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Berkley titles by Nalini Singh

Psy-Changeling Series
SLAVE TO SENSATION
VISIONS OF HEAT
CARESSED BY ICE
MINE TO POSSESS
HOSTAGE TO PLEASURE
BRANDED BY FIRE
BLAZE OF MEMORY
BONDS OF JUSTICE
PLAY OF PASSION
KISS OF SNOW
TANGLE OF NEED
HEART OF OBSIDIAN
SHIELD OF WINTER
SHARDS OF HOPE
ALLEGIANCE OF HONOR
SILVER SILENCE

Guild Hunter Series

ANGELS’ BLOOD
ARCHANGEL’S KISS
ARCHANGEL’S CONSORT
ARCHANGEL’S BLADE
ARCHANGEL’S STORM
ARCHANGEL’S LEGION
ARCHANGEL’S SHADOWS
ARCHANGEL’S ENIGMA
ARCHANGEL’S HEART

Anthologies
AN ENCHANTED SEASON
 (with Maggie Shayne, Erin McCarthy, and Jean Johnson)
THE MAGICAL CHRISTMAS CAT
(with Lora Leigh, Erin McCarthy, and Linda Winstead Jones)
MUST LOVE HELLHOUNDS
(with Charlaine Harris, Ilona Andrews, and Meljean Brook)
BURNING UP
(with Angela Knight, Virginia Kantra, and Meljean Brook)
ANGELS OF DARKNESS
(with Ilona Andrews, Meljean Brook, and Sharon Shinn)
ANGELS’ FLIGHT
WILD INVITATION
NIGHT SHIFT
(with Ilona Andrews, Lisa Shearin, and Milla Vane)
WILD EMBRACE

Specials
ANGELS’ PAWN
ANGELS’ DANCE
TEXTURE OF INTIMACY
DECLARATION OF COURTSHIP
WHISPER OF SIN
SECRETS AT MIDNIGHT
 BERKLEY
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2017 by Nalini Singh

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes
free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for
complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without
permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for
every reader.

BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Singh, Nalini, 1977– author.

Title: Silver silence : a Psy-changeling trinity novel / Nalini Singh.
Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016058705 (print) | LCCN 2017006109 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781101987797 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101987810 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Romance / Paranormal. | FICTION / Fantasy /
Paranormal. | GSAFD: Romantic suspense fiction. | Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9639.4.S566 S57 2017 (print) | LCC PR9639.4.S566 (ebook) |
DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058705

First Edition: June 2017

Cover illustration by Tony Mauro

Cover design by Rita Frangie

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Version_1
 Contents

Berkley titles by Nalini Singh

Title Page
Copyright

Age of Trinity

PART 1
Chapter 1
The Human Patriot
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
The Human Alpha
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
The Human Patriot
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
The Human Alpha
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
The Human Patriot
Chapter 17
 The Unknown Architect
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
The Ruling Coalition of the Psy
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
The Human Alpha
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
The Human Patriot
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40

PART 2
The Human Alpha
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
The Unknown Architect
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
The Human Alliance
 Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Shadows

Acknowledgments
About the Author
 Age of Trinity

OCTOBER 2082 IS a new beginning.

Psy, human, and changeling, all three races have agreed to work
together to unite their divided world.
The Trinity Accord is the fragile foundation of all their hopes and
dreams of a future without war, without violence, without shattering
loss.
It is a noble ambition.
But the past is not an old coat that can be discarded and
forgotten.
It is a scent that clings and clings and clings.
That scent is of blood and betrayal and a chilling, emotionless
Silence.
The psychically gifted Psy seek to feel emotion for the first time in
over a hundred years.
Changelings with their primal hearts fight their natural instinct to
trust only pack, only clan.
Humans look to the future with a grim-eyed determination to no
longer be the weakest race.
And others . . . they seek to spread chaos and death and division.
Welcome to the Age of Trinity.
PART 1
 Chapter 1
To be a Mercant is to be a shadow that moves with will, with intelligence,
with pitiless precision.
—Ena Mercant (circa 2057)

SILVER MERCANT BELIEVED in control. It was what made her so

good at what she did—she was never caught by surprise. She
prepared for everything. Unfortunately, it was impossible to prepare
for the heavily muscled man standing at her apartment door.
“How did you get in?” she asked in Russian, making sure to stand
front and center in the doorway so he wouldn’t forget this was her
territory.
Bears had a habit of just pushing everything out of their way.
This bear shrugged his broad shoulders where he leaned up
against the side of her doorjamb. “I asked nicely,” he replied in the
same language.
“I live in the most secure building in central Moscow.” Silver
stared at that square-jawed face with its honey-dark skin. It wasn’t a
tan. Valentin Nikolaev retained the shade in winter, got darker in
summer. “And,” she added, “building security is made up of former
soldiers who don’t understand the word ‘nice.’” One of those soldiers
was a Mercant. No one talked their way past a Mercant.
Except for this man. This wasn’t the first time he’d appeared on
her doorstep on the thirty-fourth floor of this building.
“I have a special charm,” Valentin responded, his big body
blocking out the light and his deep smile settling into familiar
grooves in his cheeks, his hair an inky black that was so messy she
wondered if he even owned a comb. That hair appeared as if it
might have a silken texture, in stark contrast to the harsh angles of
his face.
No part of him was tense, his body as lazy limbed as a cat’s.
She knew he was trying to appear harmless, but she wasn’t an
idiot. Despite her offensive and defensive training, the alpha of the
StoneWater clan could crush her like a bug, physically speaking. He
had too much brawn, too much strength for her to beat him without
a weapon. So it was good that Silver’s mind was a ruthless weapon.
“Why did you need to see me at seven in the morning?” she
asked, because it was clear he wasn’t going to tell her how he kept
getting past her security.
He extended a hand on which sat a data crystal. “The clan
promised EmNet a breakdown of the small incidents we’ve handled
over the past three months.”
Those “small incidents” were times when Psy, humans, or non-
clan changelings needed assistance in the area controlled by
StoneWater—or elsewhere, when members of the bear clan were
close enough to help. As the director of the worldwide Emergency
Response Network run under the aegis of the Trinity Accord, Silver
was the one who coordinated all available resources—and in this
part of the world, that included the StoneWater bears.
Of course, she had no ability to order them to do anything—
trying that on a predatory changeling was an exercise in abject
failure. But she could ask. So far, the bears had always come
through. The data crystal would tell her how many clan members
and/or other resources had been required to manage each instance;
it would help her fine-tune her requests in the future.
She took the crystal, not bothering to ask why the alpha of the
clan had turned up to personally deliver the data.
Valentin liked to do things his way.
“Why does Selenka let you get away with breaching her
territory?” The BlackEdge wolves had control over this part of
Moscow when it came to changeling access. The city was split
evenly between the wolf pack and the bear clan, with the rest of
their respective territories heading outward from that central dividing
line.
 This apartment building fell in the wolf half.
Valentin smiled, night-dark eyes alight in a way she couldn’t
describe. “StoneWater and BlackEdge are friends now.”
If Silver had felt emotion, she may have made a face of sheer
disbelief. The two most powerful packs in Russia had a working
relationship and no longer clashed in violent confrontations, but they
were not friends. “I see,” she said, refusing to look away from those
onyx eyes.
Predatory changelings sometimes took a lack of eye contact as
submissive behavior, even when interacting with non-changelings.
Bears definitely took it as submissive behavior. They weren’t exactly
subtle about it, either. In fact, bears were the least subtle of the
changelings she’d met through her work as Kaleb Krychek’s senior
aide, and as the head of EmNet.
“What do you see, Starlight?” Valentin asked in his deep rumble
of a voice that spoke of the animal that lived under his skin.
Silver refused to react to the name he insisted on calling her.
When she’d pointed out he was being discourteous by not using her
actual name, he’d told her to call him her medvezhonok, her teddy
bear, that he wouldn’t mind. It was difficult to have a rational
conversation with a man who seemed impossible to insult or freeze
out.
Bears.
She’d heard Selenka Durev say that through tightly clenched
teeth on more than one occasion. While Silver’s conditioning under
the Silence Protocol remained pristine, her mind clear of all emotion,
in the time she’d known Valentin, she’d come to understand the wolf
alpha’s reaction. “Thank you for the data,” she said to him now.
“Next time, you might wish to consider an invention we in the
civilized world call e-mail.”
His laugh was so big it filled the air, filled the entire space of her
apartment.
The thought made no sense, yet it appeared like clockwork when
Valentin laughed in her vicinity. She’d told herself multiple times that
she worked for the most powerful man in the world; Valentin was
only a changeling alpha. Unfortunately, it appeared changeling
alphas had their own potent brand of charisma. And this bear alpha
had a surfeit of it.
“Have you thought about my offer?” he asked, the laughter still in
his eyes.
“The answer remains the same,” Silver said as a burn spread
through her chest. “I do not wish to go have ice cream with you.”
“It’s really good ice cream.” Smile disappearing, Valentin suddenly
shifted fully upright from his leaning position against the doorjamb,
the size and muscle of him dangerously apparent. “You doing okay?”
“Quite fine,” Silver said, even as the burn morphed into a jagged
spike. Something was wrong. She had to contact—
Her brain shorted out. She was aware of her body beginning to
spasm, her lungs gasping for air as her legs crumpled, but she
couldn’t get her telepathic “muscles” to work, couldn’t contact her
family or Kaleb for an emergency teleport.

