“What is needed,” said Edmond, “is a new Aristotle—a new Roger Bacon, whose province is all knowledge—someone to coordinate all the facts you have amassed into a rational structure of things that are”
“And of course that is impossible because no one person can possibly be cognizant of all the infinite little facts we have dug out of nature. It is a life-time work to acquaint one’s self with a single minor specialty.”
“Do not be too sure”
“Well then, who is the man?”
“Myself,” said Edmond, and was a little startled by Stein s chuckle. “I have no humor,” he thought in his other mind. “The things that amuse these beings are at times surprising.”
“Listen,” said Stein. “If you know everything, perhaps you will explain for me some of our traditional mysteries.”
“Perhaps,” said Edmond. “Specifically what?”
“Any of several. For instance, how to liberate the energy of matter—atomic energy?”
For a moment Edmond hesitated, balancing the idea between his twin minds. It would be so simple—a key couched in a few words might unlock the portal for the man beside him, had Stein but the perspicacity to understand the hint. Out of his mind rose a picture of a certain experiment—a flaming power that might be uncontrollable. In his other mind formed the very words of the suggestion—“Use atoms of niton as your oscillator.” His first self toyed with thoughts of the results of revelation. “Jove’s thunderbolts in the paws of apes; they will certainly consume themselves.” And his second self, “However amusing, this eventually is undesirable, since it dams the spring from which my own race is to flow. A people’s gods cannot survive their race.”
So Edmond temporized. “I have made a vacuum tube which in effect satisfies your problem.”
“I know,” Stein answered. “Frankly, I do not understand your filament, but it is active like radium on a lesser scale. It releases energy, but only in a single degree, and that a low one. What I mean is energy to do—well, this.”
He waved his hand to embrace the scene about them—the humming lines of traffic, torch-bearing in the dusk, the persistent lights that were everywhere, the block-distant rumble of an elevated train. Power on every hand, energy rim rampant, flowing like blood through the copper veins of the Colossus of the Lake Shore.
“How many little activated filaments,” asked Stein, “would you need to create this?”
“Indeed,” replied Edmond, “I am not denying the benefits to be derived from an illimitable source of power; but for every advantage there is a loss and a danger. The same energy that vitalizes a city can be inverted to destroy it. You have seen or perhaps experienced the effects of present military explosives, which are instantaneous; what of an atomic bomb that keeps on exploding for several weeks?”
“With unlimited power, there vanishes the economic need for war, my friend,” said Stein.
“The need vanishes, but not the desire.”
Stein chuckled again.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I am tempted to take you at your own valuation, Mr. Hall, and yet I do not always like you.” He paused, and then continued: “Suppose now I grant your claim to know everything. Have you evolved any philosophy out of your knowledge? Can you, for instance, give me one statement that is unalterably true? Can you give this—” his hand moved in another all-embracing wave—“this thing Life a meaning or a purpose?”
“Well,” said Edmond slowly (while his other mind taunted: ‘Observe: I have degenerated to the use of expletives’). “Well, naturally I have evolved a certain interpretation of things as I perceive them. I do not believe my viewpoint to be unalterably true, as absolutes are non-existent. Do you believe that any statement is possible which is wholly true?”
“No,” answered Stein. “I believe with your Oscar Wilde that nothing is quite true.”
“That statement is a paradox,” said Edmond, “since to be true it must be false. However, there is one statement that is utterly true—a sort of pragmatic Einsteinism, but applicable not merely to pure science but to all things that are.” He exhaled an eddying stream of blue cigarette smoke, and continued.
“Cabell also bothered himself with this problem, and produced a fair solution: Time gnaws at all things; nothing is permanent save change.’ However, a moment’s analysis will show that this statement too is only relatively true.”
“Ah,” said Stein. “Yes.”
“The one finality which is absolute—the one truth which is quite true—is this: All things are relative to the point of view; nothing is either true or false save in the mind of the observer.”
