"Don't worry about my condition, Ulick. God, I pray, will give me strength to fight carnal temptation. Those subtle sophists, your daily intellectual pabulum, deny the potency of prayer, yet it is one of the certitudes of our otherwise miserable existence. Once you cast on the vast current of prayer your harassed soul you are at peace with man and God. No adversity can pierce the cuirass of your soul. But Ulick—my dear Ulick Invern, I can't leave you without speaking to you of something that is very dear and near to me...." (He knows all, thought Ulick, tightly holding the back of a chair) "and that is my sister Mona. Are you behaving honourably towards her, Ulick? If not, if you are indulging in one of your numerous masculine caprices, for God's sake remember that she is my sister, the only daughter of her mother and father, who adore the girl. She is read in the 'modernity' you admire, too deeply for her spiritual repose. She is a sceptic. I am a convert. My parents are easy-going, though my mother is naturally pious. But their religion is invertebrate. Without dogma a religion is like a body without skeleton. It can't stand. It won't endure. So Mona leads too free a life. Now, Ulick, I conjure you by your friendship, don't poison that girl's mind, don't tempt her young heart." Milt's manner was cordial, even tender. He loved his friend, but he loved his sister more than a thousand friends. Ulick was moved. "I swear Milt. I am afraid I already care too much. I'd better go back to Paris, after all." Milt took his hand. "If you love Mona, why not tell her so? She has a beautiful soul. Don't torture her any longer. She is very unhappy just now. Write her frankly, confessing your faults. She knows. She will forgive, I'm sure."
"She knows," too, cried Ulick. "Who told her? Alfred again? I think Master Alfred is riding for a fall, as far as I'm concerned ... he is due for a good hiding." "Now, don't judge too hastily, Ulick. Remember that Alfred has been a close friend of my family for years. Naturally he is interested in Mona, and doesn't wish harm to come to her." "That's why Mona went away without telling me, without saying good-bye, without writing," pondered Ulick. "That's why," answered the brother, guessing the reason of his embarrassment. "Write Mona, Ulick. Play fairly with her. I can't speak plainer. Give up your loose living. You are intended for better things. You are gifted, independent, young, above all, young. I don't advise marriage—not immediately. But don't let happiness slip through your fingers. It may offer itself but once, and you are very careless. A woman's heart contains treasures of affection. Don't waste them; cynicism is worse than corrosive-sublimate. It poisons, kills your higher brain-centres. Pardon my brotherly solicitude, Ulick. I'm a bore, but right is sometimes on the side of the stupid, and victory doesn't always perch on the banners of the intellectually elect. Write Mona, Ulick, and may God bless you." He was gone, his kind face happy with the idea of having accomplished good, before Ulick could gather his wits. The ending of this afternoon seance had been a great shock to the young man. Nor had his not particularly sensitive conscience escaped troubling. He was a Roman Catholic. He was what the world has agreed to call a gentleman; the inward monitor, out of those multiple egos, reproved him for his manner of living, for his behaviour to that sweet, if not precisely, innocent, young woman. A virgin? Yes. How long would she remain one in his corrupting company? This question he quickly buried. What a lot of psychologic palaver over a girl, he mused. Perhaps Milt wished to marry his sister to a good parti. Dismissing this mean suggestion, he posed the naked question: "Shall or shan't I write to Mona? And if I do write, where shall I send the letter? And what shall I say to her? Go to confession, get down on my marrow-bones and say 'mea culpa'? No, decided Ulick, as he sat down to his desk, I'll send her a fairy-tale instead of a history of my wicked life." Ulick took up his pen and began to write.
IV
From her attic of dreams, from her Tower of Ebony and spleen, Mona Milton in one of her rare morose moments, saw unrolled beneath her a double line of light. Tall poles, bearing twy-electric lamps, either side of the nocturnal Avenue, and casting patches of metalic blue upon the glistening pave—veritable-fragments of shivering luminosity; saw the interminable stretch of humid asphalt, stippled by notes of dull crimson, the exigent lanterns of citizen-contractors. Occasional trolley-cars, projecting vivid shafts of canary color into the mist, traversed with vertiginous speed and hollow thunder the dreary roadway. It was midnight. On both sides of the street were buttresses of granite; at unrhythmic intervals gloomy apartment houses reared to the clouds their oblong ugliness magnetically attracting the vagrom winds which tease, agitate and buffet unfortunate people afoot in this melancholy canyon of marble, steel and speed. A belated bug-like motor-car, its antennæ vibrating with fire tremulously slipped through the casual pools of shadowed cross-lights; swam and hummed so softly that it might have been taken for a timorous amphibian, a monster neither boat nor machine. To the faded nerves of Mona, aloft in her cage, this undulating blur of blue and grey and frosty white, these ebon silhouettes of hushed brassy palaces, and the shimmering wet night, did but evoke the exasperating tableau of a petrified Venice. A Venice overtaken by a drought eternal. Venice ærial, with cliff-dwellers in lieu of harmonious gondolas; a Venice of tarnished twilights, in which canals were transposed to the key of stone; across which trailed and dripped superficial rain from dusk and implacable skies; rain, upright and scowling. And the soul of the poetic Mona posed ironically its acid pessimism in the presence of this salty, chill and cruel city; a Venice of receded seas, a spun-steel Venice, sans hope, sans faith, sans vision.