• • •

MOVING far faster than most people expected bear changelings to

move, Valentin caught Silver’s slender body before she’d done much
more than sway on those ice-pick heels she liked to wear. He knew it
wasn’t the heels that were toppling her; Silver was never in any
danger on those heels. The woman walked on them like he walked
on his “bigfoot-sized” feet, as described by one of his three older
sisters.
“I’ve got you, Starlight,” he said, scooping her up in his arms and
walking into her apartment.
He’d been trying to get in for ten long months, ever since he first
met Ms. Silver Mercant. But he’d never expected it to be because
she was convulsing in his arms. Placing her on the dark gray of the
sofa, he turned her onto her side and gripped her jaw to keep her
head from jerking too hard. At least she was breathing, though the
sound was ragged.
With his other hand, he grabbed his phone, went to call Kaleb
Krychek. The viciously powerful telekinetic could get her to help far
faster than any ambulance. But Silver’s body was spasming too
violently for him to both hold the phone and keep her from hurting
herself. Swearing under his breath, he dropped the phone and
placed his other hand on her hip, holding her in place.
“Not how I wanted to put my hands on you, moyo solnyshko.” He
kept talking so she’d know she wasn’t alone, but his blood was
chilling with every second that passed. It was going on too long.
Deciding to risk it, he released her hip and, snatching up his
phone, managed to make the call. “Silver’s apartment,” he said to
the pitiless son of a bitch who was Silver’s boss. “Medical
emergency.”
He dropped the phone as Silver jerked again. “Hold on, Starlight,”
he ordered in his most obnoxiously alpha voice, trying to keep her
body from wrenching painfully at the same time. If Silver was going
to respond to anything, it would be to the idea that he’d dared give
her an order. “You’re tougher than this.”
Her eyes, that glorious silver, met his, the pupils huge . . . right
before her body went limp.
Kaleb appeared in the room at the same instant, the Psy male
dressed in a flawless black-on-black suit. “What happened?” he
asked, his voice as cold as midnight on the steppes.
“Get her to a doctor,” Valentin growled, the sound coming from
the human male’s vocal cords but carrying the bear’s rage. “Tell
them it was poison.”
Kaleb was smart enough not to waste time questioning him. He
simply teleported out, taking Silver with him. Teeth gritted at the
fact she was out of his sight, Valentin got up and, going into Silver’s
kitchen, began to pull out anything that could be food. Psy had
strange ideas of food—meal bars and nutrient mixes. The only
surprise in Silver’s cupboard was a block of fine dark chocolate.
Wondering if he’d discovered a secret about the most fascinating
woman he’d ever met, a secret he could use to sneak past her
defenses—no, he had no shame whatsoever when it came to Silver
Mercant—he turned over the block and found a small card still
attached to it. The writing was in English. It said: Thank you for your
Other documents randomly have
different content
“It might be, Mildred. But in that case I would not now pray as I do,
that you may become my wife.”
She looked down at my hand and her little fist beat on it softly.
“How am I to know?”
“Mildred, know what...?”
“If you said to me: ‘Give me a kiss,’ I would kiss you for I feel like
that. If you said to me: ‘Come with me for a week,’ I would say yes,
for I think that for a week I could be sure that I would feel that way
... and if I did not, why a week comes to a close. But no man asks
me that! No man tries to kiss me. They all say: ‘Mildred, I love you. I
shall always love you. I want you for my wife.’ That means forever
and ever. You are all so sure. How can I be sure?”
“Will you give me a kiss, Mildred?”
She leaned forward and her lips were faintly parted. My mouth
touched hers, and my eyes saw within her gown her perfect breasts
like porcelain cups, red-tipped.... She was straight again and smiling.
I hid my face in my arms, fighting to master the storm that her cold
lips had loosed.
“John ... did my kiss hurt you, then?”
“No, Mildred. But I suffer. You are so perfect and so brave: and you
feel nothing.”
“That is not so! I liked your kiss.”
“Mildred, beside the anguish and the joy that I feel, you feel
nothing.”
She held my hand in her two palms.
“Tell me what to do.”
“Believe in me, Mildred.”
“Why, I do believe in you!”
“Above all else ... above all others.”
“Why? Why must it be only you?”
“Because that is love, Mildred. Because I could not bear it any other
way. Because the death of not having you would be as nothing
beside the death of sharing you even with another’s thought.
Because only in the unity, in the solitary oneness of two souls can
love live.”
Mildred shook her head, and her gold curls rang about her ears.
“You talk like someone else. Yes,” she faced me, “someone who
loves me, too, and wants me whole and for always and can’t bear
any other eyes but his own looking upon me. Someone else whose
wishes I’d obey reasonably, John, as I obeyed yours, when you said:
‘Give me a kiss.’” Her eyes were cool and happy despite their
problem. “But he doesn’t ask reasonable things. He wants me
forever and ever. How can I promise him that? And how can I
promise him what I can’t give him at once?”
“Who is he, Mildred?” I forced the words and they came like gray
ghosts out of my mouth.
“Oh, you don’t know him. I’ve known him long. And he’s wonderful,
too. Like you are. But different. In every way, different. You don’t,”
she smiled, “encroach on each other at all. He’s big and dark, and
rather slow. And you are wonderfully quick. He is a poet and smells
always of pipe tobacco. His hands are gnarled....”
“He loves you.”
“I think as much as you do, John. His words are strangely like yours,
even though he himself is so different. That is important, is it not?
He asked me one reasonable thing ... one thing I could do.”
“What was that, Mildred?”
“To come to his rooms.”
“Mildred!”
“He has a lovely place down on Washington Square. I supposed,
when he had me there, he’d want to kiss me. But no ... he’s
unreasonable, just like you. He frightened me. He left me so alone. I
was almost chilly, I assure you. With his pacing up and down: saying
‘I love you. I want you. I love you,’ and not even taking my hand.”
She reached for mine. “You see,” she smiled, “he is even less
reasonable than you. You at least kissed me.”
I was up from the couch. She had held my hand. I snatched it from
her. I began to pace, till the thought came that he had done this. I
stopped and faced her. I pulled her up and held her in my arms. I
covered her face with kisses. I found her throat in my dazed ecstasy;
I pressed my mouth within the gauze of her gown. Her cool hand
stopped me, and she held me off.
“No,” she said. “No, I cannot.”
“Why? If you mean what you said. Why?”
Her eyes took on a serious dark question: and I knew how right I
was to love her for the splendor of her chastity. For ere she
answered me, she was seeking deep within her soul the reason, the
quiet reason.
In that true moment when with head bowed she went within herself
to give me answer why she had denied me, I knew the greatness of
my love, and how she was greater than I, and how my sultry
passion had been an ugly shred tangenting from my love.
“Mildred,” I said in her silence, “you will give your answer. But in
your search I can tell you already that you were right; even for my
sake, in the light of my own love, you were right to hold me off. You
cannot be taken that way. You cannot be stormed. Mating with you
must be the peaceful meeting of two equal wills. And it must come
to be within a quiet deep and great like itself. There is a passionate
stillness more powerful than any tempest. I shall not kiss you again,
my love, until you know that kiss for the threshold to our life.”
Her eyes were heavy with thinking. They grew bright.
“Then you agree, even in that, with Philip!”
I nodded. I could not hate him when his name, whoever he was,
lived on her lips.
“And now I can tell you why I pushed you off.”
“Why, Mildred?”
She moved her head slowly from side to side; she sat down; she
smoothed her gown downward from her neck.
“I have learned something ... here.” Her hands with a sharp candor,
while her eyes met mine, followed the gauze I had ruffled, and
cupped her breasts. “I care for you, and I care for Philip. I thought
that was enough: that I could blindly let time order ... time and
mood ... what each of you wanted of me, and what I wanted to
give. It is not so. Time counts terribly! Before I can give myself to
either of you, I must know which of you I want to take me first. And
then I feel ... I feel, when I have learned who is first, there may be
no second!”
“Mildred, you see that I was right? You have learned what I knew
when I first saw you. Before I saw you I held myself for you. I
denied myself. Not only did I know there could be no one beyond
you ... none even before you!”
She was murmuring almost to herself: “It was your mouth on my
breast. Your hot mouth marking my flesh, that made me know....”
“You would have hated me, were it not I....”
She shook her head: “Philip might have kissed me. How should I
know?”
I smiled. “There is no hurry, dear. Wait. I shall be patient. Wait.”
She hid her face a moment in her hands. And lifting them again, her
eyes laughed hard and strong in her fragile face.
“Oh, patience! Bother patience! Why should we wait? Why can’t we
know now? I want to know. If Philip were only here, I’d know soon
enough. The others don’t count. Really ... how wonderfully simple
when there are only two. And you call for patience. Timid! I’ll phone
for Philip. Yes, I will. If he’s home, I’ll phone and I’ll go over there:
or have him come here quick.... You really should meet him.” Her
smile was above malice. “And I’ll know perhaps, just if I look at him.”
She danced toward the door. There was a knock that stopped her.
She moved slowly, suddenly transfigured, and turned the knob. A
maid stood hesitant.
“Miss Fayn, it’s something urgent, Miss. Your father would like to
speak to you just a minute.”
Mildred looked at me. There was a pallor over the bloom of her
cheeks. Her eyes still danced, unknowing, within an invading pallor. I
was alone.

