man is beginning to master life, does that not prove, besides, that man’s essence and the essence of being are common terms, permitting a contact after all between the subjective and objective, between the phenomenal and the absolute?”

“You are assuming the success, Doctor Stein! And you are assuming that this thing which man is ‘mastering’ is life: is something more than the creation of the subjective will which started with the Unit that it finds everywhere and thereby ‘masters’ ... finding and mastering only and always itself. You are assuming that every day is not compounded of events which transcend the powers of unitary logic and unitary experience even to conceive them. How do we get out of the difficulty? From these parabola shapes that are the events, perhaps, of every day, our minds snatch down the fragmentary intersections that touch the terms of our minds. The rest is ignored. Your ‘success’ of biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, æsthetics, mechanics, is simply your own dream, complacently rounded by your unitary will. Unchallenged, for the most part, for the simple reason that long ago man’s mind has lopped off whatever might have challenged.”

“Well, then, even you will admit that the human will is unitary.”

“And what does the will cover? how successful, how potent is the human will? If it were not deeply at variance with Life, would our will make mostly for anguish and for failure? Would it not be a bit more competent than it is? Would history, social and personal, not be a happier story?”

Professor Stein’s eyes were hot.

“Come up some evening, Mark: any evening when I’m in town: we’ll go into this.”

He left me.

_j_

Clasping Mildred’s hand in the pied lobby, I touched a warm, proud sorrow. She was changed ... deepened rather. In her great eyes, a new limpidity: and more than ever the counterpoint of her bright hard body and of her spirit, dark and profoundly still, gave to her a beauty almost beyond my bearing.

I gripped myself. I silenced my clamoring question: “Mildred, Mildred, did you love him, then?” We sat, touching our food, saying no word, until I had mastered myself.

When I was able to speak:

“I went to his place this morning, and they let me in.”

Her eyes rose to mine and dwelt there quietly.

“I saw his face, dead. Even in death it was noble. He must have been a great man, Mildred.”

Her eyes assented, serenely.

I made my eyes see only the loveliness of this girl: but perhaps my mouth trembled with a jealous pain.

“John,” she answered both my eyes and my mouth, “you are suffering too. You are afraid Philip’s death has given him an advantage over you--a sort of perfection easier to love than your own struggling life. That’s not true, John. Would I lunch with you in this gay place to-day, not twenty-four hours after his death, if I responded in such a foolish way to life? You are very dear to me, John: I know that also.”

I could not speak. So I took from my pocket the envelope and gave it her, in silence.

She examined it, turning it about. Her eyes met mine fully:

“How amazing! How amazing!” she whispered. “Where does this come from?”

“I found it on the floor not far from where he lay. It might have been nearer, or have blown from its place on the desk. For the windows were open. Why is it amazing?”

“Why? Because it is my hand. And because I did not write it.”

“Mildred, for the sake of our reason, be sure of what you say. You must have written more than once to Philip.”

She paused: her teeth bit hard in her lower lip, a tremor of resolve pushed up to her sharp shoulders. Then, in a quiet containment, she answered me.

“I make no mistake, John. I did write, infrequently, to Philip. I never sent him a note by messenger. If I needed to communicate with him quickly, I telephoned, or I wired.”

In her pause, the gilt bustle of the room where we were lunching, the room itself, became a shallow and unreal line upon some darkling density about us. Mildred went on:

“This is a fine version of my hand. But it is not my hand. And there is more superficial evidence than my conviction, that it is not mine. _Did you notice the envelope_, John?”

Her hand on the table with its débris of crystal and porcelain and silver was steady: mine, taking the paper, trembled.

I looked, and my soul blanched: my hands seemed to crumple and collapse about the flimsy paper. I fumbled at the flap. There was the same lining of green tissue, and the name embossed in tiny letters ... _Tissonier_ ... the Paris stationer from whom I had bought my stock! How could I have failed to notice this before? this fine baronial envelope and the tinted tissue lining which I liked because it gave to the sheer white linen an undertone of privacy symbolic of what an envelope should carry.

“It’s my envelope! It’s one of my envelopes!”

I faced Mildred’s eyes: and I was whole again, for in her own there was no withdrawal, no banal suspicion marring their bestowal. She spoke, and lightly:

“Could there be some simple explanation?”

“There must be.”

She smiled: for she knew that my response proved I had understood the caress of her own thoughts. Oh, Mildred, how I loved you at that moment, how unbelievably pure stood your spirit in my mind, and how I quailed to think that these mists of blindness and blood should mar your dwelling in my life and the sweet entrance of my life in yours.

