“I have sometimes wondered whether intellect is indeed worth its price, and whether after all it is not merely the old curse of Adam, divorcing us from the simpler and far nobler things that were long ago. I have a half-memory of such things as are incomprehensible to you, Sarah, who have only a perfect intelligence with which to understand—I confess I do not know.”
He turned abruptly and moved toward the hall, while across the moonpath on the lake there seemed to flicker for a moment a curious misty glory that danced and beckoned.
“By your standards, and doubtless by all rational ones, this that I go to do now is very foolish, and void of wisdom; nevertheless, I go not entirely without assurance. For this stream of life you hover above is a deeper flood than you know, and there are reasons buried therein that are outside the grasp of our minds,—even, Sarah, of yours—even deeper than the inexpressible. Therefore I go to face that inevitable outcome not wholly without hope, and go indeed with a pleasure greater than I have ever known.”
He moved out into the dark hall. Sarah, on whose face the silver dagger of moonbeams now fell, stood silently gazing after him, with no rancor, no ire in her face, but only a languid little regret glinting about her eyes, and a faint puzzlement therein.
CHAPTER XIX
RETURN TO OLYMPUS
EDMOND stepped from his car before the house on Kenmore Street, and gazed up at it. There flickered the light of a hearth fire from the library—the blue glow of cannel—symbol of warmth and cheer and welcome flung out into the chilly autumn evening. No other lights—aid the room hold Paul and Vanny together? Edmond wondered idly with half his mind; it mattered little. He moved toward the entrance, producing his key. Down the street he glimpsed a lurking figure with something of desolation about it; he turned a suddenly intense gaze upon it and it retreated, vanished.
Edmond unlocked the door, entering; he dropped his coat and hat and ever-present cane upon a chair remembered in the dusk, and turned toward the library whence issued low music from the radio.
Vanny stood before the fireplace of the monkey’s skull, her figure outlined against the glow, in an attitude poisea, expectant. She wore that purple silken robe which Edmond had himself draped aoout her, through which her limbs were half-outlined by the flames in long lithe shadows. Her hair was a jet helmet, circling the haunted wistfulness of her eyes. She stood waiting, while Edmond paused a long moment on the threshold, for to his vision the scene held a breath-taking beauty.
He moved into the room, closer ,to Vanny, studying her. She had grown a trifle thinner, a shade paler, but surely her eyes were less haunted. His second self supplied the answer: “Lacking my presence, the unbearable things she learned are dissipating like heavy gases; having no words to fix them, she cannot recall them clearly, and they grow dream-like.”
Vanny dropped to the low fire-bench, looking up at Edmond timidly to read his expression, then with a flaming gladness. Edmond smiled, and for once there was little of irony in his smile. He bent to kiss her, slipping beside her on the bench. There was the scent of wine in her breath and her cheeks were beginning to flush.
“She has bulwarked her brain against my coming,” thought Edmond sadly; “my very presence is an assault on her sanity.”
Vanny spoke. “Oh, Edmond, I hoped you would come. I have been wanting you.”
Edmond’s delicate long fingers caressed her; something of beauty had entered his life again, and he was content.
“First I only hoped you would come, Edmond; then when I realized your approach, I sent Paul away, and that was hard to do, and he was very bitter; but by ways I learned of you, I made him go.”
Then, “Do you come to stay, Edmond?”
“For as long as is permitted me, dear.”
“And is that long?”
“It may be forever—for me.”
“Then I am happy, Edmond.”
For a space of minutes they were silent, Vanny happy without thought, content in the presence of her loved one. Edmond sat not without thought, but as happy as might be, and whatever of sadness entered him he lost in the mellow flow of music.
“Dance for me, Vanny.”
She rose, dropping the purple silken robe, so that it lay glistening like an irridescent pool of oil about her feet, then moved from it like an emanation in the breeze. Edmond watched her dance, reveling in the forever. Thereafter he summoned her, so that she lay warm against him with a well remembered pressure, and he kissed her, and spoke with her.
