FROM where he sat, sheltered from the wind by the rock at his back, Thorne looked down on a restless sea of cloud out of which the higher peaks pushed occasional wooded shoulders. It was early: he had slept on the mountain, and climbed to this lookout before dawn. When the clouds lifted the wilderness would lie spread out at his feet like a map. Into that wilderness John Cawder had disappeared.
Roger Thorne and John Cawder had been roommates in prep school and for two years of college, before the older boy had suddenly pulled up roots and vanished on the eve of his twenty-first birthday. Their tastes had been much alike and very different from those of their classmates, and it was loneliness as much as anything that drew them together in the beginning and held them for those five years.
Cawder was queer—much more so than his friend, whose greatest sin against society was the earnestness with which he applied himself to the most unrewarding work. The queerness grew, until only Thorne would have much to do with him. He came of a talented line: his father a poet whose early promise had flowered macabrely and withered overnight—his grandfather a chemist and physician of note who choose to bury himself in the dark corners of the world, doing battle with little-known diseases. His own talent lay in his paintings, and even as a boy they had attracted attention. At first they had been sunny—clean—full of the feverish vitality which was so characteristic of him, but as he grew older they changed as he did. In that later phase, as he blazed a meteoric trail through the salons of prewar Europe, something dark and morbid crept into them and touched them with the kind of strangeness which makes people shift uneasily and look away, only to look again—and buy.
Thorne had not seen him in all those years. He had had his own successes in mathematics—the borderline of theoretical physics—but it was in no way spectacular as Cawder’s was. The artist’s lean face was in all the picture magazines, lending its distinguished pallor alike to the Old Families and café society, while Thorne was known to the handful of men, leaders in their own fields, whom his work touched. Both men were lonely: Cawder’s the loneliness of his genius, untouched by the bland, blind adulation of his public—Thorne’s a loneness which he had chosen himself, because there were few people who could join him in the world in which his thoughts moved, and because there was another world—this world of mountains and empty skies—where being alone made him a part of the things he loved most.
THREE days ago they had met on the platform of a little mountain station where Thorne sat, hands clasped over the patched knee of his breeches, puffing on a stubby pipe and swapping yarns with old Jim Dawson, the station master. They had been face to face as. Cawder stepped off the late train. They eyes met, and Thorne knew that the artist recognized him, but Cawder turned quickly away, climbed into a streamlined roadster parked behind the station, and drove off into the darkness.
Thorne had probed a little then. He learned of the fenced-in wilderness with its armed guards and its great iron gates, always locked. He heard of game which was never shot, fish which were never caught, mile after mile of timber which no axe had ever touched—woodsmen’s stories, told by men he knew well. He heard rumors, too, and because they in no way fitted the John Cawder he had once known, he was here, inside the fence, past the ring of guards, waiting on a mountain top for the sun to raise the mists.
The wind through the junipers beneath him played a muted melody which he tried dreamily to break up into its component notes, visualizing the mathematical functions which would express them. The bird songs of early morning came up to him out of the edge of shadow where the bulk of the mountain loomed over the valley. A junco flicked to a spruce bough, tinkled briefly and was answered; a strayed butterfly moved like a speck of sunlight against the forest far below. But before his halfclosed eyes was the lined, pale phantom of John Cawder’s face as he had seen it for that moment under the yellow light of the station lantern: desperately lonely, desperately unhappy.
He picked up the binoculars that lay on the moss beside him. The leaden glimmer of a lake showed through a gap in the clouds, almost directly under him. Fingers of the mist stretched across it, frayed by the wind, spinning away into invisibility. He found the scar that spread its ugly fan across the mountainside above the lake, where fire had eaten through thousands of acres of virgin forest nearly two generations ago. It had been in Cawder’s time—John’s father—while Old Cawder, his grandfather, was still alive. Jim Dawson had told him the story: with the other men from the settlement he had fought the fire and been driven off by the Cawder men for his pains. The fence had been built after that—guards brought in from outside—a hard road made. From that day, even in starvation times, no mountain man had set foot on Cawder land and no Cawder had entered the crossroads store. Now Young Cawder—John Cawder—lived there behind his walls as his tribe had before him, an outlander, hated and despised.
EVEN after forty years the burnt-over area was an evil-looking thing. Thorne’s powerful glasses picked out the charred skeletons of once giant trees, veiled a little by the struggling undergrowth. He saw the bare bones of the mountain jutting out where the fan of desolation spread itself against the peak, and followed its ragged edges down to the point which was the handle of the fan—to the lake and the house.
It was set on solid rock—a granite block, split off the mountain centuries ago and bedded deeply in the valley floor. It was built of rock, four-square, gray and ugly. Cawder—John’s father—had built it to replace the house the fire had destroyed. He had not made it beautiful, poet though he was.
The lake was at its foot, the forest behind it. A terrace of fitted stone mosaic, marked in some complicated pattern, surrounded it. From the edge of the terrace a neglected lawn straggled down to the forest’s rim. It looked empty—deserted—and lonely as Cawder had been.
She had been standing in one of the recessed balconies overlooking the lake. Thorne did not see her until she moved. She came out of the shadows and stood with her hands braced against the parapet, the pale oval of her face turned up to the mountain, her tall body a scarlet sliver against the gray stone. It seemed that he could feel her eyes on him, studying him, and an unaccountable shiver wriggled up his spine. Then as suddenly as she had appeared she was gone.
“Cawder’s wife!” Old Jim had spat deliberately at the stove and closed his thin mouth tight. Thorne wondered if this were she.
