




CHALK FACE




  _BOOKS BY_
  WALDO FRANK

  THE UNWELCOME MAN (1917)
  THE ART OF THE VIEUX COLOMBIER (1918)
  OUR AMERICA (1919)
  THE DARK MOTHER (1920)
  RAHAB (1922)
  CITY BLOCK (1922)
  HOLIDAY (1923)
  SALVOS (1924)
  CHALK FACE (1924)




  CHALK FACE

  BY
  WALDO FRANK

  [Illustration]

  BONI AND LIVERIGHT

  PUBLISHERS       NEW YORK


  _Copyright, 1924, by_
  BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

  _Printed in the United States of America_




Dear Father:


A weakness we have long shared, and nurtured together: our hankering
after good mystery stories. We have opened many a volume that promised
luridly--and failed to keep its promise. And whenever we did find a
passable tale, our best pleasure in it was to pass it on to the other. In these exchanges, I have learned that you are more critical than I:
so that as ever, in bringing you this book, I do so timidly. If it
please you, I shall not need to worry about its other readers. I can foretell certain of your observations. “Chalk Face” may seem to
you at least as much a Parable as a mystery story. But what indeed is
the difference between them? What more lurid than the depths of desire,
what more mysterious than the hinterlands of conscience? And what event
is so great a mystery as life itself? I believe that every tale should
be a mystery tale. I believe that the only stories that are not mystery
stories are the shallow stories.... Howsoever, if you find in this book
elements of moral and of wonder usually absent from tales of crime,
these are ancestral traits which I have straight from you. So, in the
impulse making me write my story as in the consequence, you have your
share--and you must be indulgent. W. F.

  _Seville, February, 1924._




_CONTENTS_


  _Part One_        The Man With the White Head

  _Part Two_        The Other Room

  _Part Three_      The Challenge




“THEN THE LORD ANSWERED JOB OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND....”




CHALK FACE


_The man who writes the story of his life begins by trying to justify
his impulse. But justification masks the true desire; and the sincerest
confessions often start with falsehood. I could invent a reason for
these pages, easily and plausibly enough. I could say, being a man of
science and having failed in my elected sphere, that with my story I
shall make amends: give to the world a document whose revelation may
mean far more to it than any alienist’s career. This statement would
perhaps be truth. My tale will add to that source of knowledge beyond
the axioms of rational science from which to-morrow the true science
of man may spring. But this statement would not be the truth: it would
not express the extent nor the inwardness of my impulse in writing. For
I am moved by a will far warmer than any altruism. I write, first of
all, for myself._

_In setting down a record of my terrible adventure, I hope to escape
(for brief and precious hours) from this eternal Twilight. I shall
dwell once more in the innocent world of men: in the world where the
sun is luminous because the night is black, where life seems good
because death seems real. Let me not dwell upon the nature of this
Twilight. It is neither darkness nor brightness, neither warmth nor
cold. It is penetrant and it is hungry, and it devours the flesh of man
that is made of sunnier senses. You who read do not know the blessed
marriage of your world. You do not know that sun is sweet to you,
because you are sun: that your five senses catching to your mind the
rounded beauty of nature and of love bring but fond reflections ...
stars, fair women, mountains ... of yourself._

_There is a Truth in which the sun burns up as swiftly as your flesh. All is gone here; and in this thundering silence the march of man that
to you seems so bloody, to me has the cadence of a quiet song. Man is
born into his mother’s arms, and belief cradles him. That breast and
that milk are real, for they are part of himself. The day is real and
the night, work and reward are real, love is real: pain is real because
the need of victory is real. What blessedness! Man is complete in his
flesh because no form, no thought comes to his mind that is not portion
of his flesh. He loves his flesh in the sun and calls it God: he loves
his flesh in a woman and calls it Love. He is all simple and whole:
only his words, like in a child’s game, break his unitary world. But
where I am, the flesh is not gone: it has become a fragment of a truth
vastly beyond it. This is agony, and from this I seek respite._

_I want once more to see the sun as you do: to feel the earth solid
and absolute beneath my purposeful feet. I want to live again in your
commanding passions: loyalty, wonder, anger, worship, love. What joy
to be able to say: “This is my friend,” “This is my work,” “This is
my sweetheart,” “This is my faith.” What common joy for you! Is it not
worth what you call pain to have it? Is it not worth what you call
death to have life?_

_For me, pain and joy, love and hate, heaven and earth, life and time
and death have dimmed. They are all words of mortal flesh, expressive
of flesh’s elemental moods. Outside the flesh, they have no meaning. My
flesh is broken up but it is not yet gone; so that its word and will
still speak to me ... fragmentarily, nostalgic ... of its departed day. I tell my story to bring its wholeness back._




PART ONE

THE MAN WITH THE WHITE HEAD


_a_

I am John Mark, M.D. I title myself so, even in my dreams: for it is
a new title and for long it was dream. I worked hard for it. I do not
want you to think that I am dull, so that the winning of that not rare
degree was difficult. No: I am above the average in intelligence--but
in ambition also. Even as a student I did not aim at becoming a mere
doctor. John Mark, M.D., was to have a higher connotation. It was to
stand not for the usual empiric healer: but for the leader, for the
creator. I am on the way. I am twenty-eight, and a citizen of New York, where I was born and
where my mother was born: my father is of an old family from Vermont. For three years upon a small income inherited from my mother’s father,
I studied in Vienna, in Zurich, in Paris, in Saint Petersburg. What
there was of theory to learn in my especial field I learned with ease
and no great exhilaration. (It was little, after all.) What inspired
and nurtured me was the personal contact of half a dozen men, masters
whom I had read and reverenced for years from a humble distance. They received me: they showed interest in my work. They came to look
upon me, subtly I felt this, as a potential equal. And I, harvesting
the ripe treasure of their science, grew to recognize that their
superiority was not one of stuff or spirit, but of years and labor. I found that my own impulse was very close to theirs: my power to
abstract phenomenal data equally intense: my capacity to associate my
findings, to link them up and to transcend them in intuitional concepts
possibly as great. I was no epigone to these masters.