“My God, here she is!” he thought. “Still featured like a child, still beautiful, still loving someone—a boy!—almost as lovely now as she was then when Mallows was a boy!”
1901! Ah, Time! The figures reeled in a drunken dance and he rubbed his hand before his eyes. In 1901! How many centuries ago was that? How many lives and deaths and floods, how many million days and nights of love, of hate, of anguish and of fear, of guilt, of hope, of disillusion and defeat here in the geologic aeons of this monstrous catacomb, this riddled isle!—In 1901! Good God! It was the very Prehistoric Age of Man! Why, all that had happened several million years ago! Since then so much had begun and ended and been forgotten—so many untold lives of truth, of youth, of old age, so much blood and sweat and agony had gone below the bridge—why, he himself had lived through at least a hundred lives of it. Yes, he had lived and died through so many births and deaths and dark oblivions of it, had striven, fought, and hoped, and been destroyed through so many centuries of it, that even memory had failed—the sense of time had been wiped out—and all of it now seemed to have happened in a timeless dream. 1901! Looked at from here and now, it was a kind of Grand Canyon of the human nerves and bones and blood and brain and flesh and words and thought, all timeless now, all congealed, all solidified in an unchanging stratum there impossibly below, mixed into a general geologic layer with all the bonnets, bustles, and old songs, the straw hats and the derbies, the clatter of forgotten hooves, the thunder of forgotten wheels upon forgotten cobbles—all merged together now with the skeletons of lost ideas in a single stratum of the sunken world—while she
* * *
—She! Why, surely she had been a part of it with him!
She had turned to speak to another group, and he could hear her saying:
“Oh yes, I knew Jack Reed. He used to come to Mabel Dodge’s place. We were great friends…That was when Alfred Stieglitz had started his salon----”
Ah, all these names! Had he not been with these as well? Or, was it but another shape, a seeming, in this phantasmal shadow-show of time? Had he not been beside her at the launching of the ship? Had they not been captives together among Thracian faces? Had he not lighted tapers to the tent when she had come to charm remission from the lord of Macedon?—All these were ghosts—save she! And she—devouring child of time—had of this whole huge company of ghosts alone remained immortal and herself, had shed off the chrysalis of all these her former selves as if each life that she had lived was nothing but an outworn garment, and now stood here—_here_! Good God!—upon the burnt-out candle-end of time—with her jolly face of noon, as if she had just heard of this brave new world on Saturday—and would see if all of it was really true to-morrow!
Mrs. Jack had turned back once more at the sound of Amy’s voice and had bent forward to listen to the girl’s disjointed exclamations as if, by giving more concentrated attention, she could make sense of what the girl was trying to say.
“I mean!...You know!...But Esther! Darling, you’re the most…! It’s the most…! I mean, when I look at both of you, I simply can’t”—cried Amy with hoarse elation, her lovely face all sunning over with light—“Oh, what I mean to say is”—she cried, then shook her head strongly, tossed another cigarette away impatiently, and cried with the expiration of a long sigh—“Gosh!”
Poor child! Poor child! Hook turned pompously away to hide the naked anguish in his eyes. So soon to grow, to go, to be consumed and die like all of us! She was, he felt, like him, too prone to live her life upon the single instant, never saving out anything as a prudent remnant for the hour of peril or the day of ruin—too prone to use it all, to give it all, burning herself out like last night’s moths upon a cluster of hard light!
Poor child! Poor child! So quick and short and temporal, both you and I, thought Hook—the children of a younger kind! While these! He looked about him at the sensual volutes of strong nostrils curved with scornful mirth. These others of this ancient chemistry—unmothed, re-born, and venturesome, yet wisely mindful of the flame—these others shall endure! Ah, Time!
Poor child!
16. A Moment of Decision