TOM RENNARD and his sister stood under a house with a high straight stoop like a dozen alongside it. They looked up. Behind them their passing through Stuyvesant Square. The sky was very deep and warm on the moldering housetops, beyond the cool clouds. These skimmed their shadows across the Park’s shut green. They threw small puffs of gray on the gleaming creepers of the Church. They dropped to the squat red meeting-house of the Friends and lightened its brick with their dark. They went westering over the bleak dense City.
“This is the number.”
They mounted the stoop.
Each had a hand on the iron rail that rusted under crumbling paint.
A piercing rumble lay in the Park. Jangle of horse-cars, stir and laughter of children, the dry gasp of life hot over the Park from four dense sides, as over a cool well. And the Square merging with these the distances it caught on its church-steeple: hoot of river craft, gashes of dull speed echoing into sharpness as an elevated train passed through muffled houses. All of it funneled down the narrow eastward street that fell from the Square to the River: rose above the shoulders of these two: flattened back against the reticence of brownstone walls.
“Not a bad house,” said Tom. “Relic of Knickerbocker glory. Some less brilliant Stuyvesant cousin may have lived in it once.” He pulled a bell-handle: its call pierced and lingeredin the old mansion’s depths. The house stood unmoved like a ventriloquist.
He turned. The sun was aflame in the Eastern windows. He faced the Park. Slow swarms of men and women crawling and scattering like bugs. These drew away his thoughts from the house and Cornelia. She stood laughing at the ornamented vestibule: its florid crimson plaster.
“Strange, isn’t it?” she said. “When they tried to add beauty to their houses they made them hideous. Why is it?...”
Tom’s new partner, Gilbert Lomney, who was a cousin of the President of the Fidelity Bank, who was a nephew of the General Manager of a great Railroad System, who was among the loyal stags of Mrs. Astor’s balls, who was a fellow with no moral and no professional sense—he wondered how he was going to get along with him. He brought in business well enough. But Tom had misgivings. He thought about them now. Lomney’s most brilliant feature was his glasses: his best achievement was his neckties. His glasses had a way of catching the sun whenever there was any sun around. His neckties were striped and of three colors. Without his glasses, Lomney was dull. Without his neckties, he would be naked. His eyes were flat. His complexion was habitually gray. About his mouth were the heavy lines, the puffing pucker that denote a sluggish kinetic system. One thing, to be sure: Lomney’s head was long—what Tom knew to be a generous head. But he was not sure of the brows that seemed dissociate from his eyes. Well: this was his partner. That day there had been a rub in the office.
Lomney came in smiling in the morning.
“Rennard,” he said, “is there no way of getting out of this contract cheaper than by paying the indemnity?”
“Why doesn’t Murchison pay it? Good God! it’s scarcely a mutual document at that!”
“Well, if he has to, he’ll have less respect for us.”
Both of them knew that Murchison could afford to be fair: that Sampson could not afford to be cheated. But, “It’s not a question of that,” said Lomney, “It’s a question of how we are going to stand at 79 Broadway.”
“Let’s have all the facts—since the contract.” Tom easily devised a plan. He had taken it to Lomney, who rejoiced.
“Come out to lunch, oh, Daniel!” He flourished a silver-headed cane.
“No, I’ve an engagement.”
“Very well. Ta-ta. I’ll not be back to-day.”
Tom sulked at his lonely lunch. He did not mind the trick he had played for Lomney’s client. But the unctuous pleasure of his partner was an ill thing to accept. It made him clear away his desk that afternoon with a fresh disgust: and be improperly amiable to Ladd, their abject clerk: and smile at Lomney’s fizzle of a brief to be argued in the morning.
“Let him lose the damn motion, I’ll win it back on appeal for him. More glory, more money——” Standing on the stoop, Tom saw and added: “—More satisfaction in having Lomney lose.”
He went on, while his body waited: “Why should I be doing these clever things for the half benefit of Gilbert Lomney? Don’t I know? I have the brains, but he has the pull and the people. Face it, man, it’s the game.”
He knew he would have to. There was little use in being clever at the Law save one could sell one’s cleverness. There was little use in treasuring even in some mute corner of his soul the dream that ability, unorganized, was profitable. It could only spoil his humor: perhaps his chances. Some day, Lomney might find him lunching alone and think it queer. This above all must be avoided. Lomney had his Class’s phobia for queerness. He would not have trusted Solomon in an outlandish cut of vest.
Coming this late afternoon to see his friend, Tom found the check on his tangents of mood abominably hard. He must take Lomney to his bosom and cherish him: as a man should another who was to multiply his power....
Waiting made them pensive, forgetful. The doors of the vestibule sucked suddenly in. Cornelia and Tom gathered themselves with an alacrity determined by their recovery from its opposite. A woman was there. Her bare arms were folded: a gray apron spread across her body like a sooty mist over a fertile field.
As they stepped in they left the day. They entered another time. In the transition they were quick to both. It was September and hot. Beyond the bricks and the pavements, Indian Summer made the world glad. Trees waved in their new bright colors like flowers sprung up over night: earth was a-dance with insects, was leaping drunk from sharp liquors: air trilled with seeds for the next Spring. In New York heat was empty. Tom and Cornelia thought this. David also.
He sat upstairs in his room, looking over the Square.
Tom and Cornelia were out of the day and into the hall. About them the odor of endless passions, innumerable steps: the acerb sad odor of the lodging house. More lasting and more real it was than the lives of the creatures who came and who went. Here in this breath of the dark halls, their one permanence.
David had but recently moved in. The room was still somewhat strange to him: it was hard to rest in it, to rest asleep in it. Being with it stirred his nerves. The need of repose sent him to sitting in the Park. Also, he was still weary in the change from his vacation spent in the mountains with the Deanes. The first days of return had been dense ringing blows on the slumber of his nerves that were once more glad—glad as never before—in the free welcome of the woods. This was gone—gone echoing as David refitted to the City.
He was pensive, waiting for his friends to see his new room and take him to dinner.
He sat with his elbows on the base of the open window and was glad when the breeze touched his face. Also he was a little irritated when it fingered upward and threw his hair in his eyes. He had to move his hand to move his hair. Unwelcome. His mood was the immobile one in which the Past alone may move. The wind was the stir of the outer world, the world in which was his future and from whose moving he was momently apart.
It had been hard to leave the comfortable Deanes because they were so good to him and made him welcome and made him feel that he was theirs. It was a little easier to go, because of Lois. She held him suffering near to her, with her lips turned away. But the real reason of his going was a hidden spring that David could not name. He knew vaguely his going had to do with this same comfort which made his going hard. One quality held him, drove him. There was much to ponder in this, since, had he but known it, there was much of David in this. He needed to move on.
He found reasons for his impulse, worthy reasons that his aunt and uncle were the first to admire.