A stillness lay within the room that had rung and sung with the
dancing laughter of Mildred. Mildred was gone: and someone else is
here! Who is here, blighting this room? I stand and feel a horror rise
from my loins like a gray cloud ... up, up my sides it crawls: lifting
my hair it passes. I forced myself to look over each shoulder:
nothing. It is gone. What is it that was here and that I have not seen
and that I felt I knew? A foul dark mass in the shrine of Mildred’s
room. But the horror that scudded through me is away. Thoughts
come. Good thoughts. Chasing all others.—Mildred is mine, is mine!
And she is wonderful beyond my wonder.
... She opened the door and I shuddered for on her face was the
darkness that had been alone with me.
“Oh,” came her voice, reed-like and stripped. “Oh, he is dead.”
I looked my amazed question: knew I was looking it.
—Your father? Not your father?
“You never saw Philip LaMotte.”
“Never.”
“You will never see him. Nor I, again.”
From within her eyes the shadow came to me and awoke my skin
once more to the familiar horror.
“He is dead.”
I was silent.
“They telephoned my father. Papa and he were friends. Philip has
been murdered!”
I saw her, saw above all my transcendant need of her like a new
radiance within her body. The bewildered cloud upon her face of
sorrow was an intruder, a foe.
—You are mine. All else is trampled out in the march of my love....
She would not have it so. She stood there sorrowing. I took her
hand, and her touch said: “He is murdered.” It was a film, viscous
between us.
But still I could say nothing. I held her hand: I dared not loose it just
because it said: “He is murdered.” Why should I be downed by that?
Whether it helped or no what did it avail against my mastering
need? But the touch of her limp hand spoke, spoke again. My clasp
fought vainly, drawing in the foe, in the attempt to shut him out.
Mildred withdrew her hand, and left in mine the word of her own:
“Philip is murdered.”
I forced myself to say: “I will leave you, love. I cannot help you now.
You will want to be alone.”
She nodded and her eyes avoided mine.
“It is terrible,” she spoke in a voice strangely casual and high. “Who
could have murdered Philip? Sweet, gentle Philip. Great Philip. I am
all dazed. We spoke of murder in his room, that day.”
“You spoke of murder?”
“Philip said to me: ‘You are the woman for whom man kills. I could
kill for you, Mildred.’”
“Dear, even the past is drawn into the dark design of an event that
sweeps us. Philip was rich——?”
“I know.” She did not like my reasoning. “I am dazed. I want to go
to bed ... and to sleep. Leave me, John.”
Still her eyes kept from my own. She had been glorious in my need
of her. Now shattered and distraught with the shadow on her
fragrance, she was almost ugly. Her arms were thin as she twisted
her hands together and her neck was long: and her eyes drooped
heavy down.
—Why is she ugly? I did not love her less. The ugliness I felt was a
pain added to the joy of loving her. And then, a dim sense came. It
was to grow ever less dim.—She is befouled with a thought! And
that thought is my own. She has been fair like a dawn with the dawn
of my love and now my thought clouds her.
—Why is she dark? Because this murder will concern me!... So much
I knew an instant, and forgot. I left her.

