“Laura, you are a fool.” Duffield stood up.
“I know I am. I am sort of glad, that you think I am a fool. It puts me miles out of reach of your kind of wisdom. I know I am a fool. You had your share in making me one. But even you shan’t succeed in making me a coward.”
Deems Duffield sighed and drew on his fawn-hued gloves and sent a little whistling note through his shut teeth. Coming up to his wife, he looked at her and slowly shook his head. He placed his hands on her thin shoulders: their eyes met.
“It’s a fight, then, my dear?” He said this pleasantly.
“I am sorry, Deems, you have made such a ruin of our lives.”
“I am sorry, also, Laura.”
He drew her quickly to him. He kissed her forehead and stepped back.
“Good-by. You are the best thing I have ever had, and I hate to see that I have lost you. But it’s not the best things we need most, my dear. It’s the ordinary things. Often in life, we have to get along without the best in order to have the common.”
She stood breathing deeply, white and strained from his words. In her mind was a racing kaleidoscope: how he first had kissed her, and taught her love; how fearful she had somehow been, and how he had fallen away. In her soul was a sense of guilt. She said nothing: he was gone.
She rang the bell.
“Delia,” she said to the entering maid, “I have changed my mind. If any one calls this afternoon, I am in.”
She threw herself on the chaise-longue and picked up her novel.The Egoistof Meredith. Its crystalline obscurity distressed her. It seemed so far removed from life: so frigidly in diapason between the Sun and the North Pole. She threw the book away and scribbled a sentence on the edge of a newspaper that lay near her hand.
“All marriages that turn out monstrously begin as idylls. Indifference at the start is the one defense against horror at the end.”
“How I wish I could express myself!” she sighed. She tore off the edge of paper, crumpled it, thrust it in her corsage. Marcia was there.
“I met father in the street.” Marcia made no further greeting to her mother. “He seemed in fine fettle.”
Speaking she crossed to her own room. She shut the door. Her thought ran: “Papa hasn’t Mamma’s family but he makesup for it in liveliness.” She examined herself in the mirror and took off her hat. “I wonder whether it is a wise thing to confuse marriage and love. I wonder whether the woman must always get the worst of it, like Mamma. Perhaps not. Mamma is the so-called innocent one. Perhaps the rule is that the innocent one, of whatever sex, should get the worst of it. I’ll remember that.” She had dropped her suit on the floor and slipped into a bluecrêpe de chinegown that hung straight and square from her shoulders. Within it, her body moved like a still sure mechanism. “Oh, well,” she said, half aloud, throwing herself on her couch and taking a book, “the sins of the parents shall educate the children unto the third and fourth generation.”
She remembered her unopened letters on the table near the lamp beside her. She reached for an ivory paper-cutter and began to open them.
One of them, from an unknown hand:—
Dear Miss Duffield:I have something of interest I wish to tell to you, and I must see you alone to do so. Will you have tea with me, say at theOrange Tea-Pot, next Wednesday at five? You will catch the reason and the caution implied in the rather unfrequented place. It is not bad, though.I hope to see you, and am,Yours most sincerely,Thomas Rennard.
Dear Miss Duffield:
I have something of interest I wish to tell to you, and I must see you alone to do so. Will you have tea with me, say at theOrange Tea-Pot, next Wednesday at five? You will catch the reason and the caution implied in the rather unfrequented place. It is not bad, though.
I hope to see you, and am,
Yours most sincerely,Thomas Rennard.
Marcia read the remaining notes: placed them all back in their envelopes upon the table: took her book. She read for an hour. She called the maid, ordered a bath, undressed. She stood for a moment before her cheval glass, hesitant to throw her bath-robe over her nakedness. With a free delight she watched the bright strength of her body. Her hips were slight and firm: her breasts were two swift standing rondures: her abdomen drew tautly down into the straight and narrowlyset legs. Marcia knew from statues she had seen that this faint triangle of strain, tracing and pointing downward at her thighs, was almost masculine. There was voluptuousness in this: and in the dear black hair falling about her body, making its whiteness burn. Marcia hated that flabbiness of mind and form which she called feminine. Coquettishly, as if to bar another’s pleasure, she threw a robe across her shoulders. She seemed to be outside desiring to be in. With the check to her nibbling sense, her mind went free, and she began to think of Thomas Rennard.
How was he able to be sure she would not take his presuming letter to the lady he was assiduously courting—and exploiting? Marcia caught herself so forming her question. She tried to change it: “How does he know I won’t?... Well, I will.” She wondered if she would. Imperceptibly, she had returned to the first form of her question. She resented Tom. Her mother was working for him with far greater will than any of the other “friends” had been able to inspire. It was dear already that this young flasher from Ohio was going to have the dull but golden Lomney for a partner. A bit dangerous, thought Marcia. What if next year, her mother tired of him? What if he proved too false? Marcia smiled. There seemed small doubt of that. There he would be, deep in their Group, inextricable. Matters must not go so fast. Marcia must delay them. She pictured the pair, lost in their confidences, and was troubled how.
She came back to the note. What had heartened him to send it? Was Mr. Rennard after all a rash importunate, one easily ruined? Marcia did not doubt the true purpose of the note. He wanted her to tea. He could not pay attention to her here. That was enough. Did he truly desire this enough to risk his hold on her mother? A dangerous—compliment.
She went over the always chance occasions she had seen him. Never alone. She had felt the pointedness of hisglances toward her: caught him talking to her mother with a strained interest in her own mood. She had tested this by changing her mood and watching his rapid awareness. He was a curious man: bright, lithe in all senses, unbelievably hard, yet fraught with a glow that she was sure impact might turn to fire. She wandered over his personality. She felt he was too clever and too sensible to be sincere. Yet his standards seemed too directly those of his intelligence and strength to lend reason to insincerity. She did not know. She did know she would have tea with him: and say nothing to her mother.
It was easily reasoned. “I’ll control him, myself. If he goes too far or too fast, I’ll have the weapon of a word to Mamma. What a brazen, simple country boy it is!...”
She went: she was right at least in this, that Tom had nothing to impart to her “of interest” beyond that he liked her and of course couldn’t see herreallyat her mother’s. In all else, she was wrong. She could not understand this sudden, cold-passionate man. In writing to Marcia Duffield, he had not understood himself.
