Chapter IV: Part ONE: The Man with the White Head (3)

Sixth Avenue. Rattle of trains like dry words in a mouth obscene with secrecy. Why do I walk Sixth Avenue again, since I was going to dare the hurt of Spring? I stop, a small sign in a second-story window holding me:

MRS. LANDSDOWNE

... A modest sign ... and a late afternoon at the Institute in Winter. Four of us in our aprons chatting, smoking, the day’s work done. The windows are black already with the night, shutting in snugly warmth and fire with us. Ford, whose work is closest to my own, Ford speaks:

“There’s one of them, of all I’ve tested, just one, has authentic power. An inscrutable hag from London. No incense, no scenery, no occult traps. And no sentiment, no gush. That’s why she’s poor, I suppose. Women pass her up for a picturesque liar. A prophetess who’s not a prima donna, wherever she is, is in a wilderness. But she is tremendous. Mrs. Landsdowne, her name.”

A dingy vestibule, a double row of plates, brass on chipped plaster, woodwork greasy brown.... As I press sharp on the bell ... the gas light was low in a shade dim with dirt ... I hope there is to be no answer. No answer. I turned to go. The door clicks like a word, ordering me about. The hall is black reek. I stumble on the stairs.

At the first triangular landing, crimson carpet strip, two doors formed the legs. I passed them to mount still higher. The left door opened and a narrow form stood framed in the gap. I saw a long hand, I saw eyes.

They looked at me and the hand widened the gap of the door. The door shut me in with blackness and with her whom I knew there beside me.

I could feel her move down the corridor. I followed. Her footsteps were like gray in the hall’s black hush. I did not hear my own.

A portière parted, we stood in a large room flush with the rails of the “L”. Between the brown bare floor and the plaster above that dipped and swelled a bit about the chandelier, the furniture stood sheer: dimensional impacts within the cave-like air. A long table faced the windows. On its either side was a chair upholstered red. In the corner was a piano and on the stool, twirling about to face us, sat a boy. He was thin and white. He arose. Mrs. Landsdowne twined a boney arm about his shoulder.

“This is a son of mine,” she broke her silence. The white creature glanced away from her dark thrust ... passed me ... the portières seemed not to part for him but to blot him out in an eclipse.

The chandelier was not lighted. A student’s lamp cast a pale flush on the table. A train, crowding of steel and wheel and wood, avalanched past: by it the hollow room with its dense things was lifted into dance, a moment’s frenzy that died down, leaving the room a pregnant atmosphere for this sharp woman. She drew down the shades, she took the seat nearer the window; she waved me to face her in the chair across the table.

I saw her: I asked myself if her protracted silence was designed that I might see her, or that she see me.

“John Mark,” she murmured, “John Mark. That is clear. And a zigzag route your coming, strange for a sober and determined man. But you’re not sober. Drunk with thought and with fasting. Down from a street that is east to an open Square. What draws you, drives you ... a cloud on the open Square. Zigzag. West ... north ... east ... north ... west. Wandering. A crucifix of pain rising from that smoke of the open Square. North and south, the tree: west and east your arms. You dangle. Such young flesh! Why did you come here?”

Her arms were folded on her sunken breast. A black silk shawl glossed the sharp shoulders and was caught in an old breast-pin, garnet and enamel. Her throat was bare. And from a face, ashen and chiseled close by all the steels of fate, her eyes now turned on me. Their heaviness made the brow almost a girl’s, made the mouth a gash with blood dry for lips. The hair lay a black coil over the brow: hair and eyes burned in an ashen desert face.

“Why did you come here?” came her voice again.

“You who have found my name must find that, too.”

“Oh, that is a mere ... surface. I have not gone into you, sir. I am not sure that I care to.”

“Mrs. Landsdowne, you must!”

Her eyes began to focus far behind my own, so that their traversing mine took on an imperturbable coldness.

“Why have I come here? Surely it was not chance: this zigzag route.”

“You know there is no chance. I have no name for it: I see your mind tracing a design out of a swarm of myriad living gray things. Strange! They are like cells of our flesh, but they have space about them. They swing like stars! You are the sort who knows ... why have _you_ come here?”

I clasped my hands together. I was very tired. Yet as I looked on this woman life seemed more bearable to me, than it had been for long. My clasped hands cupped my falling head. I was very sleepy, and there were tears in my eyes.

I looked up at last from my sweet indulgence, and a horror in the face of the woman dried my tears.

“Will you speak, Mrs. Landsdowne, will you speak to me?”

She shook her head.

“Coward!” I cried. “Coward!”

