So Edmond locked the door upon a room of wonders, abandoning there his quest for truth through the maze of natural things. For he foresaw that the facets of the jewel were infinite, and that a greater intelligence than his would yet fail to isolate truth in a laboratory. He opened another door upon the colossus of the city, and stepped into the streaming life that flowed about him.
Disregarding his roadster that stood at the curb, he walked east to Sheridan Road, to board a bus. The day was crisp late Autumn; leaves crunched underfoot as he walked. Trim women passed him with a single glance, a man or two with none at all. At the comer half a dozen people waited; Edmond scanned them with his instantaneous glance. He attempted to read their characters from their features; he failed and knew that he failed. Two of them, girls in sleek cloth coats with caressing fur about their throats were talking; the rest stood in that frigid silence characteristic of an unacquainted group. He listened casually.
“Paul’s bringing two or three with him tonight—one’s a critic on the State Herald.”
That was the slender dark one speaking.
“Paul’s the only one that’s got anything. He’s a thrill, Vanny.”
“Think so? Come on over, if you like; it’s just an informal bull-session.”
“No bridge?”
“Not with this bunch of literary lights. The supreme egotists are your literati, and bridge requires a partner.”
Edmond glanced at the speaker’s face, unexpectedly meeting her eyes. He bowed in recognition, and the girl smiled a perfunctory smile. It was Evanne Marten of his school days, grown, he thought, rather lovely in a dark, lithe way. She had an air of being always taut as a watch spring, an élan, a vivacity, that had come of her childish sauciness. When the bus stopped, he watched the smooth flash of her legs as she mounted the step, watched without any emotion but with a distinct aesthetic appreciation.
The two girls turned into the interior; Edmond chose to ride above, where smoking was permitted. As he moved up the narrow stairway he heard the voice of her companion, “Who’s the queer boy friend, Vanny?” and Vanny’s answering laugh. He smiled a little to himself and thought no more if it for that time. He permitted his minds to roam at random, absorbing the unceasing roar of traffic, the buoyant life that flowed in a river of steel about him, in the middle distance the flash of the lake under a morning sun. The bus rumbled in heightened tempo as it spun at a suddenly increased speed into Lincoln Parkway. Over there the Elk’s Memorial An equestrian statue of someone, too distant to read the inscription. The overpass at the park’s south limits; the Drake, the old watertower. He watched Vanny and her companion alight; they marched briskly along Michigan toward a row of shops, turned into one—“Veblis—Chapeaux”. The bridge with its sentinel skyscrapers. After a few blocks he got off, turned west into the Loop. He drifted with the crowd and sought to identify himself with it.
After a time, he turned into a motion picture the-tare—the first time since his latter childhood. He followed the play with interest, absorbed not by the puerile story nor the caricatures that passed as characterization but by the revelations of the minds that created and the minds that enjoyed these things. Through the play he saw both author and audience. He wondered mildly at what he perceived.
“If this level strikes the average of humanity’s intelligence, then the world lies ready for my taking.”
He reflected further.
“What I see here is again the crowd, and therefore no true standard by which to judge. The mob-man is the composite picture of his component men; all fine shadings are lost in the dominant and primal influences. A man may be intelligent enough, but the mob-man never; and it is this being I see reflected here, for audiences are in a true sense mobs.”
He left the theatre and turned down State Street, passing gradually from the flooded noonday canyons of the Loop into streets of lower buildings and drab little shops. A panhandler sidled up to him with a low whine; Edmond tossed him a quarter without listening or looking. From a basement entrance a dog rushed out at him barking and snapping; with experienced skill, he dealt the cur a sharp blow with his cane.
“Man and his ally the dog both perceive in me the Enemy,” he thought. “Why am I the Enemy? For what obscure reason am I placed here solitary, foredoomed to defeat, my only safety to assume the disguise of humanity? Something has gone wrong with the progression of the ages, and I am born long out of my time.”
