Waldo David Frank

“ 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.... ”

“ Now she is there—fulfilling all my world whose unfulfillment I had sensed, not consciously, but as a larva longs for its own birth. I have loved my work, like a woman, because I knew that there should come a woman worthy of my work. I have been faithful to my work, in faith of this woman who was to come to crown it; who was to come, in spirit and in flesh, to equal its high dream. Unwitting I have labored in a dream: and behold, it is fecund of this fleshed perfection: Mildred chaste as thought, Mildred deep as discovery, Mildred remote and imminent as truth! ”

“ All about is the night, for the house stands on the very mountain crest. Night has invaded even the hall, even the other room. And all about is silence. The mountain sinks in silence beyond our senses. And our senses like prisoned birds live in this shut room where alone there is not blackness and silence.
We are I and Mildred, lovely in a gown of green that shimmers on her body like an emerald molten by the white flame of her flesh. We are I and Mildred and Mildred’s father, and both my parents, and Philip LaMotte and Doctor Isaac Stein. ”

“ Philip—what of that? When he was a danger, you did not know of him: now that you know of him, he is dead. The danger is dead. She did not yet love him. He made claim upon her, my one rival claim: and life has withdrawn it for me. A shock—she will need time—but she will recover! Did this murder shake her whom he loved as much as me who never saw him? Why not be glad [62] then, if she be not too shaken? Do you want her prostrate? What folly is this in your will? Are the gifts of event less welcome than the gifts of nature? Aren’t you glad you have a body and a mind welcome to Mildred? ”

“ Mildred stood helpless like a goddess: no man dared take her without the fullest raiment and the richest music, and a fair temple built to flesh her spirit. Such were the exalted symbols of my sense, but my thoughts were shrewd. This perfect child was of the modern world. To snatch her away would be to blemish her. What the world could bring to make an harmonious matrix for her life with me, in no way changing her, was the instant need. Marriage ... a home. All else had been violence rather than fruition: a gesture like that of a crazed man who mars his love in the impotence of desire. ”

“ Their windows told of no life. Life was a fertile hush dreaming inchoate like a stirless sea against these rocks of houses. I walked as through some elemental birth, æons anterior to men and cities; through sleepy and vast densities scarce sparked with consciousness. A monster too dull to be savage, too close still to the protoplasmic slime, was this Spring world sprawled upon the stone hills of the city. And as I walked within its palpable mood, my own thoughts clashed like cymbals in a night: their strident clarities were like a wound gashed in its somnolent flesh. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Moving toward home, I move in a dark element, and it has swallowed all the laughing world. This lawn is a breast of decomposing flesh. The stones of the city are death substantiate, feeding upon the drab-clothed men and women who weave within and without in wistful struggle to escape. Upon my window-sill where Spring sat and pelted me with flowers, an empty breath breathes emptiness.... The true stuff of space in which our cosmos flickers like a fly in a night of storm?
[216] I am on my couch.
—Oh, there must be a truth to salvage me from chaos. Life is a whirlwind? ”

“ Every sense, long denied, called for her: every need of my body and my soul, as waking from a trance, fused in a single passionate direction: moving toward Mildred, drawing Mildred to me. But my work is not the sort that the world pays for. That is no reason to abandon it. I cannot bring to Mildred a man wrecked of his place in the world. It is John Mark, scientist, who needs her. It is Mildred Fayn, as she lives now in her high artistry of leisure, whom I need. I cannot make of her splendor a cook or a drudge. ”

“ Because of death. We are at war with death. In the conflict, misery and hesitancy die. Joy only lives. Life is good, not because life is good but because we battle death. Blessed is the foe, for he makes us blessed to ourselves. This quiet street is quiet because just beyond is the clatter of Broadway. Lights there jerk in a shallow panic, therefore this strip of sky between the houserows deepens its gray blue. And the man who passes: he is a soft and reticent word of flesh because he is within stone lips of houses, because he moves from clamor.... Mildred: what will I say to her to-night? ”

“ I shall dwell once more in the innocent world of men: in the world where the sun is luminous because the night is black, where life seems good because death seems real. Let me not dwell upon the nature of this Twilight. It is neither darkness nor brightness, neither warmth nor cold. It is penetrant and it is hungry, and it devours the flesh of man that is made of sunnier senses. You who read do not know the blessed marriage of your world. ”