e
I AM home. The lamp reveals my study, sharp: a changeling! White
curtains in the deep-set latticed windows, shelves of books, the
couch right angle to the open hearth, the low gray ceiling ... nothing
is moved yet everything is changed. A glow like fever hushes in the
shadow, the dull familiar things swell with vibrance into a dimension
new like an omen.
I sit down, carefully folding my coat.—No wonder. What a shock!
What a night. I huddle in my dressing gown and greet the smoke of
my pipe.—No wonder. I take my book.
—Better read.
Above my shoulder, as I sit with the lamp close on the plain pine
table is a separate shelf: books on astrology. The book I hold is
bound in ivory parchment, cracked: the Gothic type stands bold on
the soft paper.
I begin to read where only yesterday I placed my mark. Yesterday
and this page: to-day and this page again. How can such difference
meet upon a page? But why so whole a difference? What has
happened? Your parents—nothing definitive there. Nothing is lost
there, surely. What you anticipated was: what is anticipated, is.
Make them understand. There is a way, if not to make them
understand, at least to make them.... This sense of an abysmal
separateness in your eye trying to link the words upon the page with
words an eye of yours saw yesterday, could not be born of what
happened with your parents. Philip—what of that? When he was a
danger, you did not know of him: now that you know of him, he is
dead. The danger is dead. She did not yet love him. He made claim
upon her, my one rival claim: and life has withdrawn it for me. A
shock—she will need time—but she will recover! Did this murder
shake her whom he loved as much as me who never saw him? Why
not be glad then, if she be not too shaken? Do you want her
prostrate? What folly is this in your will? Are the gifts of event less
welcome than the gifts of nature? Aren’t you glad you have a body
and a mind welcome to Mildred? Don’t you accept whatever vantage
they give you? Why not accept the vantage of events? How can you
help accept? John Mark, will you be morbid, like other men, when
the sun and moon of life shine full on you?... Better read.
—If there is something in all this, this strangeness in you: something
beside the tumult of your love, and the shock of learning how close
to your desire was another hand, hot and touching your own as you
reached—if there is something else, you’ll see it clearer in the
morning. Don’t push your clarity. Let it ripen. Dangerously close his
hand to your own? It is gone.... He may not be dead? ... a wound?
No, he is murdered. And that is forever.
—Mildred is strangely dim. My memory and the note of my taut
nerves tell me best at this moment how I love her. I want to see her.
I want to have her vividly here. To corroborate what? I want to see
again that first time when I saw her....

Evening, a dance. The electric lamps drive a stiff flood of light

through the gold-paneled room. No air—this atmosphere is a harsh
painted substance. Men and women are brittle or are cloying: their
spirit is dark as if no air had ever entered them. The music is a
weave of stuffs contorted, writhed, a hypocritical plea for gayety: its
sinuous lies move through the hall and through the bodies of the
dancers with a false laughter, with a macabre rhythm. Cynic music,
substitute in this world for breath; as are the lamps for light.... And
the coupled forms jerking slow in its rugose waves.
Then, I see Mildred! I have met her before: casually, more than
once. Now, for the first time, there is the grace in me to see her!
She is air, open and coursing: she is sunlight. Her solidity is resilient.
She has a body which is a luminous smile, impervious and ruthless.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her. For her antithesis is so exact
... the velvety music, the slow whining bodies ... that she is clear like
a poem in a world of inarticulations.
“Let’s talk,” she says. “It will be good for you to talk. Your mood is so
heavy.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Where else did you expect to find me?”
“I expected to find you nowhere.”
“Then you don’t know who I am.”
“You are Mildred Fayn. I have seen you: and I have heard of you.”
“Well, then? Did you not hear that I dance, that I motor, that I ride?
Did you not hear that I flirt?”
“Whatever I heard and saw has naught to do with you.”
“You look, Doctor Mark, as if you had made a discovery. And you
look solemn.”
“I am pleased.”
“You are like a child, perhaps? Most solemn when most pleased?”
“Children have the gift of discovery—and of wonder.”
Suddenly she was serious. She had glanced dazzlingly around me.
Now it was as if she came straight forward.
“I’ll dare be ‘serious’ with you,” she murmured.
She looked full at me: her eyes had a crisp tenderness, like some
immortal fruit ever upon the Springlike verge of ripeness. I knew
that she understood, although the words perhaps were not within
her mind, how laughter is oblique: how seriousness is the full face of
joy.
We sat in a little bower cut off from the hall by palms. It became a
cool and fluid haven from the hall—from the hall’s synthetic sun. She
was quiet. She folded her frail hands in her lap and raised her head.
A smile flickered at her mouth like a butterfly at a fruit. She dispelled
it.
“It’s hard to sit serious,” she whispered.
“It is so revealing.”
Again, instantly, she understood.
“Yes: we don’t mind being naked when we are in motion. It must be
that motion covers us? The dance, the swim. But being still, and
being seen....”
“Laughter,” I said, “is a shift we wear like motion.”
There was a pause. I illogically broke it: “You are uncovered, yet you
are at ease.”
She laughed: “No! You are wrapping me up in your observations
about me.”
“Why do they cover, rather than reveal you?”
“Why? Because they are illusions.”
“Oh!”
“Aren’t they romantic and inaccurate? You see, I am a girl who
dances and motors and flirts.” Her smile was indulgent: as if she
invited me, knowing how hard it was, to candor.
“How can you expect me to know you so swiftly?”
“Why not—swiftly?” she said.
I was aware of her as if she had been naked. I leaned forward in my
chair: she lay back in hers, with an ankle poised upon the other. She
knew my awareness, and was unashamed. There was naught
sensual in my knowing her. She did not challenge my sense: she
challenged my understanding. Her emerald dress gleamed in fluid
angles over her hips, around her waist and breast. She was not
naked, after all: she was clad in a cool flame aura of which her eyes
were the measureless sources.
“I am going to leave you here,” I said at last. “I want to see you
again. You will let me see you again?”—Again, again! oh, forever,
shouted my heart. “But not again in that lewd place, with its plush
music and its sticky light.”
“Where?” she asked. My violence was beyond her. She did not think
of the dance as anything but pleasant. And the music was to her the
usual dance music.
“In your home.”
“Come, surely,” she agreed. She gave me her hand.
I had many words, and she had none. My words were my ignorance:
her wisdom was itself, needing no concepts. In that moment, I
learned that also words—like motions—were shifts of
incompleteness. I grew ambitious as I had never been before. Long
I had willed to be great as men are great. And since I had first seen
her on this night I had dared to want her, as man possesses woman.
Now I longed more vertiginously far: I longed to be able to achieve
the domain beyond words, beyond conscious acts—to exert the
wisdom of power, somehow, beyond the articulation of my mind;
even as she was wise in the absolute miracle of her thoughtless
body. So fragile, so profoundly luminous she was! her eyes, her face,
her form the entexture of a petal in which all immensity lay glowing.
—To be a man is misery! Yet to hold her, I must be a man. I
understood the wisdom of beauty, its undimensioned power: and
how intellect and words are its groveling slaves. I envied this girl, I
with my man’s mind. I resolved to equal her in her own high
domain....

