“What, Vanny?”
“No, I mean it, Paul! I can feel it, sense it! Not physically, but I can feel the presence, and both are he! I am afraid of him, Paul, but I love him like—like a dog his master—like—” She fell silent, leaving her simile mysteriously incomplete.
“He is unbelievably powerful,” she said, after a long pause. “Nothing ever bars him from the attainment of his purposes. Think, Paul, how he has defeated you at every encounter from earliest school days, and sometimes in rather terrible fashion!”
“Do you think so?” returned Paul. “I thought—” He paused, reconsidering the idea he had been about to phrase. It had occurred to him that in this present encounter he was worsting his redoubtable opponent, winning from him the greatest of his treasures. But was he? Was he not rather contenting himself with the leavings, with a part of Vanny that Edmond, for his own insane reasons, had rejected? “He ravishes her soul like the orthodox Devil,” Paul thought, “leaving her body easy prey with the spirit drained out of it.”
“I know this,” said Vanny; “that if the whole world were set on one course, all the ministers, scientists, rich men, generals, and statesmen wanted one thing, and Edmond opposed it, he could sit in his black-windowed room upstairs and contrive a means to defeat them. You see, Paul, this sense makes his companionship very poignant, but also blasting and withering like a desert sun; and his love is languid and insufferable!” Some rising emotion shook her; tears were beginning to glisten in her eyes. “But I love him, Paul! I want his love and I am miserably cheated!” She was panting in an effort to suppress her tears; an old phrase of Edmond’s, the word “experiment,” had returned in memory to harass her.
“Whatever he wants is inevitably his,” she continued sadly, and then, with a sudden flash of insight: “His one weakness, and like a curse on him, is never to know his desire, to want nothing at all badly enough to make its attainment a satisfaction—not me nor anything in the world!” She was weeping bitterly now, and her emotion burned rampant on its own fuel.
Paul seized her shoulders, shook her, held her close, so that her eyes were hidden. Her hysteria subsided.
“Vanny, you must come. This is madness.”
“No, Paul.”
She lay in his arms as many times before, and Paul felt as always the seductiveness of her.
“Paul—”
“Yes, dearest.”
“Give me love again—human love—like men and women and natural things!”
Minutes passed—Edmond entered quietly and stood above them with his old ironic smile.
Paul rose pallid and dishevelled, and faced Edmond, who said nothing, but only waited with a smile of bitterness, his blazing eyes on Paul. Vanny crouched in terror, her eyes on Edmond, her hands fluttering frantically.
Silence.
“Well,” said Paul at length, “after the manner of such gentlemen as I, I had better ask what you are going to do about it.”
Edmond did not reply nor vary his gaze.
“Don’t blame Vanny,” said Paul. “Blame me, and mostly yourself. You’re not fit for her, you know.”
Edmond did not reply.
“It’s your fault,” said Paul. “She wanted your love and you withheld it. She’s told me. She needs it, and you made her desperate.” He felt a surge of panic, and his voice rose. “You’ve got to let her go! You’re making her as crazy as yourself—Don’t you see it? She can’t stand it! Let her go, I tell you!”
Edmond did not reply.
“You devil!” Paul felt as if he were screaming. “Will you let her go? You don’t want her! Let her find what happiness she can!”
He choked. Edmond did not reply.
An outburst of deep terror was flooding Paul’s brain, as he understood that he faced something unnatural. He uttered a cry that was curiously shrill, and drove a clenched hand to Edmond’s face. Edmond fell back against the wall and the ironic smile seemed to grow more bitter in a driblet of scarlet from the crushed lips, but there was no change in his intense gaze as Paul fled sobbing.
Edmond turned his eyes on Vanny, who through usage found them bearable. She smoothed her hair and garment, and stood before him like an ivory statue, a pallor on her cheek and a question in her haunted eyes.
“For that he should have died,” said Edmond, speaking at last, “but that he spoke the truth. You must be released. I will go.”