“Let me see,” she was saying while I longed for peace ... peace with my love: “Let’s put our heads together.... It is my writing, forged. It is your envelope, stolen. We can dismiss the possibility of someone else just within our circle having my hand, and having gone to just that _papeterie_ in Paris for his correspondence paper. I suppose your stationery is accessible enough?”

“It stands in an open pigeonhole in the base of my table.”

“John, do you know anyone who knows both me and Philip ... some possible person?”

I had to be equal to her coolness: this was the very wine of my love that she was perpetually in her moods and acts inspiring me to a new height of conduct.

“I can think of no one. Of course, that remark is worthless: there might be such a person without my knowing it. But where would the motive be in stealing my envelope and forging your script upon it? The whole complex act strikes me as stupid: a gratuitous elaboration in no way fitting the simplicity of the murder. Just look, Mildred. A man announces, when he knows Mr. LaMotte to be alone, that he is the bearer of a message. He does not say, from whom. He would not be expected to say: for if the message is confidential, the name of the sender will not be transmitted over the telephone. What comes next? He is in the presence of his victim; if he has a letter at all, its purpose is already fulfilled in the act of handing it over. At that moment must come the blow. I can see a reason in his having forged your hand. Mr. LaMotte’s interest would be greater, opening the note. In his engrossment, the assassin would have an easier field for his work.”

“More than engrossment. Amazement. Philip finds in the envelope no note at all. He finds a word from me in such strange hands ... and no note.”

“That is true. It would be enough to bewilder: to stun. That is important. But why my envelope?”

“Well, it _is_ your envelope?” she smiled again.

“I feel certain of it.”

“There must be a reason. Possibly to attach suspicion to yourself?”

“A clumsy way, Mildred. A clumsy thing to do since I never met the man. Besides, the envelope lies on the floor of a passage where the police failed even to find it. The murderer would not have bungled there after his perfect blow. The envelope would have been in the victim’s hand if it was to serve as a false clew.”

“You are assuming perfection in the murderer, John. That does not strike me as correct. If he’d been perfect he’d have left no clew at all ... and he was seen, seen clearly. Therefore, he is not perfect. Therefore, illogic might enter in: even contradiction--even absurd elaboration.”

“Yes.” I was thinking of my talk with Doctor Stein. Where had my sudden words sprung from?--Perfection ... illogic ... contradiction: Mildred went on:

“You can’t assume that this act is a perfect single whole, with no excrescence, no alien details.”

I marveled at her.

“A man so perfect as to murder perfectly would not murder at all.”

“Go on.”

“Not murder Philip LaMotte.”

“Go on.”

“The fact that he needed to destroy a person so noble, so great, proves his own imperfection: proves that there was a flaw in him; a flaw of bad thinking, a flaw of impure action. By that flaw you will find him.”

“Mildred, you mean that it is precisely in some act of his which we who are not murderers would reason could not have been committed, that we will find him?”

“That you will find him, John.”

“I?”

“I think you will look for him, John.”

“Not we?”

“I cannot look for him, John. But I feel that you will look for him ... and you are going to find him.”

So quietly she spoke: almost so pleasantly: again I knew how in her perfection there could be room not alone for no fear, even for no emphasis. She had the ruthlessness of purity. And I was caught in it: held now forever in the white fierce light of her exaction. Would I burn in it? or grow luminous? Would I grow luminous first, and burn at last?

So quietly she spoke: “I feel that you will find him.”

And I was quiet, too. I had resolved to tell my whole experience: in the street at the hour of Philip LaMotte’s death, in his room this morning where his wound had told so mysterious a tale. Her way silenced me. She did not want to enter, in her own person, this dark threshold. Was she commanding me to proceed for her, or was she expressing her impersonal knowledge of what I was going to do? It mattered little. I knew the event chained me. I knew that she knew what I was going to do. Perhaps when I saw light I might know also why.

But she was sitting near, and this was real. In her face lay a warm flush: the glamor of her mouth and of her skin and hair was heightened by a dark suffusion from her eyes. Mildred was nearer to maturity. A new reticence held her within herself. There upon her face I saw what I had seen before upon the face of a woman newly loving, or of a woman pregnant: a secret pride darkling her glory from the world and giving to her beauty, whose like I knew not, the magic of apartness.

So full I was of forbidden questioning that I sat silent and watched her. What in her flesh was this dawn-like pregnancy? Was it love? love then for whom? If it was love for me would her new fending off have been against myself? If it was love for Philip--murdered Philip--would it not glow like sunset rather than like dawn?--You are a mystery, too, sitting so graciously apart in this harsh public place with its angular colors and its shallow shapes. Mystery mothers me: I must be born once more from a mysterious womb.

