Bright resilient
Spring, you’re a red-cheeked girl laughing into my room! Mysterious
Spring, for you are real! Marvel of that: this volute swelling bloom
within my window. How wide do you go? How deep?...--At the ruddy heart
of Spring a spot gray and harsh. I lie in bed and grow aware of myself
as a canker in the morning.--Can we both be real? This carnival of
light does not destroy the canker: all gayety sets off a gray moment
that is I. Which then is the real I must dwell in, since I know that I
am not this Spring?... --Why am I this gray thing, lying in the Spring? --What is the matter with me? Where have I been? --Morning ... _John Mark_. Does the name construct a world? Oh, there’s
a larval world of dream that no sun has scattered. But what is a world
of dream against May’s wooing? Spring pearls over larval worlds of
dream with its iridescent dance. Yes, there is that darkling realm: let
the sun then spill it over ... limekilns and autumnal grass and murder,
murdered by the Spring. But they come in! Which now is the dream, which
the real? Spring, can’t you reach the canker?... It protrudes, it
invades. Murder ... _John Mark_! Under the hall door there will be the daily paper. What balm do I seek
of that, wanting it now for my eyes? I lie in bed, I seek a balm of
denial. --In the paper you will learn what is real and what is dreamed. Go for
your daily paper and watch the dark dream die. It will say “Clear and
warm to-day,” and your window says it. Spring there, sitting on your
window-sill, says what your paper will say. So Spring is real. _What
else will it say?_

I draw my legs from the covers. Pain. _Then that is true?_ My hand in a
search that makes its moving to my ankle a deep rent of some sleep in
my mind, touches the swollen flesh of a larval truth. --That ankle and its pain: the limekiln and the man with the white
head: my parents: Philip: Mildred! The low house on the mountain? The
other room? How should I know what is true? Perhaps there is no falsity
at all. If all is true, will horror go away? Spring tides into my room,
_my ankle scorched against the limekiln slant_. I am John Mark, _Philip
LaMotte is dead_. I love you, Mildred, _read what the paper says about
the death of your parents_.... How many things can there be true at
once? An instant I have lain quiet in my bed. Three volute worlds spin from
a spot of my mind in threefold spaces, touching one another only at
myself. One world has a surface of shimmering sunny waves. One world
is an opaque clot colored like blood. One world is pale, a white
transparency, and at its heart little filaments ultra-violet, fixed,
while the misty surface spins. The instant is gone. Painfully with my swollen ankle, I make a way from
the bed to where, under the door of the living room, I see the tip of
the paper. I knew then how I had marched that night through the bleak
field, away from the limekiln which lived in it like a sultry evil eye:
how I had reached a suburb where the houses stood soiled between the
night and the day, and how a cab had taken me home. The black letters spoke to me:

  MR. AND MRS. CLAYTON MARK
  DIE IN STRANGE MOTOR MISHAP

  ----------

  L. I. Garage Man Held

  ----------

  Well-Known Society Leaders Crushed to Death
  as Front Wheel Flies Off

  ----------

  Only Son is Dr. John Mark of Institute

Well, John Mark, here is fact, whatever truth lie under. Mother and father are dead. You’ll no more see them. They are bodies
arrogantly aloof from your erectness, from the touch of your longing. The white head man who said: “I am your slave” ... that’s a fact, too
... doomed the car that slew your mother and your father. You possess
half a million ... a fact! ... and you love Mildred, you can marry
Mildred. Is that the truth? Philip LaMotte is dead. The white head man
who said: “I am your slave,” rose ... you saw how he rises ... rose
above Philip LaMotte and with your surgeon’s science struck him dead. Philip LaMotte dead, your mother and your father dead: --I can marry
Mildred? ... “A little truth. For God’s sake, now, a little truth to season all
these facts. Else they’ll stink in your flesh, John Mark: they’ll rot
your soul, John Mark. A little truth.”

How strange that I lie bearably in bed! Pleasantly. That ankle is a
blessing. No fracture. I diagnose a strain and a bruise. A fortnight’s
rest will doctor it as well as any doctor. A fortnight’s meditation
will doctor my mind and my soul. For they are sore in need of healing. --Truth, to ease the chaos of these maddening facts: truth that is
harmony like this which holds my body, all of its stress and thrust, to
the balance of health! *       *       *       *       *

But first there is the funeral to go to. The ankle’s an excuse to free you of that. No: be borne in your royal
litter, wounded but heir to half a million dollars: borne to the laying
away of your slain parents. That is a privilege too rarely human to
be missed by you. Such a son, such loving parents: and the muffled
friends, looking with veiled envy at your devotion. _b_

The day of the funeral was a bright laughter. Sun sent its golden peals
across the sky that warmed and opened like a wanton girl. The stones of
the city as we passed were a half liquid substance, laved and entered
and absorbed by the May morning. Asphalt, men and women drab-clothed
walking, the strew of wagons and the loom of houses ... all was a
texture of imprisoned light. I felt how all this various matter was a
whirl, crystallized and bound, of luminous electrons: how all of it was
one with the sun’s steep pour and with the sudden jet of my own mind
merging with it. The cemetery was a smile of lawn in which the monuments stood like
polished teeth. All of the countryside was a response in laughter to
the frolicsome couple of the sun and sky. We stood beside the Minister. The marble vault opened its bronze grille
and as the coffins slid into their place, a Christian word nodded
the act to gayety. Were not the coffins polished? Was not the vault a
little elegant smile echoing the brash laughter of the skies? And the
solemnity of the group who with bared heads watched the bodies of my
parents slide away, was it not thrust across the wanton mood of the
morning like a comic strip? Eyes dwelt a moment upon me and read there
the conventional bereavement. A subtle counterpoint stirred underneath
the elemental laughter. All of us seemed little whirls of dust modeled
by a momentary wind: pompously we were acting our droll scene for the
gods whose straighter moods shone in the sun and the earth, and who
used us for their more intricate and secret humors. I have lost my mother and my father. How, here, in this laughing farce
of Spring, can I dwell with my sorrow? Here all of us are dwarfed too
cruelly.