“Do you think, Edmond,” answered Vanny slowly, “that anywhere I can now find companionship or love other than that I know with you? Because through you I have almost understood the inscrutable things, other men are as children or the beasts of nature.”
Edmond shook his head sadly.
“Do not part us, Edmond,” said Vanny. “I love you, Edmond.”
“They think we are both mad,” she said, “and I too think so,—sometimes; but often I know otherwise when I perceive that you are an angel or a devil, or something more than a man. Nevertheless, I love you, Edmond.”
And at his silence, she continued, “Do not punish me, Edmond, because I have these several times yielded to the stubborn bestial clay within me; I have more of the beast than you, but now I swear it is dead, Edmond. I will ask no more of you, no more than you will give.”
And again, “Will you understand me, Edmond?”
At last he spoke, gently.
“I am not angry, Vanny, nor do I fail to understand. There is something else between us, something ineradicable and fatal to any further union of ours, “Vanny, I am not human!”
“You are telling me that you are the Devil,” she said, “but I love you Edmond.”
“No, Vanny, it is less comprehensible than that. You and I are alien, not in race, but in species. This is why you are unable to bear a child by me, nor ever will be able. We are fortunate in that, for a child of ours would be far worse than any mixed breed; it would be a hybrid!”
Through his other mind flashed a comparison of Vanny’s pale body and his own deformity.
“When the horse and ass breed,” he said, “the offspring is a mule. Vanny, our child would be—a mule!” And as her desolate eyes still gazed into his:
“Perhaps I am the Devil, inasmuch as I am mankind’s arch-enemy, and that which will destroy him. What else is the Devil?”
A sort of comprehension was born in Vanny’s mind. She glimpsed the meaning of her husband, and a feeling of the inevitable disaster dawned in her. Henceforth, they were enemies, alien species, like the lion and the lamb, but with no ultimate lying-down together!
“Then good-bye, Edmond.”
For once Edmond vocalized the obvious.
“Good-bye, Vanny!”
As he moved again out into the street, he was more utterly miserable than ever before.
CHAPTER XIII
LILITH AND ADAM
EDMOND and Sarah, two strange elements in the fantastic quadrangle, seemed for the brief ensuing period to be more perfectly aligned, to possess a greater degree of harmony than the stormy combination that was the origin of their union. Sarah, cold, languid, impersonal, seemed to her companion a fit and desirable consort, and a haven of peace and quiet intellect. Not yet had the demands of his body made themselves evident, and the pleasant poison he had imbibed was yet to run its course in his nature.
Still, a remnant of the sorrow Edmond felt at the loss of Vanny survived to sadden him. Sympathy and pity were emotions that had grown less foreign to his character, and he was coming to know a sort of familiarity for their twin dolorous faces. Yet the first bitterness of his renunciation passed with the inception of Sarah’s completer understanding. He managed to suppress for the time being that sense of beauty which was the one trait that had so far yielded him a modicum of satisfaction. Sometimes, however, the urge returned to plague him, and he wondered anew at the self-borne inconsistency that caused him to find beauty in an alien creature.
“There is a sort of Satanic majesty about Sarah,” he thought, “and her self-sufficiency is admirable, and proper t
o her kind. There is also a very precious element in understanding and companionship, and Sarah only, of all created beings, has that to offer me. It is irrational for me to seek in her a beauty her heredity denies her, the more irrational since her body, and not human woman’s, is my appointed lure. And yet, rational or not, I miss the white wistful loveliness that is Vanny’s! I have twisted my own nature into hopelessly unnatural channels!”
So he entered into this new union, part of him satisfied, and part of him prey to a longing that survived out of his old life. He moved Sarah away from her drab little room into an apartment overlooking the Park on Lake View Avenue. He doubted whether the change to more commodious quarters affected her at all, for so self-contained an entity was she that her surroundings were of all influences the most negligible. Not that she was a stranger to beauty, her artistry denied that supposition; but she drew her inspiration from a source far removed from reality, somewhere in the depths of her own complex character. She found, in her quiet and complacent duality, compensations that Edmond for all his restless seeking was forever denied.
