Chapter 13
section thirteen of chalk face by waldo frank this librivox recording is in the public domain part i the man with the white head l spring is a grimace when one's heart is gray man and women coming from work in eyes and mouths the sprites of spring peer forth at the white clouds Washington Square is a well of muddy life, and its trees are young girls dancing at the brink, dangerously close their tinkling hands to the suck and grime of the depths. Sixth Avenue is a long and hollow passage where flows the bilge of New York. Spring cannot hunch low enough to enter.
I choose Sixth Avenue. For when one's heart is gray, spring is a grimace. I am almost cheered by this contrast. I am hungry. I turn east once more. In the Brevort café I order a good dinner. I cannot eat. The mirrors, the hard floor, these so deliberately joyous guests, are not spring, are brittle pasts of spring, specimens of spring long dead,
preserved in alcohol. Spring hurts, yet it is fecund. It may come nearer to my exiled heart if I am not afraid to be hurt. I walk back toward Sixth Avenue. My long siege of myself seems to be over, and to have left me nothing. I am a little light of head, being so light of stomach, but my mind is taking on its normal compartmental tightness, its normal limits, its normal weakness, even its normal satisfactions. Is the spell over? And have I dreamed that
Mildred sent me on a crazy quest? I could see her tonight. And if a ghost of that horror still remained, would we be aware of it, warm in the sweet flesh of our love? Oh, Mildred, I am weary, and I hunger. Take me. Wrap me away. Make me holy man by being holy woman. I know this pang of will against its own inevitable surge. I have passed a phase. But Mildred is not yet there, nor can I reach her heart save through the heart of myself.
I must go on. The Secret. 6th Avenue. Rattle of trains like dry words and a mouth obscene with secrecy. Why do I walk 6th Avenue again, since I was going to dare the hurt of spring? I stop.
A small sign in a second-story window holding me. Mrs. Lansdowne. A modest sign. And a late afternoon at the Institute in winter. Four of us in our aprons chatting, smoking, the day's work done.
The windows are black already with the night, shutting in snugly warmth and fire with us. Ford, whose work is closest to my own? Ford speaks. There's one of them. Of all I've tested, just one has authentic power.
An inscrutable hag from London. No incense, no scenery, no occult traps. and no sentiment, no gush. That's why she's poor, I suppose. Women pass her up for a picturesque liar, a prophetess who's not a prima donna. Wherever she is, is in a wilderness, but she is tremendous. Mrs. Lansdowne, her name. A dingy vestibule, a double row of plates,
brass on chipped plaster, woodwork, greasy brown. As I pressed sharp on the bell, The gaslight was low in a shade dim with dirt. I hope there is to be no answer. No answer. I turned to go.
The door clicks like a word, ordering me about. The hall is black reek. I stumble on the stairs. At the first triangular landing, crimson carpet strip, two doors formed the legs. I passed them to Mount Still higher.
The left door opened, and a narrow form stood framed in the gap. I saw a long hand. I saw eyes. They looked at me, and the hand widened the gap of the door. The door shut me in with blackness, and with her whom I knew there beside me. I could feel her move down the corridor. I followed. Her footsteps were like gray in the hall's black hush. I did not hear my own. A portier parted. We stood in a large room flush with the rails of the L. Between the brown bare floor and the
plaster above that dipped and swelled a bit about the chandelier, the furniture stood sheer. Dimensional impacts within the cave, like air. A long table faced the windows. On its either side was a chair upholstered red. In the corner was a piano, and on the stool, twirling about to face us, sat a boy. He was thin and white. He arose. Mrs. Lansdowne twined a bony arm about his shoulder. This is a son of mine. She broke her silence. The white creature glanced away from her dark thrust,
past me. The portieres seemed not to part for him, but to blot him out in an eclipse. The chandelier was not lighted. A student's lamp cast a pale flush on the table. A train, crowding of steel and wheel and wood, avalanched past. By it, the hollow room with its dense things was lifted into dance, a moment's frenzy that died down,
leaving the room a pregnant atmosphere for this sharp woman. She drew down the shades. She took the seat nearer the window. She waved me to face her in the chair across the table. I saw her.