“Ach,” said Stein, “I do not believe that!”
“Thereby proving its truth,” replied Edmond.
Stein was silent, staring at the thin-lipped ironic countenance beside him.
“As to your last question,” continued Edmond, “of course the answer is obvious: There is no meaning at all to life.”
“I think all young men have discovered that,” said Stein, “only to doubt it when they have grown older.”
“I do not mean precisely what you imagine,” Edmond replied. “Let me ask you a question. What becomes of a straight line projected along one of the three dimensions of space?”
“It follows the curvature of space, according to Einstein.”
“And if you continue it indefinitely?”
“It completes a circle.”
“Then if time is a dimension of space?”
“I see,” said Stein. “You infer that time itself is curved and repeats itself.”
“That is the answer to your question,” said Edmond gloomily. “This little arc of time that you call life is a minute part of a colossal, hopeless circle, with neither beginning nor end, cause nor objective, but returning endlessly upon itself. Progress is an illusion and fate is inexorable. The past and the future are one, merging one into the other across the diameter of the present. There is no escape even by suicide, since it is all to be done over again, even to that final gesture of revolt.” Silence. Stein, infected at last by the pessimism of his companion, gazed somberly at the river of steel flowing around them. He glanced again at the satyric features of that figure beside him, on whose thin lips flickered for a moment an ironic smile.
“My God!” he said, after a few moments. “Is that your philosophy?”
“Only that part of it which is susceptible to words.”
“Susceptible to words? What do you mean?”
“There are two kinds of thoughts,” replied Edmond, “which evade expression in language. Words, you must realize, are a rather crude device, a sort of building-block affair, piled together in the general outline of a thought, in phrases or sentences. They are neither flexible nor continuous nor perfectly fitted together, and there are thoughts which lie in the crevices between words—the shades, the finer colorings, the nuances. Words may blunder around the borders of these thoughts, but their expression is a question of feeling or mood.”
“Yes,” said Stein, “I can comprehend that.”
“There is another class of thoughts,” said Edmond, so somberly that Stein glanced again at him, “which lies entirely beyond the borders enterable by language, and these are terrible thoughts, which are madness to dwellers in Elfhame.”
Stein, following out the course of his own reflections, forbore to answer or question further. A block or two slipped behind them. After a while he spoke. “Can you think these thoughts?”
“Yes,” answered Edmond.
“Then you are claiming to be something else than human?”
“Yes,” answered Edmond again.
“Well, I think you are crazy, my friend, but I am not denying the possibility that it is I—”
His eyes turned to the incredibly delicate hands, one casually guiding the wheel, the other poising a cigarette. “Certainly there are differences. Let me off at—Diversey, please.”
The car rolled quietly to the curb, and Stein opened the door. He ste
pped out, standing for a moment with his foot on the running board.
“Thank you for the lift and the lecture,” he said. “Always from our rare conversations I take away one gem. Today it is this: That there is no hope anywhere, and the sum total of all knowledge is zero.” Edmond smiled again his thin-lipped sardonic smile.
“When you have really learned that,” he said, as the car started slowly forward, “you will be one of us.” For some minutes, Stein stood blinking after the gray car.
CHAPTER XVIII
EDMOND AGAIN FOLLOWS HIS FANCY
WITH the discontinuance of Alfred Stein’s distraction, the old longing against which Edmond had struggled flowed back again. The low purr of the motor became intelligible: “Vanny … Vanny … Vanny,” it muttered in endless repetition. The strident horns about him shrieked a cacaphony whose endlessly recurrent theme was “Vanny”! So he came unhappily to Lake View, and to the apartment building that housed his strange domicile.
