I was routed out of these interior speculations by an even more startling remark of O’Rourke’s. We were in the hallway, just about to enter the restaurant, when I distinctly heard him saying:
“In that particular dance hall it’s almost impossible for a girl to get a job without sleeping with Harcourt first. At least, that’s what Monahan tells me.
“Of course there’s nothing irregular about that,” he continued, allowing a moment’s pause for the observation to sink in.
We took seats at a table in the far corner of the restaurant, where we could talk without fear of being overheard. I noticed O’Rourke glancing about with his habitual keen, all-encompassing yet thoroughly unobtrusive gaze. He did it instinctively, just as an interior decorator takes in the furnishings of a room, including the pattern of the wallpaper.
“But the fact that Miss Marjorie Blair had taken the job under another name almost led him to commit an indiscretion.”
“God, yes,” I exclaimed. “I never thought of that!”
“It was fortunate for him that he had taken the precaution to ask for her photograph first. . .”
I couldn’t help interrupting him. “I must say that you learned a devil of a lot in a short time.”
“A pure accident,” said O’Rourke modestly. “I bumped into Monahan on my way out of Clancy’s office.”
“Yes, but how did you manage to put two and two together so quickly?” I persisted. “You didn’t know when you met Monahan that the girl had been working in a dance hall. I don’t see how the devil you just fell onto that piece of information.”
“I didn’t,” said O’Rourke. “I extracted it from Harcourt. You see, while talking to Monahan . . . he was talking about his assignment—and about you, incidentally . . . yes, he said he liked you very much . . . he wants to see you again, by the way . . . you should get in touch with him . . . well, anyway, as I was saying, I had a hunch to go and telephone Harcourt. I asked him a few routine questions—among them where had the girl worked before, if he knew. He said she had worked in a dance hall. He said it as if to say: ‘She’s just a little tart.’ When I went back to the table I just took a flier and asked Monahan if he knew a girl named Andrews—at the dance hall. I didn’t even know then which dance hall. And then, to my surprise, after I had explained the case, he began telling me about Harcourt. So there you are. It’s simple, isn’t it? I tell you, everything connects up in this racket. You play your hunch, you throw out a feeler—and sometimes it tumbles right into your lap.”
“I’ll be damned,” was all I could say.
O’Rourke was studying the menu. I looked at it distractedly, unable to decide what I wanted to eat. All I could think of was Harcourt. So Harcourt fucked them all! Jesus Christ, I was furious. I wanted more than ever to do something about it. Maybe Monahan was the man; maybe he was already laying his traps.
I ordered something at random and sat looking disconsolately at the diners.
“What’s the matter?” said O’Rourke. “You look depressed.”
“I am,” I answered. “It’s nothing. It’ll pass.”
Throughout the meal I only half listened to O’Rourke’s talk. I kept thinking of Mona. I wondered what she would say if I were to mention Harcourt’s name. That son of a bitch! Fucking everything in sight and then, b’Jesus, almost fucking me out of a job! The gall of him! Well, another clue to work on. Things were happening fast. . . .
It took several hours for me to break away from O’Rourke. When he wanted to hold you he could tell one story after another, gliding from one to another with the most dexterous ingenuity. I was always exhausted after spending an evening with him. It exhausted me just to listen, because with every sentence he let fall I watched like a bird of prey for my opening. Besides, there were always long interruptions in the stories, demanding regressions, recapitulations and all mannr of acrobatics. Sometimes he’d keep me waiting a half hour or more in a telegraph office while, with that patience which exasperated me, he laboriously went through the files in search of some trivial detail. And always, before resuming his story, he would make a long, windy detour, as we went from one office to another, concerning the clerk or the manager or the telegrapher in the office we had just left. His memory was prodigious. In the hundred or more branch offices scattered throughout the city he knew all the clerks by name, the record of their progress from one job to another, one office to another, and thousands of intimate details about their family life. Not only did he know the present staff—he knew the ghosts who had occupied their places before them. In addition he knew many of the messengers, both of the night and the day shifts. He was especially devoted to the old fellows, some of whom had served the company almost as many years as O’Rourke himself.
I had learned a great deal from these nocturnal inspections, things which I doubted that Clancy himself knew. More than a few of the clerks, I discovered through the course of these rounds with O’Rourke, had been guilty of embezzlement at one time or another in their seedy, cosmococcic career. O’Rourke had his own way of dealing with these cases. Relying upon the good judgment which his long experience had given him, he often took amazing liberties in dealing with these unfortunate individuals. Half the cases, I am certain, never became known to anyone but O’Rourke. Where he had confidence in the man he would allow him to make restitution little by little, making it clear, of course, that the matter was to remain a secret between them. There was at times a twofold purpose in this benevolence. By handling the incident in this irregular way not only was the company certain of retrieving all that had been stolen but, because of his gratitude, the victim could henceforth be relied upon to act as a sort of stool pigeon. He could be made to squeal and squawk when occasion arose. Many a time, in the beginning, when I wondered why O’Rourke was taking such an interest in certain ratlike characters, I discovered that they were of the lost tribe whom O’Rourke had converted to useful instruments. In fact, I learned one thing about O’Rourke which explained everything, so far as his mysterious behavior was concerned: that was that everyone to whom he gave the least time or attention had some importance in the scheme of his cosmococcic life.