Mona held in her hand a book of musical sketches by an author unknown to her. It was entitled Melomaniacs. It had been given to her by Ulick Invern. But her attention had strayed from its pages to the spectacle of the night. She was not happy. Nor was she unhappy. A sense of emptiness oppressed her, the futility of matters mundane, love included, oppressed her consciousness. If she could but pin her faith to something tangible, concrete, make a definite act of affirmation before the veil of life, behind which was hidden the accomplices of her destiny. Know thyself! is wisdom, but if you are sick unto death with yourself and its petty, insistent claims upon your volitions, then forget thyself! might be a sounder motto. Mona had not the temperament dynamic; nor yet was she lymphatic. In the company of Ulick she had let herself go, as will some women in the more masterful grip of the male, without relinquishing the captaincy of her inner citadel. And now she had mentally dismissed her lover, realizing in a sudden illumination that his instability, as unstable as an anchor that drags, would be a bar to their happiness. She had tartly contradicted Alfred when he laboriously hauled out, as if from a secret place, the chief defects in Ulick's character. Yet, she recognized the justice of the impeachment. Ulick was too fond of his pleasures, and girls were no doubt the stencil of his cardinal sin. Impotent to change his volatile nature—volatile, at least, where women were concerned—she had resolved on hearing of the Dora episode to break their friendship. She felt the wrench, especially this evening. She had returned from the seashore promising herself that she would be strong. Instead, she felt uneasy, full of barren desire, giddiness in her head and a sort of green-sickness in her stomach. She recognized the symptoms, as would any full-blooded girl of normal instincts; she also recognized the necessity of suppressing certain emotions. So she resumed reading The Rim of Finer Issues. She didn't like it as far as she had gone. The writer, evidently unformed, floundered between Henry James and the new French symbolists; psychological analysis was intermingled with symbolical prose, the admixture proving rather confusing to her tormented spirit. She longed for clarity. Still she continued to read in a cursory manner.... Then her attention was caught by a subtitle: Frustrate. No doubt the prose-poem threatened by the heroine with the iron-colored eyes, or was it rust-colored hair? She read on and with increasing interest this rhapsody of the sex-cells.
"O the misty plaint of the Unconceived! O crystal incuriousness of the monad! The faint swarming toward the light and the rending of the sphere of hope, frustrate, inutile. I am the seed called Life. I am he, I am she. We walk, swim, totter and blend. Throughout the ages I dwelt in the vast basin of time. I am called by Fate into the Now. On pulsing terraces, under a noon blood-red, I dreamed of the mighty confluence. About me were my kinsfolk. Full of dumb pain we pleasured our centuries with anticipation; we watched as we gamed away the hours. From Asiatic plateaux we swept to Nilotic slime. We roamed primeval forests, arboreally sublime, or sported with the Behemoth as we listened to the serpents' sinuous irony. We chattered with the sacred apes or mouthed at the moon; and in the Long Ago wore the carapace and danced forthright figures on coprolitic sands; sands stretching into the bosom of earth, sands woven of windy reaches, hemming the sun.... We lay in Egyptian granaries with the grains of corn, and saw them fructify under the smile of the sphinx; we buzzed in the ambient atmosphere, gaudy dragon-flies, or as whirling motes in full cry chased by humming-birds. Then from some cold crag we launched with wings of firebreathing pestilence and fell fathoms under sea to war with lizard-fish and narwhal, for us the supreme surrender, the joy of the expected.... With cynical glance we saw the Buddha give way to Christ. Protoplasmically we noted the birth of planets and the confusion of creation. We saw hornéd monsters become gentle ruminants and heard from the tree-tops the scream of the pterodactyl dwindle to child's laughter. We heard, we saw, we felt, we knew. Yet we hoped on. Every monad has its day.... One by one the inchoate billions disintegrated as they floated into formal life. And we watched and waited. Our evolution had been the latest, until heartsick with longing many of my brethren wished for annihilation.... Save one I was at last alone. The time of my fruition was not far. O for the moment when I should realize my dreams!... I saw my companion swept away, swept down to the vistas of life, the thunderous surge of passion singing in her ears. O that my time would come! After vague alarms I was summoned.... My hour had struck. Eternity was behind me, eternity loomed ahead, implacable, furrowed by the scars of Time. I heard the voice of my foreordained mate in the Cosmos. I tarried not as I ran the race. Moments were priceless; a second meant aeons; and then leaping into the light—Alas! I was too late.... Of what use now my travail, my countless preparations? O Chance! O Fate! I am become one of the silent multitude of the Frustrate...."