--I cannot even say: Mildred, I love you. You do not dismiss me but you hold me off.... Now she chatted. She was in no way broken. And I saw how great her confidence in me, since she looked with her candid eyes in mine that would have quailed, had hers found falsehood there.

--No, you believe in me. And chatting here so bright within this whirling social dust, you sheathe for me a knowing that is tender!

Mildred gives me her hand on the street steps.

“Good-by, John. I hope I shall soon see you.”...

Behind her the day’s Spring fades. The sky is pale blue and the houses faint softly as she goes, taking my hope along. Hope is not dead, but it is in her hands. Do her hands know? Is she too a mere symbol like myself, of this mystery that twirls us? Yesterday I was my center: my will was a solid thing, impervious and young: a true thing, I, with a true world for my willing. Now I am snatched like an atom upon some cosmic dance. Life is a spiraling and a plunging beyond. And all I see, myself and Mildred clearest, plunges along.

Spring poured its first bold colors down the Avenue. In women’s dresses and mouths, in the eyes of men, in the taut caper of horses, in children’s laughter, Spring flowed up and down like a warm stream between the thawing houses. I went along. But as I walked, it was as if I went scarce ankle-deep in this shallow human water. My body rose above the house banks and my head moved dark beyond Spring, beyond sun....

_k_

At last came an hour when I could bear my room no more. Every moment not engaged at the Laboratory I had passed there. Mrs. Mahon brought me food, and barred from me the world of newspapers and visitors and letters. I ate fruit and drank milk and gave up my tobacco. A gray cloth hung upon my book shelves, so that the deep associations of the titles should not distract me. At the Institute, I spoke to no one: I localized my work to its immediate details and stopped at that. The eyes of Doctor Stein, warm as soon as they beheld me, studied me first and then withdrew even from such delicate obtrusion. I was alone with my thoughts ... whatever they were: alone with myself, whoever that might be.

At the end of fourteen days I faced the chaos of my mind. I had succeeded in pushing close my nerves to the home of my desire and they screamed with piercings. I had succeeded in breaking down the barriers between sense and impulse. The swarming congeries of will within me, no longer a mute coil, now in each thrust and writhe touched a quick nerve. This plethora of response that my nerves made to the world was an unwieldy burden. In a scatter of impulse and desire, my personality seemed on the verge of dissolution. Still most deeply imbedded in my swarming wills was the will to remain John Mark: and was the knowledge, born of the thwarting pause, that the invasion of my conscious senses into these arcana must cease, if I would not be fragmented and lost.

I was exhausted. I knew that this loosing of the stuffs of my being was an advance: even if the secret lay still beyond. I had made penetrable an approach. Nor did I take too seriously the protest of my self, crying in its impenetralia against my mind’s invasion. After all, what prize could I put on merely continuing to be John Mark? I needed knowledge! And if knowledge meant the snuffing out of this ephemeral phase I named John Mark, so be it.

I had been isolate in my room: reading no word: with windows shut against the Spring itself save at night when I slept and the invasion of the street could without harm come to my vagrant mind. But as the mind’s texture, worn by the constant siege, grew loose and its conscious and unconscious parts less separate, I found that I had marvelous contacts with the outer world. Along with the chaos in my mind whereby sense touched hidden thought, there came an outer chaos of illumination throwing together outer act with my own inner senses. Following within myself some vein of instinct, I would come upon a house miles off where a group of persons were enwrapped in an action proceeding from a similar desire. It was as if the mental association of the normal man with me had become incarnate. A scent of leather from my shoe brought me a vision of a horse loping upon a hill and mounted by a cowboy. A sudden flare of anger at my fate revealed two swarthy foreigners in Chatham Square locked in an ugly conflict. Soon I learned that I could direct these vaultings of my sense to the objective world. And then, the world of those I knew and loved came to me. But never deeply! A mere façade it was, of the world outside.

I had no command over the hidden and the intimate deeps. I could not see Mildred’s thoughts nor better grasp her spirit. But almost without effort I could know the acts of her body, and her immediate moods.

Mildred was living her usual life: she was reading and dancing and riding, and considering a trip to Europe. I could not see her thoughts of me: and from this I knew that her thoughts of me were deep. The men about her were vague shapes shadowing the envelope of her body, no one of them piercing, no one of them coming close.

I knew that the newspapers had already ceased, if not to talk, at least to shout, about the murder of LaMotte. Nelson the serving man had been released: there was no evidence against him. Dull detectives continued to shadow him and Elijah Case, the hall boy. And when in my mind I followed one of these gross forms, at night, I learned along with the Law that Elijah made mysterious journeys to a downtown office building, at the small hours of dawn--in order to see his mother who scrubbed floors.