He slipped his key into the lock of his letter-box; Sarah never bothered to have the mail brought to her, for it was inconceivable that it should contain anything of interest to her. On Edmond, however, fell the responsibility of keeping oiled the machinery of living—there were bills to be paid, and occasionally a technical communication or royalty check from Stoddard. Momentarily Edmond paused startled. Out of the customary series of typed addresses slipped one whose directions appeared in delicate mauve script—an unassuming gray little envelope—thin to the point of transparency. Vanny!
A rare thrill of pleasure rose and subsided in Edmond’s being. Whatever Vanny might write could not alter circumstances, could not make those two alien creatures into a common kind, nor break the unbreakable circumference of the circle Time.
He slipped the letter among the several others, and stepped into the automatic lift. In a moment he was entering the apartment which at present sheltered Sarah and himself. As always, Sarah was not in evidence; she would be in the rear, in the second solarium, engaged with her curious little landscapes, or turning obscure thoughts this way and that between her twin minds. It was seldom that they two saw each other now; Sarah was satisfied to be relieved of the burden of procuring food for herself, satisfied in her pregnancy, self-satisfied in her art. Her not very coercive sex tissues were content with Edmond’s infrequent praise, his occasional commendations, and his negligible caresses.
Nevertheless, Sarah was a great artist, Edmond admitted to himself—a worthy Eve for her generic Adam, the superwoman intrinsic. She was unharrassed by her environment, adjusted, happy, where Edmond was of all these the antithesis.
Thus Edmond reflected in one of his minds, while the other still surged sea-like about the fact of the letter. He opened it and drew forth a single thin sheet of gray paper, at which he glanced, absorbing the few lines with his accustomed instantaneous perception:
“The love that is too faint for tears,
And scarcely breathes of pain,
Shall linger on a hundred years
And then creep forth again.
But I, who love you now too well
To smile at your disdain,
Must try tonight that love to quell,
And try in vain.”
For the third time a surge of pity overwhelmed Edmond, as he stood gazing now over the deep park, to where Lake Michigan split the cold fire of a rising moon into a coruscating path. Vanny! Poor Vanny, with her ice-and-ivory body only halftenanted! Sweet Vanny, whose life-cycle had so tangled with his that she had lost the thread of it! Dear, Human Vanny, who wanted only to live out that cycle in love and peace, like birds and beasts and things natural!
Edmond crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it from the open window, watching it spin downward a dozen stories like a little planet—a world peopled by the hypotheticals and conditionals of his life with Vanny—the ought-to-be’s and might-have-been’s. Then his eyes turned again to the Satellite, on which he seemed to gaze downward as it lifted gigantic from the far end of the moon-path. He watched it pour down its rain of silver mat the wave crests cracked and flung back in fragments like white petals.
“The dead world strews flowers on the grave of the dying one,” he thought, and suddenly perceived this moon as a world ideal. Lifelessness—the happy state toward which all stars and planets tend, when this miasmatic Life-disease had vanished cured. The smaller world yonder, burned clean by solar fire, scoured clean by the icy void—a world of airless rock—there hung the ultimate, the desired end. Heaven and Hell swinging forever about the common center; Heaven the world of annihilation, Hell the world condemned to life. He crystallized his thought:
“Long miles above cloud-bank and blast,
And many miles above the sea,
I watch you rise majestically,
Feeling your chilly light at last.
There’s beauty in the way you cast
Split silver fragments on the waves,
As if a planet’s life were past
And men were peaceful in their graves.”
A simple conception, reflected his other selfnothing to imply, naught of the terrible inexpressible, a thought bound neatly into language. And yet, in some way, a lofty thought. Edmond was in a measure satisfied, as one who has at last conceived the solution of a difficult problem. And suddenly he was aware of Sarah’s presence.
She stood behind him as he turned, her gaunt little body merging with the gloom, her eyes blazing in the lamp light with their accustomed intensity. Strange and alien and rather hideous she seemed, with her fleshless limbs and ashen skin. “I have known a body that was vital, with the curve of ivory and the flash of fire,” he thought, “but Sarah’s glows only with the pale gleaming of the intellect, which is but a feeble little glimmering that shines through the eyes.”
