"I wanted to understand," said Vanny, "since I have lost him utterly—lost him," she added in bitterness, "because I was a fool!"
"Do not imagine," said the woman in a voice of curiously flat intonation, "that your little peccadillos could drive him away. They are without meaning to him."
"Do you love him too?" Vanny said.
The woman spoke. "I have that which I wish," she said, and was again silent.
"You do love him," said Vanny. The other made no reply.
"I am sorry," said Vanny finally, "that I came here on such a hopeless errand. You understand that I must do what I can to draw him back; at the least, I must try."
The woman turned her strange eyes on Vanny, and spoke.
"No need to try," she said, "since you have never lost him. He seeks an illusion called beauty which he finds in you but misses in me."
A tinge of joy showed in Vanny's face. "Did he say that?" she asked.
"He says nothing. There is no need. Now do leave here and try no more to draw him from me, since you will inevitably succeed, and the course is disastrous."
"Disastrous! To whom?"
"To each of the four," said Sarah, "but mostly to Edmond." Again she was silent, while Vanny wondered dimly how she knew of Paul.
She rose to depart. "I've got to try," she said, moving toward the door. The woman Sarah watched her silently, though Vanny fancied she saw a glint of regret in the curious eyes.
CHAPTER XV
THE LOSS OF BEAUTY
SARAH was to bear Edmond's child in March, and late September found their curious establishment as settled as any normal household. But as the period of her pregnancy progressed, Sarah drew more and more into her own being. Her minds, always introverted, turned their twin backs on reality, to dwell in a world within themselves and bounded by their own configurations. Never oppressed by that craving for an understanding companionship that drove Edmond, Sarah now found still less need for any outside entity.
Yet she did occasionally seek his caresses, and these he gave, although hopelessly and indifferently. And the old loneliness returned to Edmond with a strange new intensity born of disappointment.
"Beauty has vanished out of my world," he thought, "and nothing is left me save a being who is to be a mother, and therefore is no companion."
But his other self meanwhile was regarding a visual memory of Vanny, with her body that curved, and was reminiscent of glades and sunlight and things earthly.
"The curse of the Cave still persists," reflected Edmond, "though differently in me than in men who daily go out to the hunt leaving their females to tend fires. Life moves in cycles and each individual finds his little circle encompassed by the greater circle that is society."
Instantly his other mind visualized his concept, thus:
One night he saw Vanny on Michigan Avenue, walking with Paul, and moved by that pity which hq had come to know, he slipped back into the dark entrance of the North American Building, that they might not meet. An ancient longing surged through his duality, and the sight of Vanny's pallor twisted in his breast like an oriental his. Nor did he fail to notice the questing glance of her luminous eyes, peering here and there in a hopeless search, while Paul talked earnestly of something negligible.
"She feels my presence like Sarah," he thought. 'The suppleness of her mind amazes me; who can limit the potentiality of the simplest brain? She has learned more of me than I had believed possible."
But the anguish of his loneliness persisted below the icy speculation. He wanted again the virile love of humans, and Sarah's languid caresses seemed ever less desirable.
"I have tasted an opiate," he thought. "Human love is not for my kind. Vanny and I are as poisons to each other, and as I kill her mind with forbidden visions, so does she destroy my body with fatal pleasure.
"Alien are we, natural and appointed enemies; no good thing may ever come out of this brief union of ours."
He followed with his burning eye Vanny's diminishing figure.
"Silver flame of Attic woodlands," he thought. "Why does she, of an alien species, draw me as Sarah should? I who should call kind to kind, as mare and stallion, woman and man?"
And his other self supplied the answer.
"Because all my associations have gathered around the normal woman-body. Beauty is to me what experience has trained it to be, and Vanny, not Sarah, is its embodiment."
Often a vague idea of suicide beckoned, and as often a stubborn pride of race rejected it.
"Surely no race whose first member is suicidal has any survival value. On me lies the primary burden of proving my species' fitness."
And his other self replied, "This is the primitive idea of Duty that misleads me. This is patriotism, and pride of blood. Peace is a thing infinitely more to be desired; and peace is easy of access, and I know the way."