“Are you less unhappy with me than with Paul, Vanny?”
“I am the Vanny who was yours, and I have forgotten Paul.”
Startled, Edmond’s other self recalled that very afternoon when he sat on the lake-cresting hill and spoke with his vision. He noted too that a misty glory had entered the room, dancing and beckoning in the fire-light.
“But do you like to return? To recall things as they were?”
“How can I return? I have never been away.”
“That is bitter reproach, Vanny …” He paused, suddenly pallid. “Stop, Vanny! The Time-circle is slipping, and it will be all to do over again! Pour me a glass of wine.”
Vanny reached the silver decanter that was fashioned like a fantastic Bacchus, filling two glasses. They touched glasses and drank.
“Another, Vanny.”
Again they touched glasses, smiling over them at each other, draining the tart Riesling to the bottom.
“And another, dear.” Again they drank.
“No, that is enough now.”
A pleasant ruddy mist settled over Edmond’s minds, blanketing the terrors that had been rising therein, smothering them, so that the inexpressible was no longer conceivable to him, and the Time-circle slipped smoothly back to its appointed place and the dancing mist was no more. Vanny came to him again in the robe that flashed red and violet in the fire-glow, and he reached out his thin wiry arms, his incredible serpentine fingers, to draw her to him. Her eyes were bright with wine, and the deep terrors behind them were hidden; her cheeks were flushed, and through her half-parted lips her breath flowed over Edmond bearing the perfume of wine’. So for a little while they were a unity, flesh and spirit merging like separate notes in a chord, into a pagan paean, a rhapsody.
Vanny lay finally passive against him, the flush of her cheeks paling, her eyelids drooping, her lungs gasping in the too warm, over-sweet air of the room. Above the arch of the fireplace, the skull of Homo leered sickeningly at her.
“Your coming, Edmond—the wine—they are going to be too—much!” Her head drooped.
Edmond rose, and with an effort raised her, bore her unsteadily up the broad stairs. He felt a peculiar pleasure in the weight of her body, always so vibrant and tense, now listless and unresponsive against him. He lowered her to her bed, and by a means known to him, cheated that body of the pay it would have demanded for an evening of ecstasy. But he himself lay tossing most of the night despite a deadly languor.
CHAPTER XX
LIVING
THERE began now for Edmond a new sort of life, a dreamy indolent existence through which Vanny moved like the shadow of his fancy. Day after day slid quietly below the threshold, so peacefully that nothing marked their passing save Edmond’s increasing weakness, and a lassitude that grew with deadly steadiness. For this, of course, there were compensations.
He had dusted off his tubes and wires in the laboratory upstairs, and sometimes spent a whole day pursuing his old will-o-the-wisp of knowledge that danced before him now very far over the swamp of the unknown. At times he surprised himself by curious discoveries that lay far beyond the borders of science; and in these hours labored with a vigor and enthusiasm that he had almost forgotten. But at other times he sat most of the day idle with his head upon his hands.
Occasionally Vanny came in, seating herself soundlessly and timidly in the comer, never daring to speak in this mysterious sanctum unless Edmond first addressed her. She witnessed many great things, but saw them only as rainbow shaft
s of fight and flaming bits of metal; of their import she comprehended precisely nothing. Once she saw him fling a leaden ball against the ceiling by an invisible force, and press it there until its outline marred the plaster, though nothing apparent held it. Another time for her amusement, he twice caused her to slumber so deeply that she seemed to awaken as from a distant world; when she revived the second time, flushed and happy from not-quite-remembered dreams, he told her that she had been dead. For this miracle he used a small shiny gold needle that trailed itself into a copper wire.
Still other times, by means of a little spinning bowl of mercury, he showed her knife-sharp crags and a disastrous landscape on the moon; and once, when he bade her peer therein, she looked down upon a wild roseate glade through which two winged beings moved, not human-like but of transcendent beauty, swift and iridiscent. She felt a strange kinship existing between these and herself and Edmond, but he would not tell her on what world she gazed, nor on what sort of creatures.
