DAVID lived alone for a little more than a year. Already in that year’s Spring the two friends decided to find a place together.
Their living room opened from a narrow hall. Along a darkness, sidling, their two bedrooms, symbols of our forbidding attitude toward sleep as a dull thing crowded between bright periods of bustle. They blinked, these rooms, with their hopeless single eyes flat on the gray bricks of the adjoining house: blinked like purblind old women against something too close for focus. Here, sleep was imprisoned, that might heal men from the poison of their days, but that men have turned into a merely deeper and more occult brew of their days’ poisons.
The room where the sun came was the room they thought they lived in. Their home, that: though they spent far less hours there than in the blinking sleep rooms, and though, of course, the sun was usually there when they were not—they who weighted each day into the City as miners go down shafts. But it was good to know the sun was there even with them away: they had hunted long for a southward room. The resilient Mrs. Lario, with her bare arms giving to no touch and her smooth throat so palpably immune from the gust of a man’s passion, above the tight composure of whose eyes brooded her hair like a black tempest of contradiction, came and cleaned. She turned the mattresses: she sprinkled water for the dust of the crumbling floors. She made the rooms gleam with a moist complacence like her own widowed virtue. But then, beside Mrs. Lario, came the sun: dried the moistureof her mop, turned all this artificed cleanness that smelt so of its triumph over dirt into a health that glowed, self-sustainedly, without a hint of being mere reform. The sun came and balanced Mrs. Lario; and made her possible. So that when Tom and David were up, ruffled and wearied, through their shafts at night, they felt that their home had been not cleaned alone but redeemed also. And if there was a flavor of must in the tidied bedrooms, the rococo sitting of the pillow-shams, the somewhat chromo-patterned regularity of things left on their bureau, there was as well good air, still a-thrill with the sun’s last coming. On Sundays, they greeted the sun as one they knew, who knew their home better than they: greeted him a bit like a familiar god with his long frank strides shattering their windows.
David was making a success in his uncle’s business. He had at last achieved a salary determined rather by his place in the office than his relation with its head. Mr. Deane’s theory had unconsciously been one of compensation. He balanced his knowledge of the boy’s advantage by miserable pay. This enabled him quite honestly to say: “David gets no more than any other beginner.” An easy way of feeling just. Now David was beginning to lead the life of a young bachelor in the City. He had outgrown his little Eastside room: he was after all a representative of the Deanes. If he went to the theater, it was not right that he should sit in the gallery like a clerk. If he went hunting for rooms with this smart chap Rennard, he must not, by an admission of the low price he could afford to pay, reflect on the House of Deane. Mr. Deane was a little on his mettle with his nephew as most men with their sons. He was approaching the time of vicarious satisfaction. He made David assistant to the Credit Department, and gave him a good salary.
David knew the nepotic alloy in his good fortune. It did not trouble him. He thought, somehow, he deserved it. Herecalled vaguely an old remark of Tom’s about another matter. “Men who get what they deserve always do so, you will find, for inappropriate reasons.” David was letting the sweet illogic of America come in on him. He was lost in wonder at the perfect and complex weave of manifest occurrence which armored the reality, latent and different, beneath. The weave was one of grace, good will and beauty. It was in contradiction to the moving nakedness he felt fatefully aswing below his life and the whole City. He was after all in much a child: one who wanted the world to be good to him: to whom the real was the most splendid of fairy-tales. He fitted into this social structure so close akin to the land where hags turn into princesses and pumpkins become coaches. He was that sort: the sort who wanders blithely through an enchanted forest where great black trunks of trees stand under a green sea of murmur like protective stanchions and who picks up an acorn, finds it to be a golden apple, eats it with neither indigestion nor surprise. The whirling petulance of American life, its oneness with the tempo and technique of the dream, was very near and very sweet to David.
