Chalk face — Themes and Context

as 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.

My thoughts stood apart from the city, and from myself, and from each other. I knew that I had come to a crisis in my years. I needed Mildred and I needed my work. To forego my impecunious glory upon the laboratory battlefield meant death. To fail of Mildred seemed to mean death, also. How could I have them both? I had not even wooed her. Her brilliant being stood beyond any touch or any claim of mine. Had she been a woman whom I could bind with sentimental promise or engage with the zest of fighting with me toward a dim future, she had not been Mildred. She was alive, gloriously, luminously alive. Like a flame she spent herself in the day, and she might be gone to-morrow. Even now, I could not tell but there was possibly another’s love to fuel her. But even if she could wait, could I? I knew at last the desperate price of my abstaining years. There was stored up in me a might of energy, continent, compressed, and the fire touched it. I was fire--a white totality of active hunger, kindling, devouring in a moment the years’ accumulated burden. I needed Mildred; and needed her perfectly; and needed her at once. I could not take her hidden, meanly, without killing my great need ere its fulfillment. All the ways of an inherited culture had this night for me their reason. Beauty and amenity of place, the lovely stuffs wealth has created for its homes and bodies ... I saw them all as acolytes of my essential worship. 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.

But what hope was there? Why as I walked through the high Spring-flushed night did I not walk in despair? My mother was the implacable foe of Mildred and in her hand was a weapon she had already with sure instinct wielded. And Mildred herself: what reason had I to believe that she would love me, wed me ... even if the way were clear? We were friends. I had soon won from her the clear note of her laughter. But her laughter surely was no hidden grace that I alone could win.

She herself was the rare thing, and that all life responded to her, that life’s common stuff was by her alchemied into her gold. Since she was perfect, why should she receive within herself the transfigurement of love, the translation of marriage? Mildred must have many friends, many loves, for she was virginal not by deprival but as a young birch is white. She was intelligent; her mind had a luminous response to every phase of the world that touched her own. Her intelligence lived inseparate within her senses, within her milk-pale skin. But even so, could I imagine that she would have responded to the mute beginnings of my glory? What was I in her eyes? A quiet man, young, fair-haired, with deep gray eyes, not tall: evidently gifted, evidently strong; a man who stood at the bottom rung of a mysterious ladder that led to esoteric formulæ about the stuffs and ways of human brains. That much she might know. Could she, for all her pure intelligence, know how my science was to be a Dionysian dance: an heroic poem in which I marshaled the harmonies of nature, as once did Æschylus with his Prometheus, or the old Jew with his Job? Could she know that? and could I tell her that? _Psychologist_: what a prosy lie the word would give her! Oh, I had faith in myself and faith in Mildred. But how could I hope that she was ready to come to me knowing me her equal, as I knew her my own?

--I should despair, I should despair!

And yet I did not. I walked with bright thoughts through the soft fluxed night, and the defeat with my parents, the uncertainty of what lay beyond, did not make me despair. Indeed my chances of battle did not hold my thoughts. I walked in an exhilarant and scattered mood as if the battle was already won, and I could disband my army!

--Life is good. Why do I think this now? 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? ... why have I thought of death? I go to Mildred whom my life loves; and I think of death, and I learn that it is the strangeness and the nearness of death which makes life real!

I see a baby boy: he is in the street, he has been struck and badly hurt by a stone. His sister, scarcely larger than himself, leads him across the gutter, screaming, homeward. Toddling howling mite! His tears hold rage, fear, protest, pain--no thought of death, no questioning of life. No, he is wholly alive: life is not good to him, nor does he love it: fatefully and wholly he accepts it. For he thinks not of death. Life may be anger and agony and hunger, but it is everything.--Why then does life seem marvelous to me, save that death must be near? Mildred...? What if she is death and wooing her, life wooes its end? and this be the reason why in love life seems so marvelous good? O Mildred, if this is death, let death enfold me. If you are death, hurry me to your flame-nothing beside which life--green hills and creatures swarming in the sun--is a gray sleep. You are not death, my love. You are the golden trumpet calling me to life.

I see other things. Walking toward Mildred, I see the city. Mildred colors the whole strange story: that I am alive, that I am I, now strange! And being strange, all is real, all is inevitable. The real is mysteriously new! Mildred in everything. She has unfolded and become the world. Yet in this ecstasy of clearness, I cannot even know if she is life--or death!

But I do know how this city is a shell: how life floods beyond it: a cracked shell, the city, so that in little eddies life seeps in.

My vision seeps in, also. I am in a maze of pictures. Mildred has released me from herself to a bewildering freedom.