Their wooing was a languid, and to Edmond, a disappointing affair lacking both the stimulus of obstacles and the spur of uncertainty. Sarah was acquiescent but unresponsive, yielding lackadaisical caresses in return for Edmond’s own unenthusiastic offerings. There was none of the fiery ecstasy that made Vanny’s love like to a flaming meteor burning the very air in its passage. That compulsion to reproduce, which had seemed originally noble and worthy of fulfillment, hung now about Edmond’s neck like an iron collar, deadening half his pleasure in Sarah’s companionship and reminding him insistently of the delights he had forsworn.
“If this is the measure of my race’s capacity for enjoyment,” he reflected, “then whatever their attainments of the intellect, they have much indeed to learn from their simple human progenitors!”
As summer progressed, the feeling of discontent deepened, and even the high and Platonic intimacy with Sarah was embittered by it.
“Sarah has failed me now,” he thought. “There is no release anywhere for me who am doomed forever to tread a solitary path.”
He continued his gloomy reflections. “It is a curious fact that all speculators concerning the Superman have made the egregious mistake of picturing him as happier than man. Nietzsche, Gobineau, Wells—each of them falls into this same error when all logic clearly denies it. Is the man of today happier than Homo Neanderthalis in his filth-strewn cave? Was this latter happier than Pithecanthropus, or he happier than an ape swinging through Pleistocene trees? Rather, I think, the converse is true; with the growth of intellect, happiness becomes an elusive quantity, so that doubtless the Superman, when he arrives, will be of all creatures the most unhappy. I, his prototype, am the immediate example.”
It was with a feeling of relief that he realized Sarah was pregnant; part of the compulsion was satisfied, part of his responsibility was behind him. Sarah too seemed to feel the lessening of the tension; their mutual interest in this purely rational undertaking of producing offspring bound them a little closer together. But Sarah withdrew more closely into herself after the event; she seemed to have less need than ever for a presence other than her own.
Often, during the months of summer, Edmond brought out his grey car and drove for many hours and many miles in an effort merely to escape the dullness of thinking. For his very thoughts palled upon him at times, seeming to him a rather wan and sickly substitute for certain realities he had known. He was seldom successful in his attempt, for the curse of intellect pursued him with speed easily sufficient to outdistance the mechanism in which he fled.
Still, the curious union was surviving. His nature and Sarah’s never met in open conflict, since Sarah’s desires were never deep-rooted enough to resist his own impulses; she gave way to him equably, quietly, and without rancor, yielding everything and finding recompense in her unborn child, her art, and herself. So the strange ménage ground itself into a sort of stability as summer closed.
CHAPTER XIV
EVE AND LILITH
VANNY sat miserably silent after Edmond’s departure; the house seemed as still as the depths of a pyramid, and as old and lifeless. She was dumb, dazed, by the impact of events. The whole impulse that drove the wheels of her life was rendered powerless by her loss, as if she were a motor whose current had been suddenly cut off. She sat unmoving while the clatter of Magda setting the table for lunch scarcely penetrated her consciousness; a long time later she heard the stolid servant removing the untouched dishes. Edmond gone! It was incredible catastrophe. The words were as meaningless as if one should say, “The sun has gone out; the world is condemned to darkness.”
The afternoon waned, and still she sat hopelessly, without thought, knowing only the depths of her misery. Finally she was aware that the doorbell was ringing, had been ringing for some time. She would have risen when Magda’s heavy tread forestalled her. A moment later she looked uncomprehendingly at the figure that entered the room; realization came slowly that it was Paul, very excited.
“My dear!” he said, “I came at once, as soon as I found your note.”
“Note?” Vanny said vaguely, tonelessly.
“Of course! Here!”
She glanced indifferently at the missive he presented; truly enough the script was her own, confuting in its accurate familiarity the very testimony of her memory. A single line, “Come back, Paul,” and her own signature, perfect to the shading of its letters. Why had Edmond inflicted this irony on her? Was he, she wondered, attempting a mistaken kindness, or, out of the depths of his wisdom, did he indicate to her the course he considered best? No matter, she concluded dully; it devolved on her to follow his implied command.