One morning in the mountains, sudden, he listened to his words: “Aunt and Uncle,” he said, “don’t you think I will be training better for an independent life if I learn to do without your dear hospitality?”
A ponderous sentence. It emptied David whose native tongue was rounded, poetic, simple. He stood ponderous and awkward like it, above his uncle.
Mr. Deane was in white flannels and a blazer coat that was almost unheard-of in America and had come blushing from London. It was red and yellow and purple: striped it was and flaring in front so as to leave way for the hospitable stomach. Mr. Deane sat curling his legs and peacefully tasting his cigar.One difference in Mr. Deane on a vacation was his less unnerved way with his cigars. In the City he chewed them, in the country he smoked them. Mr. Deane was altogether a more delightful and more generous person. His little blue eyes looked larger as if they were more alive: his cheeks hung less heavy: his sparse hair was less awry. In particular, his voice was different, what he said. It came in less hectic bursts, less flurries of sudden release. His voice was almost an easy monotone. He could speak more on a single subject without wandering or strutting away. He could find more subjects on which to speak. In the City any family discussion left him somehow outside, though he himself had started it. His eyes stared away, he retired, he became abstracted. Soon he was forgotten. He sat there at the table, chewing his cigar, glassily looking inward. His brow furrowed moistly, his cheek-jowls had pleats like an old dog’s.... But this Mr. Deane was alert and full of jests. Each afternoon, he trudged forth with Lois and David, grunting along a tree-swooned road to a distant woody place where he might ply them with candies and tea. He appeared in the morning, a racket in hand:
“Well, young man, are you ready to be beaten?”
And since David was a beginner at tennis, his uncle whipped him. He twisted his body into intricate designs, he served a high slow ball, surged forward with racketen couchelike a spear oren gardelike a shield. He laughed when Lois laughed from her bench, was happy in his 6-4 victory over David—far more happy, it seemed to David, than any business success had made him in the City.
The brief time her father was with her in the country, Lois escaped her friends. The pair played and chatted together: occasionally, she read him a story from one of the magazines or faced him over a card-table. And these activities, in which David joined on his own brief sojourn from work, went onwithout the interest, almost without the notice of Muriel and Mrs. Deane.
Summer to them meant merely a transfer from the City of the business and paraphernalia of City life. “A change of air” was what they said, and what they actually meant. They were sure to go where the greatest number of their friends went also. Such activities and such relations as the summer brought of itself they disqualified before the more serious continuance of City social life. Of course Lois could not be spared: but she was far less tolerant with the free toss of the greenland and the glint of a lake to formulate her appetite for somewhat else. There seemed less excuse for her dapper friends and the conventions of pleasure, under the stars and out in the open breezes. Lois could not know that these enhanced her feeling for herself: that it was against this feeling the world so painfully grated.
The indifference of Muriel and Mrs. Deane was a delicious pretext for defiance. Not the least charm for Mr. Deane’s spirited revival was this half-sheepish, half-crude flaunting of revolt into the proper faces of his wife and daughter. It was as if he said: “I have my own way of taking a vacation. You think it foolish. Doubtless it is. But itisa vacation.”
Now, in this climax of ease and pleasure, something spiteful had to commence to stir in David, to spoil it all. Something that came with a new burst of feeling for Lois, with a new glow of comfort in this family that was so glad to have him.
There was no doubt of that. His aunt’s note of a year ago had invited him to the house “until you find a comfortable and proper place for yourself in the City.” By Spring he knew that they had put aside all thoughts of his leaving, and that his uncle had no doubts of his being able to “do” downtown.
The Spanish war burst, half frolic, half business, upon the country. In February the battleship “Maine” went down in Havana harbor. In March, the Inquiry Commission backedthe voices of papers and politicians shrilling for war, by its dubious decision that an outside mine had done the damage. Congress turned its trick of political revolution. President McKinley was swept from the saddle. His reservations were set at naught: his reluctances were negated to weakness. In April came the call for volunteers.
The crisis caught David in a tender mood. Stirrings of doubt concerning business and politics had died. This energy was being poured as fuel into the flame of Lois. As his energy bubbled up, there it went. There grew indifference for other things—for all things. Something in the casual technique of Lois kept the flame from spreading: sealed it in a tight place where it danced by itself, rather merrily than tragically: smartingly rather than to a sear. David went on with his affairs.
His weekly salary had been raised five dollars. He left off going to food-pens for luncheon. The spirit of earning more made him careless about spending. He came to find Miss Lord less noxious and took to asking her to an occasional meal. He went to theater, read novels, liked his Aunt Lauretta. He tried to keep clear of Lois: but after all the pleasure of her company was far more real than the pain. He saw the Rennards frequently: but their apart opinions stayed apart, they did not merge with him. His emotions and his nerves were a blind swirl within a rigid life.
Now, the call for volunteers. He was young and strong. Was it not his move to answer? He did not want to go. He was comfortable in his new indifference. Doubtless, the Cubans were not comfortable. But they were very far away.
He brought his problem to Tom. He did not know what he wanted of his question.
“Lord, man! Don’t be a fool.”
David had never seen his friend so moved, so angry, sotenderly savage. Tom jumped from his seat and paced the room. His hands were fists.
“David,” he stopped before him and spoke with a hot restraint, “I am ashamed of you. Why the Devil shouldyouwant to go to War?”
David was sprawling in a wide Morris chair. He curled up a little under this onslaught like a furry caterpillar.
“Who is to go, if unmarried fellows like myself are not?”
“Who is to go?” Tom blazed at him. “Who is to go? I’ll tell you. Loafers who have nothing better to do. Men who are so miserable in their jobs they’d die for a chance to get away. Men who are so miserable in their homes they’ll die if they can’t get away. Unmarried, healthy men? The very last, I tell you. Let the sick of heart and the sick of life go first. They’ll find the Cuban fever far more like a pleasant change.”
“This is no time to be flippant.”
“I am not flippant.”
“Then you’re—you’re wrong. This is an unselfish war if ever there was one——” Tom’s smile choked him. “Well, darn it: we’re in it. We’ve got to see it through, however you may look at it.”
David was sensitive enough to feel the deep concern which Tom’s cynicisms covered. This was why he stopped his words of protestation. Strange unease came to him with the feeling. Tom wanted him to stay, to live. Why should he stir against his friend because of that? Tom stormed, making his friendship clearer, showing his affection warmer; David grew colder, less convinced, almost spitefully set against him.
He stood up. “Well,” as if to make an end of an unbearable thing, “I think I am going to enlist.”
A cloud went over Tom Rennard’s face. It was gray, feverish. His hands fell out as if a current had crumpled them and gone.
“It is up to you,” he said. David left....
How unfair, how like a woman he had been! Why? Why did this brilliant warm-hearted comrade lead him into moods that were womanish and unfair? He had left Tom as if Tom had insulted him. Could he have left otherwise, if Tom had said: “By all means go. You’re not worth saving.”
