A crucifix of pain rising from that smoke of the open
Square. North and south, the tree: west and east your arms. You dangle. Such young flesh! Why did you come here?”

Her arms were folded on her sunken breast. A black silk shawl glossed
the sharp shoulders and was caught in an old breast-pin, garnet and
enamel. Her throat was bare. And from a face, ashen and chiseled close
by all the steels of fate, her eyes now turned on me. Their heaviness
made the brow almost a girl’s, made the mouth a gash with blood dry for
lips. The hair lay a black coil over the brow: hair and eyes burned in
an ashen desert face. “Why did you come here?” came her voice again. “You who have found my name must find that, too.”

“Oh, that is a mere ... surface. I have not gone into you, sir. I am
not sure that I care to.”

“Mrs. Landsdowne, you must!”

Her eyes began to focus far behind my own, so that their traversing
mine took on an imperturbable coldness. “Why have I come here? Surely it was not chance: this zigzag route.”

“You know there is no chance. I have no name for it: I see your mind
tracing a design out of a swarm of myriad living gray things. Strange! They are like cells of our flesh, but they have space about them. They
swing like stars! You are the sort who knows ... why have _you_ come
here?”

I clasped my hands together. I was very tired. Yet as I looked on this
woman life seemed more bearable to me, than it had been for long. My
clasped hands cupped my falling head. I was very sleepy, and there were
tears in my eyes. I looked up at last from my sweet indulgence, and a horror in the face
of the woman dried my tears. “Will you speak, Mrs. Landsdowne, will you speak to me?”

She shook her head. “Coward!” I cried. “Coward!”

Her hands hollowed and passed over her eyes. “I am not a coward,” she said. “I want to know.”

“I am not a coward. But I am afraid.”

“Are you afraid of a murderer, Mrs. Landsdowne?”

She smiled. Her eyes resumed their distant focus and she smiled. She
shook her head. I leaned forward, then:

“Mrs. Landsdowne,” I whispered, “am I that?”

Her lips stirred: the hand above her brow twitched: she was trying to
speak. “No ... and worse....”

“Mrs. Landsdowne, I must know!”

“You want to know?” And now she was laughing with her blood dark lips:
and her eyes were stiff in amaze. “What horror is this I have done? How could I?... Have you merely
caught my madness?”

... Her stiff eyes on me. “How could I murder him with my body absent, with my mind innocent? Are
we both mad, Mrs. Landsdowne? I want to know! God, have I not crucified
myself to know? What have I done?”

“_What are you doing now?_”

The words were terrible to me. They came low and calm, it was as if
her eyes were speaking in their stiff amaze. But her words released a
chaos in my flesh. My nerves in panic rushed in myriad ways, so that my
flesh seemed a delirium of motion. “_What are you doing now?_”

I arose. Faintness spread like a death from my heart, and I sank back
in my chair. “What am I doing now?... Will you help me to know? Will you help me to
save me?” I pleaded: my shred of energy forced into voice. She laid her hands upon the table. “You will know, John Mark.”

“Tell me, now.”

“I cannot tell you. But I will help you to know.”

“Tell me. Tell me.”

She shook her head: “You will know what you have done. One can know
only that which has been done.”

“How can you be so ruthless? This godless horror----”

“It is not godless, Doctor Mark.”

“I am not godless?”

“Why, no. Of course not, Doctor Mark.”

“But it is horror. It is horror even to you....”

“It is not godless. Go home. You will know.”

I pressed myself from the chair. “Tell me one thing then: is it _human_?”

She shook her head. “How do we know how many things are human?”

A great lust took me then to ravish her of her secret. I leaned over
the table and I gripped her arms. I drew her up toward me across the
table. I vised her shoulders. “Tell me! Tell me!”

She shut her eyes, so close now to my own; and her hands fended them. Her desert face, her talonous hands were very near my eyes. I thought
of Mildred: I had grasped her, too--to force what truth from her?--and
I had failed. I was motionless in amaze at my cruel thought linking
this woman with Mildred, linking my need of her with my love for
Mildred. “Let go,” I heard her mutter. “Do you want to blind me?”

I released her. “You have promised.” And I laid a bill on the table. “John Mark,” she said. And still her bitter presence mingled in my mind
with Mildred.... Mildred! “I cannot break the body of your way to-night
with words any more than to-morrow can invade to-day. Each has its
place appointed. You will come upon to-morrow waiting your way, and you
will come upon knowledge waiting your way. I am a part of the morrow
of your knowing. I cannot break in. You have been with me, John Mark,
only as a traveler is with the distant town that his eyes behold from a
hill’s height, deep and far on his way within the valley.”

She took my money and placed it in a drawer. I held her hand gently. “Why is this horror just my life?”

She shook her head, and her free hand touched my brow in a caress. “There we are all children. That ... the one mystery worth knowing ...
none of us may know. Our eyes can study deep in the ways of life. But
God’s will ... God’s reasons.... There we are all children.”


_m_

Sixth avenue. Unwittingly, perhaps to place myself once more in the
world? I looked at my watch. 9.03. Only 9.03! I have swept out so far
and come back, and my watch says 9.03. I turn toward home, and my steps hurry me. Why is that? Am I running
from the black apocalypse behind, or rushing toward some blacker
revelation? I do not know: I am encased in darkness, and that is all
that I feel. My power to touch the body of the world, the deeds and
ways of my friends, is gone from me. I move through presentiment of
birth, as in a womb. So different from life, this dank dark mother of
my ignorance. And yet a womb, nourishing me and pressing me toward the
light. Houses, sky, the shuttling tissue of men and women past me are the dark
wall and dark blood of a womb. I airless and immobile within it, still
believe in Birth. Doctor Stein ... the revered Doctor Stein, whose interest in me at the
laboratory has so warmed my heart, is coming down my steps. I am beyond
surprise. Within this mothering darkness of my life words and customs
and conventions move quite nimbly. So I greet Doctor Stein. I observe
how his gentle face is a bit clumsied by his embarrassment:

“I just thought I’d drop in. I knew, though I’d said ‘Come,’ you were
not coming to see me.”

“Doctor Stein, I didn’t dare.... I was afraid you’d forgotten that
casual invitation.”

“Just so. So _I_ came.”

“Won’t you come back, Doctor Stein?”

He followed me docilely, and took the chair I pointed out for him,
sprawling a bit with his legs out, priming his pipe, and his eyes
puzzled at the curtains over my book shelves.