I released her. “You have promised.” And I laid a bill on the table.
“John Mark,” she said. And still her bitter presence mingled in my mind with Mildred.... Mildred! “I cannot break the body of your way to-night with words any more than to-morrow can invade to-day. Each has its place appointed. You will come upon to-morrow waiting your way, and you will come upon knowledge waiting your way. I am a part of the morrow of your knowing. I cannot break in. You have been with me, John Mark, only as a traveler is with the distant town that his eyes behold from a hill’s height, deep and far on his way within the valley.”
She took my money and placed it in a drawer. I held her hand gently.
“Why is this horror just my life?”
She shook her head, and her free hand touched my brow in a caress.
“There we are all children. That ... the one mystery worth knowing ... none of us may know. Our eyes can study deep in the ways of life. But God’s will ... God’s reasons.... There we are all children.”
m
SIXTH AVENUE. Unwittingly, perhaps to place myself once more in the world? I looked at my watch. 9.03. Only 9.03! I have swept out so far and come back, and my watch says 9.03.
I turn toward home, and my steps hurry me. Why is that? Am I running from the black apocalypse behind, or rushing toward some blacker revelation? I do not know: I am encased in darkness, and that is all that I feel. My power to touch the body of the world, the deeds and ways of my friends, is gone from me. I move through presentiment of birth, as in a womb. So different from life, this dank dark mother of my ignorance. And yet a womb, nourishing me and pressing me toward the light.
Houses, sky, the shuttling tissue of men and women past me are the dark wall and dark blood of a womb. I airless and immobile within it, still believe in Birth.