“...Of course, my dear nephew, you must stay with us until you have found a comfortable and suitable home for yourself in the city....”
“...Of course, my dear nephew, you must stay with us until you have found a comfortable and suitable home for yourself in the city....”
So had David’s aunt, Lauretta Deane, written to him and made him somehow doubt the amiability of the lady, despite the fact of her welcome. He had never met the family of his uncle. He felt a significance in this. His mother used at times to talk of Aunt Lauretta as of a fortunately distant fact.
“Your father and Uncle Anthony never did seem to get along,” she said. That perhaps disposed for her of Anthony’s wife.
Mr. Deane answered the bell.... David stepped into a naked hall, hanging in camphored drapery. The varnished floor swept away in parabolic shadows; the bannisters of the stair were a red lacquered flourish, a sort of scrolled battalion along red, lacquered steps. There was his uncle, rather hot, coatless, diminished.
“Well—glad to see you, my boy.... Have a good journey?”
David was looking for more glory. It struck him that the house was bigger, brighter than this man. The traditional Uncle Anthony seemed to require the setting of his visits to the little town. He mumbled amenably.
“Your aunt and your cousins are in the mountains.... I’m alone, as you see. Come in.”
He went before David up the stairs. They sounded hollow and yet they were bright.
“The parlor’s closed up for the summer. Step in here. Have a drink of something cool?”
“Just vichy, thank you.” His uncle moved toward the decanter beside the paper-littered chair where he had evidently sat.
David stood still, holding his cool glass and aware, though he looked beyond, of vagrant feathery bubbles in the water. Mr. Deane leaned over the decanter.
In the center of David’s mind was the scurry of papers—Sunday papers—on the floor, on the table, on the chairs. Chairs protruded flamboyant scrollery from under the drab gray of their summer dress, like little old coquettes. Massive pictures heaved on the walls, and these were covered also and betrayed glimpses of finery of gilded frames. The family photographs were bare. David found himself sharply looking at a stentorian lady and two pretty girls with down-turned mouths. He drew his body toward his questioning uncle.
Mr. Deane found questions hard. Three times he asked if David had enjoyed his vacation: three times if he was ready for work. Then, with a sudden sympathy, it came to him that such solicitude was perhaps wearying.
“Better sit down,” he said. Gently. At last, “Well—I guess you’re tired. You can go to bed if you wish to. All ready for you, my boy, you see.”
There was a certain pride in his remark. David caught this. He did not understand. He was in a mood where what he did not understand he could not like.
He found his two legs not quite enough to stand on. He was uncomfortable, shifting, now he had gotten up. He followed his uncle to the fourth and topmost floor of the empty echoing house. In each narrow hall as they passed through, a gas-jet trembled in a red rugose globe.
“Here we are, my boy. Bathroom below.” Mr. Deane smiled. “I’ll have you waked in the morning. Sleep tight.”
David heard him stamp heavily down to his easy-chair, his chaos of papers, his whiskey. As he had turned, he seemed to wink at David. Was he trying to be kind? A door slammed outer silence. The room was alive....
The Vice-president of the Railroad had an estate three miles beyond the limits of David’s town. The Vice-president had a somewhat remote sister who used to visit David’s mother. Although Mrs. Markand always tried to stop her and to change the subject—it shamed her—this lady would talk of the glories of that estate and of the pride of its owner. So now this room was talking of the Deanes. A remote room it was, thrust out in limbo—an obviously spare room. But it was full and stridulous with observations.
David sat on the broad bed. Two dormer windows were open, and the street came in. A low ponderous murmur welling and declining. Fogged and blue. With sudden periodic flashes of near commotion: a passing cab, a car clanking. The pervasive sense of low hard pavement drenched with the beat of life swung up to him in flat strokes.
The room had the same fogginess, the same color as this new world: the same dull compression of incessant life. It, too, was a scabbard for some lancing emotion. Doubtless his glimpse of the family photographs had determined David’s mind more than he knew: the muffled finery of the house.
David had the sense of a prison; or was it a church? There were hearts here that beat against this place, and yet they were worshipful voices. He had never thought of the arrogant consistence of walls and of an aunt. He was not sure of his cousins.
Unknown to himself, with the naïve prescience of the wild caught thing, David found the spirit of the house: its angular and mournful fixity, its irrelevance of finery and comfort. He had been shocked to find that he knew these sorts of furniture and ornaments: there had been sporadic visits to stately country parlors. The City’s contribution seemed mostly the house itself, perhaps its work upon what was in it.... A City of somber houses sentineled like conquerors on sodden streets.
David settled back in the wide bed and drifted away; a cloud of porcelain fans and gilt settees and majolica statuettes swept in his mind with a mingling of soft girls, and beat on the frown of gray walls....
It was night when he awoke. A numbness was over David. He thought: “Why don’t all these things thrill me more?” He felt the plethoric breathing of New York. Night had always meant to him the freedom of dreams, play of stars. Here was a night that stirred with stifled pain. David jumped out of the bed and went to the window.
An unbroken flank of houses rose from the mist of the street. They were lightless and sleeping. They were not dreaming like most houses he had known that went musing by night. They were heavy and hurt. It was as if the day had struck them and blinded them; left them there in a coma. David saw the quavering glow of the sky. The air came to his naked throat with moist fingers that trembled. David crept away to bed....
“Your bath is ready, Sir.”
He heard this, he recalled the several knocks that had preceded. A sun slanted into the dormer windows, lay bright there in the corner of his room. But the shadows were everywhere—hostile hangers-on.
At table below he found his uncle, still coatless, moist, full also of night’s shadows. His uncle looked worn and tired. A drawing weariness in his own body, over his own face, told him the same shadows clung to himself. City morning lacked the resilience of new birth. It must be the usual thing: for Mr. Deane had answered his question with “Yes, I slept fine,” and David looking back over the swift night could see in it no cause for this new agedness that waked in his veins.
“A cool night,” said Mr. Deane. “You were lucky, lad, not to be introduced to the city in one of our broilers.”
The swinging door widened, the maid brought David his breakfast. A melon, eggs daintily propped in porcelain funnels: he must split them, he guessed, with a sharp stroke of the knife without taking them out: coffee that cut mental mists.... What curious impressions he was having! He sat so long in this room, he noticed the shadows on his uncle’s face, the shadows in his own blood: he had not seen the room. He felt now as if he had thought the room was dark, and there was no use trying to see in the dark. The door swung wide: it was as if himself had just come in. Yellow woodwork in the pantry, an entering maid. He saw the heavy panelings in oak and the resplendent chandelier in the air and the straight-back, red-plush chairs and that the maid was like himself from the country. She was a heavy solid girl moving in grace. Chestnut hair about the sweet round eyes. Her smile was sweet, he did not feel like smiling; she was the sort that smelt of warm milk; David thought to himself what a shame she had lost two of her teeth.