It was strange. It brooded in David for several inactive days.
Tom sat long, fingering his hurt, with a cold smile wavering away. His mind reached back to the first afternoon of the three at Cornelia’s studio: to the parable he had thrown off and that had had no sequel. Was this hostility of David’s perhaps its sequel?
He stopped smiling.
“God send, at any rate, he doesn’t go!”
And Tom did not believe in God. He believed in himself. The very following day he saw Mr. Deane in the latter’s office.
Mr. Deane beamed on him. “I have heard a great deal of you, Mr. Rennard—from my nephew. What can I do for you?”
“Mr. Deane,” Tom leaned forward in his chair. “You can’t do anything material for me. I hope you will forgive what may seem the impertinence of this visit.... You know what interest I have in David. I am eager to know how he is getting on: what you think of his prospects. I have long wanted a few words with you on this subject.”
Mr. Deane looked at the young lawyer quizzically, then in assurance.
“This won’t get back to my nephew?” Tom waved his hand in deprecation. “You see, Mr. Rennard, I am afraid of conceit. Conceit spoils more careers than drink. My long experience has taught me that bright young men are what you might call perishable goods. I encourage them onlysomuch.But in your confidence I am glad to tell you that I have great hopes of David Markand.”
Tom nodded seriously and held his silence. He knew this type of gentleman. Mr. Deane would presently go on. As he wandered further into the happy ways of his own conceits, he would be easier to manage.
“David has a good mind. He can work. He can apply himself. At first he was a little bewildered. He had a strange habit of asking my office manager a lot of foolish questions. I was afraid his mind was too much the wandering sort. But that’s over. That was mere strangeness here. I knew that. I could afford to smile at my manager’s worry. You see, Mr. Rennard, this is a personal organization. It’s a family. I know how my men are, and the women also. They don’t get into trouble inthisbusiness. We satisfy them: our kind hands are forever on them: no inducement to discontent or worry. And it pays. It’s a way of keeping your machinery in good repair. Why, just the other day, one of our warehouse truckmen....”
He forgot Tom. He prattled on. Tom saw he would have to stem him back at some convenient crossing. The War was broached.
“I think David has some idea of volunteering.”
He said this casually, and peered sharp at Mr. Deane: saw the shock on his face, and was relieved.
“Has he?” Mr. Deane’s flow of words belonged to a distant mood.
“Yes. You know David’s generous instincts.” Mr. Deane sat abruptly straight: he grasped a pencil, tapped the desk with it. “When he reads the general language of the Call he thinks it means him. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if he tells you some fine morning that his business career is ended.... Well—and yet you know, Mr. Deane, there’s absolutely no such hurry.”
“Hurry!” the older man exploded. Straightway, he held himself down and was still.
Tom went on: “If the War lasts, why, then, of course....”
“Of course, if the War lasts. But it won’t.”
“America can’t squeeze all herself into Cuba. Our own affairs....”
“Precisely.”
A silence. Mr. Deane was thinking.
Tom jumped up. “Well, sir,” he thrust out his hand, “I hope I am pardoned for taking your time in this outrageous way. It naturally meant a great deal to me to have the mature judgment of some one like yourself on a boy whom I consider my friend. I am glad to find that you confirm my confidence in David’s real business ability. I needed your corroboration. To tell you the truth, Mr. Deane, David’s impetuosity worries me at times: that quality of giving without thought—without proportion. I was a bit afraid. You have reassured me. Thank you very much.” He was gone.
That afternoon, Mr. Deane devised a plan. Deane and Company must render its quota of service to the national cause. Deane and Company was a single unit in the zeal of its officers and employes to enlist. Some restraint must be placed upon such vast enthusiasm. The country could admit to its armies only the merest fraction of those champing with the eagerness to serve. Meantime, the land must not be dislocated. Business must go on. Another course, even if due to an heroic response, would virtually be to lend comfort to the Enemy. Wherefore, in order to save its employees the embarrassment of individual choice, Deane and Company suggested that enlistments be confined to unmarried men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty. To such, their positions would be found open on their return from service. David was twenty.
This suggestion was printed and posted. David sought out his uncle.
“Uncle, I want to enlist.”
It was his office; Mr. Deane was contained and strong with all the prestige and strategy of place. He did not want his nephew to enlist. This was to be a hot and nasty war. America had no need of his particular kin beyond his own chosen service for him in the House of Deane.
“Of course, my boy, of course. I don’t dissuade you. Although you have seen the ruling of the directors—it leaves you out. Your flying in the face of that regulation might well cause a stampede in the office. But never mind,” Mr. Deane hastened to add. He was not sure enough of that stampede. “Never mind, I am thinking it over. I want you to promise me you will do nothing until I have made certain inquiries regarding service. I will let you know.”
David came again. Again, his uncle put him off. He was expecting word from Washington about commissions. How would David like to go as a full-fledged lieutenant?
“Worth waiting a short while for, eh, my boy? Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt has advised us to wait. They are turning ordinary soldiers away. How would you like to defeat your own chances by being in such a childish hurry? If you really want to serve,” he looked sharply at his nephew, “you must wait.”
So David waited. He was not anxious to fight. His talk with Tom was a strange reason, a feeble one, for turning into a soldier. David knew dimly that his resolve had sprung contrariwise from a host of impulses and moods having no true connection with the War.
The public clamor overcrowded the camps. Manila Bay was won. There was small need of men. David in the pause began to create pictures of what battle meant. He did not like it. He was no coward. Simply, he thought death to soyoung and fortunate a man must be a pity. He was a little sorry for those he would leave behind, if he did die. Nor did he wish to insist on losing a leg or an eye. He would have to bear the brunt of that. And it seemed a matter of insisting. True, if he were killed, Lois might lose her flippant bloom. That was an inducement. But there was no hurry even about hurting Lois. He could afford to postpone her anguish for a brief while. He could in the meantime enjoy it actually, by telling her about it.
“Lois,” he came to say to her one evening, “I am going to enlist and go to Cuba.”
They were sitting in their customary room. Nothing had greatly changed. If David’s love for Lois had become an easier burden the reason was that he no longer drew so near to her. He did not sit so close and hold her hand and let the song of her hair atune his nerves. She whipped his blood less: and all of his love was the mere increased turmoil of his youth when her youth flowed upon it: the added leap of two dancing streams made one.
She also had learned the need of forbearance. But his aloofness spurred her. There was that one time when she placed her cheek against his, nestled her sharp shoulder in his breast.
“You don’t like your old cousin a bit any more, do you?”
David held himself very still and apart. Then, what bound him to himself broke loose. What he did was splintering from his willed reserve so fast that soon all of his reserve was flown from him in action. His arms held her. All her body measured its panting frailty against him. His mouth hurt her lips. The rest of her was molten and not hurt half enough.