I can fly where I will, and enter where I want. I see myriad women’s arms, suddenly free and fragile like their hair. Women’s arms wave, like hair, in a great wind. A wind sweeps my maze of images: I see streaming men and children and women. Each is crouched close to another. They do not see how they, are streaming, streaming. They think of themselves as fixed, all else as moving.

But I am moving. Something in me is fixed, and something in me is moving!...

This is a pleasant room, and I am in it.

What room? Perhaps I am in my house with Mildred, and I am to have a study generous like this one. Am I in my own future, then? Where am _I_ if this is my own book-lined study? Where is Mildred? Let me look sharp and wait. Someone is there....

The room is high and long. Two windows in one wall let in the budding tree-tops of a square. The other walls rise in dark shelves, open with books. Against the black of the wood, the plaster wall is white.

A Tanagra spots it: a Chinese painting: a little rustic jar that seems Etruscan or may be from Peru. Someone is there. Not I. I am not looking, in this torrent maze, on my own future. For the man is not I. He is dark. The lamp, blue Persian with a silk turret-shade clouded like ivory, shadows half his face, a long and from the forehead tapering face, and lights an eye that looks up now from his book. The black hair curls on the forehead in a rounded bang: like one of the saints on the great Porch at Chartres. A noble face: the nose is straight and the mouth warm-lipped and large. Brow and curled hair give saintliness, the nose is resolute and the mouth is subtle. A variance of authority. He rises. He is tall. His eyes become attentive and less thoughtful. A regal man, now at his ease in his home, in the negligee of a moire braided jacket. There is someone else just come into the room. The clear blue of the eyes is questioning. Can this someone else be I? What folly! Yet, if I can see this meditative man, why should he not see me? What a vague mass is the newcomer. I feel, rather than know it for another man. If I look square for this new presence, I shall lose the master of the room.--_Watch the master close!_ The sharp question in his eyes hardens at this other in the room, as at some ominous intruder. Immobile his face: he reaches out a hand. His eyes do not lower to what is in his hand. I feel his hand flex and relax and drop what was in it. Only his eyes are clear, gazing at this other in the room: and yet straight at me, as if they gazed at me! The eyes fill with bitterness, with horror that grows fixed and leaves his eyes.... They die in resignation ... and their horror creeps now over my own flesh. His hands fly above his head: so very empty, so very white and tremulous his hands. A knife in his breast. And all is gone....

... Flowing rivers of faces, of lives saying: “We are steadfast, we are solid,” as they stream and faint. Now, the familiar blank before my eyes. The normal street ... I smile at my fancy. I laugh aloud, walking now commonly. I call to my relief my easy rational knowledge.

“No wonder if to-night you suffer from an erratic gush of energy. Hyperæsthesia. Here is Mildred’s house. This confidence ... call it euphoria, for that talk with your parents was a blow, no doubt. Go ahead. A mastering passion is right to admit no doubt. Bad names can’t spoil the splendor of my sureness. Go ahead. Win her. What lies beyond this radiant mist? _Go on._”

I rang the bell and gave my hat and coat to the calming butler.

That moment with the butler in the hall was like a strip of arid land parting two seas of my mind. As I went up the stairs, all that had lived in me, walking through the city, went ... went out, and I lived whole in the imminent presence of Mildred. If I had asked myself what I had thought, what I had seen, out there, I could have answered only: Mildred. But even to have asked the question would have been impossible to me, since every question and every answer now was Mildred.

She opened, closed the door. Mildred is in the room, with her hand still on the doorknob and her eyes smiling upon me. Mildred I know and following my eyes I find at last myself, and still find only Mildred.

Let her stay there smiling, her slight shoulders faintly straining back with her arms, and the bare throat pulsant. Let her stay there holding me in her smile. For when she moves, what will become of me? Her chin is up: her face is inclined forward so that her violet eyes lie under the half-shut lids and peer at me. Her chin is a rounded, exquisite apex, and the cheeks trace triangularly subtle to the brow that is her chiefest glory. Mildred’s hair is gold, and is banded high, freeing all her forehead.

Let her stay there smiling, holding me in her smile. With her arms’ strain as they clasp the knob behind them, the shoulders are sheer in the orange gauze of the gown: and the little breasts are high and firm ... very high, and strangely one with the throb of her throat!

Mildred comes forward and gives me both her hands. Her arms are thin, they have no molded beauty. They are like all her body: no sculptured mass of flesh but a mysterious stream of life swift-running, like white fire ever within itself, yet fixed upon some pattern immobile and essenced.

“Well,” comes her laughing voice. “You’re early. And you’re out of breath. If you were late that’d be more excusable. Sit down.”