He liked her standing close to him, serving him: her arm touched his shoulder. He saw that the ceiling was painted: it sagged down in a verdant circle of flowers: obese angels cavorted about very green garlands.
“We’re friends,” his senses spoke, “we are both strangers.”
Mr. Deane rustled his papers: he dipped toast in his coffee, noisily lapped it up, sucked his mustache. It was droll how his red tongue shot out and caught the brown drip of his mustache. Mr. Deane was talking.
“We’ll go down together, my boy—for the first day.” He consulted his watch. “It’s eight-twenty now. As a rule, I think Mr. McGill will want you at the office at eight. Ittakes forty minutes from here to the office. Fifteen minutes for breakfast.” He reckoned and rang the bell. To the entering girl: “Anne, Mr. David’s regular breakfast time will be ten past seven.”
His face had been long, looking away. It turned again toward David, and broadened. He winked. Yes: he was trying to be kind.
“Does your watch keep good time?” he asked. Why should this question seem to bring him relief? “See to that, my boy. The City is run onschedule. Onschedule. That’s why it’s a great City. That’s what makes a great City out of a piece of country. Manhattan once had fields in it. And a few hills. Oh, yes—Central Park was a squatter’s marsh. Wait till you see it with its new asphalt roads! Some day there’ll be asphalt roads all over the country.”
“It’ll be hard on the horses,” David felt he must inform his uncle.
“Hard on the horses? Maybe. Maybe it will. That’s the rule of civilization. It is hard on us all. Hard on the workers and hard on the bosses. It’s worth it. Progress must have her dividends. When Captains of Industry die of overwork, should we spare horses? We’ll do without them!”
Mr. Deane made a long strip of his napkin and ran it horizontally, methodically over his mouth. “You see,” he went on, “you’ll have to change your outlook on life, now that you are to become a part of the great City—a part of the great Machine. You’ll be proud of it, soon enough. The New Yorker is a man of service. He serves Business. He serves Country. He don’t think of himself. Look at me. Your Aunt Lauretta is away vacationing. I stay here and work. I don’t think of myself. I’ve not taken three weeks off in twenty years’ time. I stick to my guns. They can trust me in the City. They know I am faithful: I am always on the spot. The easy jolly ways of the country don’t go far in theMetropolis. We’re a beehive, we are. Work! Service! And the ambition of each man is to die in harness. Of course, I mean the men whosucceed. That is the one way to earn real money in New York. To think of absolutely nothing else: to give time to absolutely nothing else. There’s the American Ideal of Service for you.” He paused and glowed upon his nephew who sat, stiffly erect, trying to believe, in order that he might like this talk.... “And, my boy, what’s the result? Don’t you know?... America is the result!” He flourished his white hands. “The great Democracy. The land of three and a half million square miles. We’ve made it. The American Ideal made it. I’ve been out West. I’ve seen our country. The Rockies that you could drop the Alps into—lose them. The Grand Canyon that’s a mile from top to bottom. The geysers in Yellowstone Park. The greatest, most populous, thebiggestcountry on Earth! And we’ve made it. We’re making it, my boy. American Ideals.”
Mr. Deane stopped again. He reached for his climax. He found it. “I presume,” he said, “I presume no sane man will deny that William McKinley is the greatest statesman to-day in the world.”
He said this with a new impressive quiet. He had heard a speech of Senator Black: he had shaken hands with him. He recalled his gesture.
David nodded. He felt he must do something. He felt a strange discomfort. Why should he resent these patriotic words? why want to doubt them? Should he not have found glory in believing? His mind dropped back to Thomas Rennard and he knew that Rennard would have contrived to scout these boasts. He found himself relieved. He wanted Rennard as a companion in the guilt of his mood. He was quite sure it was guilt to doubt a word of his uncle’s. No question of that.
He sat beside him in the car: his uncle was reading his third morning paper. They spurted and clanked, they swayed down the great iron street. David was swung in the wonders of this clanging cable that tossed them headlong, while the wheels groaned to be free of their rails, that dropped them rocking and sighing to a halt. What he saw was himself surrounded by mournful men—clottings of men under straps—and all devoured by the news they sucked from their papers, all immersed by the same strange shadows—angular shadows—he felt in his own veins. Beyond the maze of men ran out the mazes of traffic. Capering strides of horses with yearnful nostrils; interminable houses, motley, jagged, restless, broken off into squares and corners like herded wild things before the assault of other wild things more volatile than they. So it seemed to David: these buildings grouped in panic were of one stuff and soul with the scurrying, arrogant throngs that pressed about them and clambered through them.
In its startled rhythm David’s mind wandered aimlessly. He forgot about the car: when it moved with any respite it loped like a weary and whipped horse. The broken rhythm made openings for his mind: patches of his past came through the interstices of moving, came torn and poignant. He saw himself in his easy greasy clothes at work at home: he felt the shoulders of plain men beside his shoulders: eyes of brothers looked into his eyes and his hands, black with oil, clasped other hands that were warm. His hands and theirs were near each other—far, equally far from himself now moving through a city. He saw not patches of his past but of himself, as if he had been looking through this clot of men at a man beyond them. He had a vision, harried by the car’s toss, of a young man alive with many others. They marched along a hooded way into a shadowy house. Their loose clothes, the grease of their hands, the smile of their eyes was going to be cleansed away. He saw his hands clasping,so far from his hands now, hands of men who were brothers and who were losing hold of a warmth held in the clasp of hands.... His drifting mind touched a book he had loved:The Tale of Two Cities. He saw a tumbril with its sodden burden moving through the Terror of Paris. He saw the death-claimed gaze of men moving through crowded streets. He heard the groan of wheels. Seeing these far things, when his uncle jerked his sleeve—“Here we are”—he was not far away....
“That’s the East River yonder.”
David’s mood changed.... They walked down a narrow street whose name was a legend. David was walking on Wall Street. Glass casements fronting heavy buildings, huge masonry pillared by slender stone—the grace and loom, the hypocrisy of Power. Spawn of the buildings: men with naked singing nerves like wires in storm, and women with dead eyes, women with soft breasts against a hard tiding world. Furious streets. A street wide and delirious with men shouting and waving their straw-hats like banners. Streets narrow and somber that curled like smoke across his feet. Streets eaten with secret moods. Streets cluttered and twisting with pent power. Streets pulsant like hose. Streets slumberous like pythons. Streets writhing and locked.
A wide gash of sky. The sun was a stranger. The blue was a burn.
They went toward the River. Black houses were lost among masts of ships. Black herded houses crawled towards the wharves. Men were nervous like rats feeding on grain.
David walked on Wall Street. Walked toward his uncle’s office that was to swallow him up. Walked down to where it waited him, a block from Wall Street. Life was sea-yearning. Shops sold sails and compasses and binnacles. In the smart of the salt a scent and a sense of spices. Coffee and wines were at home here in the grime of the North, hadbrought with them the linger of their homes. Tobacco. Musty housings for jagged yellow leaves. A brooding, reeking, murmurous street.