That's an ambitious attempt to compress the evolutionary processes into a page, she reflected. On the shelf devoted to her beloved Frenchmen she took down A Rebours and read what Huysmans wrote of the poem in prose of Mallarmé's in particular ... "the adjective placed in such an ingenious and definite way that it ... would open up such perspectives that the reader would dream whole weeks together on its meaning at once precise and multiple, affirm the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the characters revealed by the light of the unique epithet ... a spiritual collaboration by consent between ten superior persons scattered through the universe...." "I confess I'm not one of the ten," said Mona aloud, for she often wedded her interior dialogue to the exterior. "I should die of mental starvation on such a condensed literary diet; it may be poetic, but it is too peptonic, and my soul can't be fed with prose pemmican. Yet Frustrate is a strange panorama of sex and evolution. 'Every monad has its day.' True, I wonder if this orchestra of cells that I call 'Moi' will ever have its day? The time of my fruition is afar. Who is the Siegfried that will release this Brunnhilde from her bed of fire? That's a question which every girl puts to herself in a thousand different forms. I should like to be married. I love children. There is no other adequate method to lure them into this chilly life but the mating of men and women. Really, Mona, does the man matter much? Eugenics, a fine word for an impossible thing! I like Ulick. He wouldn't make me happy, I know. But what's the difference if I can hold his baby and mine to my breast? Nothing else counts. I'm in a nice depressed mood tonight. I musn't forget to take a pill. It's usually the liver, and calomel is the last resource of the virtuously bilious. Oh! dear, I wonder what he is doing now? With that horrid woman? Not that I care. Why should I? Ulick is nothing to me. Young men must observe the laws of hygiene or else be ill, so he says. I believe him. What about women? Are they so differently constructed? Saints? I don't believe it. If we were frank, we should tell the whole truth—women are much more amorous than men, although the emotion with us is more massive, yet more diffused. There! I've told my mirror the truth. Polichinelle's secret. Because of our excessive temperament we have been put behind bars for ages. Heavens! Every household is a harem with one lawful wife; the concubines live elsewhere. Some day women will go on a sex-strike. Then the men will crawl. If it's right for the men to go philandering, why isn't it right for the women? I wonder what Milt would say if he could peep into my brain at this moment? Horrified he would surely be. That Dora! Alfred Stone says she is very pretty. Pooh! I know what his 'pretty' means. A lascivious kitten. But she serves the purpose. I don't mind the physical facts; men have strong stomachs, but how can a superior young man like Ulick stand the vulgarity, the stupidity of such a girl! Maybe she isn't stupid or vulgar. That singer, Esther Brandès is a law unto herself; no doubt has a regular flock of lovers ... artistic women are privileged ... I wish I was an artistic woman. I've never had a real affair. If these monads of mine are to have their day it's high time they began. Only to think of it, I was once spoony over Alfred. I can't endure his presence now. They say we always return to our first loves. What nonsense. We usually turn down a side street when we see an old beau approaching. I know I do. I wonder whether Ulick really was in earnest about our dream-children? Our monads must have been mighty lively when we held hands at the Casino and at Martin's. What were their names, those children? Shamus, Tenth Earl, or is it Marquis of Thingamajig somewhere in Ireland? Shamus and——? Wasn't there a horse or a mare in the dream? Yes, yes, I have it, Brunnhilde's white horse, or was it one of the white horses of 'Rosmersholm'? No, it wasn't Ibsen at all, it was Wagner. Grane! Aha! That's it. Grane and Shamus. What darlings they must be, and their mother who conceived and bore them never saw them except in her dreams. But they are more real than flesh and blood children. Our dream children. I'm beginning to think I love Ulick.... Oh! he is a dear. I'd better go to bed or I'll end a lunatic. When a woman ceases to be mistress of herself she is likely to become the mistress of a man. Dreams. Heigho! Now for my bed of tormenting fire not on Brunnhilde's fire-begirt rock, but between my sheets. But the fire is there just the same ... the fire ... the lovely, teasing fire that brings dreams ... and Ulick ... and our dream-children, Shamus and Grane ... Shamus...."