The Lost Master - The Collected Works

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  Edmond did not reply nor vary his gaze.

  "Don't blame Vanny," said Paul. "Blame me, and mostly yourself. You're not fit for her, you know." Edmond did not reply.

  "It's your fault," said Paul. "She wanted your love and you withheld it. She's told me. She needs it, and you made her desperate." He felt a surge of panic, and his voice rose. "You've got to let her go! You're making her as crazy as yourself—Don't you see it? She can't stand it! Let her go, I tell you!"

  Edmond did not reply.

  "You devil!" Paul felt as if he were screaming. "Will you let her go? You don't want her! Let her find what happiness she can!"

  He choked. Edmond did not reply.

  An outburst of deep terror was flooding Paul's brain, as he understood that he faced something unnatural. He uttered a cry that was curiously shrill, and drove a clenched hand to Edmond's face. Edmond fell back against the wall and the ironic smile seemed to grow more bitter in a driblet of scarlet from the crushed lips, but there was no change in his intense gaze as Paul fled sobbing.

  Edmond turned his eyes on Vanny, who through usage found them bearable. She smoothed her hair and garment, and stood before him like an ivory statue, a pallor on her cheek and a question in her haunted eyes.

  "For that he should have died," said Edmond, speaking at last, "but that he spoke the truth. You must be released. I will go."

  "Do you think, Edmond," answered Vanny slowly, "that anywhere I can now find companionship or love other than that I know with you? Because through you I have almost understood the inscrutable things, other men are as children or the beasts of nature'

  Edmond shook his head sadly.

  "Do not part us, Edmond," said Vanny. "I love you, Edmond."

  "They think we are both mad," she said, "and I too think so,—sometimes; but often I know otherwise when I perceive that you are an angel or a devil, or something more than a man. Nevertheless, I love you, Edmond."

  And at his silence, she continued, "Do not punish me, Edmond, because I have these several times yielded to the stubborn bestial clay within me; I have more of the beast than you, but now I swear it is dead, Edmond. I will ask no more of you, no more than you will give."

  And again, "Will you understand me, Edmond?" At last he spoke, gently.

  "I am not angry, Vanny, nor do I fail to under-stand. There is something else between us, something ineradicable and fatal to any further union of ours.

  "Vanny, I am not human!"

  "You are telling me that you are the Devil," she said, "but I love you Edmond."

  "No, Vanny, it is less comprehensible than that. You and I are alien, not in race, but in species. This is why you are unable to bear a child by me, nor ever will be able. We are fortunate in that, for a child of ours would be far worse than any mixed breed; it would be a hybrid!"

  Through his other mind flashed a comparison of Vanny's pale body and his own deformity.

  "When the horse and ass breed," he said, "the off-spring is a mule. Vanny, our child would be—a mule!"

  And as her desolate eyes still gazed into his:

  "Perhaps I am the Devil, inasmuch as I am mankind's arch-enemy, and that which will destroy him. What else is the Devil?"

  A sort of comprehension was born in Vanny's mind. She glimpsed the meaning of her husband, and a feeling of the inevitable disaster dawned in her. Henceforth, they were enemies, alien species, like the lion and the lamb, but with no ultimate lying-down together!

  "Then good-bye, Edmond."

  For once Edmond vocalized the obvious.

  "Good-bye, Vanny!"

  As he moved again out into the street, he was more utterly miserable than ever before.

  CHAPTER XIII

  LILITH AND ADAM

  EDMOND and Sarah, two strange elements in the fantastic quadrangle, seemed for the brief ensuing period to be more perfectly aligned, to possess a greater degree of harmony than the stormy combination that was the origin of their union. Sarah, cold, languid, impersonal, seemed to her companion a fit and desirable consort, and a haven of peace and quiet intellect. Not yet had the demands of his body made themselves evident, and the pleasant poison he had imbibed was yet to run its course in his nature.