It was past noon before he reached the lake shore. The woods were paper dry, the distant ranges shrouded in haze. The house rose above him like a weathered skull, its windows like sunken, glassy eyes watching him, its two wings like high, bare cheekbones, its great front door a black nasal pit. It swam in the shimmering heat of the afternoon, but took no warmth from it.
His boots clacked hollowly on the close-laid mosaic of the terrace. It was old—far older than the house. There was something oddly familiar about the interlacing pattern picked out in dull black stones against the white, weaving a tangled band about the house. It was like the complicated pattern on Celtic crosses and Norse swords—like, he remembered, a Roman pavement he had seen buried in the West Country of England—a little temple, set in its grove of ancient oaks, half swallowed up by the thick green carpet of grass.
He followed the mosaic, widdershins around the house, stepping with absurd care in the white spaces in the complex design. He remembered as a child playing the same nonsense game on the battered flagstones at home. “If you step upon a crack, you will break your mother’s back!” It had been very serious to him then, and it seemed, oddly, to be just as vital now. He grunted in disgust at his own childishness, and looked up.
She stood in the window, just above him. Her hair and her eyes were black, and her skin dark. Her hand, holding the heavy curtain away from the window, was slim but strong. She had no beauty, but there was something about her that held him, staring. Then the curtain fell across the window and the spell broke.
He turned toward the cavernous entry. Across the neglected lawn, at the edge of the forest, the sun glinted on polished metal. As he turned toward it hot steel landed through his arm and a rifle cracked spitefully. Thorne flung himself flat on the pavement as a second bullet ripped over his head. He heard the creak of hinges as the door opened behind him, and Cawder’s voice, not much changed for all the years since he had heard it:
“Kreb! I’ll handle this!”
HE SAT up. Blood was soaking his coat sleeve and dripping from his wrist. He flexed the muscles gingerly. It was a flesh wound, but it hurt. Kreb hadn’t meant to miss.
There was a queer light in Cawder’s eyes. Anger—relief—and something more. In the sunlight the man looked even older than by night. His hair was streaked with gray, his cheeks sunken, his strong frame stooped. Only his deep voice had not changed.
“I thought you’d come,” he said. “The men were watching for you. I had forgotten what a woodsman you are. Well, since you’re here—welcome to Cawder Hall.”
Thorne got slowly to his feet. It was a hell of a queer reception, to shoot a man down in cold blood, inform him he isn’t wanted, then invite him in to tea. But John Cawder was queer, and no one knew it better than he, who had been his friend for five full years.
“Thanks,” he replied curtly. “It’s kind of you.
The door was old carved oak with hinges of hand-wrought iron—the kind of thing Hearst collected for his warehouses—but in this setting it belonged. Inside, the house was considerably more livable than its exterior indicated. Somebody had gone to some pains to see to that Cawder ushered him into a big, paneled room lined with bookshelves, with a huge fireplace and plenty of comfortable furniture. A slim blonde girl rose from a desk in the corner, slipping off rimless spectacles.
“Grace, this is Roger Thorne—he went to school with me.” Cawder’s voice was expressionless. “He dropped in for a visit and Kreb winged him. Fix him up, will you?” He turned and left the room.
Thorne studied the top of her bent head as she went to work on his arm. She was too old to be Cawder’s daughter. Was she his wife, then—and if so, who was the dark woman of the window?
She went at the job with a neat precision which seemed characteristic. Kreb’s slug had ripped a bloody but shallow gash in the flesh of his left arm. She got hot water and bandages, cleaned it and wrapped it up, and made him a sling from a bright-colored square of silk which she had evidently worn over her ash-blonde hair; all without saying more than half a dozen words. She finished by neatly sewing up the gash she had cut in his shirt sleeve, nipping off the thread with small white teeth. She stepped back and looked up at him, and he saw that her eyes behind the glasses were soft, warm brown.
“Will you be staying, Mr. Thorne?” she asked. “I think John—Mr. Cawder—expects you to. This,” she touched his arm, “was an unfortunate mistake. Kreb has very little imagination.”
There was that same queer note in her voice that he had heard in Cawder’s. They wanted him here—and yet they didn’t. They posted guards to shoot down trespassers without warning. They put up a nine-foot charged fence around their woods and mountains to keep outsiders at a distance. They wanted none of any stranger—and yet his coming was somehow important to them both—somehow vital to their hopes and fears.
His eyes dropped to her hand: there was no ring. She caught his glance and flushed. “I’m Grace Walton,” she said. “Mr. Cawder’s secretary.”
THORNE took her statement for what it was worth. “Thank you,” he said stiffly. “You’ve been very kind. But under the circumstances I doubt that I would be comfortable here. I have a certain prejudice against accepting the hospitality of any man who has just had me shot.”
She caught at his sleeve. “Oh—please! It isn’t—what you think. It isn’t John! There’s a reason why no one should come to this house—ever—but now you’re here—now it may be different. It may be—the answer.
Thorne had not heard Cawder’s step behind him. The man spoke. “I think it is, Grace. I’m going to find out.” He touched Thorne’s shoulder, turning him toward the door. “Roger—my wife.”
She was the woman of the window. She still wore the clinging scarlet gown that set off her inky hair and dusky skin so startlingly. Her hair was drawn like a shining cap over her ears, framing her face, and a double chain of jet was clasped about her neck. Her lips were pale; her dark eyes quizzical.
As she stepped forward out of the doorway a small white animal whisked into the room. She picked it up—a ferret, snow white but for its bright red eyes. It nestled against her deep, full bosom, watching them all intently. Back in Thorne’s memory something stirred.