“Perhaps I’ll know better when I have talked to her across a table.”
She came with a spur of adventure. She was trapping her foe. While he reveled in his success, letting his pleasure out, she would enmesh him. Thereafter, should he ever move in a direction she did not like, Marcia would soon show him in whose hands he was. Marcia was so astir with her scheme that she thought herself cool and collected. She had a dogged affection for her mother: a sort of animal loyalty in which was properly admixed a very human loyalty to herself. Here, she was quite sure, there was question only of her mother.
Tom, meantime, waited and went over in his mind the impressions in confidence of which he had dared write his letter.
“A girl absolutely incapable of carrying an altruistic act to an end ... and yet—a Christian! If she resolved to serve her mother by telling her I was flirting with her daughter—and she is convinced that this would serve her mother: she must be hostile instinctively to her mother’s friend—she would have to be sure, first, she did not care for me. She is coming to-day to find out. It all depends on to-day. If she does not like me she will betray me with a sense of serving her mother. If she does like me, she will take secret delight in making her mother a fool.... Dear little fool herself! If she knew how much I love her black straight hair and her white straight body, how little I care in contrast for her mother’s interest in my future! If she knew—well, she must know.”
He went forward, seeing her at the door—seeing the shrewd determination in her face as she came forward to him.
“Miss Duffield,” he said, “you are not going to make the mistake so many make of thinking what I do a deliberate thing. If you will examine my note with care, you will find in it all the silly guile of sudden inspiration. I am a creature of moods.” He looked at her as he had wanted to, across the table. “So are you, Miss Duffield.”
“How do you know?”
“Why else did you come?”
She was not so foolish as to say: “There might be other reasons.” She was not so willing as to admit his statement. She was silent. Tom began to laugh: a clear, long laughter. When he was done, they both knew he had laughed something away.
The rest was easy. Marcia was certain that Tom was the contrary of canny and deliberate. He liked her: he had done a direct thing to see her. He was unworldly as ever a man must be who understands a woman.
And she liked him. She liked the respectful way he spokeof her mother. Somehow, it gave her a sense that he was trustworthy: although she had no thought of why this quality should particularly interest her. She liked the assumption in his words of her superior perspective.
“Of course, Mrs. Duffield would not understand our coming down here to have tea together. Dear lady! Does not a tinge of deception have to go into a sincere relation? Every mother must forget her daughter if she would live. It is the duty not alone of her friends—of her daughter also—to see she may. For her to know the truth of you and me would be, not to know the truth from the standpoint of her and me, but an irrelevant, damaging lie.”
He said these words, not pleadingly, not in argument, but as two co-religionists perhaps might mention an unmooted point: or as two students might discuss a lesson they had learned together.... Tom had, not an enemy in the house of Duffield, but another ally: a subtle, an amazing one. Far from having been delivered into Marcia’s hands, the hastening events laid her at least equally in his.
They balanced the accounts....
Marcia was wine for Tom. Never before had he been so held by the body of a woman. Never had he dreamed a woman could so swing with both reserves and desires: so without effort, without stint.
She filled his room with miracle. She filled his life with the ease of power. How did this come about: this wonder he had in touching her cold skin, in meeting the hardness of her teeth, her soft lips? What was this Marcia?
Madness.... Madness in sanity as wine in a cool cup. She came to his warm room. She did not kiss him. She did not speak. She did not stir. She was there.
She felt a flame rise near her. It would soon catch her clothes, burn them up. Her it would temper, make mellow.She stood, looking at the flame, this subtle man, who held back his hands and whose eyes were on her. What should she do? Why did he not come forward? He burned straight, there across the room, like a flame in a windless world. Always his hands held back. Her clothes sagged to a dulling weight.... Marcia stood swaying with the need of burning. Would he not help? Then she would help herself. Delicious fool that he was!
He was perfume and flame: each pore of her was big with him.
Tom watched the firm, still whiteness of her self emerge from the lie of her clothes. No woman. She was a god. She was a pillar of purity and strength. No lascivious rondures and flauntings of flesh, no softnesses. A human form stripped to essential grace. An instrument of living, spare and direct like a command, flaying like a rod, swift like his passion.
They loved.
They gave no thought to the Shadow—the long intricate life-way of which the passion of woman and man is the mere flaming threshold. Both of them knew this. Each drank, in the other, a secret satisfaction whose mystery and timelessness thrilled them. They did not understand themselves or each other. Their love’s dissidence from the plodding and gluttonous way of husband and wife was a brew sharp, sweet, wild: they were drunk in it together. No more they had in common than their intoxication. Themselves, each other, the nature of their love—all was unknown and secret. They scarce spoke of it. They drank and were glad, and were never content....
Out of the silence of each, they came again. The subtle liquor worked its miracle; they were one into a flame whose leaping walled about them—disappeared as a song stops—leaving them their silences. These carried them off, each toa far deliberate world. No memory, no reason: absence of desire. Until such time as a rising murmur in their separate silences swerved them, flung their silences once more together.
All this, merely the spill of Tom’s full life; prelude in hers. His work prospered. Tom had the genius of diligence. He poured himself no more into his affairs downtown than into some unremunerative affair at a friend’s, where the price of applause was exhaustion. With Tom, exhaustion was breathing space till the next passion. So he prospered in work and in play. Laura Duffield was his devoted friend. Gilbert Lomney was his partner. To both, as to Marcia, he was satisfying in the measure that was wise.
Upon this heyday of his success, David now blundered as a dull boy stumbles over another’s floor-full of tin soldiers.
There seemed no cease to the miracle of Marcia: to the delight of the insatiety between them. Laura Duffield was divorced and more than ever with her new gallant friend. In her family and in her world, he was a secret champion, a strong prop. His relations had wreathed out. He was welcome in many houses: he was a chord of many circles. His partner had come to worship him with a canine fidelity. Lomney was so dully at home in his desirable set that he no longer felt its desirability: he was convinced that in introducing Tom he did the set a favor. Tom did not disillusion him. He laughed about it with Cornelia, and made her partner of his pleasures in order to keep her partner of his reserves. With her to see on the morrow, Tom took to the gilded foyers, the gilded youth of the City with a cool grace that lissomly assured his comfort and his usage. Laura Duffield gave him a gesture of confidence; Marcia the glow of triumph: his law affairs the agility to move forth and back with telling unconcern. Cornelia gave him what he needed of a home. He was a splendid product of the City. Now,David Markand, with his dear clumsiness, to clog and clutter it all.
