But what hope was there? Why as I walked through the high Spring-flushed night did I not walk in despair? My mother was the implacable foe of Mildred and in her hand was a weapon she had already with sure instinct wielded. And Mildred herself: what reason had I to believe that she would love me, wed me ... even if the way were clear? We were friends. I had soon won from her the clear note of her laughter. But her laughter surely was no hidden grace that I alone could win.
She herself was the rare thing, and that all life responded to her, that life’s common stuff was by her alchemied into her gold. Since she was perfect, why should she receive within herself the transfigurement of love, the translation of marriage? Mildred must have many friends, many loves, for she was virginal not by deprival but as a young birch is white. She was intelligent; her mind had a luminous response to every phase of the world that touched her own. Her intelligence lived inseparate within her senses, within her milk-pale skin. But even so, could I imagine that she would have responded to the mute beginnings of my glory? What was I in her eyes? A quiet man, young, fair-haired, with deep gray eyes, not tall: evidently gifted, evidently strong; a man who stood at the bottom rung of a mysterious ladder that led to esoteric formulæ about the stuffs and ways of human brains. That much she might know. Could she, for all her pure intelligence, know how my science was to be a Dionysian dance: an heroic poem in which I marshaled the harmonies of nature, as once did Æschylus with his Prometheus, or the old Jew with his Job? Could she know that? and could I tell her that? Psychologist: what a prosy lie the word would give her! Oh, I had faith in myself and faith in Mildred. But how could I hope that she was ready to come to me knowing me her equal, as I knew her my own?
—I should despair, I should despair!
And yet I did not. I walked with bright thoughts through the soft fluxed night, and the defeat with my parents, the uncertainty of what lay beyond, did not make me despair. Indeed my chances of battle did not hold my thoughts. I walked in an exhilarant and scattered mood as if the battle was already won, and I could disband my army!
—Life is good. Why do I think this now? Because of death. We are at war with death. In the conflict, misery and hesitancy die. Joy only lives. Life is good, not because life is good but because we battle death. Blessed is the foe, for he makes us blessed to ourselves. This quiet street is quiet because just beyond is the clatter of Broadway. Lights there jerk in a shallow panic, therefore this strip of sky between the houserows deepens its gray blue. And the man who passes: he is a soft and reticent word of flesh because he is within stone lips of houses, because he moves from clamor.... Mildred: what will I say to her to-night? ... why have I thought of death? I go to Mildred whom my life loves; and I think of death, and I learn that it is the strangeness and the nearness of death which makes life real!
I see a baby boy: he is in the street, he has been struck and badly hurt by a stone. His sister, scarcely larger than himself, leads him across the gutter, screaming, homeward. Toddling howling mite! His tears hold rage, fear, protest, pain—no thought of death, no questioning of life. No, he is wholly alive: life is not good to him, nor does he love it: fatefully and wholly he accepts it. For he thinks not of death. Life may be anger and agony and hunger, but it is everything.—Why then does life seem marvelous to me, save that death must be near? Mildred...? What if she is death and wooing her, life wooes its end? and this be the reason why in love life seems so marvelous good? O Mildred, if this is death, let death enfold me. If you are death, hurry me to your flame-nothing beside which life—green hills and creatures swarming in the sun—is a gray sleep. You are not death, my love. You are the golden trumpet calling me to life.
I see other things. Walking toward Mildred, I see the city. Mildred colors the whole strange story: that I am alive, that I am I, now strange! And being strange, all is real, all is inevitable. The real is mysteriously new! Mildred in everything. She has unfolded and become the world. Yet in this ecstasy of clearness, I cannot even know if she is life—or death!
But I do know how this city is a shell: how life floods beyond it: a cracked shell, the city, so that in little eddies life seeps in.
My vision seeps in, also. I am in a maze of pictures. Mildred has released me from herself to a bewildering freedom.
I can fly where I will, and enter where I want. I see myriad women’s arms, suddenly free and fragile like their hair. Women’s arms wave, like hair, in a great wind. A wind sweeps my maze of images: I see streaming men and children and women. Each is crouched close to another. They do not see how they, are streaming, streaming. They think of themselves as fixed, all else as moving.