Her glance went past him to Cawder, standing beside the girl, and she smiled. “ ‘In the old age black was not counted fair,’ ” she quoted, “ ‘or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name.’ My husband is an old-fashioned man, Mr. Thorne. But I forget—you know him almost as well as I do. You were boys together, sharing your hopes and ideals. I should like to talk to you about those days.”
There was a tension in Cawder’s voice—almost nervousness. “I hope you will accept my apology, Roger, and stay here until your arm has healed. Grace has had training as a nurse, and we have everything that will be needed.” He tried to force a hearty note:
“We have a lot to talk about, old boy! It’s been fifteen years since we had a bull session.
Thorne shifted his feet uneasily. He had apparently stepped into the middle of a particularly nasty triangle. He studied the girl: she was younger than he had thought at first, and she felt every word the other two spoke. “Cawder’s slut” they called her in the village. It was an ugly name, and he wondered that she could have earned it or that she could stay here, brazening out her position, flaunting herself in the face of the older woman who was John Cawder’s wife.
HOW she felt about it was something no man could read from her dark face and sleeping eyes. Her gibe at her husband showed that there was no pretense between them, and she seemed to treat the girl with contemptuous tolerance. It must be unendurable for a proud woman to have to live in this atmosphere: he wondered why she stood it as she had. Money, perhaps—or love. If she could stick it out, he decided he could.
“I’m no soaring eagle like the great John Cawder,” he replied dryly. “I’ve never delighted the crowned heads of Europe and Park Avenue, but I’ve made the kind of mark I wanted to make—I’ve enjoyed doing it—and I’m satisfied with it. I suppose I may as well stay if you want me; after all, I came here to see you. I suppose you’re painting still?”
Cawder’s laugh was short. “Painting? Naturally. I find my—inspiration—here; I have to paint. You’ll see some of it later. But you’re being too modest: we’re versatile here—we like to keep in touch with the outside world even if we don’t have much to do with it. My wife has followed your work with a great deal of interest. Roger—strange as that may seem.”
Her eyes were on him, dark and inscrutable. “I know more of Mr. Thorne’s work than you may think, John,” she said softly. “I’ve had more than one occasion in the past to concern myself with mathematics, you know. Thorne’s Functions open an entirely new world to those who understand them.”
That, Thorne decided, was pure bravado. Not six men in America were equipped to use Thorne’s Functions understandingly. But she had called the play: he would follow her lead.
“I’d like to talk with you about that, Mrs. Cawder,” he said. “It’s rare to find a woman who is acquainted with my field. Perhaps you can give me some ideas.”
Cawder seemed to find that amusing; shut up in this place, miles from anywhere, his wife certainly had few chances to keep up with advances in esoteric science. Involuntarily Thorne’s eyes turned to the girl, and what he saw brought him up short. There was fear in her thin, white face: fear—for him! Her eyes were warning him—and at the same time hoping that he would stay and play out his part in Cawder’s game. Fear—and hope: it was enough for one day.
“I’ve lost a lot of blood,” he said brusquely. “I enjoy your company, but I’ll enjoy it a lot more when I’ve had a chance to rest and clean up. Do you mind?”
The girl responded. She was young: youth was in her long-legged stride as she preceded him up the great central staircase. Her slim shoulders were firm and straight. She was glad to be out of it for a little—glad to leave those two alone.
The house was huge. Grace told him that it had been modeled on the Cawder home place in England, built by John’s father after fire had gutted the former mansion and spread to the forest. One whole wing stood empty, and there were no signs of servants. “There are only the three of us,” she told him. “One of Kreb’s men cooks, or I do.” Her fingers rested on his arm. “I’m glad you’re staying,” she said.
THORNE was up with the birds in the morning. Dinner had been uneventful. Cawder and his wife seemed to have arrived at an understanding which lessened the tension and somehow, he felt uneasily, included him. The artist had been his own brilliant self, obviously delighting in his monologue on the peculiarities of the people and places he had visited during his triumphal course through the capitals of the world, and his wife showed a depth of knowledge and understanding which proved to Thorne’s satisfaction that she could not always have been locked away from intellectual circles as she was now. The girl sat quietly and adored.
Thorne had gone to bed early, but not to sleep. His wound pained him, and the whole atmosphere of the place had set him on edge. Usually, under such conditions, he was able to sink himself in his mathematics, but it was long after two o’clock before he had pursued his equations into troubled sleep in which they strove stubbornly to assume conformations and relations which had absolutely nothing to do with the purpose for which they had been developed.
His windows faced the lake. Opposite him was the deserted wing—the wing, he realized suddenly, from which Cawder’s wife had appeared as he watched from his mountain top the day before. There was still something about the setup in this house that he did not begin to understand or like, and he wished heartily that he had been content to stay at binoculars’ distance.
As he reached the head of the main staircase the door to the opposite wing opened and she stepped out. “John?” Then she recognized him. He was wearing one of Cawder’s suits, draped loosely over his slighter frame.
“Mr. Thorne!” she greeted him. “Or should I say Roger? I feel I know you well from all John has told me. You are very much like him in many ways, you know. I thought for a moment that he had come back.”
“Back?” What the devil did that mean?
“He and Miss Walton went into town last night. There were some—things—they had to do. We must amuse each other until tonight. I trust you won’t be too bored with my company.”
Thorne knew his face had reddened—and not with embarrassment. Of all the damned unfeeling things to do! This woman had her trials—more than showed on the surface. The girl was young and a fool, hopelessly infatuated, but there was no excuse for the callousness and downright cruelty Cawder was showing. John Cawder had changed in fifteen years, and with a vengeance!
