Chapter 3
Section 3 of Chalk Face by Waldo Frank. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Part 1. The Man with the White Head. B. That mood is behind me in this April dusk, as I walk through the city streets to dine with my parents. Behind me, in the sense of a wide illusion hiding the sun of reality like mist and by the sun wiped out. I have still my work. I enter still this inexhaustible day of discovery and thought, but I have found a woman whom
I love, and in my love for her I understand the years of continence and solitude. They were preparation for this love. They were the articulate presentiment that I would love indeed. They were a threshold, impassionate void for this great filling passion. I have been repelled by the unchastity of women.
Now it is clear, because I looked and longed for a woman who was chaste. I refer not to prostitutes. Indeed, a low chastity is at times the one quality they possess. Prostitutes did not repel, they bored me. They are impersonal, domesticated creatures,
like certain dogs in whom the individual will has been displaced by the alien will of man. Their one offering, relaxation, I had not aged enough to welcome. No, it was women of my own world whom I found unchaste, and now I understand, thinking of Mildred, by what previsioned measure I had mysteriously judged them. The girls toward whom I was drawn by a clear physical desire, and whose response, that should have been as limpid, was confused by fear of the morrow and the moral. The married women whose lush fields invited plaisance, and whose unchastity was still more complex.
For in them the passional was entered and deformed by the possessive. A chaos of morals, poesy, and economics weeded their warm beauty. I was attracted, when at all, to sensuous women, and sensuousness that is not sheer becomes a tepid water. Weak idealizing, smug and slavish, exaltation of the ego muddies. Such had been my conclusions, measured, though I knew it not, by the revelation that I was awaiting.
Now she is there, fulfilling all my world whose unfulfillment I had sensed, not consciously, but as a larva longs for its own birth. I have loved my work, like a woman, because I knew that there should come a woman worthy of my work. I have been faithful to my work, in faith of this woman, who was to come to crown it, who was to come, in spirit and in flesh, to equal its high dream. Unwitting, I have labored in a dream, and behold, it is fecund of this fleshed perfection. Mildred, chaste as thought, Mildred, deep as discovery, Mildred, remote and imminent as truth. I have met her, and although my continence, my solitude, and my devotion were a paean of my prescience, yet she exceeds them as the flaming day, the chill night's sleepy vision of the dawn. I have loved her, but on the sacrament of winning her and making her love me, I have not yet entered. I come this evening to my parents, illumined in my love and in my knowledge that after dinner I shall see her. Whatever happens here, soon I shall be with Mildred, and I come also tense with resolution, dark in a presentiment of its failure. I want this very night to speak to Mildred. I want to propose our marriage. How can I do this with my pittance of salary and income? I have resolved to ask my parents help. Can't we dine up here? I say as I meet them in their
drawing room at the hotel. I want to speak seriously with you of a serious matter. Downstairs in the dining room, it would be hard. I see my mother's face and I know her intuition. My son is in love. And I understand, by looking at her face, the gloom that has dwelt with my glow upon this undertaking. My mother is tall. She is going to a theater and she is dressed in a simple gown of jet and lace from which her blonde hair and her strong clear features rise
in a beauty that is almost stern. My mother loves me and does not want me to marry. She would buy my dependence on her with all her fortune, if she knew how. But she does not know how. Her love has become that most sensual and most possessive of all passions, an abstract love, a love that by no living deed, no contact of service, no exchange of will, reaches the world of spirit. She begrudges me no fame, no luxury, no vice. She asks of me no hours and no secrets. Her place in my life,
since my life to her is an aura of her own, is secure so long as no one filling it destroys it. Of course we can dine here. Clayton, will you ring for the waiter? She is silent, incurious, decorous, knowing already and asking of me no question. How against her will that mothered mine can I be eloquent for her enemy? My cause is good. I have propounded subtler and more recondite problems.
I am twenty-eight. With a power that is rare I have excluded from my life all the warm nurtures of friendship and of love. My needs have not died. It is as if they have in my austere years gone forth from me and gathered to one mastering presence. Mildred. When I saw her so it was with me. Every sense, long denied, called for her. Every need of my body and my soul, as waking from a trance fused in a single passionate direction, moving toward Mildred, drawing Mildred to me.
But my work is not the sort that the world pays for. That is no reason to abandon it. I cannot bring to Mildred a man wrecked of his place in the world. It is John Mark, scientist, who needs her. It is Mildred Fane, as she lives now in her high artistry of leisure, whom I need. I cannot make of her splendor a cook or a drudge, nor can I live with her splendor as she must be lived with, outside of my career of pure abstracted thought. How clear it is, and how awkwardly I speak this evening at table with my parents.
I had despaired before I began. Why did I come? What else was there to do? Their refusal was as vague as my pleading for what my mind knew as the crucial cause of my life. Even as I spoke, I criticized and marveled at my weakness. What is the matter with you? You don't lack persuasion, nor power, nor weight of will. "'For a hundred lesser causes you have done hundredfold better.
"'What is the matter?' "'Mother put me off. "'Dear, there's no hurry,' she said. "'Wait and see. "'You're at the beginning of your career.
"'Don't you need all your energy for that? "'If Miss Fane is truly the woman you should have, "'she'll wait for you. "'She'll give up a few fur coats to have you.' "'Her black eyes blazed.
"'In them I saw. If I had you, really, you, my boy and my body, I should be happy, living in a kitchen. But her mind and her senses were, each, the slave of the other. Her senses did not dare to be happy. In all her life she had forgone the arduous and heroic way of happiness.
So now she suppressed her avowal. She knew nothing about it. But for this intimate death, she prepared to take revenge on her son whom she loved, and on her son's loved woman. My father lighted his cigar, and as usual sagged into the ease of his wife's will.
I put you through eight years of college, he began. He examined his corona. He moistened a finger and applied it to a crack in the rich black leaf. Someday you'll get all we have. If you want some cash, up to five thousand, it's yours.
What more have you got the right to ask? If you marry, like every other married man, you got to look out for yourself. He puffed slowly, more rapidly, as he thought at last came to his assistance. I suppose your mother and I should have to move to a shoddy flat so you and Harry Fane's daughter can live in a swell one.
You'll buy our motor, I guess. When I was your age, my father, I did not argue. I did not point out to him the false exaggeration of his picture. I did not show him that at my age his work had been to help his father invest his money, so that neither of them should ever need to use their minds, that indeed neither of them had ever used their minds, and that the fair consequence had been, so far beyond the ugliness
of their thoughts, that I was able, wholly, passionately, greatly, to give all my mind, all my life, to the white flame of intellectual creation. But even this flame needed its nourishment. Was it logical to bring this light to being, and then let it die? The gross man is nourished with gross food, the indifferent man with any food at all. My high work called for high fuel, not for a drudge, not for a harried woman, nor a pretty one, nor for promiscuous
pleasures, for Mildred, the essential Mildred, nothing less. And the proof was that ere I had found the perfection of her love, I had not been nourished at all. Rather than blemish the fine growth of my life. I had lived on myself until I had found my equal. Of all this, I said not. I kissed my mother's accurately rouged cheek. I touched my father's hand. Its soft complacence gave me a savage turn. I went quickly to the door. 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 constitation. 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. When your mother said my reason, I knew I would not go back. End of Section 3