“ From hour to hour I dwelt within my work: finding it a realm so various that no mood of my waking and no dream of my sleep were quite outside it. The delights of leisure are those of wandering and surprise and repetition. In my work I had them. Easy love and comradeship bring ecstasy, because in their otherness we lose ourselves, with passion or with service. My work possessed these qualities as well. I was as full in its embrace as any woman in a happy love. And beyond all fulfillment, I had the joy of tempering my desire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ My heart was music. Life swelled in myriad atoms, and every one a separate song, and all one voice, rounding, embodying me....
But once more there is time and I am moving within it. Once more there is this shut, expanding phase which men call life, and I am bounded by it.
Some fatal signal of my will has challenged Truth to let me glimpse it, to let me use it: and we are joined forever. If I am to live, I must destroy this sin of using Truth for my own life: I must make my life into a facet of the Truth. Men have done that. (But far more men have died.) ”

“ Her love has become that most sensual and most possessive of all passions: an abstract love, a love that by no living deed, no contact of service, no exchange of will, reaches the world of spirit. She begrudges me no fame, no luxury, no vice. She asks of me no hours and no secrets. Her place in my life, since my life to her is an aura of her own, is secure so long as no one filling it destroys it. ”

“ Doctor Stein’s eyes twinkle at the complacence of my mother’s words. My father’s eyes glaze a bit as if the warm lull of the room rocked him toward sleep. Mr. Fayn mixes his cards noiselessly, and lays them out in silence: his feet tap in a toy excitement as the game goes on.
We are at peace and warm: Mildred like a green fountain, sends verdure and dance quietly down the room. Philip and I, knowing each other, quaff her loveliness. We have enough: we are tortured by no passion. From her fingers, from her throat, love jets a cool [168] source into our lives. ”

“ 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, [117] in children’s laughter, Spring flowed up and down like a warm stream between the thawing houses. ”

“ It was the form, translucent and still with a vaporous glow about it, of a youth.
He moves up toward us. The amorphous maze from which he has condensed is now an aura. He moves up from the right, he crosses the front vision of our eyes. He is very near, bearing leftward toward the house, yet slantwise so that he will not touch our room.
A youth, straight, rhythmic, with his profile sharp and his mouth a shadow in the white of his face, and his eye an impalpable fire. His hair is a tangle of shadows like the last embers in a hearth. ”

“ They will part, treacherous and careless, and let me sink at once to the night they dance against. I know in an acceptance weary like age, that I can not leap into the River, and that I cannot turn about. I feel: this guiding pressure upon the cortex of my brain, if it were in my eyes, that it might blind me.
... We are walking in a field. This field is very clear to me, as if its rugose stretch and its barren saliences had already picked their measure in my brain. The coarse grass is dry and gray like autumn, on this sultry April night. As my feet press through, the grass rustles. ”

“ The city has that flaccid impenetrance which comes before dawn. The rush of a car, the pelt of horses’ hoofs, the stride of a man, the flutter of a woman, quiver like darts against the night and fall away. Night is this impenetrable hide about the city.... We are outside the city. A ferry-boat plethorically heaves us across the River. I stand at the forward rail, and the white head man, lost in a shadow of drays and draymen and slowly stamping horses, holds still his palpable pressure on my brain. ”

“ That is my single hope: that you will understand: and all that I am saying is the truth, weighed as a man of science weighs, beloved ... all of this was taking place in me not from the moment when I knew you, but long before. What the world promised seemed good. Faith, passion, beauty, joy, the comradeship of perfect understanding, love in peace and in its strife ... ”

“ I shut the house door: I am in the street.
Faint vestige of dawn. In sparse gray filaments dawn threads through the night: a gradual loom of light that will thicken, that will converge, that will become a texture.... On the street, at the door as I step out, is a man.
He is waiting for me. He is clad in black, he stands in the black shadow of the house: all that emerges of him is his head which is round and white.
All of his head is white: it has a plastic and smooth pallor like the form of certain larvæ: it is a color inhuman and yet deeply fertile. ”

“ Mildred and Philip murmur side by side. My father has drawn a chair to the card-table and is playing with Mr. Fayn. In the far corner sit my mother and Doctor Stein, smiling, chatting. I stand at the door and watch them. All six faces are within my eyes obliquely, and they do not see me.
Now instantly, these various faces turn: see me: become one in a shrivel of horror.
I stand still. Their variance has rotted all away. They are one.... Mildred and mother and the others ... in a rigid gaze at me, in a cold terror rising from their sight. ”

“ You are a sufferer who can say to no one: “I suffer.” You are a sinner and there is no name for your sin. You are too lone to confess: too lone even to be despised.... But the word hope must still be there, since you recall it?
[227] God stands so far away: the truth, that God is All and that no life can die, is not a neighbor. Truth sweeps away the nearness of good things. For the things good unto the life of man are they on the bright surface where man crawls: it is the brightness of his need that makes them shine. Blesséd, blesséd man! Fool, when you seek the truth that lies in darkness. ”