Lois struggled. For five minutes, she played a painful game of coolness. Then, she was composed. David dared not to speak. Whatever it was that had happened must be nothing,since Lois denied it. Whatever it was must be for the last time.
So now David was childish to have forgotten. But it was hard always to remember against one’s senses. The year was so intricate a thing for David. Hoping again, he said:
“I am going to enlist, and go to Cuba.”
Lois beaming and clapping her hands: “David! How wonderful! You’re going to be a soldier? Oh, I am glad!”
She jumped up, she embraced him, she sprang quickly away before her lips on his cheek had left their taste.
“When are you going?”
This dancing, elate girl was not the prostrate figure he had imagined fondly for this scene. The need of service in the tropics shriveled in an icy blast. Lois accepted him as part of the parade they had applauded together through the open window? She was quite willing to have him offer his life—lose it perhaps—for her cold delectation. Well, she had gone too far.
“None of your business!” he stamped away. “Leave me alone, now. I’m reading....”
America fought Spain. Santiago fell. Porto Rico was prostrate. August brought Peace. David had stayed in New York.
His energies swirled back upon himself. Their bloom toward Lois was chilled: their bloom in War and adventure had been nipped. For the rest of the year, he was in silent and hidden turmoil.
Young love could not live with comfort upon Lois. Comfort—the comfort of hot pleasure or hot pain—was what it craved. David withdrew fast. He had high-sounding names for the faults he found in his cousin. She was heartless, selfish, cold. She bruised his tenderness and misprized his service. The truth was she offended his pride. She had shown thatshe could deny herself the delight of his kisses: that she could survive even the picture of his death. Looking upon Lois for himself, the Narcissus of David’s love found a shrunken ego. It was a mere question of time when he would accept this failure and look elsewhere.
But before he could redispose his forces for their new excursion David must gather them in.
He returned to himself as a traveler comes home. Like the traveler he found how the magic of change and of adventure worked not only upon the highway. Once more in the familiar place whence he had gone, he found it strange and full of undiscovered things.
He found that he was lonely: he found that he was afraid. He found that for these reasons he wished to leave the Deanes: that they made him lonely and that they made him fear. He had been sweetly at home in himself: sweetly one with what his mother had left him. Since his coming to New York, this place where his heart dwelt was empty. His heart had not even been abroad with him, it had been away. Without his heart, he had gone to work, worked hard; lived with the family of his uncle and been glad; come so to Lois and come to love her. A strange ghost of David.
The year ripened and softened into summer—the season of relaxation, the season of decision and creation. David grew aware of a rolling fullness outside him, and of an emptiness within.
He wanted to be himself. He felt all manner of hands upon him, save his own. Gentle hands: good hands. Not his.
The idea of solitude came and grew: it filled him. He did not know, he felt—what solitude would bring him. Had he not somehow known it, after all? He would go thinking of his mother. Was that not solitude? Perhaps to be alone would be to find her. To find her, he knew, would be to be alone no more. Dim inexorable forces these, which he couldnot resist the more fatefully since he could not understand.
David was an animal that sought the healing of stillness. Who shall say how close his longing was to the creeping away of the brute? Perhaps the therapy of silence is no other than this return of longing to the source of longing: to union with the limitless well of life in which lies our world like a fleck in a limitless cup. In the philosopher seeking the Word, in the dumb creature seeking rest from his hurt the lure is one: the way back sure since it is the retracing of steps to the Beginning.
The sage and the brute only can go the way of spiritual homing without the folly of explanations: they are naked and submissive before the primordial voice. David, like most humans, was somewhat between these two. He was full of reasons.
He could say: it is not good for me to see so much of Lois. He could say: it is not right to impose further on the Deanes. After all, go back a year and he had not seen them: they had not bothered—or been bothered—with him. Let him blaze his own trail.... If he wished to be free to live his own life, was that not natural also? He had his own key at the Deanes. But there was a certain unavoidable restraint. Suppose he had wanted some night to stay out till morning? This had never been. It might. He was approaching twenty-one! What would his aunt say? What would Muriel and Lois think? Manhood needs room. It was awkward to bring friends to the big house: he seldom did so. What if, some day, he should want to bring a girl—bring her somewheres? A thrilling reason, this! To have a place that was his, where he could be with a girl! The hospitable house of the Deanes was not hospitable to such conceptions. In the air of these daughters, even the thought of adventure seemed strained. The presence of Muriel and Lois fretted his nerves: spiced them: taunted them. But if their lives, theirthoughts, the gay deckings of their bodies called forth sex, also they stifled it. David wondered if it would be always so, even when they were married. For a reason he could not name he decided he would not want to be a husband to Lois. There was a curious contradiction in these girls: something counterfeit; perhaps something thwarted. David once saw a great red flower—Muriel’s—in a vase on her table. Thinking of other things, he smelt it: his mind went rushing toward it, finding it odorless. He crushed it. He had never felt the least impulse to crush a fragrant flower. Muriel and Lois were roses, but they had no perfume. He thought, if he held such a lover, he should want to crumple her. It might mysteriously be a way of having satisfaction—of having a substitute for satisfaction. Living in the house with Muriel and Lois, he found they sharpened his senses, yet blunted his will: heightened his needs, yet dwarfed his power to get them. And David knew it was Muriel and Lois who filled this house of the Deanes. It was the house of Muriel and Lois: not the house of his uncle and aunt. Why should he keep on living with two exacerbating cousins?...
There were reasons aplenty. But this fading day was a day that drifted beyond the world of reasons. He was alone.
He had been tired, he had managed to leave the office early, to be alone. He sat there, gazing away at the hot park with eyes that were truly looking inward.
Something stirred in him. Not the movement of unrest: rather a deep vibration as when coals kindle: the quickening from inert heat to glow.
What was he? What was he doing? A fear in this that was somehow sweet. For it impelled him to a sweet direction. He was nothing: what he did, mattered not at all. What of it? He was going to die some day, and that was sure. He had a haven there: and also he had a haven in the past. Perhaps he should have died when his mother died?How he loved her now! With what new fragrance! Let him fear, and be cold. He had a way in his real life from these. Some day he would die and see his mother. This dwelling back, this yearning forward were one....
She had eyes too knowing ever to need to look. Eyes that felt him. He sat there holding the skein of yarn that her long soft hands unraveled: silently. Her arms moved in rhythm: and her body: and her mouth, that was smiling. He was caught up, they dwelt together in a song whose cadence her busy hands were marking. The yarn that went from his own hands to hers, it bound them: it was not yarn at all: it was red. Sweetly, unendingly the music went that enclosed them. Sweet, unending were the changes of its mood. The cord no longer flowed from him to her. Within it was life running from her heart to her dear hands: and thence to his and to his thirsting heart. His mother fed him, always his mother smiled and he could see the breathing of her breast. She smiled, her breast rose; her breast rose and touched him. The touch was naked: naked mother-flesh to his lips.