Her hands hollowed and passed over her eyes.

“I am not a coward,” she said.

“I want to know.”

“I am not a coward. But I am afraid.”

“Are you afraid of a murderer, Mrs. Landsdowne?”

She smiled. Her eyes resumed their distant focus and she smiled. She shook her head. I leaned forward, then:

“Mrs. Landsdowne,” I whispered, “am I that?”

Her lips stirred: the hand above her brow twitched: she was trying to speak.

“No ... and worse....”

“Mrs. Landsdowne, I must know!”

“You want to know?” And now she was laughing with her blood dark lips: and her eyes were stiff in amaze.

“What horror is this I have done? How could I?... Have you merely caught my madness?”

... Her stiff eyes on me.

“How could I murder him with my body absent, with my mind innocent? Are we both mad, Mrs. Landsdowne? I want to know! God, have I not crucified myself to know? What have I done?”

“_What are you doing now?_”

The words were terrible to me. They came low and calm, it was as if her eyes were speaking in their stiff amaze. But her words released a chaos in my flesh. My nerves in panic rushed in myriad ways, so that my flesh seemed a delirium of motion.

“_What are you doing now?_”

I arose. Faintness spread like a death from my heart, and I sank back in my chair.

“What am I doing now?... Will you help me to know? Will you help me to save me?” I pleaded: my shred of energy forced into voice.

She laid her hands upon the table.

“You will know, John Mark.”

“Tell me, now.”

“I cannot tell you. But I will help you to know.”

“Tell me. Tell me.”

She shook her head: “You will know what you have done. One can know only that which has been done.”

“How can you be so ruthless? This godless horror----”

“It is not godless, Doctor Mark.”

“I am not godless?”

“Why, no. Of course not, Doctor Mark.”

“But it is horror. It is horror even to you....”

“It is not godless. Go home. You will know.”

I pressed myself from the chair.

“Tell me one thing then: is it _human_?”

She shook her head.

“How do we know how many things are human?”

A great lust took me then to ravish her of her secret. I leaned over the table and I gripped her arms. I drew her up toward me across the table. I vised her shoulders.

“Tell me! Tell me!”

She shut her eyes, so close now to my own; and her hands fended them.

Her desert face, her talonous hands were very near my eyes. I thought of Mildred: I had grasped her, too--to force what truth from her?--and I had failed. I was motionless in amaze at my cruel thought linking this woman with Mildred, linking my need of her with my love for Mildred.

“Let go,” I heard her mutter. “Do you want to blind me?”

I released her. “You have promised.” And I laid a bill on the table.

“John Mark,” she said. And still her bitter presence mingled in my mind with Mildred.... Mildred! “I cannot break the body of your way to-night with words any more than to-morrow can invade to-day. Each has its place appointed. You will come upon to-morrow waiting your way, and you will come upon knowledge waiting your way. I am a part of the morrow of your knowing. I cannot break in. You have been with me, John Mark, only as a traveler is with the distant town that his eyes behold from a hill’s height, deep and far on his way within the valley.”

She took my money and placed it in a drawer. I held her hand gently.

“Why is this horror just my life?”

She shook her head, and her free hand touched my brow in a caress.

“There we are all children. That ... the one mystery worth knowing ... none of us may know. Our eyes can study deep in the ways of life. But God’s will ... God’s reasons.... There we are all children.”

_m_

Sixth avenue. Unwittingly, perhaps to place myself once more in the world? I looked at my watch. 9.03. Only 9.03! I have swept out so far and come back, and my watch says 9.03.

I turn toward home, and my steps hurry me. Why is that? Am I running from the black apocalypse behind, or rushing toward some blacker revelation? I do not know: I am encased in darkness, and that is all that I feel. My power to touch the body of the world, the deeds and ways of my friends, is gone from me. I move through presentiment of birth, as in a womb. So different from life, this dank dark mother of my ignorance. And yet a womb, nourishing me and pressing me toward the light.

Houses, sky, the shuttling tissue of men and women past me are the dark wall and dark blood of a womb. I airless and immobile within it, still believe in Birth.

Doctor Stein ... the revered Doctor Stein, whose interest in me at the laboratory has so warmed my heart, is coming down my steps. I am beyond surprise. Within this mothering darkness of my life words and customs and conventions move quite nimbly. So I greet Doctor Stein. I observe how his gentle face is a bit clumsied by his embarrassment:

“I just thought I’d drop in. I knew, though I’d said ‘Come,’ you were not coming to see me.”

“Doctor Stein, I didn’t dare.... I was afraid you’d forgotten that casual invitation.”