Marcia felt it first, felt it before he did.
She sat on his bed; she looked at him where he smoldered in a corner smoking intemperate cigarettes. It was a mood, she thought; she said nothing. She put on her clothes.
“Good-by.”
He tore apart his revery. “Good-by.”
But the edge of his love was dulling. Always now, he was likely to leave her side and sit away from her and look away and smoke: while she lay aching with blinded desire, watching him, pressing her breast with angering hands till its pain stop the pain of her heart.
She sat up suddenly so he was forced to look. His eyes were upon her whom they loved; yet they were distant, they were lost in a mist, they did not see her. In her beauty she stood up to him, all her clear straight agile body calling him close: he bit his lips and his eyes were looking beyond her.
Then she said: “There’s some one else, is there not, Tom?”
He did not look at her eagerness. He shook his head.
“There’s another woman.”
He was angry. “It’s not so.” More force spilling away that her body yearned for. This urged her on.
“There’s another woman!”
She needed his focussing upon her, even if it were but in wrath. She stood over him now. She knew he loved her so, with the lines of her body shrill and clarified in standing. Tom was white with anger. He grasped her and broke her in anger. She laughed in love....
He loved her as never before, that afternoon. Because he loved her as never again.
The year that David lived alone was the year of Tom’s struggle with him. It was not a question of changing his life.It was a question of capturing the subjective opposition, as it came forward in the nearness of his new friend.
Tom knew a way. This inner inhibition stood objectified in David. Let him capture David. David was his old love of giving instead of constantly taking, of being calm and passive instead of constantly pursuing. In him, Tom saw the restful cleanliness of despising this race he was running hotly: the futility of spending one’s dreams upon a contest that was never done and whose prize was death. He would not give up his entry. He needed the mundane sense of power, the badge of success: he was too sensual to forego the liquor of attention. But he needed also to still the voice that kept saying: “Fool!” By the old process of projection, he now saw these words in the eyes of David. If he could have David, he could have silence.
He watched him with a growing steadfastness and a dwindling clarity. He knew at last that he wanted to win him. He knew that the affection between David and Cornelia stood most in his way.
All that year, he studied David. He came to understand his habits and his moods. He inserted himself upon his groping friend with the deliberate reserve of a chemist applying weighed ingredients to a solution.
The measuring was no easy task. David was within himself. He was hidden. It was plain he showed more of his mind and spirit to Cornelia than to her brother. They spent evenings, late afternoons together. Walks on Sundays became almost a custom. Tom was frequently along. There was no slightest wish to bar him. But Cornelia encouraged those very traits in David that must keep him intractable, secure to himself.
“And the world,—and the world?” Tom argued. “You are living in the world. It touches you on every side, at every instant. You are wrong to try to ignore or to despise it.”
Usually, Cornelia answered for her friend.
“We are the world, if we choose to have it so. What you mean by the world is only the gross and the impure. Why alloy yourself with that?”
Tom laughed. He knew this was David working upon his sister. Her life and her work were essentially conformist. She was no hermit, no rebel. She had had her great revolt, she had settled. She was not so very different from him. But Tom was too wise to say these things before their friend. To humiliate Cornelia before David would have the effect of estranging him. David would judge him and not understand. The idea that he could influence Cornelia was beyond David’s belief.... All this behind Tom’s laughing.
He kept silent, above all kept pleasant. He saw Cornelia’s motherhood once more hunting and hungry. She was going to preserve David from a hostile world, though it be with her own body. He watched her passion and David’s dispassionate compliance. He worked his own will when they were alone.
“Cornelia has a habit I can well enough understand of wishing to make my friends into what she would have liked to be, herself.”
“Isn’t she what she would like to be herself?” asked David.
Tom smiled, and was serious. “To succeed, for most of us, means breaking through an iron barrier. Even those of us who do so cannot escape a little maiming.”
“You are so violent in your statements, Tom!” The idea of Cornelia maimed was nonsense to him.
They went on talking of her new season’s work.
“There were a number of unfortunate little changes she had to submit to in her exhibit. I was heart-broken. But thank the Lord, Cornelia is sensible. Else, she might be a good artist but she’d be broke.”
“Why won’t they let people alone, when they have beautiful things to say?”
“Oh, they will, quick enough! Strictly alone. They’ll not pester them with orders. You mustn’t take Cornelia’s art too seriously, David. It is chiefly her art of living. If you think her very pretty statues great, you’ll be taking to heart every word she tells you....”
All subtly merged with his love for her and his loyalty and knowledge of the years when he had slaved for her and given her her chance. David could not bring himself to the consciousness of an objection. He said to himself:
“Tom is simply honest beyond any honesty I have ever imagined.” He was right. Tom was. He was not disloyal to his sister. He said no word of untruth. He was as kind and as loving as he had ever been. As ten years before, he would have sacrificed much for her welfare. But she was playing a game against him: and he answered.
David came to believe the hot-and-cold of talk with Tom and Cornelia Rennard an atmosphere implied in friendship with such clever, exceptional folk. He began to feel that Tom’s candor was to be prized, even if it was not always easy to interpret: and that Cornelia’s warm encouragement was to be discounted, since it meant escape from the ungenerous reality Tom told him he must soon or late confront. Because of, and in spite of her sweet charm, Cornelia somehow must be discounted.
He was sure he cared no less for her. He was a man: he was understanding a woman’s natively circumscribed philosophy, her natural taste for a reserved and personal world. Cornelia stood already, artist though she was and rebel at least in one gesture of her life—for Family. Tom was the world of affairs and of adventure. Oh, yes: David began to see all that. So of course he could understand the little flares of strain between the two. When Cornelia’s attitudeimplied a rebuke of her brother’s ways, he must listen sweetly to her words—as true to herself and her world—and not too seriously apply them.
Pure Tom all this. But only Cornelia knew it.
“What on earth are you trying to do with him?” she asked her brother.
“My dear Cornelia, how you talk!”
“Listen!”
There were similarities enough between them. She also could drive full force toward a single point: whip her intensity till it became almost a deterrent to the average dull person. But Tom could meet her at any pitch. He had one talent which she lacked and he knew this and would ruthlessly exploit it. He had a ready sense of the ridiculous: a light riding mood with which to damper her flame.