“He’s gone,” she said, turning vision-haunted eyes on Paul, who still panted in excitement.
“And a good thing, dear! We’ll have you free, start proceedings immediately!”
“No,” said Vanny. “I don’t want that.”
“Why, dear! That’s the only course!”
“No,” the girl repeated in the same monotone. “If Edmond wishes to be free of me, hell contrive it himself.”
“Of course he will! And at your expense, Vanny—at the cost of your character!”
“He won’t do that, Paul. He’ll find his own means, if he desires it.”
Now, with the presence of a friend whose sympathy she trusted, the apathy was transforming itself to an active misery, a poignant, unbearable pain.
“I’m terribly unhappy!” she muttered, and began to weep. For a long time Paul, sensitive to her needs, made neither sound nor movement, but when she began to quiet from sheer exhaustion, he moved close to her, held her in his arms, and tried to comfort. After a time she was pale and dry-eyed and calm.
“You will stay here tonight, Paul,” she told him.
“Not here! You’ll come away with me!”
“Here,” reiterated Vanny.
The afternoon dragged slowly into evening; night fell on the city, and still they remained in a room grown somber with shadows. Vanny would not yield to appeal or argument to leave the house, and Paul had not the heart to abandon her. In the end he stayed, feeling somehow as if the girl had won a victory over him. Nevertheless, the next night found him still present, and the following night as well.
So there began a queer period in the lives of these two. Paul was nearly happy in the possession of the being he desired. He worked with unaccustomed energy at his writing, using Vanny’s desk in the living room, and it seemed to the girl that his work was of more merit than heretofore. He was elated too with the acceptance of a short story by a magazine of small circulation but of decided literary repute; shortly afterward the same publisher accepted a poem.
As for Vanny, she was far from happy, but her misery drove her to Paul for comfort. She clung to his companionship with a sort of despairing avidity, feeling her loneliness insupportable without him. He was simple, affectionate, understandable; sometimes she experienced a
feeling almost of relief at the realization that his thoughts were of her own degree, human and comprehensible. More than that, she could hold conceptions beyond his powers, and could if she wished master his nature as Edmond had mastered hers. There was a grain of comfort in this, for she perceived that she retained something within herself of Edmond’s more than human abilities.
Magda, third member of the unusual household, worked on as stolidly as if she had not noticed the change in personnel. She prepared the meals as usual, served and removed them, and collected her wages each Saturday. It was as if she served not the tenants, but the house, as she had done for nearly a quarter of a century.
During this quiet and unhappy interlude, Vanny was relieved at least of the necessity of financial worry. She had her own account at the bank, and her own deposit box. An inspection of this revealed a surprisingly thick sheaf of securities, considerably more than she had believed she owned; it did not occur to her that Edmond possessed a duplicate key.
So life dragged along; the new year passed into being and the planet swung through the spring and summer arcs. Little by little the distant look was fading from Vanny’s dark eyes, as the incredible sensations and events of her dreamy life with Edmond slipped out of the grasp of her memory. She realized their passing as her recollection of certain elements grew misty, but she had no power to fix them since they included conceptions alien to her mind. She was drifting back, away from both the horrors and the beauties she had known; she watched these latter vanish regretfully, but the turning of time seemed only to measure their disintegration. She was helpless either to aid or hinder the process.
Sometimes she helped Paul at his work with an incisive criticism or a suggestion full of possibilities. More often she read while he labored, for her husband’s great library was at hand for her use, but the things she dug out of the volumes seemed usually meaningless gibberish, lacking the interpretation of a greater insight than her own. At other times she simply sat and dreamed; Paul was sometimes amazed by the stretch of time she could while away in this fashion—she who had been of old so active, so impatient of idleness. She found the library a solitary retreat, since Paul seldom entered it; the skull on the fireplace grinned at him with too ironical a smile.
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