In the moment that their eyes met, Edmond perceived that Sarah was aware of his longings and his misery, and that she held this knowledge without rancor, without anger, because she possessed all of him that she desired. This Sarah understood, having perceived the poison in Edmond’s soul, but she perceived without sympathy, comprehended without appreciating, since emotions were things outside of her being. She saw, even as Edmond had seen, the harm and the danger to himself from thus playing with forces unnatural to him; but she had resources and outlets which were denied him; she was within herself sufficient, where Edmond was driven by his unhappiness. Seeing him thus troubled, she spoke:
This is a cruel and foolish thing you do, Edmond; you stand at the window overlooking life and are at odds with yourself.”
Edmond answered, “But half of me stands overlooking since half of me struggles in the stream of life wherein I cast myself.”
“Being as you are, it is your privilege to soar above that stream.”
“But it is my pleasure to bathe therein.”
“It is a poisonous stream, Edmond. Whomever it sucks into itself, it draws out that one’s strength, soiling his body and rolling his soul and his soul’s dreams into the mud of its bottom that these things may add themselves to its flood. It is a poisonous stream and its proper name is Phlegethon.”
“This that you say is true,” answered Edmond in a low voice, “but it is also true that for all that it exacts, Phlegethon renders a certain price, paying its accounts with the scrupulous exactness of a natural law. In the filth of its bed are hidden jewels that are very brilliant, and in all ways desirable, and those that are rolled deepest in the mud are granted the most lovely of these.”
“They are ill-starred gems, and are the very essence of the poison.”
“Nevertheless,” said Edmond, “they are extremely pretty, and sometimes retain their luster for many years.”
Sarah moved close to Edmond, gazing into his eyes with the terrible intensity that was her heritage. For a long moment there was silence between them, as they sought to establish that aura of sympathy and of understanding that once had blanketed them. They failed, for the inevitable slow spinning of the Time-circle had twisted
them a little apart, so that their twin minds no longer faced squarely each to each. Sarah dropped her eyes; lacking the requisite rapport for that meeting, the communication of the inexpressible was denied her. In her low and equable voice she spoke again:
“Edmond—Edmond—it is a very terrible and obscene thing that you are thinking; I foresee but one outcome.” Edmond stood silent, staring outward at the moon which had now ascended perhaps twice its diameter above the coruscating lake.
Then Sarah continued:
“It is far better for you to fulfill your destiny, remaining in your appointed sphere; and it is the poison in your body and minds mat calls you elsewhere.” Then Edmond replied, turning bitter at last, “You who speak from pure theory, who lack all experience of these things, what can you know of the fierce pleasures and pains of humanity? What can you know of that pleasure which bums so madly that it is pain, that pain so exquisite that it is delight unbearable? How can you know that these are not worth all that I surrender—even to that outcome you threaten?”
“I want none of this,” said Sarah, “having watched the poison run its course in you.”
“No,” said Edmond, again passive, “you want none of this, being of your kind perfect, and having no emotion save one. In you emotion is rarefied to languid little tastes and preferences, likes and dislikes mat incline you this way and that, but have not the fine irresistible thrust of emotion that is known to each of those down below on the street.”
“What have they that we should envy them?”
“Only their capacity to bear suffering,” replied Edmond, “and this is a great and ennobling quality, the one quality that may defeat our land. For this capacity makes of their lives a very poignant thing, so that they five more intensely than we, and cling fiercely to their pauperous lives only that they may suffer “longer.”
The two were silent again, sending their minds through strange and not-to-be-understood regions. There was no longer a blanket of sympathy about them; something lacked, some common ground on which to meet. Edmond stood in the plane of silver moonlight which could not lend his face a greater pallor. Beside him in the shadow, Sarah waited silently—passive inscrutable Sarah, whose passions were languid and ineffectual things! Edmond broke the silence:
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