Cornelia swung upon him and thrust out her hand; her eyes blazed: “Listen!”
Tom, on the couch, curled his legs under him; he straightened like a schoolboy before his teacher, and threw a mock-serious frown across his face. Cornelia’s onslaught could not resist. It turned into argument—argument gradually stiffer, less alive against his mocking.
“David is not fit, Tom, he never could be, for your sort of life.” He was still. “What he needs, it seems to me, is a training that will permit him to develop what is deepest and truest in him: his sense of reserve, his great purity of heart. The finest thing about David is his nature’s implicit criticism of the life about him.” Tom still listened. “If he is flung into a sophisticated life, his own incorrigible innocence will merely thwart whatever he does: while that life goes on thwarting his nature. He will be nothing, arrive nowhere.” She stopped.
“You women have a genius for simplifying reality!” Tom threw this out in order to gain time. He knew it would goadCornelia into eloquence. Any disparaging generalization on her sex did always.
“Indeed! Well, you men have a genius for complicating reality till it’s as false and absurd as a wired and painted and lace-draped lily. A fine botch you’ve made of your reality. Every step of the world is so cluttered with barbed-wire rules and pitfall standards that only an acrobat can keep his feet. Why don’t you answer me? David is no man to go to the top, tricking and beating every one else down, is he?”
“No.”
“He is a simple, gentle boy. That’s what he must remain.” Tom smiled: Cornelia answered his smile. “Fortunately, he has an excellent place at his uncle’s. There is design in that. At least, there is luck. It means something. It means the pure and the brave in Davie may have a chance to grow in peace. We need that. We’ve enough of you acrobats.”
Now Tom was ready. “David’s lovely sense of right will be as useful, unless it comes in touch with the real world, as a violet under a hedge.”
“A violet growing under a hedge is sweeter than a violet crushed in the road.”
Tom knew he had talked nonsense. He always did when he would not face the sincere part of him that wished to speak. There was no time to lose. He must tell the truth.
“I am not trying to corrupt him:—I like him, Cornelia: I want him where I can be with him. So long as he stays in his ivory-tower of dreams I cannot have as much of him as I want. But, Sister! I am no prince of darkness. If I have plunged into chaos it is because that is where the money is. I am lonely there as a good angel would be in hell. I won’t be with David. I tell you, one can be lonely and untouched even at a Reception, one can be guileless even in a courtroom. I am. These things pass over me like sticks and stones—smarting my skin. I do not want to changeDavid. I want him near me. I want him to changeme. Your mistake is the horror you have for surroundings that you know nothing about. A usual result of ignorance, my dearest. David will be as unchanged, certainly, as I.”
“Why do you want to drag him into your noisy world?”
“I can’t have a friend, by long distance.”
“There’s something more in it than that.”
Tom looked, not to deny but to learn. His face was open, sincerely in search.
“I don’t understand,” she went on. “If you really wanted him to change you, were willing at all to be like him, you’d meet him half way. I have seen how you ply him with your cynicisms, heckle him with your invitations to ‘begin to live.’”
“If I met him half way I’d come back with half a practice.”
“Nonsense! You could live your professional life without him. Social demands don’t go into one’s intimate hours. There is something else. You really want to take David about with you—into the thick of the scrimmage. Every word you say to him is a sort of preparation for his entrance. Why?”
Tom was silent. He loved his sister’s trenchancy too well not to admit her points. His doubts brewed energy. He got up and paced the floor to slough it off. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he repeated. He stopped.
“Cornelia, I may be queer.... I guess I am a man of action. What else is there todowith him?”
She looked at her brother soberly. She knew he had touched a deep chord.
He went on: “My muscles seem to be very near my nerves. My muscles must move, as soon as my nerves feel. Do you understand? If I am glad, I dance. If I am hurt, even now, I am liable to cry. You know that. Don’t you remember, Cornelia, at the Farm, when I had made a particularly perfect mud-pie, how I brought it into the house and placed it intact on your table—even though it meant a mess and a licking? It was mine: I had to bring it in to you. Well: David can teach me dreams and truth: but I’ve made a mud-pie of the world. He must share it....”
He had his days of offensive against Cornelia.
“You want to make a child of him. You want to keep him a child. Motherer!”
“He is a child.”
“Aren’t you glad?”
“Well, if I am? Mayn’t one be happy with something that one finds?”
“What of David? He can’t have you for a mother all his life. Some day he will be compelled to sally out.”
“Sally out where? He can have me always as much as he has me now. We don’t need to outgrow our friends? Really, Tom, you have a vision of the world that compares with Don Quixote’s. Giants and windmills.”
“Very good, dear incorrigible Motherer.” He came close and his arms enlaced her waist: their cheeks touched. “You shall always have your two boys to make behave and keep at your breast. So long as you live.” Cornelia swayed with him, smiling. “But between feed-times, you shall let them play in the streets.” She struggled away.
“You’re horrid—you’re cruel!” There were tears as she pushed him off.
Or his days of strategy....
“I am doing my best,” he said, “to undermine you with him. There’ll not be a shred of you left in his heart, dear Sis, when I’ve done picking you to pieces.” Which was precisely what he was about, and whose telling disarmed Cornelia altogether. Surely, if he were in truth betraying her, he would not be telling her about it. So she reckoned. While David argued that Tom’s often disquieting reflections on Cornelia must in some deep way be related with the real love he knew he bore her. With this true, there could not be betrayal.
The two young men were together more and more. They sat in Tom’s warm room; their words were of high things. They knew that these were things that were not. Tom knew these things would never be: David that they must. They met in the present of life as two might take hands down an echoing corridor: close, though the one thought at the passage-end was life; the other death.
From these talks came the sense of his emptiness to Tom as he began to feed. He knew it only in the yearn he carried with him more and more for somewhat he lacked, in that nausea for the present which was dooming his love for Marcia Duffield, and making of his professional affairs a clear, cold, removed design that he learned to trace with the tips of his calm fingers. The mood helped him with Cornelia.
He went to her morose, and said kind things—angry things that in their conveyance of his troubled spirit stressed his apartness from David.
“I have been at it again, Cornelia.”