David fell down the funnel of a world. The waters touched him that touched far lands. Pregnant waters. He had been like a virgin whose lips trembled with fear. He was like a virgin whose lips tremble with desire.
He stepped into a doorway, behind his uncle....
The Deanes returned from the mountains in a body. Mr. Deane, despite his virtues, was taking a vacation. A few days after David’s mustering into service, he had gone to join his wife and daughters. David was alone in the barren house, with Anne to cook his breakfasts and make his bed.
David was alone with Anne in the house. But in the house was the spirit of its owners and more really David was alone with that.
He moved uneasy through the City, he lay uneasy in this house that was his only home. He tried to win a certain temporary comfort. He was helpless against the press of the Deanes, thwarting his rest as he sat eating his food; against the press of the City as he worked at his desk downtown, earning his food. It was beyond his reason. The days were fire. The nights were fume of heated stone and brick. And, within the stone and brick, restless spirits marring his own. The City gasped out the heat of the day by night. David was seared between alternate fires.
The heat of business dulled his will, depleted his body, aroused his nerves. A new equation. At the hour of closing, he was tired and yet only partly tired. The discrepancy gave accent to his fatigue. The rounded, gentle weariness that he had often known, which took him whole in encompassing arms and lowered him to sleep, was not this. The City worked on him with an uneven spite. There he was, with the lowsun hot in the west above the lurid Hudson: limp and moist and spirit-dead, but with senses leaping and a hunger ranging his veins.
In this state, David took his supper—trying to stifle the heat with iced tea and iced coffee. In this state he tried to sleep.
He lay naked in bed. The sheets clung to his flesh. His skin prickled with irritation.
So far as work emptied him work was good. A new experience was a new vessel—what David needed to pour of himself. But the season was dull. Mr. McGill was gone, and already his first task, to sort and enter bills of lading, was a tedious habit. It seemed not work to David but the kind of punishment that was occasionally meted out in school: like copying the commandment one hundred times: “I must not talk during hours.” There was nothing more or else to do, until the Manager’s return.
The office was a haphazard, a languorous, loose beast functioning dully through the inertia of its past and the prod of its future. Clusters of girls formed like flies on a kitchen table. They chatted and laughed and wiped the clotted powder from their cheeks. They took long hours for lunch, buying cakes and cream-puffs and olives from the store and eating in the office. The boys hovered about like greedy dogs, barking and sniffing and showing a tendency to rear on their hind legs. The girls, loving the sense of their desire, kept them unsated. Most of the occupants of the inner offices were absent. On the other floors, above, below, the rumble of the packers and the crash of boxes made a dusty murmur. David had seen these infernos of industry, caught the acerb flavor of wet tobacco and sweat and heat, observed men moving in the mist of their hands and women serried at filthy tables, with haggard arms that were forever plying and hot eyes that were still. He preferred his purgatory. He hated the hour oflunch when he must step down into the flaming stream of the canyon and be part of it, hunting his food. He was glad when the hour of closing came like a silent charm, stilled the drone of the work. No clock was needed to announce this hour. It went over the cluttered room like an invisible hand: its tenuous sweet fingers touched every one and everything. The girls at the writing machines clicked more slowly, their eyes wandered more and more, their hands brushed back their hair with a new hope.... A last spurt puckered their brows and their lips: then the power died. The boys at the tall ledger tables twisted legs about their chairs and stopped sharpening pencils. They whistled sudden snatches of a tune. Wide ranges of conversation sprang up. Talk wreathed forth until girls in the new silence of their machines addressed each other clear across the room: the men in the ledger alcoves laughed at jokes given forth from the front windows....
Sudden, like the last spin of a top, a tremor ran through the office, work toppled dead on its side.
Girls were in hats: cigarettes sprouted on the lips of the boys. Overhead in the sudden noise of stillness, the new mood of the machines. Life was out of the window. In groups of two and three the girls were sucked away to it: the boys followed, with noses forward and dragging limbs.
The streets were cauldrons that had overflowed. The sluices of pent life emptied upon them. Work had banked these fires: routine had stifled them to smoke. Now, the coals were strewn low and long. A draft of release whipped down the channeling gutters. There was flame. The houses brooded like disused ovens, storing their heat and their rust.
The vision of this was a searing stripe on David’s mind as he lay within the night: was a dark band as he awoke upon the morning. He was naked in bed. His strong arms were thrown up like an infant’s. His open palms pillowed his neck. As he breathed, the muscles in his abdomen rolled gently.He was a powerful boy, with white skin and a wave of golden hair upon his body. He had pulled his bed directly beneath a dormer window. The sun bronzed his head. The clear soft strength of his face came out in this sleepy light. David dozed and prodded his senses into getting up. He was strong and refreshed in the morning. He thought of work as a contest and knew he would win. The Hell of labor was upstairs where the men sweated in open shirts rolling cigars, and he had seen the women fold back their waists till the tawny dust grimed the skin of their breasts. He was in this world’s Purgatory. In the quiet offices beyond, the inner ones bound by invisible threads of gold to the ease of high houses in the winter and the distant smile of the mountains, was Paradise and was the goal. David thought that he had given up the free fields of his home and that now, already he was set on winning them back. This, it seemed to him, was droll. He wondered why he had thrown the fields away, when so evidently the promise of the City was to be able to revisit them. He wondered whyhehad done so. He thought of Anne, who perhaps was forgetting the scent of the clover. He recalled that if he hurried with his bath, he would have more time at breakfast—more time to be with Anne. His long legs were out of the bed.
It was hard to pierce to Anne. Both he and she were embarrassed with their desire to speak freely. They were shy. One morning she said to him:
“Mr. David, if you would want to, why don’t you come back and I’ll cook you your dinner.”
He thanked her and refused.
“You’ve worked enough, I think.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
She had not pressed her offer. He had commanded his pleasure. So it must be her pleasure. She was that sort of woman.
“What do you do in the evenings?” he asked her.
“Oh, not much. I’m always to bed early. It’s too hot for dancing, ain’t it?” She hurried through her answer.
David suddenly knew that when his sickened will and stinging senses came to the house at night, she was there also! While he lay awake in his bed, a wall was between his nakedness and hers. It was both painful and sweet to think of this.
The black heat rolled with enforcement through the City. Life was wet fire. A murmur of anguish was the breath of the night. He lay wide-eyed, dreaming. The air was a prison. His senses yearned toward the quiet of death as release from this breath of the world—from these fumes of a dead sun. He was under surprise when it knocked at the door.
“Mr. David, I’ve brought you a cool drink. May I come in?”
He did not move. He did not reach for his sheet. Anne came through the blackness and gave him a glass. He gulped wet coolth.