I asked myself if her protracted silence was designed that I might see her, or that she see me. John Mark, she murmured. John Mark, that is clear, and a zigzag route you're coming. Strange for a sober and determined man, but you're not sober, drunk with thought and with fasting, Down from a street that is east to an open square What draws you, drives you
A cloud on the open square Zigzag, west, north, east, north, west Wandering, a crucifix of pain Rising from that smoke of the open square North and south, the tree
West and east, your arms You dangle, such young flesh Why did you come here? Her arms were folded on her sunken breast. A black silk shawl glossed the sharp shoulders and was caught in an old breast pin, garnet and enamel.
Her throat was bare, and from a face, ashen and chiseled close by all the steels of fate, her eyes now turned on me. Their heaviness made the brow almost a girl's, made the mouth a gash with blood dry for lips. The hair lay a black coil over the brow. Hair and eyes burned in an ashen desert face. Why did you come here? came her voice again.
You who have found my name must find that too. Oh, that is a mere surface. I have not gone into you, sir. I am not sure that I care to. Mrs. Lansdowne, you must.
Her eyes began to focus far behind my own, so that their traversing mind took on an imperturbable coldness. Why have I come here? Surely it was not chance, this zigzag root. You know there is no chance.
I have no name for it. I see your mind tracing a design out of a swarm of myriad living gray things. Strange. They are like cells of our flesh, but they have space about them. They swing like stars.
You are the sort who knows. Why have you come here? I clasped my hands together. I was very tired, yet as I looked on this woman life seemed more bearable to me than it had been for long. My clasped hands cupped my falling head. I was very sleepy, and there were tears in my eyes. I looked up at last from my sweet indulgence, and a horror in the face of the woman dried my tears. Will you speak, Mrs. Lansdowne?
Will you speak to me? She shook her head. Coward, I cried. Coward? Her hands hollowed and passed over her eyes. I am not a coward, she said. I want to know. I am not a coward, but I am afraid. Are you afraid of a murderer, Mrs. Lansdowne? She smiled. Her eyes resumed their distant focus, and she smiled. She shook her head. I leaned forward. Then, Mrs. Lansdowne, I whispered. Am I that? Her lips stirred. The hand above her brow twitched. She was trying to speak.
No, and worse. Mrs. Lansdowne, I must know. You want to know? And now she was laughing with her blood-dark lips, and her eyes were stiff in a maze. What horror is this I have done? How could I? Have you merely caught my madness? Her stiff eyes on me. How could I murder him with my body absent, with my mind innocent? Are we both mad, Mrs. Lansdowne? I want to know. God, have I not crucified myself to know? What have I done? What are you doing now? The words were terrible to me.
They came low and calm. It was as if her eyes were speaking in their stiff amaze, but her words released a chaos in my flesh. My nerves in panic rushed in myriad ways, so that my flesh seemed a delirium of motion. What are you doing now? I arose, faintness spread like a death from my heart, and I sank back in my chair.
What am I doing now? Will you help me to know? Will you help me to save me? I pleaded, my shred of energy forced into voice. She laid her hands upon the table. You will know, John Mark. Tell me, now. I cannot tell you, but I will help you to know. Tell me, tell me. She shook her head. You will know what you have done. One can know only that which has been done.
How can you be so ruthless, this godless horror? It is not godless, Dr. Mark. I am not godless? Why, no, of course not, Dr. Mark. But it is horror. It is horror even to you.
It is not godless. Go home. You will know. I pressed myself from the chair. Tell me one thing, then. Is it human? She shook her head. How do we know how many things are human? A great lust took me then to ravish her of her secret. I leaned over the table and I gripped her arms. I drew her up toward me across the table. I vised her shoulders. Tell me! Tell me!
She shut her eyes, so close now to my own, and her hands fended them. Her desert face, her tallinous hands were very near my eyes. I thought of Mildred. I had grasped her, too, to force what truth from her, and I had failed. I was motionless and amazed at my cruel thought linking this woman with Mildred, linking my need of her with my love for Mildred. Let go, I heard her mutter. Do you want to blind me? 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 tonight with words any more than tomorrow can invade today. Each has its place appointed. You will come upon tomorrow 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 traveller 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 reason, there we are all children. End of Section 13