The terrible things of their former days together were forgotten by Vanny, and Edmond guarded carefully against the vision of the inexpressible, marshaling his thoughts into selected channels lest she sense implications dangerous to her tense little mind.
He was not always successful. One afternoon he returned to the library to find her trembling and tearful over a very ancient French translation of the Necronomicon of the Arab. She had gathered enough of the meaning of that blasphemy colossal to revive the almost vanished terrors of her old thoughts. Edmond soothed her by ancient and not at all superhuman means, but she noticed that half a dozen volumes had been removed from the library, probably to his laboratory. One of these, she recalled, was the Krpyticon of the Greek Silander in which Edmond had once during the old days pointed out to her certain horrors, and another was a nameless little volume in scholastic Latin by one who signed himself Ferus Magnus. With the removal of these books, an oppressive atmosphere vanished from the library and the room seemed lighter. Vanny spent more of her time there, reading, listening to music, keeping her household accounts, or simply day-dreaming. Even the skull of Homo above the fireplace had lost its sarcastic leer, and grinned as foolishly as any dead monkey. One day she came in quietly and surprised a sparrow on the window ledge; this was a portentous and significant event to her, as if a curse had been lifted from the chamber.
Alfred Stein, too, had unearthed Edmond’s latest whereabouts, and sometimes dropped in for an evening. Edmond was somewhat amused by the puzzlement of the brilliant little man, and found a mild pleasure in confounding him. At intervals he demonstrated some marvel from his laboratory or propounded some thesis that left the amiable professor sputtering and choleric but nonplussed. He grinned sardonically at Stein’s rather desperate attempts to fathom mysteries that were simply beyond his potentialities, knowing that to beings of a single viewpoint even the nature of matter must remain forever incomprehensible. After a while Stein reconciled himself to the deadlock, though Edmond perceived that he still considered himself the victim of chicanery; he never abandoned the attempt to pry out some bit of knowledge or information. He had come to accept Edmond as Vanny had, a being to be enjoyed as one enjoys music, without analysis, without questioning the technique of the creator. His initial dislike had vanished with familiarity; he had acquired a taste for the superman.
Vanny loved these visits. Little desire for human association remained to her, but she reveled in the sense of relaxation that Stein induced; it was breath of sea-air to a dweller on the mountain peaks. She had learned to serve wine or an aperitif, since alcohol seemed to temper Edmond’s knife-like presence; under its rosy touch he seemed milder, more understandable, less inhuman in his icy cerebration. Often they sat a whole evening while discussion ranged over the gamut of mortal experience, all sciences and arts, social theories, politics, and the eternally recurrent sex. Vanny and Stein bore the burden of the conversation; Edmond mostly smoked silently, following their trend idly with half his mind, sometimes replying to a direct question with an incisive finality that seemed to bury that question forever, or again pointing out an absurdity with his scathing smile.
One night Vanny picked up a volume of Swinburne and read aloud from it. Stein listened fascinated—“The Hymn to Proserpine.” The piece was new to him, and flowed into him like music. Vanny, intense vitalist, lover of all things sensuous and beautiful, breathed an exaltation into the long, musical, mystical lines that she half murmured. Even Edmond felt the sonorous liquid syllables agreeably, though assaying them in the scales of intellect he found them wanting.”
“Ach,” said Stein, as she finished, “that is great poetry. ‘The last of the Giants’ they call him, and that is right. They do not produce such things today—nobody!”
“Times fall away,” answered Vanny. “Poetry flourishes when men are stirred to the depths; we fritter away our emotions in the too vast complexity of the machine city.”
“Yes,” said Stein with his slight accent. “Even a great upheaval of a war is dissipated into a billion little units, and we get a lot of hysterical mush and some mediocre literature. But there is no outstanding figure to dominate his time.”