Thus he reflected, meanwhile watching the stream of beings about him, playing still the part of observer. For he moved through the stream but not a part of it; he was still alien, strange, unable to establish a rapport with the people of the stream. His viewpoint, he realized, was starkly different from theirs; it remained to find die common ground.
A window to his left caught his eye, a cheap little shop that did framing and sold the intolerable prints hung in the rooms of the neighborhood. There were a number of them in the window, but what Edmond saw was a little landscape in oils—a canvas no greater than six inches by ten. A curious little thing—nothing more than a tree, a rock, and a dusky sky, and these a trifle twisted, but somehow it seemed to convey a meaning. Something formless and inchoate, but a symbol nevertheless. It was an experience unique to him; he marveled that so simple a thing could arouse a tinge of feeling in his icy being. He entered, and stood before a dusty counter piled with framing. A nondescript man emerged from the rear.
“I want that oil you have in the window.”
“Yes sir,” said the man, and procured it, placing it before Edmond. “Very pretty little picture isn’t it, sir?”
“No,” said Edmond, examining it. Certainly it was not a pretty picture; there was an air of horror about the scene, as of some region foreign to reason, a glimpse of an insane world. He scanned the unusually lucid script—Sarah Maddox.
“Who painted this?”
“I don’t really know, sir. They come in here to sell ’em when they’re broke; sometimes I never see ’em twice. I remember it was a sort of thin woman, but most of ’em are that way.” He frowned in concentration. “Wait a minute; I think I paid her by check, and sometimes I put the address on the stub, in case the work sells good.”
He thumbed through some stubs, then shook his head.
“The check was made out to cash. I didn’t think her work would take, you see.”
“How much is it?”
The man looked at him appraisingly.
“Eight dollars, sir.”
Edmond paid and left, carrying the picture wrapped in a square of brown paper. He wandered on. He was somewhat surprised at the unattainability of man the individual. How did one pick up acquaintances? He considered approaching one of the numerous idlers he passed, and rejected the plan knowing from experience how he would be received. He walked on, back toward the towered heart of the city. A bookstore. He entered, glanced over the shelves of volumes. A clerk spoke to him by name; he had made previous purchases there.
At the rear was a table piled indiscriminately with tattered volumes. He picked up the first to hand, a book thick as a table dictionary—the Apocalypse Revealed of Swedenborg. He glanced through it, reading with his accustomed rapidity, absorbing the meaning of entire sentences instantly, as one might read words. He was interested by the curious intricacy of the author’s mind. “They call him a mystic,” he thought, “epithet of all epithets the most inapplicable. This man is no mystic, but scientist wasting his talents on a dream; his mind to his work is as a sculptor’s chisel trying to carve out of a cloud.”
He tossed the volume back, stepped again to the counter. The clerk moved to serve him.
“What book,” said Edmond, “do you find the most popular at this time?”
The clerk smiled, and tapped a pile of little, booklets before him. Edmond recognized them from various references he had seen in the newspapers; they held the autobiography of one who specialized in a lowly type of architecture.
“I don’t think you’d care for this, Mr. Hall,�
� said the clerk recalling certain previous purchases of Edmond’s. “It’s supposed to be humorous.”
“I want one, however.”
He took the thin little volume to a chair beside a table; in half an hour he had perused it.
“I lack all humor save irony,” he thought. “Until I can understand this element in men their minds will elude me. I think that humor in itself is the enjoyment of disaster to others; people constitutionally hate each other, and the reason they band together in tribes and nations is merely that they fear nature and foreigners more deeply.”
He slipped the booklet into his pocket, picked up his package, and again departed. The early setting sun of Autumn was already behind the buildings; the streets were beginning to chill. He hooked his cane over his arm and walked toward the lake; he turned north on Michigan, walking idly, aimlessly. The sense of futility was on him again; he forebore even to think. It seemed to him that he could never bridge the hiatus that lay between him and humanity; alien he was, and was doomed to remain. To make friends was an impossible feat; among the millions about him he walked solitary. He watched the flood of impatient cars jostle each other in a vast medley of motion, and walked and walked; he was lonely.
