"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 corner, never daring to speak in this mysterious sanctum unless Edmond first addressed her. She witnessed many great things, but saw them only as rainbow shafts of light 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 iridescent. 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 care-fully 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 re-turned 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 later she noticed that half a dozen volumes had been removed from the library, probably to his laboratory. One of these, she recalled, was the Krp yticon 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 Ferns 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 try 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 super-man.
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 understand-able, 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 volu
me 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 Feat 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 Iess 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 fore-doomed. 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.
"The outcome is very near," said Sarah.
Edmond silently assented.
She swept closer, murmuring in that wordless speech she used. "There is yet time, Edmond. You are needed; out of your knowledge you are needed. Re-turn to me where I am even now waiting."
Again and again Edmond denied her.
"I have chosen my course, and it yet seems to me that I chose wisely," he replied. "The things I gain outvalue those I lose."
"This is an incalculable madness and a delusion," said Sarah. "Ruin faces you."
Edmond smiled in a weary fashion. "I do not argue," he said. His eyes sought Sarah's thin awkward form as she stood erect and facing him; there was something of suppliance in her appearance, but her eyes were cold and proud. He scanned her, his twin minds probing and seeking; he perceived with a tinge of astonishment that Sarah too was unhappy. And again after many months, the aura of sympathy descended upon them, the inexpressible Iay open before their minds. They had found a common ground.
Sarah felt it, and her cold eyes lit up with their ancient fire; she leaned tensely forward and sought to convey to Edmond what thoughts were in her minds.
Sarah:
"This is a concourse of dead gods
They gather wraith-like in the night
Summoning futile powers."
Edmond:
"Synods
Of half-forgotten names of might,
Of names still potent to affright—.
Sarah, defy them not!"
Sarah:
"Their rods
Are broken and their priests are fled
Save only you!"
Edmond :
"I serve my gods.
I will not see them starved and dead—
I make my ancient sacrifice
And drink my ancient anodyne."
Sarah:
"But only you must make it twice
Since only you know other wine!
Edmond; your dieties have failed.
Rise from the River!
Cast off the slime
Of Life; look down with eyes unveiled!"
Edmond:
"I think my thoughts and bide my time."
Thus Edmond again denied Sarah, and having ceased, deliberately broke the cords of sympathy that bound them so that their conveyance of thought was constrained to language. Sarah was pale and cold before him, regarding him with deep
unwinking eyes.
"I shall not ask again," she said.
"I have fulfilled my destiny with you, Sarah," re-plied Edmond wearily. "Why do you not go back to those others, to weave your nets with them?"
"Once," said Sarah, "you told me that there were truths beyond my grasp, and thoughts outside the reach of my minds. Now I say to you that while your intellect may reach out and circle a star, yet there are simple and unassuming little facts that slip through your mental grasp like quicksilver, and you are as incapable of grasping these as if they lay buried at the uttermost bounds of the world."
She vanished. Edmond sat staring at the skull of Homo, with a faint wonder in half his mind. "Certainly," he thought, "it is surprising to hear Sarah so bitter. I had not dreamed she was capable of even such mild emotional disturbance as this; there is something wrong with my analysis of her."
And his other self brought forth the answer, a solution so banal, so hackneyed, that he smiled again his slow, weary smile. "Like all women, Sarah is reluctant to admit defeat. She is still feminine to the extent of wanting her own way!"
Nevertheless he felt that some element in Sarah had eluded him. He was aware of a certain doubt as he dragged himself erect and betook himself to Vanny.
CHAPTER XXII
DIMINUENDO
SO THINGS sun out their course in a peaceful diminuendo for Edmond; his vitality dropped from him as easily as from an aged man, with as little bodily discomfort. His intellect remained unclouded, even, he thought, clearer than before; certain veils that hung there of old had vanished, opening vistas hitherto obscured. The old hunger for knowledge grew less as he perceived its ultimate futility, but the love of beauty remained.
"My last reality is a sensation," he thought, "and so I complete the cycle that lies between the superman and, let us say, the oyster. For now the only difference remaining is that I possess a slightly more varied repertory of sensory organs. But doubtless a truly aesthetic oyster finds its compensations for this; it drinks more deeply of the wine at hand."
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