He sat abject on her couch, laid his hands on his feet with a gesture of humility in which alone a Hindu could have seen the pride. His eyes dwelt on his sister’s cast of a pretty boy—a boy with laughing hair and a face that was a flower. Tom’s lips were still. It seemed his eyes that spoke. He loved when he came to Cornelia’s place to cast off his coat and flare his collar wide from his tense neck. The muscles in his throat seemed over-stressed for the low tone and the small volume of his words.
“Clay is a happy medium,” he said. “That boy is nearly enough your boy to make you nearly happy. Clay is apossible element for our wills to work in. But human flesh, and human mind, Cornelia! They are weighted with a past so deep and so remote we are helpless before it. I know. Remember a joke I used to play on you? The uncut grass by the barn: how I made you try to stand a stick on end whose tip was fastened to an invisible string? And whenever you thought you had it balanced, I’d give a little jerk and the thing toppled?”
She stood off from her figure. She came forward; her finger touched a plane into shadow; she stepped away as if there had been some vital shock in the swift contact.
“Well?...” she said, not letting either her words, or his, eat beneath the surface of her mind.
Tom knew he could spread a bath of acid that might take its time in eating downward, yet leave its mark.
“I think, Cornelia, I have the same love as yourself for making forms. But there is something perverse and accurst in me: something that keeps me from spending my appetite on some reasonably complaisant substance, like clay or pigment or even words. Like you....Imust of course write my poems in human life. And, Cornelia, it doesn’t work.” He paused. “I dined with your friend, David, last night.” Again a silence. “I ended by running off to a trumped-up engagement because I simply could not stand his bland stupidity any longer.”
He got up and took a cigarette and lighted it. It went out at once. “I am a fool,” he said.
Slowly he began to tell the wall against which he pressed his cheek, half plaintively, the misery of the man whose medium is action. Cornelia destroyed her boy’s nose. She remodeled it. While he talked, crouched with his cheek flat to the wall, she hummed an aria fromLohengrin—desultorily, false-simply, with evident satisfaction to herself.
“Is there no mellowness in America? Is there none of thesweetness of ripe soil? David can be as vulgar as Ruth’s carpenter-lover. Sometimes I wonder is the chief product of American activity to be sweat. Bah! We sat there: and David lectured me. To the effect that truth and beauty are antagonistic and we must side with truth. When I asked him what was truth, he answered: ‘Morality is true,’ When I asked him, ‘Pray what might Morality be?’ he said: ‘If you don’t know, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! If you are going to be flippant, we’d better go back to our last subject.’ And, Lord of Hosts! our last subject had beenBalzac!”
Tom was gone. Gone so abruptly, the door stayed a-jar behind him.
Quickly Cornelia threw the damp cloth over her model and seated herself on the couch; she held her head tight in her two hands. Her mind was quick with the sharp-eating lines of her brother.
“They will never get along. Never. Never. They are so different: as different as ...” She stopped: she said to herself that this was her brother whom she loved, and how could she think unkind thoughts of her brother? It must not be. In the stifled conflict, she was moved. She got up, flung wide a window.
Night. It was cold. Gas-lamps blinked and strutted through the air. Their lights were false: they brought out only darkness. The street lay low and reeled and swung away on either side like the deck of a pitching vessel. The vessel was the world. It crashed through a sea of love that spumed upward to Cornelia’s eyes. Her heart’s heat condensed it; there were tears. She had a sense of the bleak urgency of life: of its passage and of its passengers. She had a sense of the element through which she and those she loved and the vessel plunged: how it was a sweet element and dim and how hard it was not to forget. Surely, all thought in her cold day was a denial of the Sea through which lifewas a passing: denial of all save the vessel: denial of the terror of its movement and of its passionate immersion. She, also, forgot. She, also, was a coward with the rest before such words as “religion,” or as “mystic.” The salty tang of this Sea beyond her plunging little world was in her eyes and her mouth: all her body wept silently....
The cadenced strokes of an elevated train knocked at her mind. The truth faded.
Cornelia brushed back her hair from her brow. “You are a silly woman,” she said aloud. “He doesn’t care for you really. You don’t really care for him. He will go away, and marry. He lives after all in a different world. Tom and I will console each other.”
She was relieved at her brother’s bitter mood. She was weary, as if she had been on a great journey. She lay on her couch and closed her eyes.... The air of her room was thick and was running in massive current. She felt herself swept along. The tickings of the clock on the mantel tore past her and caught in her dress like little strayings of straw. The air surged over her head; she saw a house flung upon its current and dipping across her window. Where she was it was quiet. Tom came up to her; in his hand was a gleaming scalpel. “I am going to mold David’s face,” he said. She said: “You can’t, Tom, because he is done: I have done him already.” Cornelia looked at her model of a boy: it was all wet: suddenly it sprang and David threw himself upon the ground, and broke. Her father stood over her hurting her wrists. Her wrists hurt in his fierce grasp: but she felt how her father had no hands and was armless. He stood towering beyond her, high, and hard like a stick. Cornelia knew that a string was attached to him, and that Tom held the string: he was going to jerk it, and then her father was going to fall. She was afraid: her father was going to fall on her and she would be crushed. She saw that he was a child, she wasfull of pity. Her face was upturned toward him. He was above her. She felt she was going to kiss him.... Over her eyes, there was David, peering through turbulent shadows into her, curious to see, since her eyes were open and she was not asleep, why she had not heard him enter....
The mood held. She remained in that palpitant hinterland where all the nerves and senses of herself met all the beings of her past. David impinged sweetly upon this swerving world. She lay, scarce breathing, looking at him with eyes that denied the rest of her.
The world where he could thrust in his head without violence receded. It went. Again, her senses were enemies, strangers. That was a man to whom she had not given herself. Her senses stormed her recovering mind. “Why does he not take me in his arms?” they pleaded. She was on her feet, shutting herself away.
“How you frightened me, David! I guess I fell asleep.” In her panting words, she was gone from him. She could dare to say: “What a pleasant surprise, your coming! I am so glad you came.” She gave him her right hand: the left hand followed. He held them both: she drew them from him.
“I thought I would chance it. Have you had dinner?... What were you dreaming about, Cornelia?”
She laughed, her low, stalwart laughter. “What would you imagine?”
“You looked so strange, so far away. As if you were in a spell. Even now, you are not quite out of it.”
“I was in myself, I guess.”