I sit down, and I stand again.

“Mildred, I’m sorry I am out of breath. But I have breath enough to say what must come first of all this evening ... first of all, all my life. Mildred, I love you.”

Her eyes deepen and grow soft. Her delicate face is a hard fragility about the brooding thought of her eyes. She sits down.

“Come,” she says in a voice that is like her eyes even as before it had been like her face. “Sit down beside me, John. Here.”

She leads me, holding my hand. When I am beside her on the couch her hand lifts from mine as if it had been kissed.

“You mean,” she said, “that you love me really, John? that you want me to live with you, John?”

“I want you to be my wife.”

“Does that mean, you are sure you love only me? That you will never want to live with another woman?”

My eyes gave her my answer: she saw in them, also, my surprise at her questions. She went blithely on.

“Could you love me, John, and also sometimes still love someone else?”

“It might be, Mildred. But in that case I would not now pray as I do, that you may become my wife.”

She looked down at my hand and her little fist beat on it softly.

“Mildred, know what...?”

“If you said to me: ‘Give me a kiss,’ I would kiss you for I feel like that. If you said to me: ‘Come with me for a week,’ I would say yes, for I think that for a week I could be sure that I would feel that way ... and if I did not, why a week comes to a close. But no man asks me that! No man tries to kiss me. They all say: ‘Mildred, I love you. I shall always love you. I want you for my wife.’ That means forever and ever. You are all so sure. How can I be sure?”

“Will you give me a kiss, Mildred?”

She leaned forward and her lips were faintly parted. My mouth touched hers, and my eyes saw within her gown her perfect breasts like porcelain cups, red-tipped.... She was straight again and smiling. I hid my face in my arms, fighting to master the storm that her cold lips had loosed.

“John ... did my kiss hurt you, then?”

“No, Mildred. But I suffer. You are so perfect and so brave: and you feel nothing.”

“That is not so! I liked your kiss.”

“Mildred, beside the anguish and the joy that I feel, you feel nothing.”

She held my hand in her two palms.

“Tell me what to do.”

“Believe in me, Mildred.”

“Why, I do believe in you!”

“Above all else ... above all others.”

“Why? Why must it be only you?”

“Because that is love, Mildred. Because I could not bear it any other way. Because the death of not having you would be as nothing beside the death of sharing you even with another’s thought. Because only in the unity, in the solitary oneness of two souls can love live.”

Mildred shook her head, and her gold curls rang about her ears.

“You talk like someone else. Yes,” she faced me, “someone who loves me, too, and wants me whole and for always and can’t bear any other eyes but his own looking upon me. Someone else whose wishes I’d obey reasonably, John, as I obeyed yours, when you said: ‘Give me a kiss.’” Her eyes were cool and happy despite their problem. “But he doesn’t ask reasonable things. He wants me forever and ever. How can I promise him that? And how can I promise him what I can’t give him at once?”

“Who is he, Mildred?” I forced the words and they came like gray ghosts out of my mouth.

“Oh, you don’t know him. I’ve known him long. And he’s wonderful, too. Like you are. But different. In every way, different. You don’t,” she smiled, “encroach on each other at all. He’s big and dark, and rather slow. And you are wonderfully quick. He is a poet and smells always of pipe tobacco. His hands are gnarled....”

“I think as much as you do, John. His words are strangely like yours, even though he himself is so different. That is important, is it not? He asked me one reasonable thing ... one thing I could do.”

“What was that, Mildred?”

“To come to his rooms.”

“He has a lovely place down on Washington Square. I supposed, when he had me there, he’d want to kiss me. But no ... he’s unreasonable, just like you. He frightened me. He left me so alone. I was almost chilly, I assure you. With his pacing up and down: saying ‘I love you. I want you. I love you,’ and not even taking my hand.” She reached for mine. “You see,” she smiled, “he is even less reasonable than you. You at least kissed me.”

I was up from the couch. She had held my hand. I snatched it from her. I began to pace, till the thought came that _he_ had done this. I stopped and faced her. I pulled her up and held her in my arms. I covered her face with kisses. I found her throat in my dazed ecstasy; I pressed my mouth within the gauze of her gown. Her cool hand stopped me, and she held me off.

“No,” she said. “No, I cannot.”

“Why? If you mean what you said. Why?”

Her eyes took on a serious dark question: and I knew how right I was to love her for the splendor of her chastity. For ere she answered me, she was seeking deep within her soul the reason, the quiet reason.

In that true moment when with head bowed she went within herself to give me answer why she had denied me, I knew the greatness of my love, and how she was greater than I, and how my sultry passion had been an ugly shred tangenting from my love.