My mother stopped me.
“John, I want you to come back. Are you free Saturday? ... in the afternoon? I’ll stay at home. Nothing has been decided. You must not be hasty. I want to see——”
I saw them: so impervious and healthy.—From their stubbornness, my will: from their sheer animal strength, my mental power.... So flashed my thought, but not in irony: a cool constatation.
I said:
“There is nothing for you to see. It doesn’t matter. And everything has been decided.”
... I was in the street. And I had forgotten my words, impetuous, boastful words that seemed to mean nothing at all. For in my consciousness there was the knowledge that nothing had been decided: that my great need of winning Mildred and of having her right was farther from fulfillment than it had ever been.—Better go back, and not be proud: win your mother, said my reason. I knew I would not go back.
c
I HAD left early, too early to rush precipitate to Mildred. There was time to walk to her, and in the blind congestion of my thoughts the need of walking.
Spring was a haze within the quiet street. The houses were high gray walls of emptiness. Their windows told of no life. Life was a fertile hush dreaming inchoate like a stirless sea against these rocks of houses. I walked as through some elemental birth, æons anterior to men and cities; through sleepy and vast densities scarce sparked with consciousness. A monster too dull to be savage, too close still to the protoplasmic slime, was this Spring world sprawled upon the stone hills of the city. And as I walked within its palpable mood, my own thoughts clashed like cymbals in a night: their strident clarities were like a wound gashed in its somnolent flesh.
My thoughts stood apart from the city, and from myself, and from each other. I knew that I had come to a crisis in my years. I needed Mildred and I needed my work. To forego my impecunious glory upon the laboratory battlefield meant death. To fail of Mildred seemed to mean death, also. How could I have them both? I had not even wooed her. Her brilliant being stood beyond any touch or any claim of mine. Had she been a woman whom I could bind with sentimental promise or engage with the zest of fighting with me toward a dim future, she had not been Mildred. She was alive, gloriously, luminously alive. Like a flame she spent herself in the day, and she might be gone to-morrow. Even now, I could not tell but there was possibly another’s love to fuel her. But even if she could wait, could I? I knew at last the desperate price of my abstaining years. There was stored up in me a might of energy, continent, compressed, and the fire touched it. I was fire—a white totality of active hunger, kindling, devouring in a moment the years’ accumulated burden. I needed Mildred; and needed her perfectly; and needed her at once. I could not take her hidden, meanly, without killing my great need ere its fulfillment. All the ways of an inherited culture had this night for me their reason. Beauty and amenity of place, the lovely stuffs wealth has created for its homes and bodies ... I saw them all as acolytes of my essential worship. Mildred stood helpless like a goddess: no man dared take her without the fullest raiment and the richest music, and a fair temple built to flesh her spirit. Such were the exalted symbols of my sense, but my thoughts were shrewd. This perfect child was of the modern world. To snatch her away would be to blemish her. What the world could bring to make an harmonious matrix for her life with me, in no way changing her, was the instant need. Marriage ... a home. All else had been violence rather than fruition: a gesture like that of a crazed man who mars his love in the impotence of desire.