But his first mind, considering: "Still, the idea is in itself repugnant, as it confesses the weakness of my kind. Better for me to live and suffer, that the coming of my race be easier."
And his other self again, "Why aid these successors into unhappiness like mine? If come they must, then let them, but do not usher them into Hell. Cerberus had three heads, not two."
And finally, "Neither the pursuit of knowledge nor that of power is happiness. Happiness hides in its own pursuit. Happiness is the quest; content, the achievement. But for me, who come before my appointed time, there is neither the one nor the other, since the goal is in a not yet extant future."
But always in part of his mind the image of Vanny persisted. He perceived that love had two components, companionship, which is the intellectual, and passion, which is the physical element.
"My love is thus sundered, so that I love one with my brain and another with my body."
And he smiled his ironic smile, whispering to his idle self, "Of these two, the bodily love is sweeter!"
"There is a delight I can never know," he reflected;—"the unity of these two elements of love. Sarah's mind in Vanny's body—"
His idle mind envisaged for a moment a dark thought, to be toyed with an instant, weighed, and rejected. He perceived that in certain things fate is inexorable, and monsters are always to be abhorred.
Then his twin minds reverted to Sarah—placidly intelligent Sarah, who alone could accompany him through the mazes of his thoughts, but could not follow the broad and easy way of the body—Sarah, whose pleasure in the bearing of a child was greater than that in its conception—Sarah, who knew nothing of strong human love, and desired nothing of it, her mind unpoisoned by forbidden pleasures.
"She is normal of her kind," he thought. "In the placidity of pure intelligence, she is unaware both of the pits of despair and the peaks of pleasure; her existence is an equable flowing out of ideas, unruffled by any emotional breeze. But I am a creature of the depths, toiling forever toward shining heights that recede horizon-like before me. I have in a sense perverted myself with alien joys; my nature should have been as Sarah's, but that I tasted the poison."
CHAPTER XVI
IN WHICH EDMOND REFUSES LONGER TO FOLLOW HIS FANCY
AGAIN one afternoon Edmond returned to his lake-cresting hill, whence he had watched the planet spin under him, and seated himself once more on the remembered slope. He watched the posturing of a golden finch, a laggard in the migration, in the tree above him, taking a sort of pleasure in its instantaneous grace. He answered its twittering, and reply brought forth reply, for all beings save Man and the man-ridden Dog were drawn to Edmond.
"I am less of the Enemy and somewhat more of the Master," thought Edmond. "I am of nature the user, where man is the destroyer."
But his other self sat within like a statue cast in lead, and struggled to think of things remote from that vision which was unforgettable. Like the migratory bird, his thoughts were drawn inevitably to the tropics of his mind; returning from the zones of cool speculation to that torrid equator where the two hemispheres met. So at last Edmond gave himself to his misery, and
wrung therefrom finally a sort of dusky pleasure.
"Suppose now," he thought, "I should evoke for myself an illusion, as I know how to do—a mental materialization of her whom I desire, and suppose I endow this image with the qualities of my senses, why should that vision not satisfy me? For I know that it would not. Is it that her thoughts and her personality would be my own? No; for the thoughts'.' and character of the fleshly Vanny are mine."
His other mind replied, "What is lacking in the image of my own mind is Vanny's admiration, her worship and love. These are things I can never endow, for God knows I have none of them for myself!"
Nevertheless, Edmond did evoke for himself a vision of Vanny, and by means of faculties for intense concentration made her seem real and external to his minds. For he found a pleasure in the contemplation of her white loveliness that logic could not argue out of him; therefore the image that sprang into being was that Vanny who had danced for him by night, with her body gleaming sword-like in the dusk. Edmond made the quiet autumn afternoon into an evening about the two of them, and watched his evocation dance as Vanny had been wont to dance. Thereafter he summoned her, so that she lay warm against him with a well-remembered pressure, and he kissed her and spoke with his vision.
"Are you less unhappy with me than with Paul, '
The image replied, "I am the Vanny who was yours, and I have forgotten Paul."
"But do you like to return? To recall things as they were?"
"How can I return? I have never been away."