There was then a true immersement of David in this world. And in this fact a danger. Nothing is so rebellious as reality. No man who does not first move with the world can change it. If the deep mute sense of life in David pushed ever upward in revolt, that revolt would be the mere fused head of all his being: of the world’s: it would find its articulated deed. He would go farther, infinitely, in rebellion, than the rebellious Tom whose mental area of understanding kept him in a sort of passionate inertness. The emotions of Tom Rennard were conservative: the part of him that loved loved what was still and plumbed—andthere; the manifest world he found rather than its latency of change. Only his mind ventured ahead into potential realms. His mind was muchlike a courier at work in advance to fit and to pare down conditions for the advent of his master.
So Tom felt a hazard in his friend. He wished to live in the world that he found. He wished to live with the friend that he had found. It was needful, therefore, that his friend should live there also: that he should change just in so far as to fit Tom’s world, yet not so greatly change as to be no longer David. Tom realized that the world’s acceptance he desired in David, and its possession he feared, were very close to one another. He looked at his friend, and wondered....
David lay back in his rocker, with his legs out straight and the mist of his pipe rising above his upturned head. He was comfortable: above his waist his body huddled in a condition of collapse that made the rigid straightness of his legs and of his arms falling down by his side a comical diversion. Tom looked at him from his rush seat chair, direct and simple. He sat at ease, straight. He picked a paper from the floor, but below his waist his posture was unaltered. His head moved on his neck like a hinge: his torso moved on his hips like a hinge. There was David reaching for a match: his legs shifting, his chin dropping upon his chest.
David’s arms went out, and he yawned. His body was rigid. It seemed to press out the energy of words: “Oh—O!I am sleepy.”
Tom laughed. He had come in far later—from a dance. He had been up an hour earlier. “Why don’t you lie down, then?”
David’s eyes seemed to exercise command over his sluggish state. They thought the idea a good one. The big body lifted heavily from the chair, went wide and down to the floor. David lay on his back. Tom looked at him. He could have raised his foot and placed it on David’s stomach. One hand, palm upward, slumbered directly beside Tom’s chair.Tom could have stepped on it. The temptation ran humorously through him.
“Why you should be sleepy, my dear man! I’ll bet you slept ten hours.”
“Well,” after a pause, “it’s Sunday.”
Tom laughed again. “You’re still a lazy country lout.”
David snorted and smiled. He rolled his generous round head away from Tom and closed his eyes. Since his eyes alone had borne the quality of resistance that was his space in the world, David lay prone and altogether passive: he was a little like a flame that has been extinguished.
Tom began to contemplate his friend. David breathed deep and low. Looking and pondering, Tom came to breathe in unison. His shorter, tighter body made this anomalous. They breathed together. But David was sleeping. Tom’s breath brought him discomfort. A tithe of it he discharged by stirring his foot to within an inch of David’s hand. It stayed there. He was forward in his seat. His gaze went forward fixed on some vague moving object that swung in a pure parabola away. All of him followed.
They had been together a month. There was David’s face fallen away on its side. Tom could see the slight strained tendons of his neck. His sleepy hair was a mood apart from the floor it touched like a mist thrown from the alert earth in the morning. His pipe had slipped and cast its ashes. Tom wondered if he was closer to his friend after a month, and how far closer he could grow. This the question he followed. As if in search of it, he leaned agilely forward, immersed, and picked up the pipe next to David’s hand. He was again erect in his chair. He held the pipe before him. Not seeing it. He was very awake thinking. Suddenly he looked at his hands, amazed. They were empty. The pipe was in his mouth. On his face came an expression of motion, as if he wanted to get away. He thrust the pipe back ofhim, on the tabaret. Again, rest came to his features. They no longer strained in the symbol of the need to move. He was in contemplation. His lips parted and pursed at a faster tempo than his breathing. His eyes hardened. He took a long draught of air as if his sluggish breathing had half stifled him. Once more he breathed at his wonted measure.