“Thank you—Anne.”
She took the glass. She bent down, her hair was a wonder over his eyes. A wonder, since her hair was hot and still it was good. He felt her moist lips on his chest.... There was the constant spirit of the house, the forbidding intrusion of knowing that he was a guest and she a servant, that this was evil.... Anne was gone.
No word at breakfast.... That night David found he was awaiting her and she came. His sheet was over him. He took the glass she offered and placed it on the chair; his arm drew her down till she sat beside him on the bed. He felt her body burning under her cool gown: all the world was distant, so that the house was distant too, and for once the Deanes were in the mountains.
“No, Mr. David....”
He laughed. He was scornful: the Deanes were in the mountains.
A hot black sea was the world, rolling away. His bed rolled upon it; only his bed was above the sea. It was haven. It was haven for him and his woman. He drew her down, and his mouth sought her lips, her neck. His mouth felt the wide loveliness of her body. It was distant still, there was a gown between them. The gown was wide as a world. Her body was growing great, until it was another sea that would cool him. It was a sea of fire, but the fire was white and would cool him. It was needful so.
She struggled.... Sudden she came of her own broken and sick will. Their wills were healing each other. She was willfuller now than he. She held his head in her arms, her flesh was all about him. Her gown was gone.
He found that she was lying beside him, crumpled: holding herself away. He found she was a little bruised woman with bruised little breasts and hair tangled, knotted in heat. He found he was moving away from her.
He found that the night was coming back. It was scornful and triumphant. It waved onward, and upon its bitter burning waves came the Deanes who were no longer in the mountains. There they were in the room. A vast febrile room. Filled with the City and its desolate shadows, filled with the Deanes. Huddling diminished in a corner a guest and a servant.
He spoke to her: “Anne.”
She answered: “Yes, Mr. David,” so he knew she knew this also.
At breakfast the sweet silence of restraint. A Puritan’s vow in the withdrawn eyes of each other.
But the heat did not stop: nor the wearing away of will and the rebellion of nerves. Anne came again. It had nothing to do with the wide remainder of their lives. It was somnambular. She was the soul of the heat—the gladness of it. So they got to be happy together and not to mind very much. They got to laughing and to forgetting. There were never many words. Breakfast was the break from a dream.
David deciphered her silence.
“I am wiser than you believe. I am wiser than you,” it said. “I am thankful for you. You need not worry. Oh, I am very thankful.”
All one week, Anne’s step on the threshold of his room was gone. David fumbled in bare feet along the tunneled hall. His flat palm felt her door. It was locked. The end—sweet end of unreplenishment.
No word further: no glance toward the past to open it once more....
They were really there—the Deanes! A cool, bright night with stars crushed above the crude wave of the city streets. They had traveled through that night and those stars for this city. They were there in the early morning.
They came in discussiveness and noise, as a luxurious gift comes wrapped in crackling paper. Once unbundled, they were rather silent. David sensed an unease and discomfort in their coming—a token of what happened in souls of their kind when they were taken even for a day from the rounds of their habits. David observed with what swift recuperation they merged into the imprint of their house; how their house seemed to sigh and settle with the recapture of its soul. Sudden, there was David, completely strange, dizzily away: with the memory of his amour an unbelievable, discreditable dream.
He watched Anne with the other servants that had come sink swiftly into the cloud of servience: lose her charm and her sex: dwindle in an instant to be an appendage of hermistresses, an inflection of the wishes of these reigning women. By the shock of this a sort of osmosis went on in David.
He found himself partly identified with Anne: had they not been one together?—and, so, diminished, humbled. Another part of him flung her off and merged with his cousins, his flesh and blood; become Anne’s remote and indifferent master.
He stood there awkward while the process shredded and dazed him. Between these warring halves of himself, he fell away from the sharp social trial of the moment—the need of fronting these women. His aunt took note of a vacancy about him.
“Well, David, it’s been a long time waiting to know you.” She added to herself: “He’s stupid.”
Her second daughter, Lois, supplemented her aunt as one generation should another: “I think he’s dear”; she looked at him keenly, “but what’s bewildering him so?”
She came very close to him, and held out her hand. “I’m awfully glad to know you, David.” He took her hand so patiently, that she held up her lips, “We’re cousins,” she explained and she laughed.
With great seriousness, he kissed her and liked her.
Muriel, who was nineteen and three years older and wiser than Lois, watched the little challenge of acquaintance, smiled sourly, busied herself with her bags.
“Well,” she said, searching for her powder puff. “I suppose it has been frightfully hot?”
Mr. Deane had been quarreling with the coachman about the fare: his own carriage was not yet in service. He puffed into the room. David saw and at length realized how changed he was, in the true setting of his wife and daughters. He scarcely noticed David.
“Got everything?” he asked excitedly. “Nothing lost? My! it’s hot! That robber robbed me. Lauretta—you have thekeys? I must run along. Where’s breakfast?” He mopped his brow, he paced; and David wondered whether the executive task of shipping his family to New York—or some obscure disturbance—was the thing too much for him.
David stood quietly apart. He unstrapped bags; untied boxes; stacked rugs and tennis rackets into obtrusive corners. They let him work for them, quite as they let Anne work. He found himself dwindling from them: he wondered why he minded performing these casual tasks. He found he did not care for this identity with Anne, although a part of him knew it existed only in himself. He looked at her—not even in her. She was very moist and humble and unattractive in her black skirt and her white apron tucked high in her corsage. He could not separate her body from that apron—chiefly from that attitude of serving. He wanted to say to himself “Well—she served me!” He wanted to be high-handed, cynical, indifferent. He managed to lose all sense of this toiling, nodding girl as one with the sweet woman he had held in his arms and held with all his body. There he was, scrutinizing Lois: her smart slimness; the perfect abandon of her body not to him but to her own position. His cousin wore a bright blue satin dress, simple and short and trim. Her corsage was caught up in white lace:—the scheme was near enough to the livery of Anne to make the difference crying. Her half-bare arms were white. Strangely white. David guessed what pains she must have been to so to keep them. She had taken off her hat; her golden hair fell daintily—unmoist, immaculate—upon her forehead, and in crisp ringlets down her neck. She had a tender smile that seemed to take one in and laugh one out. Her features were smiling, soft and round, and were yet tinged with an astute concern that contradicted their benevolence. The white-slippered feet and the white-stockinged legs were an increased offsetting flirt of humor to her serious brown eyes. The attentive quality in Lois was her grace, hertender aloofness, her sixteen years full of pride. David found himself quite willing to deny his amour with a servant.
Anne needed to come up to him and ask him:
“Will you be going downtown to-day, Mr. David? Or will you be here to lunch?”