"That is bitter reproach, Vanny! I am empty enough, lacking your presence."
"I am yours whenever you will it, Edmond."
"No," said Edmond, after a long moment, "my course is wiser in that it contains less of evil. It was the rational thing to do."
"But since when, Edmond, has that been a criterion of yours?"
Edmond looked into the dark eyes of his evocation with an expression that held unmistakably a trace of doubtfulness; it seemed to his perceptions that in that moment the vision spoke not with his words, but with its own. As if, he thought, he had performed some of the functions of creation, and played on a diminutive scale the part of deity—so real, so living, did this being made out of his longings and imaginings seem to him! He felt a strong temptation to do a thing his reason forbade, to adopt in fact the suggestion of this lovely fancy, and abandon reason as his criterion.
"Suppose, now," he argued while his vision nestled in his arms, "suppose I forswear reality, and take as my own this dream I hold, and dwell hereafter in a world of dream, as I can if I desire. Perhaps happiness is to be found only in such a world, a conclusion not void of logic, since it is but saying that happiness is a dream. If this is true, is it not the part of wisdom to enter the world of visions, where all the law is my own desire, and only that same desire measures either my companion's acquiescence or my own capacity?"
Out of the depths of his intricate mentality, a part of his mind sneered an answer in grim irony: "Nietzsche, here is your Superman who wastes his caresses on a phantom and indulges himself with a dream, like a morbid child! To forswear reality, to dwell in a self-created, phantasmic world, is simply to welcome a voluntary madness!"
He turned again to his vision, and the eidolon smiled into his eyes, as if grateful for his attention. "It is neither wise nor sane that I dally here with you," he told it, "to cloy my senses with a non-existent loveliness, as is the way of a madman."
"But why not?" replied the image. "Indeed, it is your own statement that beauty, like truth, is a relative thing, and exists only in the mind of the observer. If you must have reason as your guide, will you spurn the implications of your own logic?"
For a while Edmond regarded his creation with that intensity which had been Vanny's terror, and then spoke in the tones which had been her delight.
"Vanny! Vannyl—Say the answer to the question I am thinking!"
The vision trembled, the deep eyes glowed back into Edmond's unfaceable gaze.
"I love you, Edmond. You are not as men, but greater. Demon, or not, I love you. Do not be unkind—"
"Pahl" said Edmond. "I am deluding myself with my own fancy! These are my own words it gives me back!"
He dismissed the image, rose and returned to his ear above the hill, but to his backward glance the vista seemed not wholly depopulated. For beneath the tree of the finch there still lingered a misty glory, as if the intensity of his concentration had bound some wandering atoms for a while into a semblance of a form, and for a little distance this golden mist pursued him beckoning. Edmond knew better than to heed, but watched with a certain speculation in his eyes as it danced with a diminishing glory in the sun.
CHAPTER XVII
CONVERSATION ON EARTH
EDMOND drove south along Sheridan Road with that miraculous dexterity which characterized all his relations with machines. These were to him simply extensions of his body; impulses flowed as easily through his limbs to the thrusting wheels on the road as to his finger tips. He and his vehicle moved as a single being, and thought of other things.
The car paused a moment at a light-controlled intersection, and Edmond noted the spectacles and cane called Alfred Stein waiting patiently for a bus. Edmond motioned for the professor to enter, and the cane and spectacles relaxed against the seat with a tired blinking and a grunt.
"These little electrons that I weigh," he said, "they can be very heavy to an old man."
"Your reward will come later, when others will seize on your results and draw inferences and formulate theories which will endure six months or more."
Stein grinned amiably. Sometimes he felt a reluctant liking for the curious Edmond.
"Experimental science—you do not think very much of it?"
"Your science," said Edmond, "is approaching the state of Chinese science—a vast body of perfectly good rules for which the reasons have been lost. The snowball of knowledge is growing too big for you to push, with all your specialists."
"Well, what is to be done? At least we must keep on pushing."
"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 them-selves." 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 under-stand 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 run 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 Intuited: `Observe: I have degenerated to the use of r+ipletives'). "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."
The Lost Master - The Collected Works Page 125