He looked down at David, for the first time naturally: as if David were this expected object at his feet, and not some threshold beyond them.... They had been after all a mere month together. Why was he counting time with David, when elsewise he was glad to take his days in gross, and the thought of the years like steps of a painful stairway to be mounted toward the flat respite of death? In this lingering with David and his hurry elsewhere, there was a discord, a whirling that made him dizzy. One part of him moved faster than the rest. He turned and turned around. Tom’s eyes were seeking again. He must hold on to something to stop this spinning. His jaw dropped an instant, before he had caught himself up. There were his hands once more athwart his chest: in them David’s pipe. Tom jumped from his chair. Carefully, however: David was sound asleep.
It was a day of clouds low-scudding over the City.
The City crouched hostile and sharp, as if it felt the universe its foe. The City of men. With its roofs like an upstanding fur, it lay there, a cattish monster. The wind boomed afar, plunged near, whistled and shook the windows and was off screaming with fright at its courage. The City was tense and cold under its houses. A lighter shadow cut down from the retreated pall of the skies. The sun was up there somewhere. The shadow mushroomed forth, losing its lightness, swelling with relief into the wider darkness: disappeared. The City breathed again. Another shaft of light, of greater vibrance, lanced it, made it quiver, fadedonce more. These alternations were a rhythm, like breath, on the City. And in the room, where Tom stood looking out and David slumbered, these rhythms were compressed and sharpened. The swathes of lighter shadows—strugglings of the sun—brought unrest. The City was easier in the greater gloom. Was the sun what it feared? The gloom was a cloak, hiding the foe. When it parted a sword flashed. When it parted, the City trembled.
Tom felt the acerb coldness of this maze of stone and brick. A testaceous monster crouched beside the hidden Hudson. It lost its unity: it broke into parts. The City became a swim of brittle points, a sea and a foam of iron. Tom wondered how the soft breasts of the dwellers had conceived their City that was more hard and hostile than the whipped heavens. He saw them under the mountains of their handicraft like shell-less creatures huddled in a mountain of waves.
He was back from this fury to his chair. There slept his friend. He was aware of David gently asleep and of the surge of the City and of the skies a humor of hostile motion. He was aware of all this suddenly at once. The contrast was like swift heat on the smooth surface of his consciousness. It cracked. In the fissures light to see by....
The deposits of his last summer. He had gone away, for his two weeks, alone. This was his custom, and the one who might have led him to disregard it was unwilling. David had earned the respect of Mr. Deane by declining to take a vacation. He might have gone, as the year before, to spend it in the mountains with his uncle’s family. He had no stomach to. He was very far from Lois. He believed she was engaged, though he had purposely avoided the confidence she almost forced him to ask.
“You don’t seem to want to know anything about me, David.”
“What is there to know?”
“There might be many things. Why don’t you ask? Then you may find out.”
“What could there happen to you?”
“Oh, indeed, sir! So nothing could happen to me to interestyou!”
David thought she was inviting him to bare his breast for her knife-thrust. He was long past the desire of sensation from Lois at the expense of pain. He looked dull. And Lois stamped her feet. “Then I shan’t tell you. Now!”
Tom had suggested a plan. But he was half-hearted about it. He did not want to go to the old place with his friend. He did not want to go with him elsewhere. He went off alone. He selected the seashore. There seemed nothing strange in this. He thought it was the turn of the sea. Here too he did not altogether understand. He was afraid to tempt the old place with David. Surely he would not enter it alone.
He went through a little huddled city, sweating and plethoric with high-colored houses and swift dilapidations: a city with the face of a slovenly fishwife, peeled by the summer sun and cut by the winter winds.
Beyond it the beach: a great golden girdle beneath the quiet bosom of the sea. The ocean breathed gently there. It rose and fell passionless and sweet, touching the word of men with virginal disdain. The sun smiled aslant, as if half turned away out of compassion for the feebleness of men. But despite its clemency, the human swarm was like a pullulant emanation in a rich yeasty substance. Women and children and men shifted like black maggots in the luxuriance of summer.