But now I cannot even see her! Though I recount this scene, it
sleeps pale in my mind. And if she come at all, it is otherwise than in
her relevation of the world beyond our conscious words—it is as I
saw her last, diminished and blemished by a thought of my own!
—Is this why my love of her dims? Tides ... the energy that swells
my love (do not torment yourself) has ebbed into other harbors, for
an hour. Were this not so, life would grow stagnant in my love, and
my love grow foul like a hooded and shut pool. You must understand
this, always, Mildred (what do you not understand?): how the waters
of my life move out from you, and then move in on you replenished
with the verdance of their wanderings....—Better not think of her
now, nor of the man murdered, nor of the hard enameled cheek of
mother.—Better read....
Like all else in my life, the study in the pseudo-science of astrology
is at once joy in my life and design in my work. I strive, as man has
always striven, to drown this anguish of being born a man, within
the stars. I cannot. For the stars are not greater, truer than my
passions; their convolutions do not make my thoughts petty and
unrelated; nor are they closer to God than my own searching will.
The solace of lies is denied me. All my life has battled against the
ease of falsity and sentiment. The solace of the Truth——?
Oh, I am small indeed, small and imperfect: no stronger and no
greater than those whirling stars. But if they swing sure (an instant)
in balance of the truth, cannot I? Gravitation—it is a phase of will, a
phase of fragmentary conscience, making these stars swing true,
one with the other. Let my thoughts do likewise!
I plunge once more into the symphony of search. We must move (it
is the fate of imperfection: that we must seem to move): our hope is
to move in unison with all the other parts of God. For the
harmonious sum of movements is immobile—is Truth’s still image.
Work that seeks not respite, that seeks knowledge, is indeed holy:
for it binds pitiful man into this symphony.
I think of the design on a man’s palm. Is the design of the stars a
similar chart recording the destiny of man’s brain? Of course, there is
rapport here—but of what nature? Man’s destiny, the graph of
molecule, cell, electron in man’s brain, and the congeried stars—are
they related as will, voice, phonographic record (where then is the
Will?), or as simultaneous projections of some body that includes us
all? This search is my work. I feel with exquisite anguish how the
heavens will help me. The vulgar idea of the phonographic record is
unreal. The stamp of voice and the record in the wax are not cause
and effect: or rather, cause and effect are but relative revelations to
our minds of two facts as simultaneous and organic as the two faces
of a coin. Even so the correspondence between braincell and star is
organic, integral and formal. Braincell and star are related like the
chemic stresses of a body. But our point of reference is the mind,
and the mind still thinks alas! in scaffold terms of space, of cause
and effect, of time. Hence, the sideral design appears beyond us,
and appears always changing. Our limitation paints the human
drama. Two infants dropped from one womb meet star-wordings
abysmally separate. All—from the plane of the womb to the farthest
sideral sweep—has changed to human consciousness and will, in the
instant between the births. The brains of the infants are two: the
foci of their minds make of the stars two sentences—and of their
lives two solitudes forever....
I stand before these clumsy artefacts of the child-seers ... the
astrologers ... and behold the stuff of a great thought! Am I not
young, exhilarant, equipped? There is the event, threefold expressed
for our three-dimensioned mind: the stars speak the event, human
life enacts it, histology and biologic chemistry release it. What a
Rosetta Stone for the unsealing, not of the written word of dead
Egyptians, but of the living word of God! Thought and its chemic
symbols in brain and body, act in human history and its wording in
the sideral cosmos—they are my materials, and they are docile in my
hand! I shall create an Axiom in the science of man: his conscious
part in God....

But this is not for to-night. The black type of my book is gray. Other
signs fill my room.... Mildred and love, fear and hate and horror. Why
not read them, since they are clamorous near? Are they perhaps as
true as the stars? What is their symbol yonder?
Molecules of brain, and flaming suns aflicker like ghosts through
emptiness. Are they will-o’-the-wisps misleading me from emptiness
which is perhaps the truth?
I am unhappy. My life which I have given to proud search, it seems
to-night that I have cast it away on nothing. Emptiness fills my
room. Between and beyond the stars, is there not Emptiness? I have
not Mildred. Shall I win her? What else is there to win?
Cosmos is a black cavern zero-cold, and the star-worlds flashing
their feeble fires are lost. If they and we embody God, is God not
also lost? Infinite cold, infinite blind blackness: vagrant mites spitting
their star fire into tiny corners. How do I know these flame-specks
are my fate? Why not the vaster spaces in between? the spaces
empty, the spaces zero-cold? Perhaps the fate of Philip is a sun,
burnt out. And my own, the black void that will never burn.... I lay
aside my book. Its arrogant hopes seem childish. Are no men born
to utter upon earth the Black that gapes between the closest stars?
Yet why think so? That Black is an illusion. Space does not exist:
emptiness is but your ignorance. The void between and beyond the
stars is the void within your fragmentary knowledge. And through
this fact, the void cannot concern you, since only knowledge longs
and only knowledge hurts. But were it even so, why fear the void?
What is there to fear in emptiness? Fear is not emptiness. Your fear
denies your fear.

—O my beloved: this grandiose lack is only lack of you!

How came I to love you? When my young mind moved toward the
mysteries of flesh, it was not your flesh made the search sweet.
When my young spirit went upon its journey, knowing there was no
end, it was not your spirit made the journey sweet. You have come
late upon me: yet all my seeking is dead without you, and all my
seeking has come full upon you! When I first saw you, my thought
was not to kiss your mouth, but to achieve a knowledge and a
power, like your own beauty’s wisdom beyond words. What mystery
is this?—And what mystery is my despair to-night? Am I not close to
Mildred? Could not a fool see in her luminous candor the dawn of
love? There was a danger, and that danger is dead! While it lived....
I pace my room: back and forth from the recessed windows to the
wall where stands a little table with a vase holding a white lily. And I
try to think.
—You must see. You must understand.
Yes, yes. I have gone too far to fall back easefully on ignorance.
—You must probe. You must understand.
Yes, yes. I look at my books.
—Not that.
I think of Mildred.
—Not Mildred....
I stand still: a shudder swarms my skin, draws my throat taut,
uprises in my hair....

... the white room larded with books: the face noble and reticent,
and the swift births of amaze, of pity, of horror ... indecorous death.
Pale hands fluttering up like rebellious dreams—and fallen.