“I think the spirit of a time must be embodied in one man or a group, and that is why in this too swift, too powerful period there are no great artists.” Vanny spoke thus, while Edmond sat smoking, staring into the shadows beyond the lamp. “Am I right, Edmond?”
Edmond crushed out his cigarette. “My dear, you and Stein take your poets like cheese: They have to moulder a bit before they’re palatable.”
Vanny smiled; she was always proud of Edmond even when his mockery turned on her.
“Then you think some current literature is permanent?” queried Stein.
“I do not doubt it, but like all else, the term is relative. A change in fashions of thought or schools of criticism can elevate mediocre work to greatness or doom great work to mediocrity.” He lit another cigarette. “I always have found difficulty in discriminating between what you term great and mediocre literature. The differences are rather negligible.”
“Ach, the man-from-Mars pose is working again,” grinned Stein. “Our poor little human efforts are all about on a par to him.”
Edmond smiled and fell silent again. Through his other mind ran a series of disquieting thoughts, and the growing languor oppressed him with its inertia.
CHAPTER XXI
SARAH
DURING the latter months, Edmond had husbanded his little store of vitality, loosing it drop by drop like a man dying of thirst. Vanny’s hungry human body drained it like dry sand, but something of desire had gone out of her, to be replaced by a more intense love of all beauty. Denied the common lot of women, seeking other pleasures, finding different sorrows, she adapted herself thereto and considered herself happy. She demanded less of Edmond’s waning strength, and found her compensation within herself.
Edmond too found himself content with his renunciation. He lived surrounded by that sensuous beauty for which he had surrendered his hereditary self, and found it sufficient. His audit balanced; when the moratorium was over he could render full payment for value received to a certain River creditor.
Twice Edmond had glanced from a window at night to glimpse a desolate figure lurking about the house—a figure that invariably fled before his gaze. This bothered Edmond not at all; he held the opposition of humans inconsiderable.
But Sarah had not forgotten him. Four months after their parting, in middle Spring, she came to him in a manner possible to her, and told him his son was born. She came long after midnight, while Vanny slept and Edmond lay tossing and weak, in such fashion that he was suddenly aware of Sarah standing beside him, regarding him with that intensity he knew of old. His eyes ranged languidly over her spare masculine form, her awkward carriage.
“He is born,” said Sarah wordlessly.
“Show him to me.”
She obeyed; Edmond gazed without interest at the curious little tearless whelp, lean as Sarah and
himself, the little wrinkled brow and eyes already somber with the oppressive weight of mind yet to come. It clutched Sarah’s thin hair with tentacular fingers, and stared back at its sire with a premonitory hint of his own fiery gaze.
“Enough,” said Edmond, and the imp vanished.
“Edmond,” said Sarah “the outcome is imminent. I perceive your weakness, and I see that you are foredoomed. Nevertheless, there is still time—if you return.”
Edmond smiled wearily, and wordlessly denied her.
“Then you are lost, Edmond.”
“I have that which compensates me.”
Sarah gazed with the fusing of her twin minds, probing Edmond’s brain, seeking for some clue to his incomprehensible refusal. That one should with open eyes approach the foreseen end—welcome it!
“I do not understand you, Edmond,” she said, and departed with a trace of puzzlement in her eyes. Again he smiled a weary and somewhat wistful smile with no trace of irony.
“Beauty is a relative thing, and certainly only a dram and an illusion of the observer,” he reflected, “but to that observer it is a reality unquestionable. I should be more unhappy than I am could I believe that this beauty costs me so dearly is less real than life and knowledge and power, and certain other illusions.”
At irregular intervals Sarah came again, and one night brought news that she had found two other men of the new race, and that they bided their time until the change had brought forth more. This night Edmond sat facing the skull of Homo in the library, rather too weak to rise and retire. Vanny was sleeping some hours since. Sarah came by that way which was open to her, and gazed long at Edmond without disclosing her thoughts; then she told him the news which had brought her. Edmond answered nothing, fixing his eyes silently on eyes that returned neither malice nor longing, but only a faint puzzled questioning and a languid little regret.
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