He tried to sound jovial. “It’s a beautiful morning,” he observed. “Let’s go outside. I’d like a breath of air.”
Her somber-eyes searched his face; she seemed satisfied at what she found there. “I—can’t,” she said. “I mean that literally. It’s silfy, of course—some odd psychosis—John is always twitting me about it—but there it is. I really can’t cross the terrace.” She smiled suddenly, a warm, grave smile. “You could carry me across, but I’m afraid Kreb has prevented that.”
“Damn Kreb! He should learn to shoot before he tries to scare off trespassers. Is he still around?”
She nodded. “He or one of his men. John wouldn’t like to have you leave before he returns. But you wouldn’t do that, would you—Roger?”
He squirmed inwardly. She knew as well as he did that Kreb had shot to kill; he knew as well as she why Cawder had gone off with his blonde “secretary”; and here she was, flirting valianting with him as though nothing had happened, playing the gracious hostess. Damn it, he’d play on her side! At this distance Grace Walton appeared much less the injured innocent of the night before. Cawder’s slut! He supposed it was love, but it made her cheap and common compared with this woman. Cawder’s ninny was more like it!
Breakfast was a silent ritual to the inner man, as breakfast should be. She cooked it, well, they ate it together in a room looking out over the terrace, and they made a comradely ceremony of doing the dishes. One of Kreb’s glowering thugs had showed up, but Thorne sent him off and made the best of his one good arm. Kreb’s shot had only nicked it, and a day or two would see it well enough.
THEY smoked a cigarette together in the paneled library. Thorne lay back on the big divan, studying her through halfclosed eyes. His restless night was catching up with him, and he felt dog-tired. She was no beauty. She was older than Cawder, he thought, but how much older was hard to say. Her skin was clear and soft, her hair as sleek and full of life as though she had been in her teens, but her manner, her eyes, the way she walked and spoke proved her maturity. That might lie at the root of the whole sorry mess, he realized. In college Cawder had been apt to rob the cradle on the rare occasions when he stepped out of his shell and made a gesture toward social amenities. Grace was young and tremendously impressed with him both as a man and an artist. This woman was clearly another sort—someone he had met in Europe, probably, though it was impossible to point to any national background—an intellectual, whose appeal had been to his agile mind. Now that she was his wife he found that he wanted more than intellectual appreciation of his talents: he wanted passion and blind devotion, and in the girl he had found it. He was keeping her, Thorne decided, as a normal man might keep a dog.
No—there was no beauty in John Cawder’s wife—but there was something deeper than beauty. Thorne remembered her bitter quotation from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the night before. The poet had written another phrase—
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks . . .”
Shakespeare had written those lines to his Dark Lady, half bitterly, resenting the attraction which was not physical but something deeper and stronger, which he could not escape, which he could not pass off with a quip and a line as his friends of the Mermaid did their loves of the moment: “And yet by heaven I think my love as rare, as any she beli’d with false compare.”
Cawder’s wife was a woman like that.
He realized that she was watching him smilingly. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I juggled equations in my head all night, and I’m afraid I’m not responsible for what happens now. I’ve been a very bad companion.”
She leaned toward him. She was in white, her dark skin and hair set off by the clinging fabric. “My husband was not joking last night when he said that I am interested in your work,” she said. “I have had very little to do with my days here except read and study. I may be more appreciative than you think of the high realms in which your thoughts travel. I may even—help—a little.”
Her eyes drew him; their dark depths quieted the half-formed apprehension which had been nagging at him all the morning. This woman was lonely—hungry to understand and be understood—as he was. She was intelligent, and to assume that no woman could follow the arguments involved in an understanding of Thorne’s Functions, at least through the earlier steps, was nothing but sheer intellectual snobbishness.
HE TOLD her of his interest in the applications of mathematics to the forefront of theoretical physics: nuclear forces in the atom—the fundamental particles and their properties—and on a cosmically larger scale the functioning of these atomic laws in the birth and death of stars and galaxies. Thorne’s Functions were a family of mathematical relations, symmetric in certain variables, which appeared again and again in such problems. His contribution had been the study and definition of their properties, opening in the process an entirely new realm of mathematics. He told her how the tool he had devised was enabling physicists throughout the world to describe and explain forces and phenomena which had hitherto been beyond them, and how now he was seeking the key which would unite their work with the studies of the astro-physicists and provide one universal tool with which to probe the realms of stars as well as atoms.
The opening of the great front door brought him to himself. Cawder was grinning at him from the doorway; the sun had gone from the windows of the library. It was late afternoon.
“You wear my clothes well, Roger.” The artist was calmly insolent. “I hope you’ve found my wife equally—accommodating.”
Thorne struggled to his feet. The girl, Grace, was peering anxiously past Cawder’s broad shoulders. She looked paler than she had been the night before. And there was something behind the smile on the artist’s handsome, haggard face—something cold and determined.
“Your wife is an intelligent woman,” he replied savagely. “Probably the most intelligent I have known. I fail to see why she chooses to shut herself away from a world which might appreciate her more than you seem to, but that is, of course, none of my affair. I will be very glad if you will let me leave—in my own clothes—now.”