He passed the Drake. Beyond, the graying lake broke close to the street; some benches caught his eye •and he crossed over to rest, for the long walking of the day had tired him a little. He sat down and lit a cigarette, watching the play of shadows between the wave crests. He felt desolate, futile.
A figure passed before him, turned and repassed, seating itself on the next bench a few yards to his left. He smoked silently. The figure suddenly moved to his side; he sensed it now as a woman, but made no move.
“Got the blues, huh?”
He turned. She was one of the ageless creatures of the modern city, wearing a mask of powder, her cheeks bright even in the dimming light.
“Yes,” he said.
“Maybe I could cheer you up?” It was a question. “Sit here a while. I should like to talk to you.”
“Gosh, no sermons, Mister! I heard ’em all!”
“No. No sermons. I merely wish to talk to you.”
“Well, I’m here.”
Edmond drew the booklet he had purchased from his pocket.
“Have you read this?”
She leaned over, peering at the title, and smiled. “Huh, and I thought for a minute you were some kind of a preacher. No, I ain’t read it, but a regular—a friend of mine, he tells me about it. I got a laugh.”
“It is very funny, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, the part where he falls in.” She laughed. “The girls nearly passed out, the way he told it.” Edmond passed her the book.
“You may have this copy.”
“Thanks.” There was a moment’s pause.
“Say, ain’t we going somewhere?”
“I want to talk to you a while.”
“Well, I gotta live.”
“Yes,” said Edmond; “that is true, from one viewpoint.”
“Talking don’t buy no groceries. I gotta live.”
“Why?”
“Why? What’s the idea? Everybody’s gotta live, don’t they?”
“People seem to believe so.”
“Say, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you like me?”
“As well as I like any person.”
“Say, who do you think you are, anyway?”
“That,” said Edmond, “is something I have often wondered.”
He stood up; his companion rose with him. He drew a bill from his pocket—five dollars, he noticed, and passed it to her.
“Good evening,” he said.
“Is that all you want?”
“Yes.”
“Well, for God’s sake! Tinned down! I never been so—Say, I know what’s wrong with you! You must be queer!”
Edmond stared at her coldly. Suddenly a flame filled his eyes. He raised his arm, holding his hand before her face. Above his palm, his fingers writhed and twisted like five little snakes. He wiggled them before her eyes; they coiled about each other. The woman stared in frozen fascination for a moment,, then shrieked, backed away, and fled over the clipped grass toward the street.
“That,” said Edmond, as he reseated himself, and reached for another cigarette, “is humor!”
CHAPTER VII
THE STUDY OF MAN
“AN entomologist,” thought Edmond from his chair before the fire, “studies one variety of insect after another, learning their different life cycles and diverse habits.
“I spend my time unprofitably observing this single ant-heap of Chicago; perhaps I can learn what I wish by comparison with others.”
Thus, leaving Homo in Magda’s care, Edmond set out to travel. He viewed New York with little interest, sailing immediately for Liverpool because at the moment that route was most convenient. Thereafter he visited France for some months, liking best of all regions the country of the Spanish border with its magnificent uplands.
French and German he had as a heritage of his school days; other tongues came to him with an incredible facility, so that as he wandered he absorbed the dialect of his locale with chameleon-like rapidity. Yet his quest was fruitless insofar as the study of men went, for he found no differences save superficial ones.
He visited the bookstores in Paris and Venice, and added greatly to his collection. Several times he found curious volumes that surprised him—a little undated manuscript detailing a queer jest of Gilles de Retz, a tiny volume of twelve pages describing Roger Bacon’s experiment with a mechanical head. And there were others.