  Still, a remnant of the sorrow Edmond felt at the loss of Vanny survived to sadden him. Sympathy and pity were emotions that had grown less foreign to his character, and he was coming to know a sort of familiarity for their twin dolorous faces. Yet the first bitterness of his renunciation passed with the inception of Sarah's completer understanding. He managed to suppress for the time being that sense of beauty which was the one trait that had so far yielded him a modicum of satisfaction. Sometimes, however, the urge returned to plague him, and he wondered anew at the self-borne inconsistency that caused him to find beauty in an alien creature.

  "There is a sort of Satanic majesty about Sarah," he thought, "and her self-sufficiency is admirable, and Droner to her kind. There is also a very precious element in understanding and companionship, and Sarah only, of all created beings, has that to offer me. It is irrational for me to seek in her a beauty her heredity denies her, the more irrational since her body, and not human woman's, is my appointed lure. And yet, rational or not, I miss the white wistful loveliness that is Vanny's! I have twisted my own nature into hopelessly unnatural channels!"

  So he entered into this new union, part of him satisfied, and part of him prey to a longing that survived out of his old life. He moved Sarah away from her drab little room into an apartment overlooking the Park on Lake View Avenue. He doubted whether the change to more commodious quarters affected her at all, for so self-contained an entity was she that her surroundings were of all influences the most negligible. Not that she was a stranger to beauty, her artistry denied that supposition; but she drew her inspiration from a source far removed from reality, somewhere in the depths of her own complex character. She found, in her quiet and complacent duality, compensations that Edmond for all his rest-less seeking was forever denied.

  Their wooing was a languid, and to Edmond, a disappointing affair lacking both the stimulus of obstacles and the spur of uncertainty. Sarah was ac-quiescent but unresponsive, yielding lackadaisical caresses in return for Edmond's own unenthusiastic offerings. There was none of the fiery ecstasy that made Vanny's love like to a flaming meteor burning the very air in its passage. That compulsion to repro-duce, which had seemed originally noble and worthy of fulfillment, hung now about Edmond's neck like an iron collar, deadening half his pleasure in Sarah's companionship and reminding him insistently of the delights he had forsworn.

  "If this is the measure of my race's capacity for enjoyment," he reflected, "then whatever their attainments of the intellect, they have much indeed to learn from their simple human progenitors?"

  As summer progressed, the feeling of discontent deepened, and even the high and Platonic intimacy with Sarah was embittered by it.

  "Sarah has failed me now," he thought. "There is no release anywhere for me who am doomed forever to tread a solitary path."

  He continued his gloomy reflections. "It is a curious fact that all speculators concerning the Superman have made the egregious mistake of picturing him as happier than man. Nietzsche, Gobineau, Wells—each of them falls into this same error when all logic clearly denies it. Is the man of today happier than Homo Neanderthalis in his filth-strewn cave? Was this latter happier than Pithecanthropus, or he happier than an ape swinging through Pleistocene trees? Rather, I think, the converse is true; with the growth of intellect, happiness becomes an elusive quantity, so that doubtless the Superman, when he arrives, will he of all creatures the most unhappy. I, his prototype, am the immediate example."

  It was with a feeling of relief that he realized Sarah was pregnant; part of the compulsion was satisfied, part of his responsibility was behind him. Sarah too seemed to feel the lessening of the tension; their mutual interest in this purely rational undertaking of producing offspring bound them a little closer together. But Sarah withd
rew more closely into herself after the event; she seemed to have less need than ever for a presence other than her own.

  Often, during the months of summer, Edmond brought out his grey car and drove for many hours and many miles in an effort merely to escape the dullness of thinking. For his very thoughts palled upon him at times, seeming to him a rather wan and sickly substitute for certain realities he had known. He was seldom successful in his attempt, for the curse of intellect pursued him with speed easily sufficient to outdistance the mechanism in which he fled.

  Still, the curious union was surviving. His nature and Sarah's never met in open conflict, since Sarah's desires were never deep-rooted enough to resist his own impulses; she gave way to him equably, quietly, and without rancor, yielding everything and finding recompense in her unborn child, her art, and herself, So the strange menage ground itself into a sort of stability as summer closed.