“Just so. So _I_ came.”

“Won’t you come back, Doctor Stein?”

He followed me docilely, and took the chair I pointed out for him, sprawling a bit with his legs out, priming his pipe, and his eyes puzzled at the curtains over my book shelves.

“You cover your books, when you need to think deep?” he asked.

“This time I did. I never have before.”

He puffed hard at his pipe, clenching the bowl in his fist. A naïf discomfort faintly fretted his natural ease. His fine mouth moved, his gray thick brows lowered over his eyes, and in his eyes there was a twinkle as if this was a holiday for him, and he a bit rusty at it.

“Oh,” I exclaimed, as the man’s playful candor shone to me not at war but at one with his limpid mind. “Oh, I am so glad, so glad that you cared to drop in!”

“I’ve been getting up courage to come, for a long time.” He puffed.

I felt no guilt as he watched me. Let this spirit which had pierced to the soul of matter and proved its mastery by the act of birth ... let him see me clear, as he saw everything. He was above judging, he was a creator! If I was this horrible enigma from which the mankind in me shrank and for which it had no word, let him see: he who had captured in a formula the passion of gestation, would know, if he saw me clear, some law to hold me, some law to put me back into the warmth of human life. So I faced his eyes with open eyes. And I basked in his intelligence, as in a sun.

Doctor Stein chatted. He had not come to argue, he had come to play. He talked of a new composer, of an Irish comedy, of a farcical talk he had had with the Mayor who had summoned him to serve on some Committee. By a trick of memory, when he reached the Great Presence, he had forgotten the purpose of the Committee: and he scanned His Honor’s words carefully for a hint, and in vain.... I remarked how boyish was this celebrated man. The slight body was fresh and awkward: the hair uprose in a flourish that was youth: the eyes were young: the hands were feminine and young. His mind was like a mellow wine within him, that with age had grown closer to the sun and the fields. Doctor Stein was not only young, he was naïf: he was confident and blooming with his faith. Was this indefeasible verdance a large part of his greatness?... Doctor Stein wafted a great puff of smoke into the room and laughed:

“I got so mixed up, what with the Mayor’s allusions and assumptions and bad metaphors, that I began to defend myself by mystifying nonsense. You should have heard me. I rolled out great sentences signifying nothing. I made some wild statement and proved it by half a dozen mutually contradictory points. And His Honor nodded solemnly, and agreed. So I went on, more daring, wilder. Once or twice he shook his ponderous head--the weight is chiefly in the chin and jowl--as if subtly to dissent. It was rich! As I left, he thrust out his hand as if it had been a bankroll. I took it humbly. He said: ‘It’s a great honor to me, Doctor, to coöperate with one of our great American Minds, and to find that we are so fundamentally in accord!’ The Professor waved his hands in delight. ‘And you will argue against Democracy, I suppose, you young pedant. What else but Democracy could put such a man in a place of power? And what better man for the place could we hope to find? Surely, such clownish genius is better for the world than all the efficient solemnity of Germany and England. I tell you: the American politician is as great a creation as Rabelais or Aristophanes ever dreamed of. Don’t you dare contradict me. America has the comic genius.’”

At last he paused, and I could see his mind go out of the window.

“That rain must stop,” he said. “Too heavy to go on.”

I knew then that it had begun to rain immediately after my return. It was a ponderous downpour, pressure upon stone of a sheeting element almost as solid. Outside the rain was a world of thought I did not choose to enter: here in my room was a snug apartness, and I held to it and to the rain as the cover over us. I held to the Doctor as to a charm saving our sanctuary. He chatted on, again, and I forgot all else.

He arose, he emptied his pipe of its ashes and placed it away.

“It’s over,” he said.

Yes: the rain has ceased. And I know the dreaded Threshold which it has barred from me. Doctor Stein is going away, and the rain has passed, and soon I shall be _within_. My shoulders shuddered as if already a swart world clapped them.... Doctor Stein placed his hands upon them, and looked at me in silence.

“Son,” he said, after the pause--and I could hear my memory of the rain, so deep did I fear this quiet. “Son, what’s the matter?”

My face broke. I yearned to bury it in his hands: I managed to smile.

“I don’t know ... yet.”

“I like you, Mark. I believe in you. I wish I could help.”

My gratitude was in my eyes. But something else was there, so that I dared not show my gratitude.

“It is mysterious to me,” I smiled. “I seem to have lost my unity.”

“You are in trouble ... and you talk metaphysics.”

“Oh, if my trouble were some fact!”

