"Vanny! Is it clever or kind to torment me with suggestive questions?"
Something alive behind the turmoil that was Vanny's mind was urging her on. That part of her which was Eve prodded the part which was civilized, the being born of training and heredity opposed the being born of the first primal cell. She reached a sort of decision. From her position properly at the far end of the davenport from Paul, she dropped one small foot to the floor, leaning toward him. The light wash-silk housedress strained against her body; Paul was not oblivious to the lure she dangled before him.
"Kiss me, Paul. I want you to."
He leaned forward. Suddenly her arms were about him. He felt her lips against his with a burning softness, and she pressed her body close to his. There was an abandon, a fierceness about her embrace; this was certainly not the Vanny of old! His arms tightened, pressed her. more closely.
Suddenly she threw back her head; her eyes with their strange light burned close to his. "Have I smothered the fire, Paul?"
"Vannyl" he was a little breathless. "I don't under-stand! Don't you love him?"
She disengaged herself, drew away, and faced him with her eyes still burning and her cheeks flushed.
"Yes, Paul! I love him. I love him as greatly as it is possible for me to love."
"Then why-?"
"Listen a minute, dear. I tell you I love him. I am not cheating, not stealing anything from him. What I am giving you is nothing to him, it is a part of me he doesn't want, a part he has rejected. Do you understand?"
"No," said Paul, "I do not, but neither do I question."
"I am stealing nothing from him," repeated Vanny, as if to herself. "I am living in the only way I can live. I am doing the only thing it is given me to do. I do not think there is any higher wisdom than that; if any exists, it is Edmond's province, not mine."
She seemed suddenly to realize Paul's presence.
"Honey, I want you to go now. Come back tomorrow morning. Promise me."
"Of course," said Paul, still amazed as she hurried him out of the door.
She turned back through the living room, wandered into the library. The skull of Homo grinned at her with a replica of Edmond's sardonic smile.
"All right, if you know so much!" she snapped at it. `What else can I do?"
The little skull grinned silently at her.
CHAPTER XI
CONVERSATION ON OLYMPUS
EDMOND watched the writhing market as it slid closer to the edge of the second precipice.
There was a crowd at the customer's desk; those fortunate enough to be in position to buy were grabbing for bargains that seemed unbelievable in contrast with recent prices. A wave of buying was cushioning the drop.
A customer's man stood beside him.
"You were certainly lucky, Mr. Hall. You got out just in time."
"I allowed myself plenty of time," said Edmond. "The break came almost a week later."
"Hmph! Maybe! Are you buying today?"
"Not yet."
"Not yet! Why she's already rebounding. You'll buy your line back fifty points higher!"
"Did you ever review the history of past panics!"
"Yes, but this is different! Earnings are good—business is good. Money's plentiful. This break is the result of internal technical conditions!"
"So," said Edmond, "is an earthquake."
For some time longer he remained, observing rather the crowds than the quotations. The frenzy of the first break was over; some watched the gyrating prices with a dull lack of interest, others with a bear of comment on each inward flurry: The Morgan group was buying, Rockefeller was buying, rumor told of a colossal banker's pool formed to support the market. He listened idly for a while, and then wandered out into the street.
He stood at the corner of Adams and Michigan, and watched the jostling autos crowd each other, or scuttle into side streets with audible grunts of relief.
"There is the germ of a true civilization in this," he reflected. "A truly civilized man would be in effect a free mind in a body of machinery."
And at the same moment his other self was objecting, "But the existence of a free mind in a mechanical body would in itself eliminate or prohibit the existence of all art. Art is simply a reflection of man's instincts and training. Poetry and music and dancing are the wooing of birds and fish, and are inextricably tangled with sex. Literature in general is the migratory impulse, the urge to explore, as are painting and sculpture. Philosophy and religion are self-preservation.
"This free brain of ours lacking the instincts that are a part of body could see nothing of beauty, and to that extent is not a truly civilized being."
And his first self, answering, "After all, art is not beauty, since beauty per se is not existent. Doubtless, sunrise is the acme of horror to an intelligent bat, and the inhabitants of planets of the red star Aldebaran would consider our green earthly verdure a monstrous and obscene thing. Beauty and truth are not one, save in that each is relative to the observer, and neither exists but in his perception. Thus our argument is its own refutation, and civilization is truly of the mind and not of the instincts."