“I’m going downtown,” he said sharply. He looked in her face and found the soft intimate sense of her offensive: a too cloying sweetness for his stomach. On the heels of his discovery a great remorse and disgust at himself. It drove him toward a demonstration of bravado: he needed almost to make clear to this searing presence of the Deanes that he owed Anne much, was more like Anne than like them, and was aware of it. This too was checked, left him dangling.
Lois caught him looking her through, and came over to where he worked at a stubborn bag: she said: “Let me help you, David.”
“No need,” he said with a tone studiedly similar to the one he had addressed to Anne. There was balm in that. It seemed, however, not to disturb Lois: and Anne was out of the room.
His cousin helped to the extent of loosing one strap. She sat on the gladstone and was suddenly languid, and forgot....
With Lois cornering his eye, David found he had the whole group in his mind. Mr. Deane was still at paces on the floor, calling for breakfast. David was amazed at his insignificance in this concise room. His wife paid him no attention. Twice she brushed against him, crossing the room: twice also she brushed against a bag. Her reactions were one. Muriel went up to him and said: “Father, let me have about twenty dollars more, will you?” Mr. Deane’s pacing slowed against this new ordinance. He stopped, snapped the bills from his wallet and handed them to his daughter. Muriel was at the moment looking over her shoulder, giving an order to Anne. She did not stop. Her eyes did not go with her receiving hand. Mr.Deane resumed his pacing. His wife said, half in the air: “In a moment, Anthony, we shall be able to spare Anne.” Lois, musing in her corner, suddenly flared forth: “Father, you are making me nervous with your walking like a lion in his cage!” But at once her face went soft, she forgot what she had said. Then her father had left the room, following the bright discovery that Anne had left before him.
David felt it was time to be off for downtown. He went to his aunt.
“Good-by.”
“I hope, David, you don’t squander your money at those expensive lunch places.”
David said he did not. He did not add he was afraid of them. He went to Lois.
“Good-by.”
“Good-by,” she smiled. “Come back soon.”
He went to Muriel. She looked up surprised.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Good-by.”
And the revelation came to David. These four persons were not a group: in no true sense were they a group. The families that he had known were strictly groups.... Even his own, though in his father’s days the rhyme of it was pain. Some single rhythm, some common color composed them. Here were four persons. Their spirits had nothing to do one with another. He was quite sure their spirits were not aware one of another. They spent one man’s money: they obeyed one woman’s orders: they lived at the behest of a sort of mutual complacency together, sharing the pleasures that were in need of union for support. But they were not united. David felt it, touching their fingers, as he said:
“Good-by.”
It gave him a strange, even a sick feeling: as if he had seen a man devouring his own hands.
IT was voluptuous for Tom Rennard after the trees and the birds to give himself once more into the bond of his profession. Through the free woods he walked in manacled anarchy: through the City’s thralldom he walked free. He plunged into work. He touched the tasks of the approaching season, knew it would be his best, measured his dominion above success and was glad like a bird perched on top of its cage. He prepared a brief for a case months away from trial: he played with the strategy of an appeal in a suit not yet argued. In the brash nights of the refilling City he sat in hotel lobbies and let his mind cut clear through the flaccid provincial crowds. He journeyed uptown to a baseball game: drank in the rawness of the joy of others in a ball swiftly caught and clouted: let his heart fill with the tang of the game’s intricate and lissome grace against the sprawling pleasure of the mindless. Once more New York, an atmosphere, lay, swirled, clouded and shone around him. Then he shut his desk, an early afternoon, and went to see his sister.
Her studio was unfashionable in location. It was the top floor of a crumbling red-brick house in the moiled middle East Side of the city. It was east of Murray Hill, west of Stuyvesant Square: the elevated trains snorted their cinders not far from her flowered window. Cornelia began to make money and her habitation blossomed. Persian shawls appeared in appropriate corners: new rash adventures in color out of Paris gladdened the white walls: slender vases came from exile in Chatham Square. Tom called the place his refuge from the city.
“Hello,” she said. “I am glad you came. I’m lazy this afternoon.” Tom folded his coat away in the little bedroom. It had the air of a cell. The white walls were bare, the white iron bed was narrow; a small pack of books stood in the corner of the floor.
“You take it easy,” he said, already at the task, “and I’ll prepare you some Turkish coffee. Have you any of that orange essence left?”
He was adept and he needed to ask no further questions.
They settled and sipped and talked. Cornelia was on the couch. Tom squatted on the floor. Both of them had lighted cigarettes.
“Well, what adventure?” she asked.
She looked more than the three years older that she was. She wore an unembroidered smock—a dull, muslin drab. Her feet were sandaled. Her hair was drawn tight back over her head, where it could not interfere with work. Her eyes were soft in the harsh angles of her face.
“I was on a vacation, Cornelia. You know that means that I took care nothing should happen to me.”
She laughed. “That efficient you’re not, dear boy.”
“Well, there was no semblance of adventure. I tramped and drank a lot of glorious milk and slept nine hours a night.”
“And——?”
“And swam and paddled.” Tom wagged his head with the catalogue.
“You met somebody interesting?”
He stopped. “How do you know?”
“You always do, don’t you? Who was it? The girl, at last?”
“No—not the girl. And you’re wrong. Really, I had a deliciously dull time.”
She did not press the matter.
“Daydon says I ought to move now I’ve won that prize. He says no one will visit a studio so near Third Avenue.”
“Are you going to?”
“I am not.”
“I am glad, Cornelia. Just because you have begun to have money is no reason for spending it all on rents.”
“That’s just what most New Yorkers do, is it not?”
They both laughed, and were silent.
“What you said has a lot of truth in it,” Tom spoke at last. And his sister knew he had pounced on her observation as a text. He was comfortable now. He had been just a bit uneasy, questioned about his trip. There was the sign of a release from nervousness in the brightening of his eyes and the slower puff of his cigarette—the way he curled up his legs, limbered his arms and began to talk. Cornelia watched him with a vague amusement and a subtle reservation. She would let him have his speech; then she would pin him back to his trip and the thing in it which made him nervous. In this mood she listened.
“Really,” he said, “the true inwardness of New York’s rising sky-line has been the passion of New Yorkers for high rents. Have you ever thought of that? What a handy substitute for other, remoter standards they have found in the price of housing? Of course the gullible talk of the fact that New York is a crowded island. They forget the miles of dilapidated and discarded masonry within hail of their stylish towers. Some day the historian will understand. He will say this: ‘Money was so deep their worship that they mis-prized all treasures of life which did not blatantly announce it. They left their walls empty of beauty, their larders empty of health, their houses empty of grace, in order to pay high rents to the lords of land. These fabulous sums were the pride and the decoration of their lives. The height of New York rentals and the highbuildings that were their symbols became the chief expression of Metropolitan Art!’”
He laughed. Cornelia kept silent.
“The historian will finish in this tone: ‘Surely these were a foolish people, ripe for destruction.’”