“You won’t tell me what you dreamed?”
She looked at him.
Big, burly boy, with his blue muffler over his throat and his hands hanging so limp beside him. He was so at ease, so friendly curious, so cool. While she was white inside with the need of telling. It was impossible. In the shadow, apain viced Cornelia’s homely face—lent accent to the wrinkles already upon her brow. It went, leaving its sharp bite.
“How have you been, David?”
He might still ask her, force her to tell him.... David began to talk. He rambled along the flowered paths of his own green life. He forgot about her dream, he forgot about Cornelia. As her chance of self-bestowal, of drawing him back with her to the self-land she had left, faded before his dear indifference, Cornelia’s hands were fists, her soul retracted with hurt.... He chatted.
She left him to put on her hat. She saw herself in the mirror: plain Cornelia, Motherer! who had found her boy at the age when boys go forth. Her mouth affirmed the bitter resolution that must make it hard: her eyes fought against their tears—David was there—with a dry will that must dull and dim them. The ineffable glow of confidence and of the sense of being sweet faded still farther from her face, leaving it older and less sweet.
So she returned to David: they went out to dine.
THERE were times when the two young men sat in silence, looked at each other: and Tom was depressed and beaten by the world: he needed comfort of his friend. Then, out of the silence, David talked. A new way he had of bending low in his chair with one leg curled beneath it, the other straight out, while his arm rested on the forth-stretched knee and his palm turned upward. He would talk low then, try to give to Tom a thing he was not sure he had himself, and was not sure but that Tom had far more than he. He believed he was recalling Tom merely to his own possession.
“Think of what you have done in your life! You should think of that.”
“What have I done? What does it matter what I have done? What am I?”
“You conquered your life, you made a new one for yourself.”
“David, our deeds are not ourselves. We are what we are, not what we do. Our deeds, if anything, are what we have thrust from us. If I have done much, I am the emptier.”
“Are you not always living and being anew?”
“I am engulfed in a vicious world whose viciousness I know. I am false, David. I play dirty games, dirty tricks. I do my share of the betraying of the world, before I get my share of the thirty pieces of gold. You do not know. I have open eyes. I betray, loving loyalty: I do dark work, loving the sun.”
Tom was up from his chair. “Look at this flat!” Heparted the curtains of pale lavender that subdued the room to a quiet steadfast chromatic scale. It was afternoon of Sunday. Swift and passionate the sun came in. It made the curtains tremorous with fire: it cast a radiance upon the cream-dun walls. It sang through the room, with light feet tripping the soft rug, with tawny fingers touching the books and the vases.... Tom and David sat within miracle.
Tom’s voice was dark in the sunlight.
“This rare thing,” he said, “who can purchase the sun in the city? Not your saint, not your artist and lover! Only creatures like me who serve darkness. The Law that I serve lives in shadowy dusty places. Its priests are men too crafty and bent to be honest thieves. So I have the sun. And, David, I love the sun. I hate what I must do to earn it. I am a man who can keep his love only with gold that he gains by his love’s prostitution.”
The last splendor of day. The sun’s arms turned upward, suppliant in death. The vast Star sank beneath crumble of buildings. Tom and David shivered at the eternal surcease.
“I feel that the sun some day of its own accord will go from me because of what I do against it.... Go at midday, as it has gone just now.”
New shadows rose, they were silent like lips that have just spoken. The glow was gone from the room: it throbbed still in their minds. A flower faded.
David said: “I wish, Tom, I could help you.”
Tom did not smile.
“I feel you are unjust to yourself. Perhaps unjust to the world also. It can’t be as evil as you paint it. As for you, I know how far you are from what you say of yourself. You deserve the sun, Tom.”
Tom did not move.
“Just think! Over there, in the East—those black belchinghouses where you say they slaughter cattle and brew hops—the sun will rise to-morrow. Before you awake.”
“Where do you get your idea of the world?” ... A sharp question. It left David blunt.
“I can’t explain. It’s not reasoned out. My idea of the world I guess is chiefly what I feel.”
“And what do you feel?... Your own past of feelings, that is what you feel. Your mother, your easy village life alone with your mother. Nine-tenths of it.”
“Well: isn’t that life as well as this?”
“It’s dream!”
“I do not see the difference very clearly.... My mother was: and my love for her. They are more real to me than the hardness of the city. Perhaps, Tom, it is the hardness of men which is dream.”
“If your love and your life with your mother are reality, lean on them now.”
“I live with them, Tom.”
Tom walked up and down.
“I leave you in your dream, David. I want to. But some shock of the outer world will come and wake you. You are walking in your sleep. I want gentle hands to bring you to yourself, at a safe moment, at a safe place. Lest you fall, David.”
David was up also. They faced each other: the tall gentle unkempt boy and the sharp sure measure of Tom: the boy with bright slow eyes, against the weary quickness of the other.
“I may be more right than you.” David’s voice was low. It had a full cadence of shaded notes. “I don’t think what we reason out is always sure. I can’t explain. I believe that just the same.” About his low voice the room darkened. What was light and certain of the room was the spirit of the friends grappling within shadows.
David was speaking. “When I think, Tom, that there are millions, hundreds of millions of men and women: each of them has feelings deep like mine, feelings of doubt and happiness and sorrow. It seems very wonderful to me that the world should be so rich.... I used to wonder about God. It didn’t seem to me likely that there could be one Mind who knew all about the billions of people that there have ever been, be interested in them, know what was good for them, love them. But I don’t feel like that any more. This huge sea of feelings, made up of so many billion seas—well, that is true, and that is quite as wonderful as the idea of God.”
“Do you think they all feel as you do?”
“Of course they do. I know that really I am no more than the rest. I know how huge my own feelings seem to me.”
“But most of them are luckless, David, stupid victims.”
David looked wondering: “They strike me as wonderful,” he said. “Every thing! People aren’t stupid at all. Perhaps rulers and philosophers are stupid. I don’t know. I don’t know how they work. I know that no stupid man could make a chair or plow a field. And a woman, Tom, who can give birth to a child that will grow up is not a stupid woman. Think, there are billions of women who have done that! All these things seem marvelous to me. Language! Think! The little mute creature who comes into the world, and in a few years he can talk. Is that stupid, Tom?”
