Phases of an Inferior Planet Part 31

CHAPTER XX

For a week after Mariana's departure Algarcife worked on ploddingly. He closed his eyes to actualities and allowed his overwrought mind no cessation from labor. It was as if all molecular motion in his brain had been suspended save that relating to the subject in hand, and he wrote with mechanical readiness journalistic essays upon the "Advantages of a Vegetable Diet" and "The Muscular Development of the Body." Then, upon trying to rise one morning, he found that his shattered system was turning in revolt, and that no artificial spur could sting his exhausted brain into action.

Through the long, hot day he lay relaxed and nerveless, conscious of the glare of the sunshine, but dreading to draw the shades, conscious of the closeness of the atmosphere, and conscious of a beating, like the strokes of an anvil, in his temples. When his dinner was brought he drank a cup of tea and sat up. Then he reached for a phial of morphia pellets which he kept in his desk, and, dissolving one in water, swallowed it. For a moment the temptation to take the contents of the phial at a dose a.s.sailed him, but, more from inability to venture a decisive step than from any mental determination, he laid the bottle aside. Action of any kind appeared intolerably irksome, and he waived with disgust the solution of the simple problem of his life.

As he fell back upon the bed, his glance pa.s.sed over the pillow beside him, and he pictured to himself the circle which Mariana's head had drawn upon the cotton. He remembered that she always slept lying upon her right side, her left knee bent, one hand under the pillow and one lying upon her breast, her profile shadowed by dreams. He remembered the nervous fear she felt of resting upon her heart, and that, having once turned upon her left side, she awoke with palpitating breaths and a smothered cry. He saw her calmer slumber, he felt her rhythmic breathing, and he recalled his sensation when one of her loosened braids had brushed his cheek. Again he saw her as she leaned over to soothe the child, and, raising it in her arms, hushed it upon her breast. He recalled it dully, as one recalls the incidents of long-past years over which the colorless mantle of time has been cast to deaden the flickering embers amid the ashes. In his mind there was no virility of pa.s.sion nor intensity of bitterness--there was only an almighty melancholy. Life in its sufficiency of satisfied desires showed stale and unprofitable, and in its barrenness it was but a blank.

The sunshine, blazing through the open window, accelerated the throbbing in his temples. In the morbid acuteness of his senses, the cries of the vegetable venders in the street below hara.s.sed his ears. Along his whole body there ran a quivering flame of fever, and his thoughts spun like a revolving globe. The morphia had not stilled the beating in his head. It had produced a sensation of sickness, which seemed but the physical accompaniment of his mental syncope.

He surveyed the books stacked against the opposite wall and wondered vaguely at the energy with which he had attacked those volumes upon whose covers the dust was now lying like a veil. He tried to arouse a memory of the old intellectual exhilaration with which he had grappled with and vanquished an unexplored department of thought. He remembered that at such moments the printed lines before him had a.s.sumed an unusual degree of clearness, and that he had been reading _The Wealth of Nations_ when a point in comparative morphology occurred to him. But the sensation itself he could not recover. The a.s.sociation of ideas was still unbroken, but the mental state was lost.

As he lay there, tossing restlessly upon the heated pillows, he reviewed unsympathetically his old pursuit of knowledge. What did it all mean?

For what had he given his heritage of youth and manhood? For Truth.

Granted, but what was Truth that he should follow it unswervingly until he pa.s.sed from flesh and blood to a parcel of dry bones? How could he find it, and, finding, know it? That gray and ancient scepticism which had never appealed to him in health preyed now upon his wasting vitals.

Since through the senses alone one could perceive, and the senses were but faulty instruments, what was perception worth? What were ideas but the figments produced by faculties which were at best deceptive? And in the infinite complexity of the self-sustaining reality, of what account were the abstractions of the finite intellect? In Truth itself, that all-pervading immateriality, were not the myriads of man's little truths ingulfed and lost? Were not true and false but symbols to express the differing relations of a great whole, as evolution and dissolution were symbols to express the recurring waves of a great force. As one man with his single hand barring the march of the seasons, was the man who by his single brain sought to hasten the advance of the Law which is Truth. And though he crumbled to dust, not one needful fact but would find its way into the moving world.

Stunned by despondency, he closed his eyes and groaned. In the absolute grasp of the futility of endeavor, he realized the lowest depths of human hopelessness. It was as if he had reached the ultimate nothing, the end to which his pathway led. Though he dashed his brains into the void, not one breath of the universal progress would swerve from its course.