Cawder’s guffaw mocked him. That was not his game. “Don’t be a fool, Roger! Forget you’re a stuffed shirt with your head in a cloud of figures. Of course she’s intelligent—I married her—I’ve lived with her. You don’t suppose I gained my enviable reputation as an artist alone, do you? You know the namby-pamby stuff I was doing: that was John Cawder’s level. That was all I could do—until I met her. But Cawder’s wife was never made for mediocrity. She takes, Roger—but she gives too!” The lines in his face seemed to harden, the mocking light to go out of his eyes. He strode across the room and gripped Thorne’s shoulder in his strong, blunt fingers. “You’ll never know now, Roger, how much my wife can give.” He brushed Thorne’s chin playfully with his knuckles. “Don’t stand there like a wooden Indian, man! You’ve lost your sense of humor. Now—dinner—some music to quiet our digestion—and then I’ll show you what I’ve been painting back here in the wilderness with only these two charming ladies for inspiration. I think you will be interested.”
He looked past Cawder’s intent face at the two women. The girl’s eyes were begging him to go—to leave things as they had been before he blundered in. But Cawder’s wife was frozen, her black eyes hard as jet, her full mouth drawn thin. She was watching her husband’s every move, like a cornered mouse watching a cat. As Cawder started up the stairs he looked straight at her, and there was no mockery in his voice now.
“ ‘Two loves have I’, dark lady,” he said softly.
AS THE hands on the great clock in the corner of the library crept on toward midnight the tension in Thorne’s mind grew. Dinner had again been quiet; there seemed to be some kind of informal truce between Cawder and his wife on such occasions.
They talked of fishing, hunting, the outdoor life in which Thorne had found relaxation. Nothing was said of the artist’s work, or of his. Back in the library, before a roaring fire, Grace had revealed a surprising talent on the violin, and Cawder’s wife proved herself full mistress of the harp from which her strong, slender fingers brought strange, stirring melodies. Her eyes were on Cawder every minute, hard and bright, defying him. As the haunting notes shuddered away Thorne realized that Grace was crying softly in her corner. He got to his feet.
“I’ll see your paintings in the morning, John,” he said. “I didn’t sleep much last night, and I need it now.”
Cawder frowned. Thorne realized that Grace’s muffled sobs had stopped, that she was sitting, tense as a strung bow, on the edge of her chair, watching them. “Miss Walton is tired too,” he pointed out. “You drive your assistants too hard, John.”
Cawder caught him at the top of the stairs. “I won’t keep you long,” he said. “There is one picture which you must see tonight—now. Grace agrees with me. After that—you’re on your own.”
Thorne went white. “Damn it!” he snarled. “Why can’t you come out in the open? If you think I’ve been—guilty—of anything with your wife, say so! Let me get out of here—right now—and take her with me. A hell of a lot it matters to you—you and your—secretary!”
John Cawder’s eyes were very bright. “I didn’t ask you to come here, Thorne,” he said quietly. “I did my best to keep you out, short of killing you, and maybe I should have done that. You’re here and things have happened that give you a part in our little play. It’s one that Shakespeare might have written—and it will be played out tonight. But you were the best friend I had, as a boy—maybe the only friend, except Grace—and we’ve done our best to give you your chance. There’s a limit to that: we’ve earned our chance too. But there is one more thing I must do, out of decency—out of common humanity. Now come on.”
He opened the door to the empty wing, and Thorne followed him silently. There was no electricity here, and the hangings were heavy with dust. Cawder’s studio was a long room with a skylight, hung with paintings which Thorne recognized as the work of the artist’s last grim period. “Circe” was there: the painting which had aroused so much violent criticism when it was given to the Metropolitan by a man whose own work, though popular, had always been rejected. They were not the type of thing that people would buy, though the man’s grim genius lived in them as in few paintings Thorne had ever seen. One by one they sprang to life as Cawder went about the room lighting the oil lamps with which it was furnished. In every one, as in the fabulous “Circe,” the model’s back was turned, her face hidden.
One last huge canvas occupied the whole end wall. At first Thorne saw only confused darkness, then, as though his eyes were slowly accustoming themselves to the gloom, details of the painting began to appear. It showed a shadowed room—a huge, vaulted chamber in some medieval hall, black and gloomy—and a sleeper sprawled naked across a canopied bed in troubled sleep. It was a man, his smooth young face agonized and yet somehow brightened by the intensity of his dreams. Bending over him was a shrouded figure—a woman—her face filled with evil satisfaction, drinking in his torment. Her hand lay on his forehead, her lips were parted in a gloating smile, and it seemed to Thorne that a faint mist rose from the sleeper’s lips and hovered about her head.
What head it was he knew before Cawder raised the lamp in his hand and cast its rays directly on the painted face—before the door behind him opened and she was silhouetted there, her own face in shadow, its expression hidden: John Cawder’s wife.
Cawder was watching him intently. There was something he should know—something this picture and all that had led up to it should tell him: he realized that. But he saw only the cruelty of the man who could paint such a picture of his wife and flaunt it gloatingly before a stranger. What help he could give her was hers!
“Thank you,” he said stiffly. “It is very interesting but I prefer your earlier work. I fail to see what this has to do with my decision to leave in the morning.”
She stepped aside to let him pass. Her dark face was expressionless, her eyes fixed on her husband. He touched her shoulder lightly as he went by. A moment later, as the door to the empty wing closed behind him, he thought he heard her laughing.
That laugh haunted him as he lay in the darkness, staring at the bare ceiling. In another woman it might have been hysteria, but she was not that kind. There had been triumph in her laugh—an ugly kind of triumph—and for a little he wondered dully what factor in this distorted situation he had missed. His thoughts flicked to the girl, Grace. “Cawder’s slut.” Old Jim Dawson had spat contemptuously as he said that. But, he realized suddenly, when he spoke of “Cawder’s wife” it was with hate!