He was an open mouth, drinking the touch of her breast: drinking his mother. Swinging ... rocking ... swooning ... drinking his mother.
Footsteps in the hall. David lurched from his revery. Shreds of it clung to him spinning back to earth: he was still red and moist with it.
What did it matter if he was lonely? He would find loves. He was young and strong, his hands were not idle. The city embosomed him. His hands were not idle, seeking.
A knock at the door. There was comfort every way. Backward, forward: comfort of rest, comfort of adventure.
“Come in,” he said. He was surprised at the laughter in his voice.
Tom and Cornelia: a little hushed looking about, takingin his new walls and roof. He was on them, unbridled, pouring.
“Big enough to hold my bones as I sleep.... Don’t look so shocked. Are you going to disown me?”
His words poured fast. Slowly, behind his words, he seemed to face them.... He was leaving the world of his family, the cloying and sweet drag of it. Here was the coming. These friends: tissues of thought and passion that were not his! What was his measure, what did he look like here? Through the door had come with them the City. Chaos of steel and stone in which swung numberless worlds of flesh, lactaries of blood. Sudden he was in it! He heard its throb in his room, he felt its Hand, weave of a million separate forces, loom on him, fall on him, test him.... His voice in a maze of roars, his eyes in a maze of suns. Transfiguration. Silence out of the roaring worlds. His own voice unafraid.
They listened to him.
“Let’s enjoy ourselves to-night. Let’s eat on Broadway and go to a theater. My treat.... I insist! Look, I’m rich!” He took a silver dollar, he tossed it through the window. “I’m ready. Come.”
He was throbbing. He took Cornelia, and swung her waist and kissed her.
“Dear sweet Cornelia,” he laughed. “I swear I’ve not been drinking a drop.... It’s you!... It’s you made me drunk. Don’t you believe it? I swear it.”
She was glowing with pleasure. After all, David seemed part her boy. Let him carry on. And he, pacing about the room.
“I swear it. I swear it is Cornelia.... By my——” He stopped. He was sober.
David was sober. Looking with a new-discovered tenderness at Cornelia.
“Excuse me,” he blushed: he sank into a chair. Cornelia’s cool hand was on his brow.
“Nonsense, David. We’re all in the same mood for fun. Thank you for that. Let’s chat a moment, and then we’ll go.”
She wanted him to rest. He was perspiring. It was just the sort of sudden weather to catch cold in.
Tom lighted a cigarette. He saw Cornelia smoothing David’s hair. He saw David, unknowing, unseeing, smile into his sister’s face, relax to her sweetness. He did not like this. He looked hard at them, puffing his cigarette. Until his gaze made them self-conscious; made Cornelia take away her hand: made David look at him. This was what he wanted....
DEEPLY the luminous complex stir that came to him as he stood straining in the hall and gave up his hat and gave up his coat to the silent butler, that came through barring tapestries of blue upon mist of laughter and words, of feminine silks and smoke, of tinkle of frail china, made Tom afraid. He parted the swerving draperies as one cuts a wave, plunging into a sea. At once he was bound with this new terse element.
Fragments of Ohio still clung to him. He would have reeled in this dazzlement had there been space. But the room’s brittle density upheld him, pushed him slowly in the sense of its scarce visible grain. Tom was submerged smiling.
Already a force worked in him, digesting this dense life, making it a function of his own, making its subtle fumes a stimulant for the force making it a function. Tom’s mind groped, as he walked lightly, for an old-time hurt.... He had been badly cut in the wrist by a fall through a rocky road. For a month his cut wrist was bound close. When the bandage was off and the air let in, his wrist had seemed to possess a power of flight out of all proportion with his other wrist, with the remainder of his body. This had made for dissonance. It was as if only by good attention he held the soaring wrist in place. So now, his suddenly liberated will, as compared to all his body. Tom relaxed on the balls of his feet and had the adroitness to look about him. His field, this. In his two prematurely aged hands could he not toss this world? He felt power, he felt grace. His eyes gleamed. He laughed. Words, polished and caparisoned,flew from his mouth as if the Design fitting them to him were absolute, were mystic. Tom’s body was taut now. His mind had gathered in this reeling quality. But his body held to his will, as an artist sways to his violin. Meantime, still, the brittle density along whose imperceptible grain Tom flowed. Ladies with subtle ways of calling attention to their bosoms by suppressing them: their arms came angularly forth from the compressed and mysterious domain like spouts of energy—like escapes of self. So their arms, so their voices. At arm’s end a tea-cup: at voice’s end a word. Neither important. Sip tea, sip words. But the attention was engrossed in a deeper quaffing. These spouting shreds of self could be joined, could create a circuit, could release a current from heart to heart, from loin to loin. Tom felt this. He felt the suffused emotion of this splintering welter. He saw in the words, in the arms of ladies, sparks of invitation, fuses corruscating back to mute stores of combustible sensation. All of the afternoon seemed a disguisement, a limitless deferring of the reality of all the wills there massed. Tom wondered by what constant guard the fuses never burned to their full length, the explosives never went off: how they kept sheathed from this glitter of temptation. He perceived that the flames were cold and lightless. He perceived that the fires shot off into air: were free of substance: were in some careful way remote from the pent inflammables in every breast. And Tom had suddenly the vision of fireworks, blazing in a night above a score of hands that flashed white and calm in the broken darkness. Men and women displaying fire only outside themselves. Perhaps at the most, some inner rim of char.
He saw the goal of the grain-ward course he had been flowing. There was the hostess.
Her vibrancy was freer. She had space about her. In her true light at last, a certain glow that was warm, sincethis energy was not, as in the others, so instantly splintered off by the packed impingement. She was insulated but Tom could touch her. Her glow came forth: he found a glow of his own. He liked this Mrs. Laura Duffield.
He had the sense of her subduedness as of a charm weighty enough to sink in this pandemonium of flicker. He bowed to pick it up.
“I have fought my way through to you, Mrs. Duffield. Congratulate me.”
She held back her head; he saw the fading of her golden hair, the age of her throat, the indomitable blue of her eyes.
“This must be Mr. Rennard!”
She threw back her head still further, as if to send her laughter upward, and, boyishly, thrust out her hand. Taking it, Tom added to his vision the full ripe crowding of her breast—no longer firm to stand up alone—and the delicacy of her wrist.
She shunted him off almost at once: introducing him here and there, squandering the charm of her attention as one tosses showers of coin out of reach. He had no more of her.
But as Tom, having reached this goal of his progression, was now silted aimlessly away in wide, flat spurts of movement, he observed the crowd thrust together, into a unit, into a reason. It was so he carried it with him back into the hall, into the street. The crowd’s form turned crass as he seemed to understand the will that had brought it into being.... It was her house: she had created this turmoil. Why? Why, each Wednesday afternoon,—to make no mention of doubtless other times,—did this glowing woman need to congregate such spill of life, pack it into her rooms, feed it, coax it to place its stamp upon her? What joy could there be in what must largely stultify her individual world? Tom pondered. Was this greedy crowd somehow a vessel in which Mrs. Duffield poured herself? That it might carry her off? leavein the stir of her curtains, in the perfumed mist on her bibelots, a substitute for her own marks which should have quickened these? And if so, why?