The cry of my voice impressed him. I went on:

“You are so intact, so _one_; how can you heal me? You cannot touch my pain. Even my own mind cannot touch it. My mind, too, like all the words I can speak, is in the world of one: and the horror is, that part of my soul seems to have left that world.”

“But you have your mind, John: draw yourself back into the sanity of its control.”

“Oh, if I could----”

“The other way is dissolution.”

“Dissolution of a lie, perhaps.”

“Dissolution of your personality, of your integrity.”

“Man’s unity perhaps is nothing, and the laws and logic of it: if he is but a fragment.”

“I can’t follow you, John. I have never seen broken this unity of matter. I come always nearer to it, the more I see.”

“What could your mind and your eyes behold beyond themselves? What fragment, feeling over its own domain, could judge itself other than the whole?”

“Sick,” he whispered to himself. And in silence, he watched me. The room was gray: the light of the lamp came horizontal to his eyes that watched me. We were still. I felt the silence that the rain had left.

Then something within his eyes that had searched mine, quailed. A subtle tremor went through all his body, as if in fear it yearned to be away. He was in anguish of an impalpable instinct, shuddering him off, and that shamed him. He held his ground. But his eyes were veiled with a wistful helplessness.

--Why don’t you go? I thought. I knew he stayed because he would not give in to the shudder that shamed him: and because he wanted to understand that shudder.

He held out his hand. I took it, cold and removed. All his body was cold. Only his eyes were warm, and in them I saw a look kin to what I had seen in the eyes of Mrs. Landsdowne. Doctor Stein and she ... how could their eyes have kinship?--They have seen one thing! Two words as different as themselves are different. But they have seen one thing!

“Will _you_ tell me,” said my eyes, “before you go, what you have seen?”

But he had no word for it. A gray muteness spread upon his face, from which his eyes stared out.

“John Mark,” he stammered, “your will, John Mark--_what is it touching_?”

I looked at him in my helplessness.

--Can not you see my helplessness?

He answered my silence. He mastered himself and took my hand once more. He held it close. He was at ease and strong.

“I respect you,” he whispered. And he went away.

_n_

I shut the door and stood at the open window. Blackness. No spot of light, no twinge of movement marred the black of the world. I was tense with an expectancy. The black of the world was torture but I faced it. I knew the next step would bring me full within it: the blackness would speak. The night....

The bell of my telephone. There it was! A piercing channel to my ears, whereby the night would speak.

I took up the receiver. “Yes,” I said.

“Hold the wire.... Long distance.”

Faint buzzing, piercings of sound poured with the night into my ear.

“Hello.” “Yes.” “Doctor John Mark?” “Yes.” “Is this Doctor John Mark?” “Yes.”

“Please hold the wire, sir. Huntington, Long Island ... wishes to speak to Doctor Mark.”

“This is Huntington Hospital.”

“This is Doctor Mark.” I spoke to the night. “What is it?”

“This is Dr. John Mark?” A pause.

“Doctor, there has been an accident. An automobile accident. Your parents----”

“Are they at the hospital?”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Are they----”

“Better come out, sir,” said the night. I rang off.

* * * * *

... _What are you doing now?_ Mrs. Lansdowne’s voice.

... _Your will, what is it touching?_ The horror of Doctor Stein.

* * * * *

A train was pulling out. I caught it. I had no sense other than this full immersion in the night. And in consummation. And all of it still a Threshold.... A taxi rushed me to the hospital. A tall interne with gentle eyes came to me.

“Are you Doctor Mark?”

I nodded.--I am this night! What monstrous irony is this, calling me by a name that brings to gentle eyes commiseration and respect?

“We did what we could.”

“Both of them?” I spoke low, fearing an echo in the empty hall.

He bowed his head and shut his lips against the anatomical details that urged them.

“And Fergus, the chauffeur?”

“He is not in danger. He was thrown free through the windshield. Contusions. Lacerations. A simple fracture in shoulder and arm. _They_ were pinned in. Windows shut. It was raining hard. Do you ... do you ... want to see them?”

I shook my head. I saw them clear enough.

“First,” I said, “let me see Fergus.”

The boy lay in his high bed, bandaged: his bruised face gleaming with a spiritual torture that was almost like thirst in its need of being quenched.

He did not wait for the door to shut. He shouted:

“It was no accident! It was foul play, I tell you! Murder!”

I pressed him back on his pillow. He struggled. So I let him half rise, knowing his need for spiritual quenchment more dangerous than his wounds.