“Give me another cigarette, Tom.” She was resolved not to help him along. Tom came to silence. He felt her mood.
“Well, what is it?” he asked.
“You had better look out, brother mine. You could easily get to be a typical New Yorker. I hate talk.”
“What I said wasn’t true?”
“Yes. But it was talk.”
“Oh, boo! Don’t be so serious.”
“Weren’t you?”
“Of course not. I was speaking the truth. Even, I was prophesying. To be serious at such a game is to risk being a fool.”
“Most of your talk, Tom, is a side-stepping of something in you you want to hide. I have noticed that.”
Cornelia was half up on her couch, facing him straight. Now, she was ready to pin him. “It’s a bad convenience, dear,” she went on, “putting up all these brittle outer observations when some one threatens to get under your skin. You do it so well.”
She smiled; Tom straightened his legs and met her gaze. He knew her direction. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said.
“Why? Just because you don’t?”
This was a true shot. He acknowledged it.
“Very well,” he spoke dryly. “There was a boy—a mere boy—up there. From New England. For some curious reason he upset me. I don’t like to talk about him. I do want to see him again. It’s all rather odd because he was really quite dull. We had damn little to say.”
In a flash Cornelia’s mood changed. Her perceptions hadcontrolled her—the acute and angular and severe in her. Now she was seated toward him on the couch; it was as if dominion had passed over to her eyes that were large on her brother. She spoke tenderly:
“It’s not a girl yet, is it, Tom?”
“You know it never is. Girls can’t disturb me. I can master women. I am cool and sure before them. But so I was with this—this fellow. Yet it seems, as I look back—quite irrationally, mind you—it seems as if we had had a contest and he had won.” He paused.
“You probablytalkedto him—flaming revolutionary talk.”
Tom shrugged.
“And he was shocked.”
“Precisely,” Tom burst in. “He was the shocked one—the dominated one, the silenced. Then, why this foolish desire to see him again and throw him on his back?”
“It has been troubling you?”
“I have imaginary conversations with him. I walk up and down Broadway with him, and say: ‘See! what a Gehenna this country’s greatest city is?’ I take him to theaters and gloat and declare ‘Trash, eh? They call it art in New York.’ Even at my office. I show him through my papers. ‘All chicanery,’ I announce. ‘That’s what you want to enter, is it?’ I shame myself before him.”
“Think it over, Tom,” Cornelia followed his silence. “You should be able to find out the thing that is troubling you.”
Tom sat a bit diminished on the floor. Sedulously he flicked the ash from his cigarette, each vestige of the ash; his fingers close to the hot, red tip. He looked up:
“This chap has something I lack and want: a sort of pure sincerity. He’ll go far—and be miserable as the devil.”
“Look out! Aren’t you the one who is afraid of misery?”
“True. I want him to give me the saving treasure. I wantto give him the saving moderation. Then we could both be saved.”
Cornelia laughed. “Whatareyou talking about now?”
But Tom was very sober. “He is all wings. He has no eyes. He’ll dash himself against the sun. I am all eyes. I see everything. But where are my wings? I’ll freeze to death from far away, seeing the sun.”
He got up. He paced the room.
“Oh, this is nonsense. You are right. I liked him because he was a naïve, country lad. I was afraid I had hurt his innocence——”
“You are dying to kill it.”
Tom stopped and faced his sister. “That’s not quite fair, Cornelia. Not kill it. Steal some of it, perhaps.”
He was talked out of his mood. He was light-hearted and full of interest for a thousand things. It was a trifle after all.
So they played through the afternoon, they went arm in arm to dinner, they spent an hour in a terrace with liqueurs before them. They talked of her work and her triumphs and the quaint jealousies of artists. All this because it was his greatest pride. And several times Tom broke out in admiration of New York: in praise of her vast largesses. He was confident and proud. Cornelia smiled again—her angular, critical self....
Before her door he kissed her good-night.
“We’ve made a pretty good start, from Dahlton, Ohio, haven’t we, sister? Pretty good, pretty fair.”
She changed once more to the tender part of her nature: she ignored his mood.
“Good-night. And Tom—that country boy—bring him up some late afternoon?” Her eyes alone smiled. Tom startled, imperceptibly.
“Surely,” he hurried to say. “Surely ... if I see him.”
Nature cellared its profusion. The sap of life was sucked to the roots of things. As the year died, the house of the Deanes came to life.
Chests gave forth finery and color. Curtains were up, barring the archaic sun: dun colors were away from the florid chairs. The safe-vaults let go their silver plate and their gold, and from the hot-houses came flowers. Streets were chill, skies were mournful; in the narrow endless purlieus of the disinherited, of the nine-tenths, began the hunger for coal.... But it was summer in the City.
The position of David was straddling, but not too insecure. He was part of the Deane household. How goodly a part devolved on his own discretion. If he made himself liked, there was no comfortable share he might not win. He was part of the Deane Company—the Deane machine of subsistence. A small and trivial part with a distinction. This he did not feel until his fellow-menials later had ceased feeling it for him. In his low place there was always the seed of future sharing. He was the Boss’s nephew. In the low places of the others, there was always the seed of permanence. These were the Boss’s victims. The Boss would keep them victims if he could. He would have all the pretty terms of a century of special pleading to hallow his act. But surely the world was a smiling place for David Markand.
“My boy,” said Mr. Deane, “you are on probation. If you prove your worth, as you may well imagine, I will be glad. American enterprise is the home of the free, the contest of character and brains. The true man wins the prize. And of course, I don’t forget who you are: that you are the only child of my dear sister. Nor must you, my boy. I have no sons of my own.”
Uptown he was still somewhat the stranger. But he was the friend of Lois and he grew confident. They liked each other. Different dispensations from far separate sources had thrustthem close. Now both of them stood together at the gate of the brilliant world Muriel went to evening after evening. They saw Muriel return, full of tokens of its splendor: full of weariness and hidden joy, full of pride and hidden knowledge. David meant to enter the gates with Lois. In the waiting it was natural that they talk, hold hands.
She would have said that she found him interesting. There was her own life, which in her mind lacked quality. It was an empty atmosphere occasionally pierced by suns and falling stars. The light of these was her sustenance and was rare. So Lois starved.
She would have said that he was easy to talk to.
In the conventional sense he understood nothing: in the sense in which life was a ruled open page for Muriel and her mother. But in the outlaw sense where these two were blind, he understood miraculously well. She could skip the roted things of the world in talk with him, dwell on the stirring and uncharted. They met in a sort of reticence about the obvious. Not deliberately, but because he could not otherwise have understood. Two persons speaking different tongues could live on elemental planes. They could convey and satisfy the sense of hunger, they could fight, they could make love. The difficulty might come when they attempted to dine together, to quarrel civilly, or to get married. Here, a common set of words was needed.