My own hands bar my eyes.... How do I know this is not morbid

nonsense?
—What then is sense?
I am not so used to murder that this news, passionately close to my
love’s life, should not move me.
—I do not blame you, that you are moved.
“What can I do?”
I speak these words aloud, and the despair that dwells in them takes
shape. Shape of an impulsion. I know already what I am going to
do. But I contrive even now to laugh at myself.
—Fine man of science, driven by despair. Illogical, driven man!
I take off my clothes, and though the night is warm, I shiver in my
bed.
 f
I AM asleep and dawn is all about me: dawn within me: I am up
from bed and I am putting on my clothes. My face in the mirror
wakes me. I am half dressed already, and my mind says: “You must
not forget to shave.” I see my face. The mirror is by the window, it
stands on a highboy in my bedroom. Dawn is a mingling of stirs:
whistle of boat in the river fog, rattle of wagon in the gray cool mists
turning and twisting, footbeat solitary on the damp hard pavement—
this is dawn coming by the window into my room, to my face. I look
at my face, and then my face awakes me.
I put a fresh blade in my razor and shave swiftly. I take off the
underwear of yesterday that my hands, while I slept, put on: I bathe
cold: I dress fast.
The street is not different from the dawn that drenched my room.
Stone is solitary, damp: houses are stifled by the night that they
hold, that is passing. I buy a Times and a World at the corner stand
where the dark hunched man with thick glasses and a bristling beard
gazes at me with exaggerated eyes. I do not look at the paper,
waiting for the car. As I sit in the car, I read quietly what I expected
to find. Here is the substance:
It is a simple case. Mr. LaMotte’s serving man, Frank
Nelson, is implicated and is already in the Tombs. His
master gave him the evening off, and clearly the crime
could not have been committed without knowledge of this
and of the fact that Mr. LaMotte was alone. At about 8.30,
a man came to the apartments where Mr. LaMotte has his
chambers and told the colored doorboy, Elijah Case, that
he had an important note to be delivered in person. Elijah
phoned up and Mr. LaMotte responded. Elijah carried the
man to the third floor, pointed out the door, heard the
messenger knock, saw him enter ... and went down. Little
time passed before the elevator signal rang again. Elijah
went up, opened the elevator door and the messenger
stepped in.... Elijah recalls him clearly. “How do you
happen to be so certain?” the police asked him. “I dunno.
But I is.” He says the man was dressed entirely in black,
and that his head was white. “Do you mean white like a
white man?” “Nossah ... I means white lak ... lak chalk.”
“Even his hair?” “I don’ remember no hair. A white head.
Da’s all.” “Even his eyes?” Elijah shuddered. “Yessah. Dey
was white, too.”... The police infer that the colored boy,
who is simple-minded and imaginative, made up his
monster after he had learned the event. In any case,
Elijah went back to his little hall office: and shortly after a
call came in, by phone, for Mr. LaMotte. No: Mr. LaMotte
had no private phone. Instructions were, not to say in any
instance whether Mr. LaMotte was at home, to get the
name and announce it first. It was Mrs. LaMotte, the
deceased’s mother. She often called, and although
frequently Mr. LaMotte would tell the boy: “Say I am not
at home” ... that doubtless was why he used the house
phone ... never in the three years Elijah had worked at the
apartment had Mr. LaMotte failed to answer his signal, and
never had he refused to speak to his mother. Elijah
phoned up, now, and received no answer. This satisfied
the mother who rang off. But it began to trouble Elijah.
Mr. LaMotte never walked down, and also he never left
without giving word to the boy. During all that time, Elijah
had not been required to leave his little office in full view
of the hall. Finally, Elijah was scared. He phoned again. No
answer. He went up, and rang, and pounded on the door.
He went down into the Square and found an officer. They
broke open the door, for the pass-key was with the janitor
who was away.... The murdered man was lying on his
back in the library, with a wound in his heart. There was
little blood, no weapon, no sign of a struggle. But the
weapon must have been a long and slender knife aimed
with rare accuracy. Nothing seemed to be missing. The
small safe in a recess of a bookcase was shut, no
 fingerprints were found. If the object was theft, the
valuable stolen is unknown and hence its loss is still a
mystery. Or else the thief was frightened off ... that
happens. A simple case, which leaves the police in
confidence of a quick solution....
I noted the address and left my papers on the foul straw seat of the
car. A man with a skull-like head, skin yellow and tough and eyes
that bulged with a lost tenderness, reached out for them. Leaving, I
was aware of the two mournful rows of humans facing each other
like lugubrious birds on swinging perches.... I found the number and
flashed my police card at a brown boy who took me up: the wonder
in his eyes was mingled with proprietory pride at his connection with
a headline murder. At the door stood a policeman. I heard myself
say, coolly:
“I am Doctor Mark of the Institute.” I did not show my card.
He understood nothing, and was impressed by me. I was beginning
to be impressed by myself.
Alone in the hall, I hesitated.—I need still not go in. Someone was in
the room, and he would come, and I could talk with him explaining
my personal interest in a friend. Why not go in? What was I doing
here? I had come like an automaton sprung by the despair of the
distant night. Moving, I lost my agony. Even this single stationary
moment in the hall brought to my nerves a starting pain as if to
stand still were some unnatural act forced by my will on my body.—
Let me go on. The door opened, and a blunt big man scrutinized me
with the vacuous stare that doubtless he took for subtlety. I watched
myself dispose:
“I am Doctor Mark of the Institute.” I showed him my card, “... and a
friend: a family friend.” I did not hesitate. I wore a light top coat,
and I took it off.
The man softened and nodded.
“I am Lieutenant Gavegan.” We shook hands. “He’s in there, sir.” He
pointed with his thumb in a miracle of reticent grace. There was a
pause in which my will must have spoken. For he said, as if in
answer:
“I suppose I can leave you alone in there, sir, a few moments. Don’t
touch nothing.”
I saw the image of a cigar in his flat mind as he moved toward his
friend, the officer at the entrance. I shut the door behind me.