The sea rose from the night as a jewel glows and burns beyond itself. The sun swung into the sky and made of it a luminous flood that poured gold on the beach, splintered mazes of sapphire, emerald, bronze on the breasting waters. Yet of itself the sky was no color and no thing. The sunfevered and sank away, leaving the sky a-tremble with its passion. The sky lingered, lost in the haze of the sun’s mystery, given to the rapture of remembrance that is night.
Within this stillness the broken hurry of people. Men and women were a low spawn flecking and feeding on the universal fragrance. Tom walked among them and tried to amuse himself. Never had human life been so distasteful to him, so anomalous.
He rose early to escape it. A line of boarding houses and hotels lay along the sand. A motley strewing. High barracks with false Colonial fronts and rococo pillars scarfing their dismal heights. Smug cottages burdened with great names:Sea-Crest,Manning Arms,The Breakers. Sprawling, winging frames with turrets that twirled and were picked out in colored glass.... On the beach, when Tom set out, a sparse sprinkling of children. Mothers gossiped low in the background and a few bathers, loosed from the conventional bonds by the tart spell of the water, screamed, laughed, gesticulated, bounded. Tom left them behind. The sea combed back and the dwellings of men were lost. All about, flatness. The grass ran silver away across salt meadows that were ruddy in sun.
The sea was broken here. It lapped idle, and was green and halted by the blue purl of the river that came out to be lost in the sea’s freedom. The bay was quieter than the scudding grass that marged it. There was a rocking stillness everywhere against which the earnest and sharp sally of the pipers in the sea-weed was a dissonant shred. Here Tom threw himself down and took the pungent air into his eyes and mouth and let it moisten the strain of his body. He was immersed in the sweet summer.
A mood grew on him. He learned of a mistake that he had made. Upon the contrast and the stillness of this place came something from without and filled it and made its song.He found that he was longing for the comradeship of David.
Sitting idle and full of the sap of the summer, he found that the part of him which warmed him was straining outward, toward a vague thing indeed—since he wanted no specific thing of David—but with a pull that had no vagueness. He found himself unable to partake of the gentle world he was in. He found himself tangenting from it, making of his wish a rod to vault him back into the burning City. He sat musing, half asleep, without sense of time. He dug with his fingers in the sand. He watched a bug voyage from spot to spot with a rapt floating interest. He tried to enjoy a cigarette, with a sense telling him that the air had a sweeter perfume, could he but swing himself to know it. Unease was on him. He consulted his watch and its denotation of the hours was like news from a far country. Impulse to move was balked by lack of desire to go. He stayed, balanced, bored, strangely exhausted with these hours of indolence, glad of the excuse of hunger to make him move.
The beach was bedlam. He went through the throngs, as if he were wading a morass.
Only the buffet of the waves when he swam beyond the breakers gave him a resistance where he could dwell with a certain comfort. But he could not bathe all day. He went in to dinner. A sort of immersement in a black pot where food was. Clatter of dishes, hot stickiness of human motion, flies stuck on paper. It was hard to part the tasteless substance of his neighbors from the sodden stuff he prodded down his throat.
He escaped to the sea. While the populace digested, he could be alone with it. It beat in monotone upon his world: it flayed it. The sea lay there cruelly content, droning its repetitious chant. Until the endless song mounted, terraced, burst in his ears like a vast shout of conquest. Tom felt an invasion. His small body was being swept by a terrenemonster. The sea’s laborious approach against his nerves was no relief from the crepitousguerillaof the women, children, men, beating their individual sticks and stones upon him. Tom went back to the deserted bay where the sea was less the sea. And, gazing at the watery world, he wondered by what spell the ocean had even been a balm to him: by what strength he had dared love it.
He said aloud to himself in the silence: “Well, leave here. I give you permission. Go somewhere else. If this bores you.” He had no answer. He did not wish to go somewheres else. He wished to go back.