So between these two. Social engagements, family traditions, judgments of the technique and manner of existence she could not broach with him. She did not need to. Her school, her friends, her family webbed her in such subjects. The wider ranges that Muriel would have cut through as vague became their meeting place. They talked about life and beauty and the future. She was sixteen and David twenty. In these vast fields they were one fledgling age.
They were often alone together. The room on the thirdfloor that faced the street was the living-room of the sisters. And Muriel was usually out: and the parents stayed in their own quarters below.
Dinner’s end was release. David sat there uncomfortable and Lois sat there indifferent. Mr. Deane had few words. He was weary at night. What energy he had poured into the business of eating. Mrs. Deane was voluble enough, but she needed no attentive ears and she had none. She talked: her husband ate: her daughters spoke low together: David made his shoulders narrow and occasionally straightened with a shock when his aunt’s eyes turned on him. The last sip of coffee meant the last moment at the table for the girls, whether their mother was in the middle of a sentence or their father was asking them a question. In this case, the question could be curtly answered in the process of exit.
“Come, David,” from Lois, “you’re finished, aren’t you?”
If at first David was reluctant to leave so suddenly, he learned that nothing different was expected of him. Mr. Deane lighted a cigar. Often he was left alone to smoke it. He sat, his body folded and heavy in his chair, his eyes folded and heavy behind smoke. Anne came and went, clearing the table. He was unperturbed. His soft mouth wreathed and pouted: occasionally he smacked his lips. He was the picture of attainment. In his empty gaze, in the lack-reflex slumber of his muscles, in the dim movements of the heavy smoke, there was a gross Buddhistic character. It was clear that attainment in his American faith tended not toward heaven, but toward a sort of flatulent Nirvana.
Meantime, Mrs. Deane was upstairs, under a lamp, reading a novel; and when her husband did not eventually shake himself, with a slow and sleepy evolution, to his club, he was in bed before she closed her book.
Often members of the plenteous family of Mrs. Deane came to dine. But the atmosphere of the table was ample enoughto embrace them. There was the same dull air, charged with the vocal passion of Mrs. Deane and the sharp reserves of her two daughters. Only one sister—a Miss Dikes—could match the commanding Lauretta. They were profoundly sisters: when she was at table, the currents of air were shifted rather than changed. Always, Lois and David were willingly excused after dinner. And Muriel managed often to be out when her relatives were there. Her mother scolded and occasionally wept at this disloyalty in her child. But the child was already stronger than the mother. Muriel seldom quarreled back. She sneered and her eyes flashed: when she spoke, it told.
Upstairs David reached for a book.
“You have your homework to do, I s’pose?”
Lois smiled and nodded. “Oh, yes.... But I’m not going to do it.”
“You’ll not get your certificate if you don’t watch out.”
“And what good would it do me, if I did?... We’re going to talk.” She snatched his book.... “Unless, of course, you are more interested inThe Banking System of the United States.”
“Lord, no!” David laughed.
They sat together on the broad, cushioned couch whose gay blue and dull gold were a telling contrast to the dull blue and bright gold of the mother’s room below.
“What are you going to do when you become rich?” she asked him.
He looked at her. She asked him this as once before he had said to her: “When are you going to get married?” She had answered: “I am not going to get married, perhaps.” He had laughed her denial away.
So now: “I am not going to get rich, perhaps.” And there was she, scoffing at him, holding back her head and saying: “Please, do be serious, David!”
He was. He began to think aloud.
“Not everybody gets rich.”
This had no effect on her. As his silence marked his words as her answer, she shook her head with a faint impatience.
“I know. But what’s that to do with us? You’re my cousin, aren’t you? You’re our sort. You’re in Daddie’s business.”
“What sort don’t get rich, Lois?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She looked at him as if he were stupid. “You ought to know, better than I. You see ’em all around you at Daddie’s business.”
She also had been set to thinking. “How are they different from us?” she asked. Then: “Father says they simply aren’t as clever. Most of them drink too much: and have packs of children: and don’t bathe very often. I guess it’s all these things.”
“It must be. But you can’t really see much difference. Of course,you. You’re different. You’re a—why, you’d die, you couldn’t have been born, anywhere else. But I work with five other chaps in the shipping office, and they’re just like me.”
Lois laughed. “What nonsense. They’re not! You’re much nicer.” She was giggling in foretaste of the wicked truth she was about to utter, “you’re—I’m sure you’remuch, much cleaner.”
She was like a pricking rose under his face, laughing there on the couch. David resolved to be angry.
“That’s rotten of you, Lo. You’re no democrat.”
“Of course, I’m not. I’m a Republican.”
David, enjoying his indignation and unconsciously aware of the excuse it gave him, reached for her wrists.
“Don’t!” he commanded.
“You are!”
He pulled her to him, and put his arms around her waist. He said: “Stop making fun of people.” Then he kissed her.
Lois stopped laughing. She was very still. Her eyes glistened.
“Do you think, if you hadn’t beennicer, andcleanerand everything, I’d let youkissme?” She jumped up and away.
He liked her intimacy. It flattered him. He did not wish to tell her of his work at Mr. Devitt’s, and how easily he might have stayed there long and forever. And she liked his reticence, feeling its power. She liked the veiled promise of pleasure and strength that he suffused from all of his big being. It frightened her.
She was seated as far away from him as she could manage. Her bare elbows were on her knees and her chin was cupped in her hands. The pressure upward faintly distorted her soft mouth: one corner was open and two teeth bit white and hard against the lip. Her throat tremored with her amusement; the rose mesh of her waist fell forward in suggestion of the warm swell of her girlish bosom. David believed that she was purring. He saw her teeth biting their hardness into the blush of her lips: he saw how smooth and round her arm was. He said:
“You let me kiss you because I’ve a right to.” He was aware of the retreat in his words. “...because we’re cousins.”
She merely lifted her face a bit, as if he were stirring away. “All right. We’re going to play now that we arenotcousins. We are just you and me, do you hear? So you mayn’t kiss me anymore.”
Already he was forward. The game started. The goal was implicit with them both. In a fortnight’s time, David had won his kiss. He was very sure that Lois was very lovely: he was almost sure that she did not return his kisses because he was unworthy....
David sat at his long table in the office, lost in a maze of figures which gave a different answer each time he questionedthem. He was languidly certain the figures were laughing at him, held him in contempt. About him yellow pine, hard human bustle. He looked up through the mist of his discomfort; he saw above him a slender and sleek young man with a smile on thick lips.
“My name is Duer Tibbetts. You’re Markand, aren’t you?”
David was not sure whether to keep his seat. He was twisted in indecision.
“I am a cousin of your aunt, I work over there under Mr. Herding in the Cashier’s Office. I have just come back from two weeks in Virginia. I was told to look you up and make you feel at home.”
For the pause, he stood there a bit ill-at-ease himself.
“I’ll come round at noon, and we’ll go to lunch.” He was gone.