SLEEP came finally, but not rest. As they had the night before, his Functions began their march through his dreams, arranging and rearranging themselves with a fantastic symmetry which belied every law of known mathematics. His sleeping brain strove to follow their contortions and read meaning into them, for he could see, even in the dream, that they had meaning. It was no use. Soon he had lost all touch with them; they were racing on into realms utterly unimaginable, filled with a bizarre life of their own.
His exasperation at being left behind woke him. It was past midnight. He crawled out of bed, found pencil and paper, and tried to write down the equations of his dream—to trace the development which had eluded him. It was no use.
He heard her footsteps in the hall before the door opened. Her robe clung to her magnificent body like a white mist; her night-black hair lay loose over her shoulders.
She had a candle: there was no electricity in the old wing where her room was. He stumbled to his feet but she pushed him down again into his chair, her strong hand gentle on his shoulder. She bent over him, studying the scribbled papers on the desk, and the musky scent she wore filled his lungs. There was a scrabble of claws on the carpet and a sleek white shape leaped to the desk beside her—the ferret. He had not seen it all day. Its beady eyes were fixed like her dark ones on the equations he had written.
She pushed the papers aside. He flushed: there was nothing on them—he knew that as well as she did. He took them from her and crumpled them in his good hand, flung them into the corner. The ferret vaulted to the floor and scampered to investigate, sniffing at the ball of paper and looking up to study them with eyes like tiny embers.
She switched off the desk lamp, and the room was dark but for the white moonlight that flooded through the windows. “You must rest,” she told him softly. “Your mind is tired; it needs to be given strength—and to be shown the way it has missed. I can do that, if you will let me.”
Protest surged up in him. What could she do? What would Cawder think, finding them here together? She touched his forehead. Her hand was cool and dry.
“Come. Lie down here, on the bed, and close your eyes. I will sit here beside you.” Her fingers were massaging his temples gently, brushing his eyelids, sweeping away the turmoil that had been in his mind.
“Now look at me—into my eyes—and tell me what you see there.”
The moonlight fell on her hair, outlining her head with silver. Her face was in shadow, but her eyes seemed like lighted windows. She was leaning over him, her hands on his shoulders, her lips slightly parted, and it seemed that a kind of glowing vapor was forming about her head and cloaking her shoulders with pale light. Her eyes were enormous: he lifted himself on his good arm to look into them, and her arm went around him, holding him close. The pupils were like windows. He stared deep into them—through them—and saw there a man—himself—sitting at a desk and writing—
IT SEEMED that he was two men: the man at the desk and a second, an outsider, standing invisible and apart, watching the man who wrote. The muddled confusion which had filled his brain was gone. Instead he seemed to have gained an almost magical insight into the mathematical processes which had given birth to his functions, and into the world of mathematics for which they in turn served as a frame of reference. It was an utterly alien world, above and beyond anything he or any other worker in physics had ever imagined: a world to which his functions were as the simple number-system of every day—whose patterns and laws not only expressed but were the facts of space and time and matter, over which human intellects had drudged and fumbled. Now, for the first time, it was all clear in his brain—crystal clear—writ in letters of white fire—and as the pencil in the hand of that other self raced and wriggled across the sheets of paper, leaving its trail of cabalistic symbols, ranged tier on tier in neat ranks, he—the real he—the watcher in the shadows—sped on ahead, faster and ever faster, to see and comprehend the whole—the ultimate—the one all-inclusive relation of which all the rest was but a part.
Impatiently he snatched the pencil from the stiff fingers of his scrawling dream-self. It must be caught—set down—before it vanished! He pushed the other rudely aside, and the man turned his face toward him, questioning. His own face—
Mirrored in the man’s staring, empty eyes he saw the white face and burning eyes of Cawder’s wife.
Light stabbed suddenly in the darkness—and the vision broke. He was in bed—his own bed—propped like a rag doll against the pillows. The woman was beside him, her body pressed against him, her lips fastened to his, her eyes two fathomless pits into which he stared. The strength—the life—was running out of him as though he had been bled. His heart hammered desperately against his ribs; his lungs were struggling to draw in clean air—but the woman’s scent filled them, the woman’s eyes drowned out all the world. The light blazed down on them; a hand caught her naked shoulder and wrenched her away—flung her panting back against the footboard of the bed. John Cawder’s hand!
To Thorne, lying there against the pillows, it was like one of Cawder’s own macabre paintings. Cawder’s lined face was like the mask of an avenging godhead. Beyond him the girl was a nymph, her young, clean body wreathed in vapors. And making the third apex of the triangle was the woman—Cawder’s wife.
Her face, as she stared up at her husband, was the face of the painting. The face of Circe, evil and greedy—the face of a Medusa, drawn with rage. The ferret had clambered into her arms and lay huddled against her breast. Her lips were redder than fresh blood—her eyes bright as diamonds. Youth, and a kind of beauty flushed her dark cheeks and tautened her proud body. Slowly, contemptuously, she gathered her night robe about her and disappeared.
CAWDER was bending over him; the girl, Grace, was on the other side. He struggled to pull himself erect, but it seemed that the very life had gone out of him. Cawder’s face was grim.
“Lead the way, Grace. I’ll carry him.”
He lay like a baby in Cawder’s muscular arms, his head slumped weakly against the artist’s shoulders. Their shadows went ahead of them, grotesque and black, gangling along the walls of the corridor. They were in the empty wing now—her wing—but they were climbing to the highest floor, their footsteps echoing on the wooden stairs. Grace had lighted an oil lamp; she hurried ahead of them, opening the doors. Thorne saw the light in her blonde hair like a golden halo about her small child’s head. Her body was a child’s body, slim and delicate.