I saw my parents at their routine of loafing. Often a month passed without a sign from me; they had no outer cause to worry at my absence, nor did they worry. But now and then I found a little dart studding my mother’s breast, the thought of me in my mother: a sharp and painful and infertile moment, not deep at all since I saw it, which she soon overcame.

Once, and often then, I saw the gray eyes of my beloved Doctor Stein--unfleshed and isolate and farther apart than they were in nature--looking down on me. They were tender, almost like a woman’s eyes, and a haze of moisture came in them as they strained to focus on a point too far away or too small. He was thinking of me, but what he thought I could not reach....

Pleasanter and more willful journeys my inchoate mind took also to the outer world. On an evening when the rain fell sweet outside and I was shut with my siege, I laid my arid body on a lawn, under a tree, and drank the evening full. I was hungry, and there in my formless consciousness was Sherry’s and a rich menu succulently complete in flavor, color. But these relaxed and personal excursions of my will could not bring Mildred. I could not lunch with her, I could not sit with her beneath a tree. There was no even superficial act possible with my beloved: for her soul’s presence, as soon as I was there beside her, dwelt in my depth ... my hidden depth: I could see her, only with others: lunching, or laughing. I could see her strong limbs press the flanks of a horse as she galloped in Long Island. But since I was excluded, these visions hurt and I did not seek them. I confined my trace of my beloved to making sure that she was there, and well.

By deduction I plumbed my way ever deeper, ever closer to the node of myself: and I learned by elimination, what lived most essentially within me. All of Mildred, save her bright surfaces; all of myself in intercourse with Mildred. I was incapable of a shallow act with Mildred--or with my mother. Hidden, also, the mysterious history of Philip’s murder. Could this be that my connection with his world was after all a morbid, sentimental, subjective nothing? But I could not see even Mildred’s thoughts about Philip! No: my knowledge of his life and death dwelt in the kernel of myself: it was the Secret: it would not give up to my shrewd siege. And therefore all that was enwrapped with it ... all deep and dear ... was also barred from my invading sense.

I struggled, and I failed. Failed utterly. I wore myself out with struggling. But what I saw, down there, was not black darkness. I seemed, rather, to peer into a stormy water. Something is there! But great waves shiver every image from beneath, and when I plunge my eyes into the turmoil, the image goes, because my eyes are whelmed. A looming Presence deep in the node of myself! It is not myself, and yet it is not another. When I draw down to fix it, my mind ... John Mark ... shatters and scatters, and I must rise to air, like a man half drowned.

This way I knew was dissolution. But I could not know if the Presence which I felt and sought was other than the dark womb of Chaos.

* * * * *

Fourteen days.... And now this hour of dusk when I can bear my room no longer. The siege on the Secret may be a failure, or so nearly won that there is no more cause for my stark pressure. I do not know. All I have fought to know is hidden still, though I have broken down many approaches. I must move: and I have no sense if I am going toward my goal or if I am retreating.

But to sit still another hour is impossible. Perhaps I am to die: perhaps I am to admit that I have failed: perhaps I lay my hand at last on a Secret deadlier than death! All these things may be, this alone surely: that I must get out of my room!

_l_

Spring is a grimace when one’s heart is gray.... Men and women coming from work: in eyes and mouths the sprites of Spring peer forth at the white clouds. Washington Square is a well of muddy life, and its trees are young girls dancing at the brink ... dangerously close their tinkling hands to the suck and grime of the depths. Sixth Avenue is a long and hollow passage where flows the bilge of New York. Spring cannot hunch low enough to enter. I choose Sixth Avenue. For when one’s heart is gray, Spring is a grimace....

I am almost cheered by this contrast. I am hungry. I turn east once more: in the Brevoort café I order a good dinner. I cannot eat. The mirrors, the hard floor, the so deliberately joyous guests are not Spring, are brittle pasts of Spring, specimens of Spring long dead, preserved in alcohol. Spring hurts, yet it is fecund: it may come nearer to my exiled heart if I am not afraid to be hurt.

I walk back toward Sixth Avenue. My long siege of myself seems to be over and to have left me nothing. I am a little light of head, being so light of stomach, but my mind is taking on its normal compartmental tightness, its normal limits: its normal weakness: even its normal satisfactions.

--Is the spell over? And have I dreamed that Mildred sent me on a crazy quest? _I could see her to-night!_ And if a ghost of that horror still remained, would we be aware of it, warm in the sweet flesh of our love?--O Mildred, I am weary, and I hunger. Take me. Wrap me away. Make me wholly man by being wholly woman.

I know this pang of will against its own inevitable surge. I have passed a phase. But Mildred is not yet there: nor can I reach her heart save through the heart of myself. I must go on.... The Secret!