Though he gave the illusion of running rings around himself, though he often acted like a fool and an ignoramus, though he seemed to be doing nothing more than wasting time, actually everything he said or did had a vital bearing on the work in hand. Moreover, there was never just one case which occupied him exclusively. He had a hundred strings to his lyre. No case was ever too hopeless for him to drop. The company might have scratched it off the record—but not O’Rourke. He had the infinite patience of an artist, and with it the conviction that time was on his side. There didn’t seem to be any phase of life with which he had not familiarized himself. Though, speaking of the artist, I must admit that perhaps in that realm he was least sure of himself. He could stand and look at the work of a pompier in a departmentstore window with dewy eyes. His knowledge of literature was almost nil. But if, for example, I should happen to relate the story of Raskolnikov, as Dostoevski unfolded it for us, I could be certain of reaping the most penetrating observations. And what it was indeed that made me cherish his friendship was the kinship he had, humanly and spiritually, with such writers as Dostoevski. His acquaintance with the underworld had softened and broadened him. He was a detective because of his extraordinary interest in and sympathy with his fellowman. He never caused a man unnecessary pain. He always gave his man the wide benefit of the doubt. He never held a grudge against anyone, no matter what the man had done. He sought to understand, to fathom their motives, even when they were of the basest. Above all, he was to be relied upon absolutely. His word, once given, was adhered to at any cost. Neither could he be bribed. I can’t possibly imagine what temptation one could put before him to deflect him from the performance of his duty. A further point in his favor, in my opinion, was that he was totally lacking in ambition. He hadn’t the slightest desire to be anything other than he was. He gave himself body and soul
to his task, knowing that it was a thankless one, knowing that he was being used and abused by a heartless, soulless organization. But, as he himself had more than once remarked, whatever the attitude of the company might be it was none of his concern. Nor did it matter to him that, in the event of retirement, they should undo everything he had labored to build up. Having no illusions, he nevertheless gave his utmost to all who made demands upon him.
He was a unique being, O’Rourke. He disturbed me profoundly sometimes. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone before or since who made me feel quite so transparent as he did. Nor do I ever remember anyone who so abstemiously withheld giving advice or criticism. He was the only man I’ve ever known who made me realize what it means to be tolerant, what it means to respect the other person’s liberty. It’s curious, now that I reflect on it, how deeply he symbolized the Law. Not the petty spirit of law which man uses for his own ends, but the inscrutable cosmic law which never ceases to work, which is implacable and just, and thus ultimately the most merciful.
As I lay in bed wide awake, I would, after an evening such as this one, often ask myself what O’Rourke would do if he were in my boots. In endeavoring to make the transposition it had occurred to me more than once that I knew nothing about O’Rourke’s private life. Absolutely nothing. Not that he was evasive—I couldn’t say that. It was just a blank. Somehow the subject never came up.
I don’t know why I thought so, but I had the feeling that in some period long past he had suffered a great deception. A frustrated love, perhaps.
Whatever it was, he had not been soured by it. He had floundered and then recovered. But his life had been irreparably altered. Putting all the little pieces together, putting on one side the man I knew, and on the other side the man whom I caught glimpses of now and then (when he was in a reminiscent mood), comparing them one with the other, it was impossible to deny that they were two quite different beings. All those rugged, sterling qualities which O’Rourke possessed were like protective devices, worn not outwardly but inwardly. From the world he had little or nothing to fear. He was in it and of it, totally. But against the decrees of Fate he was powerless.
It was strange, I thought to myself as I closed my eyes, that the man I should owe so much to must remain forever a sealed book. I could only learn from his behavior and example.
A wave of tenderness swept over me. I understood O’Rourke in a bigger way than I had before. I understood everything more clearly. I understood for the first time what it really means to be “delicate.”
13
There are days when the return to life is painful and distressing. One leaves the realm of sleep against one’s will. Nothing has happened, except an awareness that the deeper and truer reality belongs to the world of the unconscious.
Thus one morning I opened my eyes involuntarily, struggling frantically to fall back into that condition of bliss in which dream had wrapped me. So chagrined was I to find myself awake that I was on the point of tears. I closed my eyes and tried to sink back again into the world from which I had been so cruelly ejected. It was useless. I tried every device I had ever heard of but I could no more accomplish the trick than one can stop a bullet in flight and restore it to the empty chamber of a revolver.
What remained, however, was the aura of the dream: in that I lingered voluptuously. Some deep purpose had been fulfilled, but before I had been given time to read the significance of it the slate had been sponged and I was thrust out, out into a world whose one solution for everything is death.