Tom’s casual yet forever determined mind associated these impressions widely until he knew that such habits were a deep part of the City’s nature. He groped with his light.
“If I understand her, I hold her:—and all she holds. I’ll go again. I’ll see that this promiscuous call makes for a more intimate occasion.”
The occasion came. But already Tom had learned to like the gatherings he was pleased to call promiscuous. Their fumes curled into his nerves, made them willing for more. A hint of his new appetite in his condemnation to Cornelia.
“Business, my dear Sis: Business. And of the lowest degree of horridness.”
“I can see where it must help your connections.”
“Let us hope so! Lord!” Tom paced up and down before Cornelia’s latest cast. “If I don’t get something out of these parties I shall have bartered my soul for nothing.... Satan will have cheated me.”
“He never does,” answered Cornelia.
Tom looked up as if stung.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing extraordinary, Tom. I am convinced that folks who strike a bargain with the Devil do so, not for specific gain, but because they like his company.”
Tom glowed at her with a cold smile of admiration.
“Splendid!... What does it mean?”
Cornelia’s sharp shoulders shrugged.
“I suppose I like Mrs. Duffield’s parties?”
“I am sure of it,” she snapped. Then, quietly, like a mother to her son, “So stop protesting, like a dear man. Yes?”
It was true. Tom knew it, however, as well as his wisesister. She understood with a great clarity only a part of Tom. She did not know how, in these protestations, he pleaded against himself, not with her. There was a depth in Tom more cold to these mundane blandishments than the surface was warm to them. Tom’s conflict was deeper than the desire to conceal from himself and from his sister this worldliness which guided him about. It was a conflict rooted in his nature. There was a part of Tom that despised his conduct, hated his success, rose forever like a gaunt, uninvited guest to spoil his banquet. A ghost in Tom that was very much alive....
It was born perhaps near the hour of Tom’s birth in Dahlton. A very looming part of the world of Tom was this father whom his mother loved. His father was there. He needed to be taken. He needed to be taken as his mother took him. At the beginning, the bar between the mother and her child has no reality to the child. Mother and child are one to the child’s rapt omniscience. The tall, gray-faced man had nervous hard hands which were strong. Often his hands viced the woman’s arms till she screamed: they screwed her to a chair while his words lashed her: they turned her about to the door she was ordered to pass through. Then, in that dawn of the world, those hands left the mother who was cowed; they took the passionate sprawling flesh of Tom and thrust him to his crib, they turned him about so that Tom’s eyes gazed at a blank wall whose denial of sight was terror.
Mrs. Rennard loved Tom’s father. Her senses had mostly pain of him, but passion also. Since her senses loved him, they needed to love what her husband gave them. Tom, feeling in these dim passionate days the aching presence of his father upon his world—upon his mother and upon himself—the visitation of his cruelty upon them—took him as did his mother. He shared his mother’s sensuous satisfaction in abject pain. Like her he made joy of anguish:like her, molded himself to love and to depend upon this man as the pain-giver, since such was the form of his love, such the burden of his support. Mrs. Rennard loved her husband, her senses took him. Tom looked upon his father with his mother’s senses.
His mother died. Curtin Rennard went to the child. He lifted him in his arms.
“Thomas,” he said, “you are to be a motherless child. Your mother is dead. I want you to pray with me to God—to thank Him for the cruel thing that He has brought upon us.”
Tom repeated his father’s words as his father spoke them. “My mother is gone, I bless You and thank You, God. She is gone, and I am alone without a mother. God, I thank You. She is gone to join the Chosen in Your presence. God, I thank You. My mother is gone—perhaps—to be damned in Hell. God, I bless You and thank You.”
Curtin Rennard took the child high in his arms: gazed into his frightened eyes: seemed pleased thereat, for he embraced him. Tom was happy then. He did not miss his mother.
He never missed her. All his will was fixed on the pain-dealing, passionate parent. His rival—his rival-self—his mother was no more there. He was more free to love, to suffer, to rebel, now that the great sick lover, the great sufferer, the unsucceeding rebel with her wide skirts and her clear wan forehead was gone from their world.
A deep and subtle relationship grew between the tremorous child and the thwarting, thwarted, powerful man, his father.
A relationship unmeasured and un-named in the peripheral vicissitudes of their ages and their minds. An eye unchecked by surfaces and the color of habit, drawn to the womb of life, must have found Tom’s love for his father in those days deeply atune with the love of his father’s wife who was dead:must have seen the bereaved love of Curtin Rennard astir for a new replenishment in all his children.
So deep a dream could not grow unchallenged in one as quick with reality as Tom. He rebelled. His nature munitioned itself for rebellion.
There was Cornelia. She saved herself from her father by making into an ideal her dim devotion to her mother. Tom took her as ally. Cornelia imaged her saving devotion in maternal deeds, she imaged it in clay. Her mother was sanctuary from the common danger. In Tom grew great love for his protecting sister: above all tense self-abandonment to his father’s greatest rival, the real world. Here lay freedom for Tom! His blood knew that the hidden love must scorch and shrivel in the sun. He courted the sun. He was in perpetual revolt against his father’s hold on his emotions: against his father’s closeted ideals: against the source of his father’s hold, his own deep identity with his mother.
Hence, Tom’s distrust of women, his devotion to Cornelia, the frenzied scatter of his forces in objective life. During Tom’s boyhood, he was almost a woman in his attitude toward women: in each of them he fought his mother, fought her betrayal of him—as of herself—to his dominant father. His love of Cornelia was at once a way-station for his self-freeing will and a substitute for the parental yokes from which he needed freedom.
Directly through her, indirectly against his father, Tom grew in love with imagery, with color, with the Symbol—the artist in Tom grew. From his passionate seeking of the outer world, there rose his power of success in society and in law. For the world loves the lavish spender of himself: it will run to the largess of his ruin as wolves to their meat.
Yet as Tom saw his practice swell, saw the doors behind which stood butlers open to him, the silent music of his blood went on. All these talents and emotions were reactions. Behind them stood the Image of a man—hating art, hating social intercourse, hating life,—of a man beckoning Tom back to an ecstatic, fabular peace. For that man’s hatreds also were reactions ... behind them....
All that ancient lure was now resistance to the life Tom flung himself upon, even as all this life was his resistance to that hidden lure. He would consecrate his talent, he would build him his church, Success. But his mind ran against it, weakened the rock on which he builded. Cornelia was knowing. Here were depths beyond her vision. She saw chiefly the young man so soaked in his Puritan upbringing that he was loath to face the joys he had of his worldly undertakings: a very usual hypocrisy and of no importance, but one she hated since she was full of it also.
