I hope I shall soon see you.”... Behind her the day’s Spring fades. The sky is pale blue and the houses
faint softly as she goes, taking my hope along. Hope is not dead, but
it is in her hands. Do her hands know? Is she too a mere symbol like
myself, of this mystery that twirls us? Yesterday I was my center: my
will was a solid thing, impervious and young: a true thing, I, with a
true world for my willing. Now I am snatched like an atom upon some
cosmic dance. Life is a spiraling and a plunging beyond. And all I see,
myself and Mildred clearest, plunges along. Spring poured its first bold colors down the Avenue. In women’s
dresses and mouths, in the eyes of men, in the taut caper of horses,
in children’s laughter, Spring flowed up and down like a warm stream
between the thawing houses. I went along. But as I walked, it was as
if I went scarce ankle-deep in this shallow human water. My body rose
above the house banks and my head moved dark beyond Spring, beyond
sun....


_k_

At last came an hour when I could bear my room no more. Every moment
not engaged at the Laboratory I had passed there. Mrs. Mahon brought
me food, and barred from me the world of newspapers and visitors and
letters. I ate fruit and drank milk and gave up my tobacco. A gray
cloth hung upon my book shelves, so that the deep associations of the
titles should not distract me. At the Institute, I spoke to no one: I
localized my work to its immediate details and stopped at that. The
eyes of Doctor Stein, warm as soon as they beheld me, studied me first
and then withdrew even from such delicate obtrusion. I was alone with
my thoughts ... whatever they were: alone with myself, whoever that
might be. At the end of fourteen days I faced the chaos of my mind. I had
succeeded in pushing close my nerves to the home of my desire and they
screamed with piercings. I had succeeded in breaking down the barriers
between sense and impulse. The swarming congeries of will within me,
no longer a mute coil, now in each thrust and writhe touched a quick
nerve. This plethora of response that my nerves made to the world was
an unwieldy burden. In a scatter of impulse and desire, my personality
seemed on the verge of dissolution. Still most deeply imbedded in my
swarming wills was the will to remain John Mark: and was the knowledge,
born of the thwarting pause, that the invasion of my conscious senses
into these arcana must cease, if I would not be fragmented and lost. I was exhausted. I knew that this loosing of the stuffs of my being was
an advance: even if the secret lay still beyond. I had made penetrable
an approach. Nor did I take too seriously the protest of my self,
crying in its impenetralia against my mind’s invasion. After all, what
prize could I put on merely continuing to be John Mark? I needed
knowledge! And if knowledge meant the snuffing out of this ephemeral
phase I named John Mark, so be it. I had been isolate in my room: reading no word: with windows shut
against the Spring itself save at night when I slept and the invasion
of the street could without harm come to my vagrant mind. But as
the mind’s texture, worn by the constant siege, grew loose and its
conscious and unconscious parts less separate, I found that I had
marvelous contacts with the outer world. Along with the chaos in my
mind whereby sense touched hidden thought, there came an outer chaos
of illumination throwing together outer act with my own inner senses. Following within myself some vein of instinct, I would come upon a
house miles off where a group of persons were enwrapped in an action
proceeding from a similar desire. It was as if the mental association
of the normal man with me had become incarnate. A scent of leather from
my shoe brought me a vision of a horse loping upon a hill and mounted
by a cowboy. A sudden flare of anger at my fate revealed two swarthy
foreigners in Chatham Square locked in an ugly conflict. Soon I learned
that I could direct these vaultings of my sense to the objective world. And then, the world of those I knew and loved came to me. But never
deeply! A mere façade it was, of the world outside. I had no command over the hidden and the intimate deeps. I could not
see Mildred’s thoughts nor better grasp her spirit. But almost without
effort I could know the acts of her body, and her immediate moods. Mildred was living her usual life: she was reading and dancing and
riding, and considering a trip to Europe. I could not see her thoughts
of me: and from this I knew that her thoughts of me were deep. The men
about her were vague shapes shadowing the envelope of her body, no one
of them piercing, no one of them coming close. I knew that the newspapers had already ceased, if not to talk, at least
to shout, about the murder of LaMotte. Nelson the serving man had been
released: there was no evidence against him. Dull detectives continued
to shadow him and Elijah Case, the hall boy. And when in my mind I
followed one of these gross forms, at night, I learned along with the
Law that Elijah made mysterious journeys to a downtown office building,
at the small hours of dawn--in order to see his mother who scrubbed
floors. I saw my parents at their routine of loafing. Often a month passed
without a sign from me; they had no outer cause to worry at my absence,
nor did they worry. But now and then I found a little dart studding my
mother’s breast, the thought of me in my mother: a sharp and painful
and infertile moment, not deep at all since I saw it, which she soon
overcame. Once, and often then, I saw the gray eyes of my beloved Doctor
Stein--unfleshed and isolate and farther apart than they were in
nature--looking down on me. They were tender, almost like a woman’s
eyes, and a haze of moisture came in them as they strained to focus on
a point too far away or too small. He was thinking of me, but what he
thought I could not reach....

Pleasanter and more willful journeys my inchoate mind took also to
the outer world. On an evening when the rain fell sweet outside and I
was shut with my siege, I laid my arid body on a lawn, under a tree,
and drank the evening full. I was hungry, and there in my formless
consciousness was Sherry’s and a rich menu succulently complete in
flavor, color. But these relaxed and personal excursions of my will
could not bring Mildred. I could not lunch with her, I could not sit
with her beneath a tree. There was no even superficial act possible
with my beloved: for her soul’s presence, as soon as I was there beside
her, dwelt in my depth ... my hidden depth: I could see her, only with
others: lunching, or laughing. I could see her strong limbs press
the flanks of a horse as she galloped in Long Island. But since I was
excluded, these visions hurt and I did not seek them. I confined my
trace of my beloved to making sure that she was there, and well. By deduction I plumbed my way ever deeper, ever closer to the node
of myself: and I learned by elimination, what lived most essentially
within me.