And happiness? What was it but another symbol to signify the wistful yearning of the world? Where was it found? Not in love, which is the thirsting for a woman's spirit; not in pa.s.sion, which is the burning for a woman's flesh. Did not bitterness follow upon the one, and upon the other satiety? His nature was deadened to the verge of obliviousness, and in his waning vitality the impulse of self-gratification had gone first. Physical desires shrank into decay, and mental ones pa.s.sed with them. He wondered that he had ever sought in love other than calm reasonableness and a cooling presence. The emotion that sent scarlet thrills to his brain he a.n.a.lyzed with callousness. He remembered his mother as she lay upon the invalid's sofa, her Bible and a novel of Victor Hugo's upon the table beside her. He saw the placid beauty of her face, the slender, blue-veined hand which she laid upon his forehead when he went to her a wailing child; and it seemed to him that such a touch was the only touch of love with the power to console. Then he remembered Mariana's hand as she laid it upon her child and his, and he knew that the touch was the same. He thought of her as she sat beside the crib when the child lay dying. The pa.s.sionate self-control about the mouth, the agony in her eyes, the tragic droop of her figure--these returned to soften him. He saw the black shadow of the palm-leaf fan, pa.s.sing to and fro above the little bluish face, and he heard the labored breathing.

In sudden bitterness he opened his arms and cried aloud, "Mariana!"

Then the tears of weakness and despair stained the pillow where her head had lain.

When the twilight fell he rose, dressed himself with an effort, and descended the stairs. His limbs trembled as he moved, and, upon reaching the open air, he staggered and leaned for support against the red brick wall. Then he straightened himself, and wandered aimlessly from street to street. As he pa.s.sed among men and women he was aware of a strange aloofness, as if the links connecting him with his kind had snapped asunder; and he felt that he might have been the being of another planet to whom earthly pa.s.sions and fulfilments bore no palpable relation, but were to be considered with cosmic composure. The thought jarred upon him insistently that these moving men and women, whom he brushed in pa.s.sing, were each stirred by an ent.i.ty akin to that which in himself lay drugged. He realized that the condition of a mind without the attraction of physical desires is as chaotic as the condition of a world suddenly freed from the attraction of gravitation.

He looked at his fellow human beings with forced intentness. It struck him with an almost hysterical shock that they were of ludicrous shapes, and he laughed. Then he glanced at a carriage rolling along the street, and it appeared absurd that one mortal should sit upon four wheels while a fellow-mortal of a n.o.bler build should draw him. He laughed again. As he did so he had a quick perception that delirium was approaching, and he stopped to swallow another pellet. He reeled slightly, and a boot-black upon the corner surveyed him with interest.

"Air yer drunk, mister?"

He laughed aloud. "d.a.m.ned drunk," he responded, and walked on. Some hours later he found himself in Whitehall Street, pa.s.sing the lighted windows of the Eastern Hotel. Beneath the station of the elevated road he came upon a stand, with the words "Cider and Root-Beer" flaming in red letters on a white background, and for the first time he was conscious of a sensation of thirst. He stopped, felt in his pocket, and then, checking himself, pa.s.sed onward to the Battery. A sharp wind struck him, blowing the damp hair from his forehead and chilling the drops of perspiration upon his face. With a feeling of relief he leaned against one of the stone pillars and bared his head to the incoming breeze. Far out the islands shone in iridescent lights, flashing through variations of green and amber, and over the water the ferry-boats skimmed like gigantic insects studded with parti-colored eyes.

Down below the water lay black and cold, the slow breakers flecked with light foam. He saw a glimmer as of phosph.o.r.escence rise suddenly upon the waves, and, looking deeper, he saw the eternal stillness. Between the throbs of fever the pa.s.sion for death seized him in a paroxysm, and mentally he felt the quiet waters stir beneath him and the quietness close over him. His hand fastened upon the iron chain between the pillars; then he drew back.

He remembered the row of acids upon a shelf in his room, and his a.s.surance returned. With a sensation of luxuriousness he recalled the labels with the large "Poison!" above, and the inscription "Hydrocyanic Acid" stared him in the eyes. When he had made that collection for experimental purposes how little had he foreseen the experiment in which it would play a part. He sat down upon a bench and stared idly at the stream of pa.s.sers-by, some lovers who went arm-in-arm, some husbands and wives who walked apart, some fathers and mothers who carried sickly children--all bound and burdened with the flesh. The fretful wail of a baby came to him and mingled mechanically with his train of thought. It seemed the frail treble in the great symphony of human woe.

Beyond the men and women he saw the black water and the dancing lights, and, farther still, the misty islands.

Gradually the fever starts grew less, and calmness came back to him.

With a wave of regret he looked back upon his lost serenity, and lamented that it had failed him. He knew that in his mental upheaval the opposing elements in his nature had waged a combat. The scientific tenor of his mind had for the past few weeks been crushed out by the virulence of his nerves. That physical force which he had so long held enthralled had at last a.s.serted its supremacy, and for the time his mind was under the sway of bodily weakness.