David was near Tom’s desk. His hand lay on a flat, blank piece of paper, and an inch rule of thin, varnished wood. He picked them up.
“Look at these, Tom. Don’t you think they’re fairy-tales?”
Tom was smiling. But he was warm. “Compared to what some men have thought and done, all men are stupid. The first man who made paper had intelligence, yes. But the dull million imitators?”
“I don’t know how to make paper. It is all a mystery to me.”
“You could buy a book for a dollar, and read a few hours and know all about it. Is that achievement, to you?”
David was silent.
“Men are a race of monkeys. All of them, David. A few among them now and then who have the genius to create. Freaks. The apes harry them to death, then they follow them. They are no less apes because they steal and follow. Take from the annals of man the deposits of the lonely exceptions and they’d go groveling and dumb, as they did five hundred thousand years ago. Do not admire men, David. Admire the wondrous diseased and solitary freak who at times is born among them, who rises above them: who has given to the monkey-clan all the stolen toys they clutter their lives with. Paper seems a miracle to you. That is sheer ignorance: sentimentalism, if you will, which is the same. Look what the monkeys do with this paper: how they degrade and defile what the creators of paper destined for the recording of holy words. You can give a monkey a jewel, but he’ll hide it in his refuse, or he’ll decorate some obscene portion of his body with it. Is that not just what has taken place with the jewels of intelligence and genius? The plow is a miracle. But the average plowman is a slave who has debased both plow and soil. What has he done with the sacrament of the harvest? He has let his soil that should be to him as the woman he loves be stolen from him: he works it for hire: he sells its fecundity to ugly masters. The lot of women is a lovely thing. But how do women conceive? What do they do with their children? You marvel at language. What do you think of what men say? No, David: yours is an old sentimental fault. Through the ages great lonely spirits have worked for good: they found the uses of fire, they invented the wheel and the sail, the arrow and the lever. The swarmsfrom whom they differed as gods from maggots took their generous gifts and turned them against life. Much of the march of civilization is the abject record of just this bitter process. The dull creature who drives your cab—how is he related to the hero that tamed the shaggy stallions of the Stone Age? or to the poet that dreamed The Wheel? Would the priest whose ecstasy brought forth fire be the friend of the janitor downstairs who tends my furnace—or of the filthy fool that cooks my dinner? What relationship beyond that joining the parts of a colossal joke binds the prophet who first pressed papyrus and the degenerate editor who buys his paper by the ton, dirties it with his lies and sells it to the herd for three cents each morning? Or binds a Shakespeare with the geese that have been quacking about him ever since he died? You have no right to admire the debased relics of greatness—their parodies. To do so is to do precisely the opposite of what you think: to flout the spirit that alone deserves your wonder. Look what the world of men has done. They have so perverted the gifts of the great that no free man can longer partake of them. Their vileness has a monopoly in the fruits of genius.”
“I can’t feel that.”
Tom was bitterly happy. He rushed on. “Well, tell me then: could your ideal artisan work in a factory? He worked with his soul and his hands, the artisan you might admire. It was his love that spoke as he worked; as he sat lost in the magic of his tools, his hands touched the wood with a caress from which came beauty. Machines and trade-union rules would make short shrift of him! There is no place in labor for the man who wants to love while he works. Or your farmer—your true breeder of the earth—can he plow a hired field and then truckle with parasite middlemen to sell and adulterate his fruits? What must his attitude be to the loafer who ‘owned’ his soil and to the loafer who ‘handled’ hisproducts? And the poet-priest that loved his paper and placed the mystery of his love on it—where would you have him write his love to-day, in the Dailies or the Magazines? Where would you have him sing and act his love, in vaudeville or the ‘legit’?”
“I am not up to reasoning with you, Tom. Not yet. But I shall be.”
“Am I wrong?”
“I am certain you are wrong. I feel these things—love and brotherhood—the many people somehow creating and creating. I am stupid, perhaps?”
“You are not stupid, David.”
“Then they aren’t stupid either! Any of them. They are just like me. They are not so very different from poets and inventors. I feel that. You say I am not stupid.”
Tom took David’s hands. “I am the stupid one. That is why I need reason. Dear, confident boy. Please convince me!”
He looked hard, almost fiercely into David’s eyes: dimly glowing they were, or rather their sentiment than themselves, in the shadow.... Tom’s hands hardened over David’s.... David grew aware of a faint unease that was sharp against the sweetness of his mood. Something imperceptible drew back in him: blanched. Tom felt the withdrawal: he dropped David’s hands—suddenly: almost he flung them from him. He stepped back and sat on the couch. His hands held his head so that they did not tremble. His voice came vibrant from the darkness.
“Do not listen to me, David. Though I out-talk you a thousand times, it is you who are right. I am of an old travel-weary race that has lost its gods and that has found no others. I feel you young and fresh beside me, though in our years there is no great difference. Your childhood was not full of false beliefs. You are strong now to go in searchof your own dear Mystery. I have cast off false gods. But their hands were about my heart: and my heart went with them. They are indeed discarded and dead. But my heart is dead along.”
David came through the room: it seemed a cavern as he made these paltry steps to Tom. He sat beside him. Still, he was ill-at-ease. He felt so suddenly strong, and stronger than his friend. While Tom talked, it had been hard for him to master the despairing sweep of impotence over his body as his mind. Now again, coming of his strength beside his friend, he felt a chord draw him, held outside himself; so that his coming was weakness. This could not be. Surely, it was good to sit beside his friend and comfort him, to be glad of the mystic glow that touched from their two bodies and made him feel Tom’s breathing, made him feel the palpitance of Tom’s thought like a butterfly in his close-cupped hands.
Tom said: “Sitting beside me, you are sitting beside nothing.”
David was still.
“At the heart of me, David, there is an empty place. What you call my success has been a violence wrenched from me. David, have you ever walked along a country-road, taken a flower in your hand that grew beside it—pulled, hoping as you walked on to unearth it by its roots: and have you ever found in your hand a pitiful crumpled heap of petals and pollen, with the nude stalk still fast behind you in the ground?”
“I wish I could reason out how wrong you are. I suppose for you I would have to make a very clear argument. My feeling does not help you.”
“Are you sure?”
“If I am downcast, argument to prove I am all right is not the thing I want. I am different from you.”
“Perhaps not in all things different, dear David.”