“I don’t see,” she said, “why you should be ashamed of enjoying Mrs. Duffield’s parties. Heaven knows we had lonely enough years, here, first.”
“You go with artists—with intelligent people. You have too much kindness to imagine how dull the rich and the successful are.”
“Nonsense! Their success speaks continual wise words. Their gold is brilliant.”
So they swayed back and forth, these two. They were equals. They had never become rivals—before David.
Laura Duffield invited her new friend to dine.
“Come early,” she said, “I want you to meet my son, before he goes to his usual party.”
He entered the drawing-room: a young girl and a young man were there.
“Farge and Marcia, this is Mr. Rennard.”
Their polite greeting was sauced in an expectant languor and a very harmless resentment. It was as if they were resigned to a bad habit of their mother.
Marcia, looking at Tom’s trimly rhythmic body, thought: “It is lucky Mamma is getting a divorce and must behave.”
Farge was too dull to syllogize but he twinged with a sort of envy and almost pondered out: “Myfriends are not freakish enough for Ma.”
Tom was seated and Mrs. Duffield was already in full talk.
He found it hard, listening to her, to take in these two. As she talked, she insisted on holding his eyes. It was as if she talked for no greater purpose. Marcia and Farge sat on a lounge just outside his range. They were looking at him. Farge smoked a cigarette; he had offered none to Tom. Marcia leaned far back, her legs were outstretched straight; she threw one ankle over the other. Mrs. Duffield made good the deficiency of her son. She never smoked, but she had full provisions for her friends. Tom felt how from ankle to neck this girl was firm and spare and full of a voluptuous relaxation. Only her eyes were taut, perhaps from poising him. She did not listen to her mother’s words. She hummed a tune very faintly: her upward foot marked time.
She got up. She jerked her shoulders, as if the gown that clung to them were an obtrusion. Perhaps the obtrusion was elsewhere in the room. “It must be late, Farge?”
The boy gave a limp hand: Marcia nodded sharply. Tom felt that Farge had not wanted to shake hands, and that Marcia would not have minded. He noticed that this girl was built very like a boy: and that Farge with his pudgy rondured body and pink cheeks was rather like a girl. Alone with Mrs. Duffield he found that he had been attracted by her daughter.
He was not sorry. This charm upon him made it easier to be charming. He told an anecdote of that day in court: he had been in court seventeen days before, but instinct made him say “to-day.” Talking, it came to him how far more naïve and fresh this oldening, troubled mother was than heryoung daughter. Tom did not understand this. He felt it would not have been safe to tell white lies to Marcia. He wondered why the strange weariness and slackness of the girl came to him as pleasure.
“Why, Mrs. Duffield, is the younger generation prematurely old?”
She laughed with her liquid laughter. She did not guess beneath his question.
“Why? Do you mean yourself? You are not prematurely old. Oh, I am sure not. You are mature. You have been forced so early to play a man’s part in the world.”
“That can’t be it. I see it most in young folk that do not work at all.”
“Well, not working at all is the part of the very old.”
“I am still not satisfied. I almost think that the shrewd parents of Competitive America have learned to palm off their own weariness on their children. Just like them it would be: a trick of the trade.”
“It is nothing but sophistication, dear Mr. Rennard. We old folks have the naïveté of savages. Our children are civilized. That is all.” She examined him. “Does this weariness repel you?”
Tom watched sharply without heightening the look of his eyes. She had no idea whence had come his thoughts.
“No,” he ventured. “That is proof, I suppose, that I am touched myself? It attracts me rather. Of course, not weariness alone.”
Mrs. Duffield was weary: endlessly weary. Often she flung herself to bed with a horror of the needs of her toilet. Often she awoke in the morning with the demands of getting up a mountain in her path. She took Tom’s words to herself. She would not have to grimace her weariness away. It would be pleasure to be with him.
Soon they were friends. When he came in to her, shethrust out an arm in greeting, and did not budge from her lounge.
“Make yourself nice and at home; or I’ll have to get up and do it for you. I’m so comfy!”
Her weariness went before her admission of it with him. He stood over her; she was aware that his eyes could see within the negligent folds of her flimsy housegown. What did it matter? They were friends. Once she said:
“Make believe this is an evening dress. Then the décolleté won’t shock you.”
“Then also, it won’t interest me,” said Tom.
She needed to know everything about him: that she might help him.
“I’ve made up my mind on that!”
She told him of herself more and more: more and more easily. She told herself that she could not otherwise gain his confidence: and she needed that really to help him, really to be “friends.” In truth she craved his help, she was glad to purchase it with whatever aid her place and her connections might afford.
“It is hard to speak of such things,” she said, half sitting up on her lounge, with a bare arm falling straight toward the floor. At once it was easy. The ease of her lying there before him and the glow of his eyes taking her in were a lubricant to her words. She could never have spoken so at first in a tailor-made suit. She would have laughed with the freedom of sincere denial at a friend who ventured to link the exhibition of her soul with the exhibition of her body.
It was through Laura Duffield that Tom came to his real establishment in practice. Gilbert Lomney was her cousin. For him, Laura was a brilliant woman who somehow had managed also to be good. He had great admiration for her, not a little fear. It was by her strategy that “Lomney and Rennard” was brought about.
The City had welcomed its own stuff in Tom and Cornelia. The City had come from the same sort of place. At the beginning, Tom felt this not at all. He was frightened by the City. He did not understand when its heights bent down and touched him. Each suppliant before New York goes through the same amaze as the unfriendly Town proves lewdly hospitable. Few dare to admit her wantonness since the avowal would take from the measure of their prowess. In the early bewilderment of being taken-in, of finding a naked mistress in place of a shrouded goddess, the critical faculties are struck to sleep.
The years of the preparing of success in Tom were like the growth of love in their delirious simplicity, the sort of wild progression that one finds best revealed in mathematics. A true tumescence. Tom found some one who liked his humor and his freedom. He introduced him to a strategic hostess. There was opened a breach in the trenched City. There was more than one of these amiable friends. Each multiplied opportunity at a geometric rate. Tom was soon in a position to choose, and from choice comes judgment. He was soon surfeited with chances, and from surfeit comes disillusion.
To be alone in the City requires a technique that only the child born in the City or the genius may possess. On all sides of Tom were people ready to be amused, ready to use him, ready to use him up. No bright young man without the taint of an uncomfortable message need go to waste in New York. Each clever little thing he does or says will echo, until, if he does not take care, he may be deafened by its rebounding clamor. He may drop like a pebble, he may sink straight to the oblivious bottom of the lake: but not before myriad wreathings forth have made him the hour’s center of a rippling world. If he step forward, he will step on some one’s heels, and that some one’s friends will, for this chancebeneficence, cherish and advertise him. If he step back, the same thing will occur. If he stand still, he will obstruct the one behind him who is moving forward, and this too will net him a sincere appreciation. He must be a genius or a willful man to escape acceptance by the City.