David had the sense, walking through the streets, of a young man marvelously sure and hard and clever for his years. He gave forth the slightest word as a pronouncement.
“The very hottest weather’s over,” he declared. “Greibeck’s is a great café. You must go there often. I discovered it last year, one day I was lunching with Mr. Farnam—H. L. Farnam of The Liberty Trust. Always go downstairs. There are women upstairs. Downstairs is the place for talking business.”
Duer Tibbetts thrust the long printed card under his nose and then told him what to eat. He ordered as if he were in a great hurry. He drank beer with his meat. “Don’t you wantanythingto drink?” he asked as if unwilling to believe in any organic deficiency in his new friend. He called the waiter by his Christian name—but never looked at him.
“We must get to be friends,” he announced. “Don’t bother about the boys in your office. They’re not our sort. Stick to work.... Stick to work and stick to your uncle. He’s a prince—a prince,” he chanted with emotion.
“I’ve been here three years. Since I was sixteen. Nocollege nonsense for me. I’m assistant cashier. You’ll find the old man is hard, but he is just. Yes, he is that. But he has his silent little ways of pushing you along.”
For the first time, he raised his eyes and David met them. He liked him better. So this Duer Tibbetts was to be his friend? As soon as he began again to talk with his eyes once more down, David examined him.
He seemed engrossed in his own words. He paid them out, as if they were coin. He talked with a certain muscular emphasis of his lips, a periodic pointing of his left forefinger. His forefinger always was detached from the others. The rest of him remained immobile. A gold chain fell straight from his lapel to his coat pocket. His hair was so blond that near the temples and behind the ears it imperceptibly faded into the color of his skin. His fingers were wider at the tips than at their base. His voice was high pitched, coarse-grained, mostly a monotone.... David met his eyes and liked him again.
Tibbetts’ gaze clinched his firmly; almost too fixedly: as if his eyes lacked the pain of encounter. They were lashless blue. Tibbetts had the soft eyes of a boy, the shallow eyes of a man who has not ventured where the boy’s eyes yearned.
David turned his own deep uncertain gaze on him: in the retreat of his glance and the veil of warmth that suffused from the contact it was altogether clear which was in truth the older of these two. But neither David felt this, nor Duer Tibbetts, steadfast and staring. What came from their encounter was David’s sense of respect and wonderment for Duer Tibbetts, and Duer Tibbetts’ thrill of respect and wonderment for himself. To this end he talked. A gentleman can boast only before an equal. And Tibbetts was a gentleman, if for no other reason because he felt the quality of David.
“A smart chap. You know: the sort who get on in the end,” he reported to his father. The young protégé and thepowerful attorney of Deane and Company discussed the new arrival. They said many things. The paramount detail that this was the nephew of Mr. Deane, they had no words for: but this was what they were keenly thinking. The suppressed thought came out in the rhythmic beat of Mr. Tibbetts’ thumb against the desk, in the over-emphasis of his son when he said such common words as these: “I like him. He is slow, but what is slowness? You never can tell what’s underneath. The fact that he don’t know much now shows merely that he has lived in a little town. Lots of good stuff has come from little towns.”
Now, he talked lavishly and with diligence to impress David who sat passive, trying to learn, telling himself that he was learning. He talked of projects and profits, of Mr. Deane’s subtle aggressiveness and of the Company’s prosperity. He spoke of the great law-suit which his father had won for the firm from the Feddlesby people. He spoke of a swinging figure that had gone from Deane and Company to help elect McKinley.
“Measure it with our payroll, if you want tofeelhow much it was to give.” He did not divulge the payroll. He said, “We” when he meant David and himself; “We” when he meant the Company; “We” when he meant America. There was a deep philosophy in this confusion. But David was still far from grappling with it, and Tibbetts did not dwell in the sphere of definition and reflection.
“Yes, sir,” he pointed and flushed with his prophecy. “We’ll be in Cuba in less than a year. Don’t you forget it. We’ve got to kick the Spaniards out and go in ourselves. Then, we’ll earn enough from our dormant Las Daciendas plantations to buy up every relic factory in Key West. It’s a coup that’s certain.”
All this puzzled David. He was not sure whether the “We” who must kick Spain out of the West Indies was the payroll ofDeane and Company: or whether the “We” that was to grow subsequently rich in Las Daciendas was the citizenry of America. It was all a bewilderment of lines.
The weeks of his residence in New York he had been sedulously reading the papers that came daily to his uncle’s house. He knew that America’s interest in Cuba was a humane one grudgingly forced on her. Her wrath at Spain and her forming resolution to have Spain “out from her back yard” were due to her Christian worry for starving natives. The impulse of brotherhood was quite clear in the papers. Yet the effect upon Business seemed equally clear in the mind of Duer Tibbetts. Brought together in David’s mind, these two clarities precipitated fog.
He went away, respecting the more this young man who saw the light while he walked in darkness.
Relief of Cuban sufferers and relief of ravaged tobacco plantations: America’s crusade for love and a great Company’s contribution to the coffers of the Republican Party: the free lists of business and the advantage of being a nephew—it was too much for David’s untrained mind. For David needed to “conform.” And David needed to admire.
It was a Sunday afternoon. The room where David sat, the room of his talks with Lois, lay in the languor of a refracted sun. It faced north. David could see the full rays beat in the flaming brick and the warm brown-stone of across the street, be absorbed. Here was a low vibrancy—strayed residues of sunlight that had lost their incandescence. The room had its compensation. Lois’ gay hand was over it. The couch had a dappled welcome in its cushions: “outrageous” her mother called them. A strip of Japanese brocade laughed on the wall: and Lois’ desk, with its bright brass knobs and its jolly fluted legs, hinted the tempo of the occasional letters and the desultory homework of its owner.
David had emerged from Sunday dinner. Rather feebly hewrestled with a Sunday paper. He was alone with it and it was winning. The article was discursive and plethoric. It dealt with Tammany Hall and the imminent Municipal Election. The City had just become the Greater City. Manhattan had swallowed Brooklyn and Staten Island. Once more it served as the shining symbol of the age: for it had gone through a merger, and it was superlative in size. Now, Tammany was attempting to recapture the swollen booty. It was, according to the writer, hopeless. “Richard Croker is back from Ireland and his horse races. But he will find only a ruin and a name where stood the corrupt organization that netted him his millions.” Later: “Mayor Strong is beloved of the rank and file of the people. Under him, under such of his competent servants as Street Commissioner Colonel Waring, the people have learned the blessings of a Reform Administration. They will never go back to Tammany. They have had high wages and clean streets, better conditions in their tenements, less disease and a low death-rate. They have understood. Tammany means misery and vice: Tammany means the seduction of their daughters into the gutters of sin: Tammany means all that crime and corruption mean. Leave it to the people of the Greater City to choose a successor or an undoer of our Reform Administration.”