There were only a few tangible shreds left in my hand and, as with those crumbs which the poor are supposed to gather from the tables of the rich, I clung to them greedily. But the crumbs dropped from the table of sleep are like the meager facts in a crime whose solution must ever remain a mystery. Those dripping images which, in the act of awakening, one spirits across the threshold like a mystic smuggler have a way of undergoing the most heartrending transformations on the hither side. They melt like ice cream on a sultry day in August. And yet, as they merge toward the inchoate magma which is the very stuff of the soul, some blurred knot of remembrance keeps alive—forever, it would seem—the dim and velvety outline of a palpable, sentient continuum wherein they move and have, not their being, but reality. Reality! That which embraces, sustains and exalts life. It is in this stream that one craves to return and remain forever immersed.
What remained then of that inextinguishable world from which I awakened one morning full of tender wounds that had been so skillfully stanched in the night? The face of the one I had loved and lost! Una Gifford. Not the Una I had known, but a Una whom years of pain and separation had magnified into a frightening loveliness. Her face had become like a heavy flower caught in darkness; it seemed transfixed by its own suffused glow. All those memories of her which I had jealously preserved and which had been lightly tamped down, like fine tobacco under the finger of a pipe smoker, had suddenly brought about a spontaneously combustible beautification. The pallor of her skin was heightened by the marble glow which the smoldering embers of memory awakened. The head turned slowly on the almost indistinguishable stem. The lips were parted in thirst; they were extraordinarily vivid and vulnerable. It seemed like the detached head of a dreamer seeking with eyes sealed to receive the hungry lips of one summoned from some remote place. And, like the convolutions of exotic plants which writhe and lash in the night, our lips with endless searching finally met, closed and sealed the wound which until then had bled unceasingly. It was a kiss that drowned the memory of every pain; it stanched and healed the wound. An endless time it lasted, a forgotten period, as between two unremembered dreams. And then, as though the folds of night had gently come between us, we were apart and gazing at each other, penetrating the flowing veils of darkness with a single hypnotic stare. Just as previously the wet lips had been glued together—like fluffy, fragile petals tossed by a storm—so now the eyes were joined, welded by the electric current of long-withheld recognition. In neither instance did there seem to be the least operation of the mental faculties: all was mindless and unwilled. It was like the union of two magnets, of their dull gray termini; the ever searching parts had at last come together. In this still, charged coalescence another sensation gradually made itself known: the sound of our ancient voice. A single voice which spoke and answered simultaneously: a two-pronged note which sounded at first like interrogation but which always died away like the pleasurable lapping of a wave. It was difficult to realize at first that this monologue was really the marriage of two distinct voices; it was like the play of two fountains sending and receiving from the same source and with the same gush.
Then everything was suddenly interrupted, a shift as of wet sand slipping from the upper bank, a deep dark substance suddenly scooped out, leaving a thin deceptive crust of gleaming white on which the unwary foot would tread and crash to doom.
An interim of little deaths, all painless, as though the senses were so many organ stops and a hand, invisible and beneficent, had absent-mindedly choked off the air.
Now she is reading aloud—familiar passages from a book which I must have read. She is lying on her stomach, her elbows bent, her head cupped in the two palms. It is the profile of her face which she gives me and the white opacity of the flesh is gloved and fragrant. The lips are like bruised geraniums, two perfectly hinged petals that open and close. The words are melodiously disguised; they issue from a sound box made of duvetyn.
It is only when I recognize that they are my own words, words that were never put on paper but written in the head, that I notice she is not reading to me but to a young man lying beside her. He lies on his back and looks up into her face with the attentiveness of a devotee. There are just the two of them, and the world has no existence for them. It is not a matter of space which separates me from them but a world chasm. There is no longer any possibility of communication; they float in space on a lotus leaf. We are cut off. I try desperately to send a message across the void, to let her kn
ow at least that the enchanting words are from the embryonic book of my life. But she is out of bounds. The reading continues and her ecstasy mounts. I am lost and forgotten.
Then, for just a flash, she turns her full face towards me, the eyes revealing no sign of recognition. The eyes are turned inward, as though in deep meditation. The fullness of the face is gone; the contours of the skull become pronounced. She is still beautiful, but it is no longer the allure of star and flesh; it is the phantasmal beauty of the smothered soul emerging with crest and dye from the prism of death. A fleeting cloud of remembrance passes over the empty map of her sharp features. She who was alive, incarnate, a tormented flower in the crevice of memory, now vanishes like smoke from the empire of sleep. Whether she had died in sleep, perchance in dream, or whether I myself had died and found her on the other side, asleep and dreaming, I could not tell. For an interminable instant of time our paths had crossed, the union had been consummated, the wound of the past had been healed. Incarnate or discarnate, we were now wheeling off into space, each to his own orbit, each accompanied by his own music. Time, with its endless trail of pain, sorrow and separation, had folded up; we were again in the timeless blue, distant one from another, but no longer separated. We were wheeling like the constellations, wheeling in the obedient meadows of the stars. There was nothing but the soundless chime of starry beams, the bright collisions of floating feathers churning with scintillating brilliance in the fiery sound track of the angelic realms.
I knew then that I had found bliss, and that bliss is the world, or state of the world, where creation reigns. I knew another thing, that if it were merely a dream it would end, and if it were not a dream . . .
My eyes were open and I was in a room, the same room in which I had gone to bed the night before.