He had always loved this being close among the pleasure-toiling people. He had looked forward to the nights. The open theater, garlanded in paper lanterns, the carrousel with its comical rugose rounds of music, the dance-halls by the sea where the salt air swooned in the invasion of shuffled feet, of perfume, of pop and beer. The silent stretches away from the lights where he could see the couples under the moon discovering love, finding for once glad uses for their bodies. All this Tom loved, and for it had come.... There was the solemn jay decked in white duck trousers who walked as close as he dared to the girl in frills, with her face simpering down toward her languid feet. [How far her puff sleeves kept him off, how dangerous a sealing of adventure to take her hands! And her lips? Could he have them without the sea rocking upon them and wiping out the future?] Tom would dance with the prettiest girl he could find—then with the ugliest: and chuckle as he discovered the law of compensation unobserved. “She has less looks, no more sense.” He would be hero to a gang of boys, buying them soda and ice-cream: confidant of the pendulous matron in virginal crinolines who believed him when he said that he was sure she could dance: you must not let your daughters bully you, madam, into being old!... Then aloof, watching the prides,the passions, the innumerable nonsenses collect, become a single human clutter, astir in a flare of lights, a ribboning of banal music, a haze of sweaty odors.... Once more about him silence and at his feet a Sea—musing in its moveless might as if it were all the heavens, all the stars made through some portent palpable to him. It lay there aloof like truth. And he its master since it lay also in his brain. The crowds he had left were a sputter of sand fallen on the sea and gone.
So, once. Now nothing of all this. The world had fooled him. Ashes were in his mind. Yet he could not leave his mind and the world. Ten days Tom moved in this numbness....
Sudden, he went to the station, and sent a wire to David, returned to his hotel, paid his bill. The message was:
“I am coming home. Save supper for me. Will call for you.”
“I am coming home. Save supper for me. Will call for you.”
... He had a sense that if he visited the bay it would be sweet and fertile like a young woman who is warm with the breathing of her body: that if he had stayed to dinner at the hotel, the women’s chatter would amuse him, the naughtiness of the children under the frowns of their mothers shine like snatches of song. For he was on the train....
A heavy heated day met him in the City: one of those laden evenings when the air has lost its resilience to throw off the fetid waste poured by the turmoil of life. All that the millions, in grips with the materials of work, have thrown impure into the air remained for the millions to breathe.
But Tom was in high spirits. His ferry had moored him on the west edge of Manhattan an hour before the time to dine. In this coincidence of his train—the one good train to catch after his sudden resolution—he read a happy omen. He would have time to wash at a hotel. He had no fears because of the short notice of his message. David had few engagements beyond occasional visits to his family, very few indeed whose urgency would prevail against the urgency of Tom’s wire.
The thought of that urgency. Why was he so pressed to see his friend? He felt no need of explaining to himself. That part of him which appraised explanations seemed content without one—a strange thing in Tom—seemed willing to nod, to say: “Yes. No need of further words. You wanted to see him.” But what of the explanation to make to David? He might think the lack of one peculiar?... Something just above his ears, in the back of his head, cracked with a swift report like a cleavage in deep ice. It was an instant: it had not hurt. During it, this thought, marvelously elaborate and clear, touched light: he would tell the truth: he would take David to their favorite café—down steps on Sixth Avenue under the booming elevated structure—where his proprietary waiter, Charles, designed him dinners, according to the weather, according to the look in his face, without questions. There they would sit—he would say: “I missed you, David. My vacation was a failure without you. I had to come back to New York to see you.” Simple enough, and honest. Yet it had cleaved some icy armor in his brain in order to get free. David would blush. He was so droll, so like a girl with his ready blushing. And what would David answer? Tom walked along with his elastic bound. He was a little like a pony pacer—a svelte small one. David had had the simile. But above the sharpness of his steps, he swam in a mist of fantasy. He believed that his mind would compress this mist, make it clear solid fact. His mind seemed averse—indolent. Perhaps after all, it could not. An illusion of the mist perhaps that it had the substance of the fact-to-be. Tom saved himself from this conclusion: “Don’t live it now.... There’ll be nothing left after you’ve done imagining.” A faint reverberance set in: reaction. “Whyshould I not tell him I was anxious to see him? Truth is essential with a boy like David. I can’t give him anyotherreason.” The steps of David’s lodging house were a bit steep.