  CHAPTER XIV

  EVE AND LILITH

  VANNY sat miserably silent after Edmond's departure; the house seemed as still as the depths of a pyramid, and as old and lifeless. She was dumb, (lazed, by the impact of events. The whole impulse that drove the wheels of her life was rendered power-less by her loss, as if she were a motor whose current had been suddenly cut off. She sat unmoving while the clatter of Magda setting the table for lunch scarcely penetrated her consciousness; a long time later she heard the stolid servant removing the untouched dishes. Edmond gone! It was incredible catastrophe. The words were as meaningless as if one should say, "The sun has gone out; the world is condemned to darkness."

  The afternoon waned, and still she sat hopelessly, without thought, knowing only the depths of her misery. Finally she was aware that the doorbell was ringing, had been ringing for some time. She would have risen when Magda's heavy tread forestalled her. A moment later she looked uncomprehendingly at the figure that entered the room; realization came slowly that it was Paul, very excited.

  "My dear!" he said, "I came at once, as soon as I found your note."

  "Note?" Vanny said vaguely, tonelessly.

  "Of course! Here!"

  She glanced indifferently at the missive he presented; truly enough the script was her own, confuting in its accurate familiarity the very testimony of her memory. A single line, "Come back, Paul," and her own signature, perfect to the shading of its letters. Why had Edmond inflicted this irony on her? Was he, she wondered, attempting a mistaken kindness, or, out of the depths of his wisdom, did he indicate to her the course he considered best? No matter, she concluded dully; it devolved on her to follow his implied command.

  "He's gone," she said, turning vision-haunted eyes on Paul, who still panted in excitement.

  "And a good thing, dear! We'll have you free, start proceedings immediately!"

  "No," said Vanny. "I don't want that."

  "Why, dear! That's the only course!"

  "No," the girl repeated in the same monotone. "If Edmond wishes to be free of me, he'll contrive it himself."

  "Of course he will! And at your expense, Vanny—at the cost of your character!"

  "He won't do that, Paul. He'll find his own means, if he desires it."

  Now, with the presence of a friend whose sympathy she trusted, the apathy was transforming itself to an active misery, a poignant, unbearable pain.

  "I'm terribly unhappy!" she muttered, and began to weep. For a long time Paul, sensitive to her needs, made neither sound nor movement, but when she began to quiet from sheer exhaustion, he moved close to her, held her in his arms, and tried to comfort. After a time she was pale and dry-eyed and calm.

  "You will stay here tonight, Paul," she told him.

  "Not here! You'll come away with me!"

  "Here," reiterated Vanny.

  The afternoon dragged slowly into evening; night fell on the city, and still they remained in a room grown somber with shadows. Vanny would not yield to appeal or argument to leave the house, and Paul had not the heart to abandon her. In the end he stayed, feeling somehow as if the girl had won a victory over him. Nevertheless, the next night found him still present, and the following night as well.

  So there began a queer period in the lives of these two. Paul was nearly happy in the possession of the being he desired. He worked with unaccustomed energy at his writing, using Vanny's desk in the living room, and it seemed to the girl that his work was of more merit than heretofore. He was elated too with the acceptance of a short story by a magazine of small circulation but of decided literary repute; shortly afterward the same publisher accepted a poem.

  As for Vanny, she was far from happy, but her misery drove her to Paul for comfort. She clung to his companionship with a sort of despairing avidity, feeling her loneliness insupportable without him. He was simple, affectionate, understandable; sometimes she experienced a feeling almost of relief at the realization that his thoughts were of her own degree, human and comprehensible. More than that, she could hold conceptions beyond his powers, and could if she wished master his nature as Edmond had mastered hers. There was a grain of comfort in this, for she perceived that she retained something within herself of Edmond's more than human abilities.

  Magda, third member of the unusual household, worked on as stolidly as if she had not noticed the change in personnel. She prepared the meals as usual, served and removed them, and collected her wages each Saturday. It was as if she served not the tenants, but the house, as she had done for nearly a quarter of a century.

  During this quiet and unhappy interlude, Vanny was relieved at least of the necessity of financial worry. She had her own account at the bank, and her own deposit box. An inspection of this revealed a surprisingly thick sheaf of securities. considerably more than she had believed she owned; it did not occur to her that Edmond possessed a duplicate key.