“It must have been done at the garage. The six nuts of the left front wheel. Kill me this instant, if it ain’t the truth. While I was havin’ supper. Foul play it was. They left the bolts in. Devilish. As soon as I speeded up, on the curve, after the tracks.... It was someone hellish. Kill me if it wasn’t. Oh--kill me at any rate.” He plunged his face in the pillows. He moaned. Then his pain sobered him.

I wanted to soothe him with my hand. I could not touch him.

“Be quiet, Fergus. I am sure you are right. No one is blaming you. Be quiet, I say.”

A fleshly gray-haired man, his smooth, round face a daze of terror, waited at the door. He owned the garage where my parents’ car had stayed while they dined with friends, while Fergus supped, while the rain fell. The man was named Dukes. He drove me silent to the place of the deaths.

The open road was washed fresh with the rain. Clouds still hung black, and the air blasted like wet words, clean and ominous, against the drought of my face. We crossed railroad tracks, and stopped.

“That last bump done it, sir,” said Mr. Dukes. “Shook the bolts out. The nuts was gone already.”

The car was ditched rubbish against a telegraph post, a shut and mangled wreck. Fifty yards beyond, also in the ditch, we found intact the tire and rim of the left wheel, where they had rolled together.

We returned to the garage. Death was there in the open mouths of the men, in their blanched eyes, in the heavy hanging shadows.

“I’m an honest man, sir,” said Mr. Dukes to me. “If this here was murder and has to do with any o’ mine, I’ll see this here place which is all I has in the world a heap of ashes before I’ll spare myself.”

“What motive,” said I, “could any of your men have had in such a thing?”

“None,” growled Dukes. The men’s murmur wreathed about me, an assent that was ready to rage into flame at the kindle of any doubt of mine.

“Any boys about? Mischief-makers? Rowdies?”

“None.”

“Any strangers?”

A man came forward: a lean, cave-jawed fellow with the eyes of a starved poet.

“There was that stranger that come askin’ fer work.”

He spoke not to me, but to Dukes. The men wreathed closer to him. They felt that his words were a healing truth. They were one, sustaining him in what he was ready to say.

“’Bout 8.30 it was or 9.00. While that car was here.”

The man was eloquent: quietly sure of himself, as if the assent of his fellows transfigured his words.

“He come to the floor and he says: ‘Lookin’ fer a mechanic?’ The car was the last in, and was goin’ out first. It was right there, next that oil-tank. I says: ‘No chance’. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘won’t you go and ask the boss? Won’t cost you nothin’.’ I looks at him. ‘No chance,’ I says, an’ then, sudden, surprisin’ myself, I gives in: I says: ‘But if you wants, why--I’ll go.’ So I leaves him.”

“Alone?”

His eyes burst at me. Then he remembered who I was. Pity controlled his eyes.

“I couldn’t tell, mister. Jesus!--how could I tell? The man looked all right. What we got to fear, usual, ’cept somethin’ lyin’ loose gets swiped? I wasn’t gone a minute.”

I felt sorry for him. I nodded.

“I come back. An’ he was standin’ there. His hat in his hand. A funny guy, he seemed then: like no mechanic. Sort o’ seemed I hadn’t seen him before. I tells him: ‘Nothin’ doin’.’ I wasn’t gone a minute. He nods. Puts on his hat. Lights out.”

“What did he look like?”

The man writhed in the effort of search and of articulation.

“He was funny lookin’. Didn’t look like no mechanic. I dunno. The light ain’t much, you see, on the floor. He was dressed dark-like ... and ... I dunno ... seems sort o’ like his head, it was white.”

_o_

I am in my room. My watch says 1.30.

The smoke of Doctor Stein’s pipe lingers like the fume of a spent flame that was the life of sun and stars and earth. All of my room is the echo of a song. It is outside me, but my senses wistfully can touch it. I touch my body, taking off my clothes. My body has the flavor to my senses, not of the real but of the reminiscent.

I lie in bed. The white sheets fold about me like a dream. I switch off the lamp: blackness moves dense upon me and within me: and the light that is gone dwells in my memory like a light of fancy.

I shut my eyes. This twisted horror, life ... Philip murdered and my parents murdered, Mildred grimacing their death with her fairness, they with their horror swarming upon Mildred.... I cannot meet it with my mind. I am sunk in this twisted terror. Naught is outside me for my mind to meet, save the voice that came from the worn throat of Mrs. Landsdowne:

“What are you doing?... But you must go on.... When to-morrow takes its place beyond to-day, you will know. And I will help you know.”

A flowing water, the promise of her words. I plunge in it. I lie in it, I sleep....