So Edmond picked his way reflectively through the separate entities flowing around him, when of a sudden, like an awakening crash to a sleeper, his twin minds fused, and he found himself staring with a curious absorption at a figure half a block before him. He quickened his steps; a sensation unique to his experience flooded his being.
The woman turned. Their gazes met and mingled like the mingling of molten metals. Two eyes, light like Edmond's, intense as his—a figure slim, and shorter than his own—an awkward and unnatural masculinity somehow inherent in it. Her hands were gloved in black, but the revealing suppleness was there.
Edmond was staring at a woman who was in every physical respect his counterpart!
And even while his consciousness reeled to adjust itself to this astonishing presence, some impish brain cells in the background were grinning. "Dog scent dog!" he thought sardonically, and raised theoretical hackles.
Then he spoke. "I did not dream you existed already."
The woman smiled, still holding his gaze with an intensity equal to his own.
"I have felt your nearness," she said.
Silently the two curious figures moved northward with the crowd, but no more a part of it than two molecules of hydrogen in a current of air. Unspoken, they knew their destination—the woman's dwelling place. North of the river, they turned west through the streets of little shops and decaying buildings, and into one of these.
Upstairs, Edmond found a room, a cell like count-less others save in the profusion of sketches, pastels, and small oils that covered the walls and lay piled in corners. And these pictures he recognized.
"You are Sarah Maddox, then," he said. "I might have guessed."
The woman smiled.
"I have two minds," said Edmond, "or a dual mind, but not such as the beasts call a dual personality."
"Yes," said Sarah.
"I have known a City, not past nor present, but a place where I am at one with life."
"I know," said Sarah. The two remained staring at each other; there was a comfort in their proximity, as of two friends meeting suddenly in a far place. Then Edmond spoke again.
"I do not think these are cities of reality in their sense. They are symbols, rather, of what may be. They are that world toward which we tend, for now I perceive our meaning, what we two imply."
"You need not explain," said the woman. "I know."
"Colors and objects are your media. I must phrase my thoughts, having but inadequate words."
Sarah smiled.
"Our implication is this," said Edmond. "That we are a mutation. We are not prototypes of things yet unwombed of Time, but part of a change that is. Weissman glimpsed the truth, and Evolution is not the slow grinding of environment on the clay of life, but a sudden unspringing of higher forms from that clay. The age of the giant reptiles—then suddenly the age of mammals. A fern
, and then a flower. Things stable and stationary for a geologic age—then the crash of a new and stronger species, and catastrophically, that age is ended.
"They out there in the street will bear more like us, and we shall replace them. The age of the dominance of Homo Sapiens shall be the shortest of all geologic eras. Five hundred centuries since he sprang from the Cro-Magnons and destroyed them, as our kind will destroy him. There will be disorders and turbulences, and the grindings of a deep readjustment as world power passes upward to us. Shall we employ it better than the beasts?"
"How to judge? By their standard or ours?"
For a time these two smiled silently at each other; understanding blanketed them, and was sufficient. Then again Edmond spoke:
"There is that possible to me now which before was undreamable. That is intelligent conversation. Let us converse of realities, such things as the world of humans discusses not at all, save mystically or sentimentally, or in the gropings they believe philosophy. Let us speak of all things that are, their beginnings and endings."
The woman smiled.
"I speak," said the superman, "in poetry—not because, as some have believed, it is the natural mode of expression, nor because it is beautiful, but for this only: that in poetry alone can I imply the ideas which are otherwise inexpressible in language. Meter and symbol can suggest what words in themselves cannot convey; to these beasts this becomes emotion, but we perceive the implicit thought."
"Yes," said Sarah.
Edmond, who until then had stood as he had upon entering, now seated himself, and cupped his chin upon his incredible hands.
"Before there was anything, there was Something, for there was the possibility of being—an existabiliity, without which all things were impossible. Nowhere conceivable does that state now exist, but on the remoter worlds, as Neptune, it is approximate, Neptune is thus the symbol of my thought."
Then Edmond gazed intently at the floor as one reflecting, and spoke again slowly.
"I am the Planet eremite, the gaunt repulsor of the light
That falls like icy rain at night, from frigid stars and moons a-cold.
Ye have not seen a world like this—the blank and oceanless abyss,
The nameless pit and precipice, the mountain very bleak and old.
