“Martin, you are like my desperate, dead mother, she being the more selfish and adored though, of the two. It’s why I’ve loved you both, though you the less. She is the most important now. She is the greater.” The adviser raised his head in a final gesture of triumph. “Speak! Why don’t you speak, Martin? Your tongue’s been loose enough before. But now that each mad syllable could match the inarticulation in my own vast lungs, you sit dumbly—like a passive Christ. Have you reformed?—or, are you a dead man waiting for my company? For I’m a King. I have great powers. Shall I have you tortured in my dungeons, or thrown from my domain?—But no! I have no rack, no bed of agony to meet your own inventions. And my domain’s a joke. You own it all, from the boiling center of the earth unto the farthest, coldest star.”
Martin held him closer. He stared at Roberts until the sick man’s eyelids lifted, showing the brief, unfocused glance. There was recognition, but complete indifference. The vacant, polite smile was only a slight movement of the lips. Had Martin not been blinded by his own fine helplessness—his deepened affection, he would have seen another thing. He would have noticed the oddly rounded chin with its slackness—its hint of cogent lechery below the hungry bones that stretched the cheek of the adviser. He would have seen the newly tapered lines, out of silhouette, and the dense eyes, gaping; or the fibrous hair, the cocked head and gently fluttering tongue. Instead, the generalities—vague outlines were predominant. This swiftly perishing mask, to Martin’s eyes, could have been a sallow apple—a melon broken from the vine—or an older moon in autumn. There was no individuality or ego. There were damp breathings, sonorous emanations from the bed and the faint, orgastic music of white flowers in a tomb. Martin held his breath, held his own head lower and asked for some release.... When he looked up again this blended, spectral motion was gone forever. This mixture of sound and color, so horrible to him, now drifted from the gently closing door.
CHAPTER XXIX
Martin knew that it was time to work again. He knew that there must be some expression of his own to erase the unending march of Carol and Roberts in his thoughts. The evolution of his type design had stopped, each pattern seeming worse than the preceding one.
He was disturbed and hesitant upon regarding the sun. The clouds were no longer poems and the sunset meant only darkness. Within himself alone could he feel the yearnings and the beauty, the life chord pulling, insisting. He was tormented with dreams. Sounds grew from the ground. Proud women with dragons on their white shoulders walked in a death-like mist. Behind the retreating curve of mountain he could hear Deane laughing. Brought with the wind, the laughter became monotonous—something at which to strike.
In the early morning there was peace. In the early morning when even the birds were silent and the stars white, Martin would awaken and stand by the window. During these moments he was elated and alive. But when he went to sleep again, he fought among dreams that seemed both real and unreal.
One daybreak he awoke and threw his arm across his eyes. The night’s monsters were growing larger and more demanding. Perhaps it was impossible to kill them by bending them into symbols—by throwing them on paper. The units of the living and the dead must be presented to daytime and the mind’s curiosity. He worked soberly, breeding the straight line with the afflicted. He tried the medium of words, changing every character, crossing their susceptible hands. He danced the ugly noises with the sound of roses and blew a splintering rock into a wreath of silver hair. Bravely he went to the night’s agony and blinding sweat until he felt himself confused by so meaningless a gallantry that once again he turned to Deane.