Other
signs fill my room.... Mildred and love, fear and hate and horror. Why
not read _them_, since they are clamorous near? Are they perhaps as
true as the stars? What is _their_ symbol yonder? Molecules of brain, and flaming suns aflicker like ghosts through
emptiness. Are they will-o’-the-wisps misleading me from emptiness
which is perhaps the truth? I am unhappy. My life which I have given to proud search, it seems
to-night that I have cast it away on nothing. Emptiness fills my room. _Between and beyond the stars, is there not Emptiness?_ I have not
Mildred. Shall I win her? What else is there to win? Cosmos is a black cavern zero-cold, and the star-worlds flashing their
feeble fires are lost. If they and we embody God, is God not also lost? Infinite cold, infinite blind blackness: vagrant mites spitting their
star fire into tiny corners. How do I know these flame-specks are my
fate? Why not the vaster spaces in between? the spaces empty, the
spaces zero-cold? Perhaps the fate of Philip is a sun, burnt out. And
my own, the black void that will never burn.... I lay aside my book. Its arrogant hopes seem childish. Are no men born to utter upon earth
the Black that gapes between the closest stars? Yet why think so? That Black is an illusion. Space does not exist:
emptiness is but your ignorance. The void between and beyond the stars
is the void within your fragmentary knowledge. And through this fact,
the void cannot concern you, since only knowledge longs and only
knowledge hurts. But were it even so, why fear the void? What is there
to fear in emptiness? Fear is not emptiness. Your fear denies your fear. *       *       *       *       *

--O my beloved: this grandiose lack is only lack of you! How came I to love you? When my young mind moved toward the mysteries
of flesh, it was not your flesh made the search sweet. When my young
spirit went upon its journey, knowing there was no end, it was not
your spirit made the journey sweet. You have come late upon me: yet
all my seeking is dead without you, and all my seeking has come full
upon you! When I first saw you, my thought was not to kiss your mouth,
but to achieve a knowledge and a power, like your own beauty’s wisdom
beyond words. What mystery is this?--And what mystery is my despair
to-night? Am I not close to Mildred? Could not a fool see in her
luminous candor the dawn of love? There was a danger, and that danger
is dead! While it lived.... I pace my room: back and forth from the recessed windows to the wall
where stands a little table with a vase holding a white lily. And I try
to think. --You must see. You must understand. Yes, yes. I have gone too far to fall back easefully on ignorance. --You must probe. You must understand. Yes, yes. I look at my books. --Not that. I think of Mildred. --Not Mildred.... I stand still: a shudder swarms my skin, draws my throat taut, uprises
in my hair....

       *       *       *       *       *

... the white room larded with books: the face noble and reticent, and
the swift births of amaze, of pity, of horror ... indecorous death. Pale hands fluttering up like rebellious dreams--and fallen. *       *       *       *       *

My own hands bar my eyes.... How do I know this is not morbid nonsense? --What then is sense? I am not so used to murder that this news, passionately close to my
love’s life, should not move me. --I do not blame you, that you are moved. “_What can I do?_”

I speak these words aloud, and the despair that dwells in them takes
shape. Shape of an impulsion. I know already what I am going to do. But
I contrive even now to laugh at myself. --Fine man of science, driven by despair. Illogical, driven man! I take off my clothes, and though the night is warm, I shiver in my
bed. _f_

I am asleep and dawn is all about me: dawn within me: I am up from bed
and I am putting on my clothes. My face in the mirror wakes me. I am
half dressed already, and my mind says: “You must not forget to shave.”
I see my face. The mirror is by the window, it stands on a highboy in
my bedroom. Dawn is a mingling of stirs: whistle of boat in the river
fog, rattle of wagon in the gray cool mists turning and twisting,
footbeat solitary on the damp hard pavement--this is dawn coming by the
window into my room, to my face. I look at my face, and then my face
awakes me. I put a fresh blade in my razor and shave swiftly. I take off the
underwear of yesterday that my hands, while I slept, put on: I bathe
cold: I dress fast. The street is not different from the dawn that drenched my room. Stone
is solitary, damp: houses are stifled by the night that they hold, that
is passing. I buy a _Times_ and a _World_ at the corner stand where the
dark hunched man with thick glasses and a bristling beard gazes at me
with exaggerated eyes. I do not look at the paper, waiting for the car. As I sit in the car, I read quietly what I expected to find. Here is
the substance:

  It is a simple case. Mr. LaMotte’s serving man, Frank Nelson, is
  implicated and is already in the Tombs. His master gave him the
  evening off, and clearly the crime could not have been committed
  without knowledge of this and of the fact that Mr. LaMotte was alone. At about 8.30, a man came to the apartments where Mr. LaMotte has
  his chambers and told the colored doorboy, Elijah Case, that he had
  an important note to be delivered in person. Elijah phoned up and
  Mr. LaMotte responded. Elijah carried the man to the third floor,
  pointed out the door, heard the messenger knock, saw him enter ...
  and went down. Little time passed before the elevator signal rang
  again. Elijah went up, opened the elevator door and the messenger
  stepped in.... Elijah recalls him clearly. “How do you happen to be
  so certain?” the police asked him. “I dunno. But I is.” He says the
  man was dressed entirely in black, and that his head was white. “Do
  you mean white like a _white man_?” “Nossah ... I means white lak ...
  lak chalk.” “Even his hair?” “I don’ remember no hair. A white head. Da’s all.” “Even his eyes?” Elijah shuddered. “Yessah. Dey was white,
  too.”... The police infer that the colored boy, who is simple-minded
  and imaginative, made up his monster after he had learned the event. In any case, Elijah went back to his little hall office: and shortly
  after a call came in, by phone, for Mr. LaMotte. No: Mr. LaMotte
  had no private phone. Instructions were, not to say in any instance
  whether Mr. LaMotte was at home, to get the name and announce it
  first. It was Mrs. LaMotte, the deceased’s mother. She often called,
  and although frequently Mr. LaMotte would tell the boy: “Say I am not
  at home” ... that doubtless was why he used the house phone ... never
  in the three years Elijah had worked at the apartment had Mr. LaMotte
  failed to answer his signal, and never had he refused to speak to his
  mother. Elijah phoned up, now, and received no answer. This satisfied
  the mother who rang off.