“I know you are wrong! I have watched you. We are friends, now, for so long a time. I could have told you this, almost when we met—when I paddled you about and you let your wrists play in the water and sprinkled me. You have a funny habit, Tom, of hurting yourself. Lord knows why you should like to! You are not satisfied with the world because you are so much better. It is no sin, Tom, to live in the world where we were born. It is splendid that you have such dreams of a far better one. Your life proves how true and real you have been—perhaps more so to Cornelia than to yourself. I am sure you would be the same for me.”
“I could do anything for you.”
“I have nothing with which to cure you of your black doubts except a stupid faith that does not touch you.”
“Davie, it is the best in you. Give me the best in you. I want nothing better in all the world....”
Silence inclosed them, again.
David struggled with what he deemed his impotence. He was not very bright, he feared. Perhaps he failed to feel the stupidity of men because himself was stupid. Tom would not tell him that. A wave of the need of giving welled about him. He was warm and relaxed within this element whose indeterminate grain moved him toward Tom.... He relaxed. The same easeless stir, moving to stiffen him back, poison this sweetness, to make him one again with his threatened solitude. David struggled for the quickening of himself in self-bestowal. Tom sat in darkness, bitter, hard, his will a clenched fist over his body. With a strain so true that the muscles in his neck stood out, he strove to turn away from his loved friend.
But his hand went forth: his knotted hand that seemed beaten by the weathers of life went forth as on a journey hazardous even to itswisdom. It tremored close to the hand of David ... the warmth of the young hand made it cold.
A sharp shrill voice that sounded a shriek in the darkness.
“Let’s have a light,” Tom jumped up.
In the yellow of the gas, David sat blinking. Tom was all movement. He flung off his shoes, put on another pair. He changed his necktie. He hung away his house coat. He stood dressed for the street.
“I must be off,” he declared. “Which way do you go?”
He was decreased to a more comfortable pitch by this let of energy: he came to David; with both hands half-helped him from his seat.
They had been long in darkness: in darkness some strange light from each had played upon them. Now at the mundane level of the gas-lamp, they stood and needed to look into each other. Their eyes were venturesome, but their darts of laughter proved them timid. They stirred: their bodies and their minds: swerving away. As if they dangled loose from one another and were close-fastened only by their eyes....
David walked yearnful through the City. It seemed sure to him that his heart was empty. He cared for no one. He was a speck caught in a petty whirl that gulfed him quite as whole as if an ocean had risen to immerse him. Happenings of the day and of all other days lay in the back of his head in a shadowed corner where he flung what he was too weary to dispose of: the corner of a curiously cluttered room that had no dear thing in it. So, walking the wild City, it was to David.
He stood in a great Square and heard New York. Low, brittleness of wagons, liquid hoof-blow of horses sweet against the opaque call of drivers, beat of the herds of men driven by iron streets. High, murmur of lamps wreathing with air that dropped like weight of sadness from the sky: weary air, sinking to the City streets of its own helplessness, in love with the warm lamps that turned away from such anguish. Thebuildings hummed their tune of mastership. But these were low: was low the plaint of the air that was being breathed and defiled by the herds of men. Under all was the City: above all was the City’s voice. David stopped still and heard it. A sudden, solitary shriek, coming from afar, dying, born anew.... The City hurried and did not hear itself.
David walked again. The cry was gone. He was deaf also: doubting, forgetful.
He walked to the house of the Tibbetts, where he was due to dinner. A warm hall: carpeted stairs leading up like a schemer’s invitation: balustrades that flourished and bold flat pictures that grimaced against walls with the effrontery of servants. The door closed. David stood on the thick carpet and felt the harsh mahoganous gleam, the cushioned unresilience of chairs, the obtuse blindness of leathered walls. He felt this Fay and her mother, how they were hard and soft: the black sleek fatness of Mr. Tibbetts moved against him, held out wide hands to take him in. A forbidding brutal gloss, like the woodwork, sheathed a softness, agiveof sentiment and thought no more alive in these people than the red plush of the sofa....
All of it was suddenly obscene to David. He was in the mood he had found once in a house of prostitution: he had entered with a fellow from the Office in stern response to passion: he had fled as one flees in a nightmare. The Madame within the harsh green satin of her kimono, which was a mold for flaccid flesh: the hard faces of the women, the hard pastiche of their gestures upon which the flabbiness of their souls and the unexercised pulp of their minds came out, oozed out—David caught himself. What nonsense with these good friends asking him questions! What had that memory to do with this? He walked deliberately into the mood of the Tibbetts: he forgot his nausea, as he had forgotten the voice of the City.
But Tom he could not forget. His forgetting all else brought him inevitably to Tom. He was warm and alive with Tom. He felt that in Tom’s friendship more than in all else—more than in his work downtown or the slow reading of good books—he was growing up. He glowed with Tom as one might smile at the accomplishment before one’s eyes of a good prophecy.
All his life he had known that he was destined to become a man. An ecstasy, this, of wonderment and terror which ran, in a kaleidoscope of color, back to his childhood and to the time when his little arms had clasped his mother’s knees.Some day he would grow up and be a man.Whenever he heard these words inside him, they came by his mother’s voice. For she had brought them first like a fire to his life. She had burned him with them as a reproof, or thrilled him with their glow of destiny, or when her slow hands and her mouth upon him told of their imminent loss, lighted him as a sacrifice with their mysterious meaning. For in these words was a world beyond his mother. In them, coming from her mouth and from her breast that he loved, David knew the ruthless rhythm of his life away from childhood up to the passion of maturity: away from his mother to a motherless cold land for his own mastership. This destiny could be many things. It was a twinkling star he looked at from his safe world and laughed against: it was a fairy-field near only in his fancy, far from his being, dominioned by the will of his young ignorance: it was a menace from which he fled to his mother and toward which the vigor of his mother’s love yet drove him.
He stood at his manhood’s threshold, not daring to turn back. A deep and cavernous beginning. A passage lost in shadows. Not seeing the passage, he dared to enter. His mother’s going had been the bidding of her love that he should leave her. But David was not alone. A part of him was still theshort and sturdy child that clasped his mother’s knees. All this was changed, and all this was eternal. For now, again, David was not alone. Tom who had shown him the coming of his manhood would accompany him through it.... His friend and comrade: though David knew it not, in a way marvelously true and false the legate of his mother.