Tom Rennard was neither. He found that the man in whose law-offices he learned far better than in law-school appreciated him and, when he was admitted to the Bar, sent him work. He found, arguing a trivial motion, that he was eyed with interest by nonchalant attorneys as he stepped back to the counsel-table. He found that his brain could be sold if at first he were willing to sell it cheap. Lawyers too busy drumming business thought they were exploiting Tom when they employed him to be of counsel in some tort case and let him do the work. Several dull fellows with gratuitous patronage stuck to him regularly until they found themselves with fees in their pockets and with their sinecures entailed. Tom had a way of making a Judge smile that the men of the Bar respected as they would not, in a lifetime, respect Justice. He was quick to see that the able counsel acts, before the Bench, not as a lawyer but as a man: that the tricks of erudition and the flourishes of oratory gleaned from law-school had best be packed away. His average Judge was a shrewd politician who, above all, must not be made to feel his juridic ignorance. What he required from counsel was a mirror in which he might see his power reflected: and his power consisted not at all in judicial learning—display of that was an embarrassment—but in a canny sense of men and use of means. Tom talked to the Bench, man to man, asking-man to man-who-hath, with a candor most attorneys needed twenty years to strip to. His attitude brought reward. Judges leaned comfortably back and talked things over with him. When he reappeared before them, he was remembered.
“But do you think, Mr. Rennard, that this point is pertinent?”
“Yes, your Honor, I do. And I am sure if you will just recall to mind the case of Larson versus Mann—the question is one that has long interested me and I looked it up——”
Who was this Mr. Rennard? this young and unknown Mr. Rennard who had a way of warming the air of a court-room to his own purposes? The question was asked: the questioners answered it. They gave him respect before he had clients: they gave him the beginnings of repute at a time when he had nothing else. Hating and fearing each other, they wanted Rennard on their side.
Tom’s advance in the social world was synchronous. The ladies who give teas are the sort who care for unattached young men. They are unhappily married, or at least unsatisfyingly so: if they have children they wish to get free of loving them too much. Grown sons can be admired safely in a surrogate: grown daughters can be restrained from mastery in a fierce competition. The smart young man may be a weapon and a drug for the woman nearing forty with social honors to defend. He serves to protect her from life and to supply her with it. The relation has its hazards. It must run the course of the golden mean. The man must not really love, not really win his lady. For her sake, as for his. If she gives herself consciously to him, she will begin at once to bully him like a son or to use him up like a husband. He will become both son and husband instead of the escape from them. She will simply repeat her family failures concentratedly upon him. He will no longer provide a cure for her life. He will stand on the brink of disaster or dismissal.
Through no prescience and no conscious cunning; rather by the balance of his nature, Tom was made for such a rôle. And Laura Duffield needed him.
Meantime had come the climax of her troubles, Mrs. Duffield was getting a divorce. It was being borne in on her that her husband was nearly bankrupt and that her alimony would be in ironic contrast to the demands of her position. Her way of living was no small part of her “morality.” It was menaced.
Deems Duffield was a broker. For fifteen years he had made a debauch of his life and won from it a rare measure of content. When at last Mrs. Duffield decided on divorce, his fortune—his last fortune—had gone the way of his self-respect. It was plain that there would be difficulty in keeping Farge at College. Fortunately, Marcia had no educational conceits. She was at ease with a few lovely gowns: she was informed with a spirit of shrewd economy that amazed her improvident mother. Duffield seldom saw his children: which Marcia considered rather silly. “Why not? He’s delightful company.” She had the wit to enjoy him, perhaps potentially the depravity not to be concerned with his. But Farge was dully loyal and not on speaking terms with his prodigal father. Duffield’s ruinous irresponsibility had broken his son’s spirit. In the example of his father’s evil charm, Farge lost that brusque approach to the demands of life which mark off certain men from the hordes of the mediocre. His cynicism was inept, his anger impotent: his confidence was gone. Adversely, her father’s nature went toward the making of Marcia. It taught her to swim nimbly between rocks, love danger, understand the world. Her cynicism became a deadly intuition of the channels of success: her anger was a sheath preventing the incisions of sentiment and pity: her break with childish faith marked the emergence of a design based on that faith’s falsity. It seemed to her a trait far too emotional in her mother to be angry at the man who had ruined them all.
“Leave him be! You know he’s amusing to talk to.Never worry, Mamma. Soon as I’m tired of this I’ll get married and fix you for life.”
There was no slightest doubt in Mrs. Duffield of Marcia’s capacity to keep her promise.
From her confidence in part came the inspiration to bear up, to borrow dangerous sums of money. For years the Duffields had been spending twice what came in: he on his Broadway favorites, she on her social equipage. But even after Duffield’s strike against paying for his wife’s affairs, even after the first skirmishes of the divorce with their cold proof that the clever broker would be able to escape with a scant alimony, her social functions remained brilliant, her head remained high. Laura Duffield was playing the rôle her faith, her one faith, sanctified. She needed the confessional of youth for the strength to do so.
One last time, her husband called on her. A smooth, stout, suave man: smartly groomed, full of sweet words, twinkling of eye.
“Laura,” he said, “it will be bad business for us both if you insist on this divorce. And the worst goes to you. I can weigh in to a mighty small income, of which half, dear, will be yours. Most of my winnings are of a sort, my dear, that it would make Justice blush to have to rule on. So, considerate gentleman that I am, I must hide from the Judge what might prove embarrassing. Hand in hand, you and I can bear up and have no fear. For all that is mine is thine. But, dear, if you insist on this legal separation you must be satisfied with what will turn out to be your legal separation from my money. You would faint, beloved, if I told you what you may expect.”
Mrs. Duffield saw the very grim reality in his threat: knew as alone the social officer knows what misery of deceit and sordidness the want of funds must bring to the fulfillment of the one life she could live. She answered:
“I can’t stand any longer the thought that you are my husband. I must be free of that. I am unclean and I am taking a bath.”
Duffield smiled.
“The bath, my dear, you took some years ago. Why repeat it in public?”
She winced.
“I have no wish to resume relations with you, Laura. All I object to is this exhibition.”
“Unfortunately, it has to be. I relish it no more than you. I deserve it less. Our marriage was public. My cleaning my hands of you must be public also. If you were so considerate and scrupulous as you pretended, you could save us much by not defending the suit.”
“I may be considerate. But if I am hit, I hit back. I have not objected to your virtual quarantine of me, these past ten years. I have behaved and kept up front. I have shown in at your parties and paid your debts when they grew troublesome. The only time, my dear, ever to pay a debt. But if you insist on placarding my love-affairs, I’ll fight.”
“Very well. Go and do your worst. I shall of course get the dirty end of this. I have, all my life. But don’t expect I’ll make peace with you.”