I look at the little waves ... the night is windless ... thridding
and skipping about the hull of the boat. Their cool tips carry dawn,
between the night of the sky and the night of the black waters. --What if I leap in? Will the waves hold me? They will part, treacherous and careless, and
let me sink at once to the night they dance against. I know in an
acceptance weary like age, that I can not leap into the River, and that
I cannot turn about. I feel: this guiding pressure upon the cortex of
my brain, if it were in my eyes, that it might blind me. ... We are walking in a field. This field is very clear to me, as if
its rugose stretch and its barren saliences had already picked their
measure in my brain. The coarse grass is dry and gray like autumn, on
this sultry April night. As my feet press through, the grass rustles. The earth breaks into warty mounds, grass tufted, and falls to sudden
hollows slakish with caked mud. I walk, and though I have not seen his
form save for that moment at the door of my house, I know the white
head man following at my rear, and leading, keeping pace with my feet
so that the sound of his steps is lost in mine. The field is wide and long: no light of habitation flecks its sallow
gloom. But the rathe filaments of dawn swirl in its air with more
abundance: a gray flush lies close to its black furrows, catches in the
grass and brings to it a tremorous stir as if it was a mouth feebly in
voice. I walk. The field is wide and long. The field’s horizons lip
darkly down, making this murmurous silence of the field a shut dank
thing, and I and the white head man imprisoned in it. He still prodding me on, prodding upon the quick of my brain: he who is
behind and who is silent.... The ground looms a little ahead. And as it rises, the dead grass ceases
underneath my feet. My feet tread sterile clay: they strike on it hard
as if the clay were frozen, and yet the air of the field is wet and
sultry.... My feet stop. I am at the top of the little loom of the ground. Straight before me
an empty shadow. The ground cuts precipitous at my feet. It wreathes
about into a semicircle. Below me in the black lies a slakish gleam: a
sort of slime within the night: far below. And beyond that, above this
bottom of the circling pit yet lower than the crest where I stand, the
field goes on over a clutter of broken rocks and stone. I have stopped short at the edge of a limekiln! My feet have held firm! There is rage in me. “So this is where you led me? to my death? to this ridiculous death? I,
after Philip LaMotte, after my mother and my father! My death was to be
at once more secret and more horrible. No trace of me was to remain. Well: come and push me in. It’ll take more than the pressure of your
eyes.”

My feet hold firm. The pressure on my cortex fades with my rage, I step
back a little and dig a heel into the clay. Then I turn about. The man is closer than I knew: a little below, for I am at the top of
the field’s rise. I stare at him and my rage makes a thrust from my eyes down to his
beetling form. I challenge him, silent. He is clearer now. I can
make out in the dawn the smooth black cloth of his coat tight on his
muscular body. I can see well the blind and larval rondure of his face. My rage thrusts at him. He rises from the ground.... “So this is how you dealt your tall man’s
blow at Philip LaMotte?” ... and like a bird of prey he planes low up
toward me, over my head. I whirl about and facing the kiln I see him
slowly plane into its slime. His face remains free and his face is turned toward me. The silence is a texture of half-uttered words: thick, the humid air
and the shut field and the kiln make for a silence bulging into sound. The white head is motionless above the kiln. What I hear is his word. But the night speaks it, the night’s silence is the word of this man. “Come down. The white one whom you met in the other room ... he is
here. Come down. Join him. For it is he you seek, if you are in earnest
in your seeking. Come down. You can’t quite see him: your eyes are too
gross. I am all of him that you can see. But he’s here. Come down: and
join him. Do not touch him again. What good is there in touching? Come
down and join the white one who is you, in the other room.... Here, if
you will but come, you and he are one. And I will be released. For I
live in the edge, the jagged, cutting edge of the difference between
you. And I am weary with your biddings, I have done them well, I am
weary. Come down. And I will be released.”

My eyes go down into the kiln below my feet, to meet the eyes of the
man. My knees hurt with a sudden strain. It grows. With the tendons and
muscles of my body I am resisting the pull of the man inside the kiln. There he floats, immersed save his head: and his smooth face shining
at me ... pulling, pulling. The grip of my will upon my muscles weakens. I hunch a little looking
down from the height. The man is smiling at me now. It is as if he
reads this hunch of my body down toward him as the first step of my
defeat. He smiles. The strain of my legs shoots upward to my back. Pain. The round head in the kiln beckons in a horrid caricature of
bidding. I am growing weak. Anguish. My knees are bent. My neck is
forward and my arms thrust out. Torture racks my body: my muscles are
corrupted. They press and shriek to tumble in the kiln. My will and my
mind fight naked on the other side ... stript of strength, stript of
body ... to defend me against the pull of the man within the kiln. I am at the end. All of my body urges down and forward. The muscles of
my back no longer hurt: they are numb, they are sheer urgency to leap. Pain lives now only in my forehead: my body is dead as if already it
had joined the man in the slime of death. But my brow holds back. It is
a flame of resistance: it is molten pain, knowing that it must fight,
knowing it must be shrewd to cheat my body of its enamoured death. My body is about to plunge within the kiln. My body is a single clamor
to be done. The smile of the white head is a bland broad smile. The
head thrusts back, beckoning, ghastly at ease. My body is about to plunge into the kiln. My mind is very shrewd at
this threshold of death. Beyond the kiln, the field goes on upon a
lower plane, over the clutter of broken rocks and stone. In an ecstatic
moment, as my legs flex to leap, my will possesses them. I leap. My body in that instant is the essence of my will. I leap high. I leap far. Not the kiln, the rocks beyond the kiln are in my eyes.... I have leaped over the kiln. My body crumples on the rocks. I embrace
their harshness with caressing hands: my lips tear, grateful, on their
sharpness. This fierce pain in my ankle, twisted as it struck, is sweet
to me. I lift myself, and turn. The kiln is behind me: and there is no one in
it. PART THREE

THE CHALLENGE


_a_

Morning and Spring pour into my room.--My room ... my bed ... my self. I have slept in my bed as usual, this is Spring.