“Am I really the first of my kind?” he wondered. “Perhaps in other ages an individual or so of us may have existed, solitary as I am solitary, lonely as I.” The thought imparted to him a feeling of great sadness. “Their works He here neglected, understood dimly or not at all, while lesser genius is enthroned.”
So he wandered, sometimes rewarded, sometimes prey to a vast boredom and a sense of futility that nothing ever quite eradicated. About a year after his departure, he suddenly abandoned his quest and sailed from Havre.
“Homo Sapiens is a single species,” he concluded, “and the world over, there exist no important differences save those of custom. Herein lies the reason for the recession of romantic color; there is nowhere anything unique. All people are merely types, members of a class, and no one anywhere merits the article ‘the’. The Kraken has vanished from men’s consciousness, and instead we have whales. The Golden Fleece has sunk into a legend of tradesmen.”
He arrived at the house on Kenmore some hours after Homo coughed a final weak cough and succumbed at last to the unnatural climate, and a window Magda forgot to close. Edmond was somewhat moved as he gazed at the little furry body.
“So passes my single friend, and the only being whose presence I could miss. To my one friendship, therefore, I now erect a memorial.”
He took the small corpse to his long-locked laboratory, emerging some time later with a tiny articulated skull. Thereafter he sent for a mason, and had this strange memento inset into the stonework above the library fire-place, whence its hollow gaze was fixed forever on his favored chair. Here he seated himself at the completion of the work, turning contemplative eyes on the empty ones that had been Homo’s. Thus he sat silent for a long time, following out a course of thought that lay mostly beyond the regions enterable by words. Finally he stirred himself, being weary of thinking, and lit a cigarette with dexterous hands.
“Homo,” he said, “is released from the innumerable petty illusions that harass life. He knows not even that he knows not, and is infinitely wiser than he was when he perhaps thought himself wise … For the most barren of all is the illusion of knowledge, which is a negative illusion, so that the more a man learns the less he knows.” His eyes turned to the little landscape by Sarah Maddox that hung to the right of the mantel; as he gazed at it obliquely, it seemed again that he looked through a window at a strange world.
Afte
r a moment, he stirred, picked up the mass of mail that had accumulated during his absence. A vast sheaf of advertisements, which he tossed to the fire, a few current bills—he had let Magda forward these monthly to his bank for payment—several envelopes bearing the letterheads of universities. Edmond smiled; he had expected inquiries concerning his A-lead from the various students of matter and energy. He put these aside unopened; Bohn could take care of the replies.
“What is to be done now?” he thought. “Let me take my cue again from the naturalist—when he has studied the habits of his subject, he secures a specimen to examine at leisure, under the microscope if he will. It is for me now to secure myself a specimen.”
But how? How should he, to whom even the making of a friend was an obstacle insurmountable, lure a human being to his side, to live with him, speak without reserve to him, that he might study at leisure the human mind? Magda? Too poor a specimen, he thought; too stolid and stupid to show the full phenomena of mentality, and furthermore, too unaesthetic.
“If I may not make a friend, I can at least hire one under pretext of needing a guide or instructor,” he thought, and dismissed the matter for that time.
He heard the buzz of the doorbell, and Magda’s cumbrous tread. In a moment she entered the library, bulking through the arch like a little planet.
“She moves in orbits,” thought Edmond, continuing the simile, “and completes a revolution once a day. Her sun is the kitchen stove, her room and the front door her aphelion and perihelion.”
“There’s a man to see you, Mr. Hall. He’s been here a dozen times. Oldish with glasses.” She extended a card.
“Alfred Stein, Department of Electro-physics, Northwestern University.”
A picture of the lecture hall returned to Edmond’s mind, the amiable little professor bustling about with his chalk and pointer, his own rare interest. It was very recently that Stein had published his most revolutionary studies of electrons.
“I will see him, Magda.”
Edmond noted that the professor had changed but little. The iron-gray hair, the thick-lensed spectacles, the droop of the shoulders, were all as they had been in the class room.
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