But being still, and being
seen....”

“Laughter,” I said, “is a shift we wear like motion.”

There was a pause. I illogically broke it: “You are uncovered, yet you
are at ease.”

She laughed: “No! You are wrapping me up in your observations about me.”

“Why do they cover, rather than reveal you?”

“Why? Because they are illusions.”

“Oh!”

“Aren’t they romantic and inaccurate? You see, I _am_ a girl who dances
and motors and flirts.” Her smile was indulgent: as if she invited me,
knowing how hard it was, to candor. “How can you expect me to know you so swiftly?”

“Why not--swiftly?” she said. I was aware of her as if she had been naked. I leaned forward in my
chair: she lay back in hers, with an ankle poised upon the other. She knew my awareness, and was unashamed. There was naught sensual
in my knowing her. She did not challenge my sense: she challenged my
understanding. Her emerald dress gleamed in fluid angles over her hips,
around her waist and breast. She was not naked, after all: she was clad
in a cool flame aura of which her eyes were the measureless sources. “I am going to leave you here,” I said at last. “I want to see you
again. You will let me see you again?”--Again, again! oh, forever,
shouted my heart. “But not again in that lewd place, with its plush
music and its sticky light.”

“Where?” she asked. My violence was beyond her. She did not think of
the dance as anything but pleasant. And the music was to her the usual
dance music. “In your home.”

“Come, surely,” she agreed. She gave me her hand. I had many words, and she had none. My words were my ignorance: her
wisdom was itself, needing no concepts. In that moment, I learned
that also words--like motions--were shifts of incompleteness. I grew
ambitious as I had never been before. Long I had willed to be great as
men are great. And since I had first seen her on this night I had dared
to want her, as man possesses woman. Now I longed more vertiginously
far: I longed to be able to achieve the domain beyond words, beyond
conscious acts--to exert the wisdom of power, somehow, beyond the
articulation of my mind; even as she was wise in the absolute miracle
of her thoughtless body. So fragile, so profoundly luminous she was! her eyes, her face, her form the entexture of a petal in which all
immensity lay glowing. --To be a man is misery! Yet to hold her, I must be a man. I understood
the wisdom of beauty, its undimensioned power: and how intellect and
words are its groveling slaves. I envied this girl, I with my man’s
mind. I resolved to equal her in her own high domain....

       *       *       *       *       *

But now I cannot even see her! Though I recount this scene, it sleeps
pale in my mind. And if she come at all, it is otherwise than in her
relevation of the world beyond our conscious words--it is as I saw her
last, diminished and blemished by a thought of my own! --Is this why my love of her dims? Tides ... the energy that swells my
love (do not torment yourself) has ebbed into other harbors, for an
hour. Were this not so, life would grow stagnant in my love, and my
love grow foul like a hooded and shut pool. You must understand this,
always, Mildred (what do you not understand? ): how the waters of my
life move out from you, and then move in on you replenished with the
verdance of their wanderings....--Better not think of her now, nor of
the man murdered, nor of the hard enameled cheek of mother.--Better
read....

Like all else in my life, the study in the pseudo-science of astrology
is at once joy in my life and design in my work. I strive, as man has
always striven, to drown this anguish of being born a man, within the
stars. I cannot. For the stars are not greater, truer than my passions;
their convolutions do not make my thoughts petty and unrelated; nor
are they closer to God than my own searching will. The solace of lies
is denied me. All my life has battled against the ease of falsity and
sentiment. The solace of the Truth----? Oh, I am small indeed, small and imperfect: no stronger and no greater
than those whirling stars. But if they swing sure (an instant) in
balance of the truth, cannot I? Gravitation--it is a phase of will, a
phase of fragmentary conscience, making these stars swing true, _one
with the other_. Let my thoughts do likewise! I plunge once more into the symphony of search. We must move (it is
the fate of imperfection: that we must seem to move): our hope is to
move in unison with all the other parts of God. For the harmonious sum
of movements is immobile--is Truth’s still image. Work that seeks not
respite, that seeks knowledge, is indeed holy: for it binds pitiful man
into this symphony. I think of the design on a man’s palm. Is the design of the stars a
similar chart recording the destiny of man’s brain? Of course, there is
rapport here--but of what nature? Man’s destiny, the graph of molecule,
cell, electron in man’s brain, and the congeried stars--are they
related as will, voice, phonographic record (where then is the Will? ),
or as simultaneous projections of some body that includes us all? This
search is my work. I feel with exquisite anguish how the heavens will
help me. The vulgar idea of the phonographic record is unreal. The
stamp of voice and the record in the wax are not cause and effect: or
rather, cause and effect are but relative revelations to our minds of
two facts as simultaneous and organic as the two faces of a coin. Even
so the correspondence between braincell and star is organic, integral
and formal. Braincell and star are related like the chemic stresses
of a body. But our point of reference is the mind, and the mind still
thinks alas! in scaffold terms of space, of cause and effect, of time. Hence, the sideral design appears _beyond_ us, and appears always
changing. Our limitation paints the human drama. Two infants dropped
from one womb meet star-wordings abysmally separate. All--from the
plane of the womb to the farthest sideral sweep--has changed to human
consciousness and will, in the instant between the births. The brains
of the infants are two: the foci of their minds make of the stars two
sentences--and of their lives two solitudes forever.... I stand before these clumsy artefacts of the child-seers ... the
astrologers ... and behold the stuff of a great thought! Am I not
young, exhilarant, equipped? There is the event, threefold expressed
for our three-dimensioned mind: the stars speak the event, human life
enacts it, histology and biologic chemistry release it. What a _Rosetta
Stone_ for the unsealing, not of the written word of dead Egyptians,
but of the living word of God! Thought and its chemic symbols in
brain and body, act in human history and its wording in the sideral
cosmos--they are my materials, and they are docile in my hand! I shall
create an Axiom in the science of man: his conscious part in God....

       *       *       *       *       *

But this is not for to-night. The black type of my book is gray.