g
I KNEW this room. The regimented books marched high toward the
high ceiling: the subtle notes upon the shelves of color and of plastic
twisted like flageolets in a bright cadenza down against the stout
march of the books. The square room veered roundly, the ceiling
vaulted: all was a concave shut and yet wide about this man who lay
upon the floor.
I knew the room, and I was not amazed. Casual thoughts....—
Mildred was here: you are the woman for whom men kill, a white-
faced man killing with shiny boots ... went through my mind as I
leaned down: I was unamazed and cool, lifting the sheet that lay
upon the body.
The face did not stop me. I opened the white shirt with its solid
bubbles of blood, and my sure hands went to the wound. The blade
had been struck from a point higher than the breast, so that its
angle from above was acute. It had passed through the pectoralis
major and minor muscles, through the fourth intercostal space, and
into the right auricle of the heart. The ascending portion of the aorta
had been severed. Death was immediate and clean. No surgeon with
a body prostrate under his hand could have cut better. This body
now was prostrate before me. Swiftly, my eyes measured it: it was
six feet, possibly six feet two.... I folded back the shirt, and now, as
if I had been satisfied, I looked at the face of Philip LaMotte.
I studied the face which, not twelve hours since, had come to me in
the apocalyptic street. A white pallor overlaid the rich dark
pigmentation. The beard stubble had grown: it emphasized the
accurate delicacy of the chin and the tender strength of the lips. The
nose arched high. The brow was serenely broad: the black curled
hair, like a filet, came low and round. The shut eyes made the vision
startling: a Saint of the Chartres Porche.
I saw myself crouched over this slain saint whom death had sculpted
into marble. My mind remarked with an aloof surprise, how little my
observations and my will at work surprised me. Was I discovering,
indeed? or was I appraising? Was I probing a crime that for good
cause haunted me, or was I reviewing ... reviewing——?
I was on my knees crouched over the body of Philip LaMotte. I
heard the door. I looked up at the figure of Detective Gavegan. With
careful grace, I arose.
“Does the boy Case have a good memory of the man’s size, who
brought the message?”
“He says: about medium size.”
“How tall is Case?”
“You saw him. He’s a short darkey.”
“If the man’d been Mr. LaMotte’s size, Case would have known it?”
“Six foot, one and a half? Well, I guess.” Gavegan flattened his eyes
once more upon me in a simagre of study.
“I know what you’re thinkin’,” he snickered. “They all likes to play
detective. How could so short a man have finished him so fine? Size
ain’t strength, Doctor Mark: no more than a big man need lack for
wits.” Gavegan’s huge form swelled.
I watched him. The hopelessness of making him respond to my
discoveries, still so dark to myself, fought against a pleasant call in
me that it would be wrong to hide anything from the law.
“Has that message ... has any letter been found?”
He shook his head wisely. “No: nor there won’t be. The final
examination is this morning. That’s why the body ain’t yet been
removed. But there won’t be. That letter was mere pretext.”
“This looks a simple case to you?”
“Plain motive. Theft. How do you know what Mr. LaMotte was
carryin’ in his pocket just last night? The butler knew. Mebbe a jewel
for a girl. Or a bundle of securities. Surely a wad of bills, and he
preparin’ for a journey.”
“Oh, he was preparing for a journey?”
Gavegan gave me a gentle look of pity.
“Come over here,” he beckoned with his head. On a small teak-wood
desk between the windows, lay a diary pad bound in black levant. It
was open to this day. There was one note, scrawled small in pencil:
“Gr Ct M 10.30”
I fingered the pad. There were almost no other entries.
“What do you think that means?”
Gavegan loomed. “Grand Central Station. Train at 10.30. And meetin’
there with ... M.”
“Plausible,” I said, and was unsure if I agreed or if I mocked. “I
suppose you know already who is ‘M’?”
He eyed me with omniscience. “That we don’t give out, sir. Even to a
distinguished friend.”
“But the wound, Gavegan! Have you looked at the wound?”
He was stupid. I prepared to tell my thoughts. Was it because or
despite that he was too stupid to receive them?
“The wound might puzzle you, I think, if you had studied more
anatomy. The man who dealt it did so from above, for it struck the
right auricle of the heart at an angle of less than forty-five degrees!
How could a short man do that to a man six feet one and a half?
And how could any man murder LaMotte like that, if LaMotte were
not literally baring his breast: parting his arms, even raising his arms
(the muscle wound shows that, besides) in order to receive the
blow?”
The image of a victim coöperating with his slayer was too much for
the law. The discomfort of my analysis struck Mr. Gavegan as an
impertinent invasion. He barred it with laughter. I could see his
thought in his mouth and his eye.
“—These scientist cranks.”
I went on: not knowing, again, if my motive was to convince or was
bravado in the certainty that my man was beneath convincing.
“Gavegan, have you ever noted the subtle stigmata of the hypnotic
trauma?”
Gavegan grumbled.
“I’m afraid, sir, I’ll be havin’ to let you go. The Coroner’s cormin’
again. We always likes to be hospitable to the big doctors at the
Institutions, whenever we can help ’em in their studies.” He pulled a
huge silver timepiece from his vest, and went to the window, and
looked out.
I was immersed so fully, that even now my action did not make my
mind break in amaze from the rhythm of events. The big man was at
the window looking out: for he believed he had heard the Coroner’s
car, and doubtless this meant that his night’s work was over and he
could go to his wife. I moved unhesitant to an open door that led
into a little passage. A strip of blue carpet covered the floor. And
naked-clear there lay on it a white envelope which I picked up and
put into my pocket.
I thanked Gavegan: gave him two cigars, and left.

h
WHEN I reached my rooms, Mrs. Mahon was there with my
breakfast tray, and wondering what could have taken me out so
early. Mrs. Mahon was the Italian widow of an Irish policeman. I sat
down to my fruit, and her ample and unsubtle beauty was pleasant
to my mood, so that I held her with words. Mrs. Mahon loved to talk
with me: but in her sense of my state she was shrewd, and she had
never intruded her wide hard rondures and the brash clarities of her
mind upon my silence. She stood over me now, with her bare arms
crowding her bosom, and told me of the latest misdeeds of her lover.
Mrs. Mahon was beautiful, and to me entirely without charms. Her
head was small, the black hair massed low on the blandness of the
forehead, and her nose was Roman. Her eyes bore out my fancy of
the moment, that she was not flesh; for in their heavy facets was no
expression. The mouth was long and quiet. Its sensuality seemed a
deliberate trait, somehow not born of her own flesh but of the will of
the artist who had made her. Finally, her body as I could sense it
under the loose white fabric of her gown, was an arrangement of
obvious feminine forms: high breasts, stomach and hips subdued:
and yet to me devoid of the mystery of her sex. She was the body
unlit, goodly and functioning: the sacrament of flesh without the
spirit. So this day it was cool nourishment to look at Mrs. Mahon, to
drink in her clarities, to convince myself that she was not sculpture,
quite the opposite: real.
The tang of the grapefruit, the earthy pungence of the not too fresh
eggs, the bite of the coffee, merged with Mrs. Mahon: and I was
happy in a deep forgetfulness. I was sleepy. The thought came:—
You have had a bad dream. Your visit to the body may be real: but
you can wipe it out like a dream. It need have no consequence in
the real world. And that is the trait of the dream, is it not? the one
trait that shuts dream out from other planes of life? And I chatted
with Mrs. Mahon, and gave her advice.
“His misdeeds,” I said, “save you from ever being bored by him. You
should be thankful.”
She smiled: “Oh, I guess he’s a man: and I guess I’m a woman. I
suppose I get him sore, too, sometimes, just because my ways are
them of a woman. And yet, if I wasn’t a woman, and if he wasn’t a
man——”
“Precisely, Mrs. Mahon. What you’ve just said is philosophical and
deep.”
She shook her head at my solemn words which, I judged, tickled her
as the prickings of a poignard might titillate an elephant. She went
out with my tray, and the thought “Rome” came to me as I watched
her perfect carriage: the low spacing of her feet, the swing of her
hips, the breadth of her back, and the little head so rightfully
proportioned, like a rudder steering the life that dwelt within her
body.
—Rome. How far I am from Rome. How sweet Rome would be, with
its sure shallow strength.
I lit a pipe. Melancholy and the hint of an old anguish wiped out Mrs.
Mahon.—This anguish is what moves me, moves me toward what
seems the cause of the anguish. A paradox that is a common law.
Look at love: how pain of unfulfillment moves us upon the loved
one, and as we come ever closer, ever deeper and more absolute
grows the pain of unfulfillment. If I could analyze what this is that
has taken me: if I could only know where it began.... But I know
that it must first fill out its life ere my mind measure it. What did my
poor analysis avail me? How wisely I announced: “Your anguish
moves you toward the source of your anguish. You cannot stay still
because you must fulfill your own beginning.” And how blindly I
moved!
I reached into my pocket and took out the envelope that I had not
yet examined, and that Mrs. Mahon had helped me to forget. It was
addressed
Philip LaMotte, Esquire
By Bearer
and it was in the straight high script of Mildred Fayn!
It was empty.
I tapped it against my open palm and wondered why I felt that it
had any bearing on the case. There was no proof that this was the
alleged letter of the fatal messenger. On the contrary, how could I
entertain a thought that would implicate Mildred in this horrible
affair? What was I trying to find, or to think? I was abhorrent to
myself. Doubtless, Mildred had written more than once to a man so
close. My reason flayed my miserable thoughts: but did not break
them: did not avail against their issuance in deed.
I telephoned to Mildred.
“Yes?” she answered and her frail voice bloomed out of the wire,
drenching my sense in a languor of desired peace.
“Mildred,” I said, “doubtless these days you would prefer not to see
me.” She did not answer this. “But something possibly important has
come up: I feel that I should speak to you.”
She hesitated.
“Meet me at lunch, at Sherry’s ... at one-thirty.”

