“The search for truth in life and life in truth is, after all, the perfect religion, for in seeking truth we attain that which we can never find in formal creeds,” was his answer. “We of the East have been—we are interested in Christianity not as a religion so much as the religion of the nations which have developed science and power. But now we are seeing that the very power you have created may master you and destroy you and us. Do you remember the statement of the Japanese statesman who said to the Westerner: ‘As long as we produced only men of letters, men of knowledge, and artists, you treated us as barbarians. Now that we have learned to kill, you call us civilized’?”
“What is your notion,” she asked him, tremendously moved by the clear-sighted wisdom of this quiet little man, “of the outcome of all this? Where will it end? From your distance can you see whether we of the West are headed towards greater wisdom or destruction?”
“Who can tell? The great nation or people or civilization is not that one which has the greatest brute strength but the one which can serve mankind best. The machine has been created—and it in turn is mastering its creators. I have been in your country many times and I feel that only your Negroes have successfully resisted mechanization—they yet can laugh and they yet can enjoy the benefits of the machine without being crushed by it. …”
As they drove homeward Jimmie, somewhat irritably, asked her: “What were you and that Chink talking about so long?”
“He was telling me about his country. It was very interesting, too,” she answered him. Remembering his reception of the night before of Meekins’ opinions, she knew it was unwise to tell him all that she and this wise little yellow man had discussed. But long after she was in her bed she lay awake, looking out across the deserted expanse of the Square. Her discontent was taking form. She felt a new confidence filling her as she realized that perhaps there was some valid basis for the vague unrest which had been troubling her. As she hovered in that indefinite land between sleep and wakefulness, she mumbled to herself: “I don’t know what I can do about it all, I’m sure, but there’s emptiness, emptiness, everywhere” From the room beyond there came the steady, rhythmic sound of Jimmie snoring. …
XXIII
Washington Square lay in restful beauty beneath its glittering blanket of snow. Here and there were rounded mounds, hillocks of whiteness whose framework were iron benches that had held countless pairs of lovers in the gentle warmth of spring or the torrid breathlessness of summer. The commonplace, ugly fences had been transformed miraculously into graceful lines of ethereal, ghostlike, shimmering whiteness. The harsh lines of the Arch had been rounded and softened until it seemed like a huge cake of frosted icing baked for some Gargantuan wedding feast. Across the Square loomed the church Stanford White had designed, the cross above the mass of yellow brick purified by its coating of white.
In the little patches of earth enclosed by the fences, gusts of wind were taking the new-fallen snow, swirling it in graceful spirals that danced and pirouetted with such sinuous loveliness that beside them Pavlowa would have seemed a clumsy, heavy-footed rustic doing a barn dance. Here and there scurried along a figure, head bent before the icy wind, or a lumbering Fifth Avenue bus with its green sides visible in spots free from the encrustations of snow. The verdant hue of the buses or the blackness of clothing only accentuated the whiteness around the moving figures. As if awed by the phenomenon of the transformation, old but ever new, all sound was muffled, an encircling blanket of stillness gripped and held all things, animate and inanimate, in its soft grip.
For hours Mimi sat and looked out upon the Square, long hours after Jimmie had ploughed his way down the steps and disappeared in the distance as he forged his way through the snow to the subway. Why, she asked herself—and in presenting the question to herself she placed it before some greater power, some wiser and more farseeing, One beyond the confines of her own mind and spirit—why was I given this restless spirit, this ceaseless inability to be content with what life has brought me? Why cannot I be like other women, able to content myself with whatever comes, refusing to let the tiny mice of search for the unattainable gnaw at my restless heart? She thought of the times when she might have avoided all this seeking, seeking, seeking, by calm and unquestioning acceptance of life as she had encountered it, yielding principles and ideals which conflicted with the ways and customs and accepted standards of the world as she found them. She might have married Carl. She might have yielded to marriage or support without marriage when other men had offered it—acceptance of any one of a number of men whom she did not love and never would have loved but who could have given her ease and comfort and freedom from financial worry. She might have given away or abandoned Petit Jean and dropped for all time memory of his entry in the world. Instead here she was wanting him, longing for him more passionately than she had ever wanted him before.
Jimmie had wanted children—had begged her to give him a son, preferably, but if not a son, a daughter. There had been a time when she might have wanted to give him what he wanted. But she had not had the courage to tell him that the granting of his wish
