Mildred stood
helpless like a goddess: no man dared take her without the fullest
raiment and the richest music, and a fair temple built to flesh her
spirit. Such were the exalted symbols of my sense, but my thoughts
were shrewd. This perfect child was of the modern world. To snatch her
away would be to blemish her. What the world could bring to make an
harmonious matrix for her life with me, in no way changing her, was the
instant need. Marriage ... a home. All else had been violence rather
than fruition: a gesture like that of a crazed man who mars his love in
the impotence of desire. But what hope was there? Why as I walked through the high
Spring-flushed night did I not walk in despair? My mother was the
implacable foe of Mildred and in her hand was a weapon she had already
with sure instinct wielded. And Mildred herself: what reason had I
to believe that she would love me, wed me ... even if the way were
clear? We were friends. I had soon won from her the clear note of her
laughter. But her laughter surely was no hidden grace that I alone
could win. She herself was the rare thing, and that all life responded to her,
that life’s common stuff was by her alchemied into her gold. Since she
was perfect, why should she receive within herself the transfigurement
of love, the translation of marriage? Mildred must have many friends,
many loves, for she was virginal not by deprival but as a young birch
is white. She was intelligent; her mind had a luminous response to
every phase of the world that touched her own. Her intelligence lived
inseparate within her senses, within her milk-pale skin. But even so,
could I imagine that she would have responded to the mute beginnings of
my glory? What was I in her eyes? A quiet man, young, fair-haired, with
deep gray eyes, not tall: evidently gifted, evidently strong; a man who
stood at the bottom rung of a mysterious ladder that led to esoteric
formulæ about the stuffs and ways of human brains. That much she might
know. Could she, for all her pure intelligence, know how my science
was to be a Dionysian dance: an heroic poem in which I marshaled the
harmonies of nature, as once did Æschylus with his Prometheus, or the
old Jew with his Job? Could she know that? and could I tell her that? _Psychologist_: what a prosy lie the word would give her! Oh, I had
faith in myself and faith in Mildred. But how could I hope that she was
ready to come to me knowing me her equal, as I knew her my own? --I should despair, I should despair! And yet I did not. I walked with bright thoughts through the soft
fluxed night, and the defeat with my parents, the uncertainty of what
lay beyond, did not make me despair. Indeed my chances of battle did
not hold my thoughts. I walked in an exhilarant and scattered mood as
if the battle was already won, and I could disband my army! --Life is good. Why do I think this now? Because of death. We are at
war with death. In the conflict, misery and hesitancy die. Joy only
lives. Life is good, not because life is good but because we battle
death. Blessed is the foe, for he makes us blessed to ourselves. This
quiet street is quiet because just beyond is the clatter of Broadway. Lights there jerk in a shallow panic, therefore this strip of sky
between the houserows deepens its gray blue. And the man who passes:
he is a soft and reticent word of flesh because he is within stone
lips of houses, because he moves from clamor.... Mildred: what will I
say to her to-night? ... why have I thought of death? I go to Mildred
whom my life loves; and I think of death, and I learn that it is the
strangeness and the nearness of death which makes life real! I see a baby boy: he is in the street, he has been struck and badly
hurt by a stone. His sister, scarcely larger than himself, leads
him across the gutter, screaming, homeward. Toddling howling mite! His tears hold rage, fear, protest, pain--no thought of death, no
questioning of life. No, he is wholly alive: life is not good to
him, nor does he love it: fatefully and wholly he accepts it. For he
thinks not of death. Life may be anger and agony and hunger, but it
is everything.--Why then does life seem marvelous to me, save that
death must be near? Mildred...? What if she is death and wooing her,
life wooes its end? and this be the reason why in love life seems so
marvelous good? O Mildred, if this is death, let death enfold me. If
you are death, hurry me to your flame-nothing beside which life--green
hills and creatures swarming in the sun--is a gray sleep. You are not
death, my love. You are the golden trumpet calling me to life. I see other things. Walking toward Mildred, I see the city. Mildred
colors the whole strange story: that I am alive, that I am I, now
strange! And being strange, all is real, all is inevitable. The real is
mysteriously new! Mildred in everything. She has unfolded and become
the world. Yet in this ecstasy of clearness, I cannot even know if she
is life--or death! But I do know how this city is a shell: how life floods beyond it: a
cracked shell, the city, so that in little eddies life seeps in. My vision seeps in, also. I am in a maze of pictures. Mildred has
released me from herself to a bewildering freedom. I can fly where I will, and enter where I want. I see myriad women’s
arms, suddenly free and fragile like their hair. Women’s arms wave,
like hair, in a great wind. A wind sweeps my maze of images: I see
streaming men and children and women. Each is crouched close to
another. They do not see how they, are streaming, streaming. They
think of themselves as fixed, all else as moving. But I am moving. Something in me is fixed, and something in me is
moving!... *       *       *       *       *

This is a pleasant room, and I am in it. What room? Perhaps I am in my house with Mildred, and I am to have a
study generous like this one. Am I in my own future, then? Where am _I_
if this is my own book-lined study? Where is Mildred? Let me look sharp
and wait. Someone is there.... The room is high and long. Two windows in one wall let in the budding
tree-tops of a square. The other walls rise in dark shelves, open with
books. Against the black of the wood, the plaster wall is white. A Tanagra spots it: a Chinese painting: a little rustic jar that
seems Etruscan or may be from Peru. Someone is there. Not I. I am not
looking, in this torrent maze, on my own future. For the man is not I. He is dark. The lamp, blue Persian with a silk turret-shade clouded
like ivory, shadows half his face, a long and from the forehead
tapering face, and lights an eye that looks up now from his book. The black hair curls on the forehead in a rounded bang: like one of
the saints on the great Porch at Chartres. A noble face: the nose is
straight and the mouth warm-lipped and large. Brow and curled hair give
saintliness, the nose is resolute and the mouth is subtle. A variance
of authority. He rises. He is tall. His eyes become attentive and less
thoughtful.