Yet ah—my silence murmureth! Oh, Inner Orbs, ye have not heard
That stillness where there is no death, because no life bath ever stirred!
`But here God's very name is dead!' wept Heaven's mighty Myriarch,
Then trembling turned away and fled, for Some-thing gibbered in the dark!"
Edmond raised his head from his cupped hands, and gazed with the old fiery intentness at Sarah. Comprehension surged between them, and he smiled, satisfied.
"There was a beginning," said Sarah.
"Creation is simpler to the understanding than Pre-creation," responded Edmond. "Even mankind is to some extent creative, though the fools unknowing worship in their Creator a goddess instead of a God, since creation is a feminine act. Yet there is more to be said:
"Dawn amid darkness, while afar
The little lights in scimitar
Lit up an age-old barren sea,
Of nothingness infinity.
Incipient air and pregnant storm
Embodied then a giant form
Still trembling with the power that gave it
INTELLECT to damn or save it.
SENTIENCE, from its twi-formed birth
Of MALE and FEMALE, air and Earth."
Sarah
"Mine the torch, and yours to light it."
Edmond
"Yours to save, but mine to blight it."
Sarah
"Yours the seed, but mine the flower."
Edmond
"Yours the years, but mine—THE HOUR!" Another pause, as Edmond fused his twin minds Into a questing purpose. He spoke again:
"You are right in saying that masculinity is of Inceptions, and femininity of growth. The sperm is mine, but the child yours. You are right, too, in saying that there is a compulsion laid upon us, not in the sense of a duty, but as a tenet of nature. We two have received a trust, that our kind survive. We must reproduce."
Now Sarah's eyes, still gazing with unwinking intensity into Edmond's own, flamed with a deeper light, a universal light that glows in the female of all species. That, too, Edmond perceived, and to his consciousness there seemed a discordant note, but he said nothing.
"There will be an ending," said Sarah.
"Endings are simpler than Existence," said Edmond, "and Destruction, like Creation, is feminine; I deal with things already created and not yet destroyed. Beginnings and endings are your province; mine, things as they are. Yours are birth and death, but living is mine. As you and all women are closer to the emotional primitive, so are you more in accord with Creation and Destruction, for nature, which is the most creative, is of necessity the most destructive of forces. Therefore, do you tell me of the ultimate end and the return of chaos."
Again Sarah smiled that fleeting and intense smile. Then, folding her hands, she spoke softly.
"There came a night when all things lay
As if some wind had swept away
All vestiges of pulsing life,
And left cold bodies to be prey
To primal elements, while they
Renewed their immemorial strife."
"That," said Edmond, "is approximate truth. The music of the spheres is a gigantic crashing as they pass into existence and out of it."
But his other self was reflecting, "Intellectually she is all that I desire. Physically she possesses no tiny trace of appeal. Why?"
He stood upright. "There are things to be done. I must go."
Sarah smiled without reply. Both understood that other meetings were inevitable, desired by both. Edmond passed again into the streets of jostling vehicles.
CHAPTER XII
SATAN
MEANWHILE Paul and Vanny again reclined before the fireplace of the monkey's skull, and Paul spoke of such things as poets speak of. Vanny listened, though a little wearily, yet withal indulgently. She had not colored her cheeks, and her eyes had still more of the inexplicable distance that had been growing therein.
"So that if poetry is but meter—a tom-tom beat, —then beauty itself can be reduced to mathematics," said Paul, and paused for a reply.
None followed. Vanny turned her luminous eyes upon him.
"You haven't listened to a word," sulked Paul.
"I have, Paul. All you say is true—very true, childishly true. But—Paul, you are only a child—all of us are children—to him!"
"Can't you forget him for a minute?"
Vanny did not answer.
"That devil!" said Paul.
"Yes—his name is Lucifer."
"No,—Caliban—Vanny, he's mad, and he's making you mad, too!"
"Often," said Vanny, "I have wondered if that were the explanation. Perhaps! Only there is something else—something inexplicable—either divine or infernal. Something—"
Her voice dropped. Suddenly she looked at the man with a deeper luminescence in her eyes, so that Paul started back aghast.
."Paul, Paul—he is different—inhuman, somehow! At times," her voice grew tense, her eyes desperate, "at times, Paul, he is two people!"
"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 some-times 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 wa
s besting 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."
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