They had entered a great hall which stretched across the entire wing. Cawder lowered him into a massive armchair and went about the hall, lighting candle after candle. As the little flames leaped up he saw that the hall was lined with paintings—rank after rank of them, lined along its paneled walls. This was not Cawder’s work—he knew that.
The girl’s arm went around his shoulders, propping him up. She held a tumbler to his lips; he swallowed painfully and the raw liquor hit his stomach like an exploding ball of fire, burning through his body like liquid lightning. He tried to pull himself erect in the chair.
“What happened?” he asked. “What—is she?”
Cawder stood with his feet wide apart, his arms folded, staring down at him. His voice was tired now—resigned. “She’s Cawder’s wife,” he said bitterly. “She has been for three hundred years. You have Grace to thank that she’s not your wife. Because friend or no friend, Roger, I was going to let you end the curse that has haunted Cawder men since Elizabeth’s time. She could have you—and I would be free. Free of that—vampire—forever!”
He caught at the word. “Vampire?” His hand went feebly to his throat. “You mean she—drank my blood? Is that what has happened to me? Is that why I’m so weak?”
“It’s not that simple, Roger. If there is a name for her kind, I don’t know it. Lamia, perhaps—I don’t know. Your blood is safe, though. It’s your—life—that she drinks.” He shuddered and a shadow passed across his haggard face. “She has sucked at my life for fifteen years.”
Thorne’s brain throbbed. This nonsense—this craziness—the man was mad! He turned to the girl, and it was in her face too. She nodded: “It’s true, Roger. She had no secrets from me. She’s delighted in it—reveled in it—knowing how I would age, and John, and she would be always the same, never changing, never aging—and some day free again to spread her evil in the world.”
He buried his aching head in his hands. It was fantastic! And yet—he had not dreamed the thing that had happened—had not dreamed the black pools of her eyes, the pressure of her body against him as she lay there, draining the life-force out of him and filling his brain with those bright visions of power. He closed his eyes, and the equations stood there against the blackness. He would never forget them now: she had promised that. And they were true. He knew that. They were real!
“I had a dream,” he told them. “My Functions—things I never saw in them before—things nobody has ever seen. How could that be?”
“That’s it, Roger!” Cawder’s voice was patient. “It’s what has happened, time and again, to me—to my father—to every Cawder man for three centuries, and to God knows how many poor devils before us. It’s what she is, Roger—what she was made for—and it’s hell alive! Call her vampire—call her one of the Muses—call her anything you like: she takes for everything she gives. She’ll drain the genius from you until you’re a withered husk—she’ll fatten and grow sleek on it like a blood-sucking cat, and you’ll grow old and lean and haunted, like the rest of us. She’s too fine and proud for anything but genius. There’s more—life—more ectoplasm, or whatever the stuff is that she needs, in men with brains. And she can pick your brains—inspire you—make you great, but the greater you are the more she demands, until you’re burnt out or mad or dead.”
Grace touched his arm. “Do you think you can stand now, Roger? There’s something we have to show you—something that may help you to believe.”
ONE on each side, they dragged him across the floor to the line of paintings. Many of them were dark with age—none of them were recent—but out of them all the same face looked: her face. The lamplight picked one out: a woman in medieval dress, gazing quizzically over her shoulder, fondling a white ferret that lay against her breast. It was the picture that had leaped to his mind when he first saw her, standing in the doorway of the library—the picture she had made, crouched on the bed, staring up at her husband.
“Da Vinci painted that.” Cawder’s arm was around him, bracing him, but the life was coming back into his body. “He knew her as Cecilia Gallerani; she has had many names. It hung in Cracow before the war. It was smuggled into Greece and then to Cairo. I bought it there—as I have bought these others. They’ve known her all through history—there, in that Egyptian portrait of Alexander’s time—in that Greek marble—in paintings and sculpture by the greatest artists mankind has known. She made them great: she drank their life and paid them in fame, in glory. She feeds on glory as she feeds on life. She—withers—without it.
“It’s not only artists—there have been poets, dramatists, musicians, statesmen—any form of greatness draws her. Shakespeare knew her, and he knew what she was. It’s in his sonnets:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride . . .’
And further on:
‘For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who are as black as hell, as dark as night!’ ”
Cawder’s voice had sunk to a husky whisper, and the girl’s fingers were biting into Thorne’s arm. “We’ve kept her for three hundred years, Roger. We’ve kept her to ourselves—away from other men—ever since that first Cawder man was cursed with her long years ago. We’ve passed her from father to son—Cawder’s wife—since Shakespeare’s time. Cawder’s wife: but not the mother of Cawder men! We’re bastards—every man of us—and proud of it! She’s had no men but us for three centuries, and we’ve known her for what she is. We’ve found our own mates and bred our sons, and laughed in her face! Oh, she’s tried—she’s tempted us—she’s played with our talents and made us seem great—but we’ve never given in, and we’ve never let her go. Never—until now.”
The man’s arm tightened around Thorne’s shoulders. “I tried to do it, Roger. You had the genius she needs: she’d take you, and be content—and I’d be free. It was our chance, Grace’s and mine, and I tried to take it. I left you to her—for a day and a night—but you were Roger Thorne. You were the boy I knew in college—the man whose climb I have watched all through the years, free, without the kind of black, evil help I needed—without her. I had to come back—I had to show you the painting—to give you that one chance to see and understand—but I couldn’t tell you.” The man was pleading. “I couldn’t. It was my chance—our chance—and I had to take it. You were blind: maybe she blinded you, or maybe it was your own logic, for there’s no logic in this thing—no science or mathematics—only madness, and evil, that’s lasted through all eternity. Because she’s lived forever; I know that. She’s lived forever!”