This duality of being occurred to him in perplexing inconsistency. Had he been a pure mentality, his life would have been one steep and victorious ascent towards knowledge. Were he but a physical organism, carnality would have satisfied his cravings. Then the remembrance that stronger than will or flesh is necessity arose and smote him into silence.

Many of the people had gone, but he still sat plunged in thought. A hatless woman, fresh from a midnight carousal, with a bleeding cut upon her lip, took the seat beside him, and he found a forlorn comfort in the contact with alien wretchedness. When she laid her head upon the back of the bench and fell asleep, he listened to her drunken snores calmly and without aversion. He became aware that his old kinship to humanity was at the moment restored, that, losing it with the loss of desire, it was regained in despair. Suddenly the head of the woman beside him rolled forward and rested against his shoulder. She stirred slightly, heaved a sigh of satisfaction, and returned to her ribald dreams, while he, in numbness and pain, found consolation in this forced sacrifice of comfort.

He did not move, and through the long night the drunken woman slept with her head upon his shoulder.

For the next few days he dragged out a methodical existence. In the mornings he would force himself to rise, swallow his food, and take his accustomed seat before his desk. With a failing hand he would take up his pen and endeavor to bend his fever-stricken brain to its task, but before a dozen lines were penned his strength would falter and the effort be abandoned. Then he would rise and finger the phials on the shelf, until, turning from them, he would say, "I will fight--fight until the last gasp--and then--"

At the beginning of the week, when his lodging bill was due, he carried by the armful a number of his books and p.a.w.ned them for a nominal sum.

Then he remembered his watch, and left that also. It was a heavy hunting-case of his father's, which he had always used from the nearness of the a.s.sociation, and as he laid it down something came into his throat. He opened the watch and took out the picture of his mother which was inside--a sketch in color, showing the l.u.s.trous Creole beauty in her first youth. Then he snapped the case and saw the initials "A. K. A."

pa.s.s into the hands behind the counter.

Leaving the p.a.w.n-shop, he walked rapidly through the oppressive September sun until his limbs failed. Then turning with the throng of men that flowed into City Hall Square, he came to a sudden halt before the fountain. He was dazed and weakened, like a man who has recovered from a lapse into unconsciousness. The constant pa.s.sing of the crowd bewildered him, and the sound of falling water in the fountain irritated him with the suggestion of thirst. He turned away and threw himself upon a bench beneath the shade of a tree. For an instant he closed his eyes, and when he opened them he found the scene before him to have intensified. The falling water sounded more distinctly, the sky was of a glaring blueness, and the dome of the _World_ building glittered like a cloud of fire.

To his straining eyes the statue of Horace Greeley seemed to grin at him from across the traffic in the street, and as he staggered to his feet he felt an impulse to shake his fist at it and say:

"d.a.m.n you! It is a chance that I want," but his muscles faltered, and he fell back.

Then his glance wandered to the man beside him, a filthy vagrant with the smell of grease about his clothes. Did not he want his chance as well? And a few feet away a boy with a scowl on his lips and a bruise above his eye--why not a chance for him? Then a gray haze obscured his vision and the noise of the street was dulled into a monotone.

The throbbing in his temples grew faster, and as he sat there he knew that he had fought to the final gasp and that the end had come. In his physical downfall there was room for neither alarm nor regret. He was lost to all vaguer impressions than the trembling of his frame, the icy starts through his limbs, the burning of his eyes, and the inevitable beating in his temples. Beyond these things he neither knew nor cared.

With the instinct for solitude, he started and rose to move onward, when he saw that the earth was undulating beneath his feet and that the atmosphere was filled with fog. The dome of the _World_ building reeled suddenly and clashed into the flaming sky. He heard the sound of brazen-tongued bells ringing higher and higher above the falling of the water, above the tread of pa.s.sing feet, and above the dull, insistent din of the traffic in the streets.

Then his name was called and he felt a hand upon his arm.

"Why, Anthony!"

He looked up bewildered, but straightened himself and stood erect, straining at the consciousness that was escaping him.

"How are you, Mr. Speares?" he asked. His voice was without inflection.

Father Speares spoke with impa.s.sioned pity. "What are you doing? You are ill--a ghost--"

Algarcife steadied himself against the bench and said nothing.

"What does it mean? Your wife--where is she?"

Anthony's voice came slowly and without emotion. "I am alone," he answered.

A quick moisture sprang to the older man's eyes. He held out his hand.

"Come with me," he said, fervently. "I am alone also. Come to my house."

Algarcife left the bench and took a step from him.

"No," he replied. "I--I am all right."

Then he staggered and would have fallen but for the other's sustaining arm.

Phase Second

_"And not even here do all agree--no, not any one with himself."_