i
MY work took me. I worked well. Doctor Isaac Stein’s warm voice
startled me at my shoulder.
“You have a fine power of concentration, Doctor Mark. I’ve been
here five minutes watching your immobile absorption.”
I turned and met the gray eyes of the great bio-chemist: of the man
whom of all Americans I admired most.
“It is the contrary of concentration. My brain is split in two. And the
one part does not trouble the other.”
He nodded and frowned.
“It’s the part of your brain which dwells so voluptuously with those
ganglions, that interests me.”
“I stand rebuked, sir.”
“You’ll learn that the other part which you think now so worthily
engaged in speculation and in rhapsody, is merely the part not yet in
solution—not at the point yet of true condensation. When you’re
wholly crystallized, Mark, then you’ll be whole.”
“You disapprove of me, Doctor Stein?”
He laughed. “You should know better than that.”
“You have the passion for unity of your race, sir.” I laughed back.
“This faith in unity which your science posits is itself the creation of
a wild mystic rhapsody.”
“It is the premise of every human thought, of every human act.”
“—That has survived, since it fitted into the unitary scheme. But is
there not something arbitrary about that, Professor Stein? Two
intense single-minded peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews, set up
a scale of consciousness based on the Unit, and narrow down the
multiverse to that. Everything that men did or thought must fit that
scale of One, be translated into it: everything that failed was
rejected, was unrecorded, hence intellectually was nonexistent. To-
day, after three thousand years of this sort of selection, we have
quite an array of theory, data, thought, all in the key of One: we
have a whole civilization based on One, a whole set of religions
tuned in One, to which our senses as well as our minds submit and
finally conform. What does that prove beyond the thoroughness of
the Greeks and Hebrews? of their initial will to throw out all contrary
evidence, to deny all dimensions beyond it?”
“Could this premise of the Unity have builded up so wholly the
structure of science, æsthetic, logic ... the structure of human
action, were it but an arbitrary premise that might be replaced by
others at least as valid?”
“The strength of the limited, Doctor Stein: the protection of
exclusion.”
Doctor Stein’s eyes sharpened.
“Very well. Then, does not the success of this premise, which you
call limiting and protective, prove that it expresses perfectly the
human essence? The fact that by means of the premise of unity man
is beginning to master life, does that not prove, besides, that man’s
essence and the essence of being are common terms, permitting a
contact after all between the subjective and objective, between the
phenomenal and the absolute?”
“You are assuming the success, Doctor Stein! And you are assuming
that this thing which man is ‘mastering’ is life: is something more
than the creation of the subjective will which started with the Unit
that it finds everywhere and thereby ‘masters’ ... finding and
mastering only and always itself. You are assuming that every day is
not compounded of events which transcend the powers of unitary
logic and unitary experience even to conceive them. How do we get
out of the difficulty? From these parabola shapes that are the
events, perhaps, of every day, our minds snatch down the
fragmentary intersections that touch the terms of our minds. The
rest is ignored. Your ‘success’ of biology, mathematics, chemistry,
physics, æsthetics, mechanics, is simply your own dream,
complacently rounded by your unitary will. Unchallenged, for the
most part, for the simple reason that long ago man’s mind has
lopped off whatever might have challenged.”
“Well, then, even you will admit that the human will is unitary.”
“And what does the will cover? how successful, how potent is the
human will? If it were not deeply at variance with Life, would our will
make mostly for anguish and for failure? Would it not be a bit more
competent than it is? Would history, social and personal, not be a
happier story?”
Professor Stein’s eyes were hot.
“Come up some evening, Mark: any evening when I’m in town: we’ll
go into this.”
He left me.

j
CLASPING Mildred’s hand in the pied lobby, I touched a warm, proud
sorrow. She was changed ... deepened rather. In her great eyes, a
new limpidity: and more than ever the counterpoint of her bright
hard body and of her spirit, dark and profoundly still, gave to her a
beauty almost beyond my bearing.
I gripped myself. I silenced my clamoring question: “Mildred,
Mildred, did you love him, then?” We sat, touching our food, saying
no word, until I had mastered myself.
When I was able to speak:
“I went to his place this morning, and they let me in.”
Her eyes rose to mine and dwelt there quietly.
“I saw his face, dead. Even in death it was noble. He must have
been a great man, Mildred.”
Her eyes assented, serenely.
I made my eyes see only the loveliness of this girl: but perhaps my
mouth trembled with a jealous pain.
“John,” she answered both my eyes and my mouth, “you are
suffering too. You are afraid Philip’s death has given him an
advantage over you—a sort of perfection easier to love than your
own struggling life. That’s not true, John. Would I lunch with you in
this gay place to-day, not twenty-four hours after his death, if I
responded in such a foolish way to life? You are very dear to me,
John: I know that also.”
I could not speak. So I took from my pocket the envelope and gave
it her, in silence.
She examined it, turning it about. Her eyes met mine fully:
“How amazing! How amazing!” she whispered. “Where does this
come from?”
“I found it on the floor not far from where he lay. It might have been
nearer, or have blown from its place on the desk. For the windows
were open. Why is it amazing?”
“Why? Because it is my hand. And because I did not write it.”
“Mildred, for the sake of our reason, be sure of what you say. You
must have written more than once to Philip.”
She paused: her teeth bit hard in her lower lip, a tremor of resolve
pushed up to her sharp shoulders. Then, in a quiet containment, she
answered me.
“I make no mistake, John. I did write, infrequently, to Philip. I never
sent him a note by messenger. If I needed to communicate with him
quickly, I telephoned, or I wired.”
In her pause, the gilt bustle of the room where we were lunching,
the room itself, became a shallow and unreal line upon some
darkling density about us. Mildred went on:
“This is a fine version of my hand. But it is not my hand. And there
is more superficial evidence than my conviction, that it is not mine.
Did you notice the envelope, John?”
Her hand on the table with its débris of crystal and porcelain and
silver was steady: mine, taking the paper, trembled.
I looked, and my soul blanched: my hands seemed to crumple and
collapse about the flimsy paper. I fumbled at the flap. There was the
same lining of green tissue, and the name embossed in tiny letters
... Tissonier ... the Paris stationer from whom I had bought my
stock! How could I have failed to notice this before? this fine
baronial envelope and the tinted tissue lining which I liked because it
gave to the sheer white linen an undertone of privacy symbolic of
what an envelope should carry.