  So life dragged along; the new year passed into being and the planet swung through the spring and summer arcs. Little by little the distant look was fading from Vanny's dark eyes, as the incredible sensations and events of her dreamy life with Edmond slipped out of the grasp of her memory. She realized their passing as her recollection of certain elements grew misty, but she had no power to fix them since they included conceptions alien to her mind. She was drifting back, away from both the horrors and the beauties she had known; she watched these latter vanish regretfully, but the turning of time seemed only to measure their disintegration. She was helpless either to aid or hinder the process.

  Sometimes she helped Paul at his work with an incisive criticism or a suggestion full of possibilities. More often she read while he labored, for her husband's great library was at hand for her use, but the things she dug out of the volumes seemed usually meaningless gibberish, lacking the interpretation of a greater insight than her own. At other times she simply sat and dreamed; Paul was sometimes amazed by the stretch of time she could while away in this fashion—she who had been of old so active, so impatient of idleness. She found the library a solitary retreat, since Paul seldom entered it; the skull on the fireplace grinned at him with too ironical a smile.

  Of late she had grown careless of her appearance; she employed no cosmetics, and her clear skin seemed always ivory-pallid. Mostly she wandered about the house wearing that iridescent purple robe that Edmond had draped about her; her hair drifted like black velvet around her face, and Paul thought her more lovely than ever. And then, as autumn sent a preliminary chill into the air, she perceived a restraint in Paul's manner; with something of Edmond's unbelievable perspicacity, she understood that he was concealing some unpleasantness from her.

  "Paul," she asked him suddenly as he sat at the desk, "have you seen him?"

  "Seen whom, dear?" He looked up perturbed. "Edmond, of course! Where is he?"

  "What makes you ask that, Vanny? How can I know?"

  "Where is he, Paul?" she repeated.

  He surrendered gloomily. "I saw him, dear. He's living in an apartment on Lake View; I think he's living with a woman."

  Vanny's pallor increased so violent
ly that Paul was startled; he sprang toward her from the desk, but her eyes met his steadily enough.

  "Tell me where, Paul," she said, "or take me there. I want to see her."

  "I won't! You can't ask that!"

  "I want to see her."

  "She's ugly," said Paul. "Thin and shapelessly angular, and she looks like him."

  "I want to talk to her."

  "But he'll be there!"

  "Not in the morning." She rose, moving toward the hall; Paul gave in with a sigh and followed.

  "I'll go with you then," he said with a wan smile of surrender.

  Edmond had taken his grey roadster; they found a taxi, and sped silently along Sheridan. Vanny spoke not a word until they angled off the teeming Drive to Lake View, and halted before a brown brick apartment building.

  "Wait for me," she said then and walked unhesitatingly toward the boxes in the hall; his name was there; he had not deigned to alter it. She pressed the button beside it; a long minute passed without result. Again she pressed it, steadily, insistently, and waited; finally the door buzzed in mechanical invitation. She pushed it open; there was an automatic elevator, and she stood tense during the interminable ascent, half hypnotized by the long bee-like drone of the mechanism. The apartment door opened as she approached. Sarah looked out at her with intent, expressionless eyes, and instantly Vanny perceived the nature of this being for whom Edmond had abandoned her. This was a woman of his own sort, able at once to be companion and mother, capable of permitting the fuifillment of his life. Her mood turned suddenly to extreme melancholy. Now indeed, with such an opponent, it was a hopeless task to win Edmond back!

  The woman Sarah still stared without speech, and Vanny felt constrained to break the silence.

  "I am Mrs. Hall," she said. The other nodded silently, swinging the door wider and moving aside. Vanny entered, and the door closed. She stood surveying a room obviously of the better furnished-apartment class. Here and there about the walls were oil paintings, pastels, and crayons, and she recognized the handiwork; this was the same twisted artistry that had produced that disturbing landscape, once in Edmond's library, that yet hung in his laboratory. Sarah motioned her to a chair and sat herself facing her. The tense silence settled over them again. "I wanted to see you," Vanny said finally. The woman nodded.