She laughed then, softly and cruelly. She stood in the doorway behind him, the ferret cradled in her arms like a familiar spirit, its red eyes intent. “Yes, Roger,” she mocked, “I’ve lived forever. I’m Lilith—Circe—all the women who have bred genius into the starveling race of men! Without me you’d be beasts, wallowing in the forests for grubs. Without me there would have been no beauty—no glory—no power. And I’ll live on—forever—with men who have the courage of their genius! With the Leonardo’s and Shakespeares of this world, not with the sniveling, cowardly race of Cawder! I’ll make you great, Roger Thorne: you know that. I’ll put you on a pinnacle where you’ll overshadow Newton and Einstein and every man who has ever lived in the world of mathematics. Or if greatness means nothing to you, I can open that world you glimpsed tonight—open it wide. It’s in your grasp, Roger Thorne—in your little human brain—but without me it will lie there dead. You will always know that, after tonight, remember. You will always seek it—you will labor away your years in search of it—but unless I lead you, Roger, you will never find it. I think you know that too.”
IT WAS like one of Cawder’s own macabre tableaux: the woman, the white beast cradled in her dusky arms—and they three under the painting that mirrored her: Cawder, a whitened mummy of a man; Grace Walton, shivering with fear; and himself, a flabby-legged husk sucked dry of his manhood. It was true—this whole mad story. He licked his parched lips.
“You were gone, John. Why didn’t you stay? Why did you come back—to her?”
The woman’s eyes were bits of bright jet, hard and triumphant. “Why didn’t you go, John?” she mocked. “Why didn’t you take your yellow-haired moon-calf and go? Because you couldn’t! Because no Cawder can. Because you have my blood—the blood of my kind—in your veins. Because even in that small degree you are my kind. Because you love me, John Cawder, and will always love me. For all your other women—for all your bastards—Cawder is Cawder, and always will be, and Cawder men will always return to—Cawder’s wife!”
Thorne had felt the girl’s slight body grow rigid against his side as the woman spoke. He knew what it must mean to her—what it had meant for all the months she had been here, knowing this and accepting it: Cawder’s slut, but never Cawder’s wife.
She moved like an uncoiled spring. The lamp stood on a little table beside her, and she hurled it straight at the woman’s head. It struck a foot from her and burst, showering kerosene into the flames of the candles. Instantly a sheet of flame had walled her in.
For a moment he saw her standing there, frozen, the ferret writhing savagely in her arms. Fear was drawing the blood out of her face. He saw ugly shadows come under her staring eyes, and black lines of terror creep down past the corners of her mouth. He saw her shoulders, sag, and knowledge of death come to her. Immortal she might be, but not in the face of fire.
Then the doorway was empty. Above the crackle of the flames he heard her footsteps fleeing down the hall. It was they who were trapped—they who would burn for her sins. Then John had him by the arm, and his own feet were moving clumsily, carrying him along. There were doors opening on the narrow gallery that ran across the front of the house. Grace went first, then he, then Cawder, the ruddy light of the burning room throwing his giant’s shadow out across the ragged lawn. He saw the moon, great and white over the mountain. Men were shouting and running down there—Kreb’s men—Cawder’s guards.
The balcony was narrow; they edged along it toward the center of the building. Kreb’s men were pushing up a ladder, and one of them was running up it like a squirrel. Thorne suddenly missed the girl, then he himself was picked up bodily and lowered into the night. His feet scrabbled on slippery rungs; his fingers clamped on the ladder’s uprights; strong hands caught and held him. And Cawder’s form was coming down after him, silhouetted against the blazing building.
In the fire-light the pattern on the terrace seemed to writhe and caper with a life of its own. He knew now what it was, and where he had seen it. It was a thing the Romans had known, and likely the Piets before them—a barrier against evil—a boundary which no spirit or god or devil could pass, save by invitation. He remembered that first morning: she could not cross the terrace, but he could have carried her.
AND then he saw her there, in the black hollow of the doorway. There was no fear in her now. She stood watching them, tall, white, unafraid. Her eyes were on them: they found him, and he felt the blood pound in his temples. He took a step toward her; stumbled and fell to his knees on the pavement, at the edge of the mosaic band. She smiled, and her gaze flicked past: to the girl, to Kreb—to Cawder.
He heard his own voice croaking, “John! For God’s sake—John!” He heard the girl’s voice whimpering, “John! Don’t do it—John.” He saw John Cawder walking like a man in a dream, his sunken eyes fixed on the woman who was his wife, who waited in the shadow of the doorway, his feet stepping carefully between the tendrils of the pattern. They stood together for a moment, then Cawder’s strong arms swept her up and they were coming back. Her arms were around his neck; her black hair veiled them as her mouth found his. He stopped, his feet at the very edge of the mosaic, and they saw his own arms tighten about her body, his head bend over her. Then he had turned and with quick, young steps was striding through the doorway, into the burning house.
The girl was young: she would get over it. The forest would cover the blackened scar where Cawder’s house had stood; the winds would scatter the ashes of Cawder and Cawder’s wife. Thorne knew now what that fanning scar on the mountainside had meant, and what an earlier Cawder had tried—and failed—to do. But as he sat at his desk, tracing slowly the symbols which she had drawn from him, he wondered how much of them came from himself and how much from her. She was not human; he believed that. She might be more than human, of a breed which humanity had hunted down and made to pay for its strangeness. Her blood was in men’s veins, and some day by the strange lottery of genesis her race might be born again, decades—centuries from now—when the world would be ready for it.