He found himself outside the door. He was afraid to open. He knocked. He did not think it right to be so ceremonious. He entered.
David was there. Tom went forward with the slain feelings the occasion had given birth to. What he saw was a blight that had drawn the life of his coming. What remained, talking, moving, was a ghost. David was not alone. With him some friend.
“Farmer was alone. I happened to meet him coming up. I knew you would not mind, Tom, if he came along.”
“Of course—of course not”
Tom knew that soon he would understand. In order to be polite, he had better delay the moment. Perhaps, he could put it off till he was rid of these two fellows.
“Where shall we go. I’m hungry.” David seemed satisfied. He had worried a little perhaps? David put on his straw hat with a despicable slap of his palm.
“Where you say. It makes no difference to me.”
Their favorite café—and Charles? David suggested. Tom nodded.
It was a hilarious dinner. Actually. Tom helped it. The Farmer person had an aptitude for puns. He told them with a Carolina accent. Tom knew of him, that he wore a straggly ribbon for a tie—gray and brown—tucked like a shoe-string into the yellow edge of his collar. He knew also that the collar button showed—it was black bone—and an adam’s-apple: that the shirt bulged and was half stiff, and wrinkled. Tom knew no more because his eyes rose no higher and no lower. They remained at their horizontal tension.
He packed them off to an extravaganza. No, he could not join them. He simply could not. They would enjoy it without him. One did not go to the theater for company—as one went to dinner. They were gone at last.
Tom was home like a spent arrow. Down the turbulent avenue with the trains clamoring overhead. He took off his clothes. He was exhausted, as if he had run that day, not been carried, to New York. In a moment, he slept.
He woke early and lay in his bed and understood.
David did not know it: he had done this thing with a knowledge surer than knowing. That much was clear. If David had had a doubt as to the true trivial purpose of Tom’s telegram, if he had so much as said: “There may be something important” he must have given Tom the chance to tell him. It was plain, David had sensed the lack of a particular business, guessed the purely social nature of Tom’s wish: keen willing, without knowing, to avoid it.
Was it stupidity? Tom thought not. The stupid person would not have understood so much. He would have said: “There may be something important.” Or, feeling the true inwardness of Tom’s importunity, he must have been passive before it. Beneath David’s ingenuous behavior, there worked a deliberate negation. That much seemed certain. Part of his will’s function it had been to hide from David what it was all about, since his will was willing to cause Tom’s distress, and David conscious would not have been willing to cause it, David’s innocence a cloak over himself. But the detail of his meeting Farmer? Tom believed that in the wide world of occurrence the searching will could always find material for its act.
The important thing now was to slur over the affair. A great hurt, an inexplicable wound: a pin prick that somehow had touched his heart—one could not talk of such improbable things.
He saw David the next day.
“Really, man, why do you insist on foisting such impossible persons on yourself and me?”
David squirmed. “I can’t say I like him either. But he seemed begging to come along.”
“He is the dullest man I have seen in a year. I didn’t cut short my trip, you know, to dine with your stray cats.”
“I suspected you couldn’t go him.... I knewsomethingwas the matter....”
... That was long since: that could not happen now. Tom sat over his sleeping friend on the floor and had this thought: “He feels differently now.” Of a sudden a twinge strangely akin to guilt went through him. What was he thinking about indeed? He had wanted to be with David those idle days. David had not had the same wish so strongly since he had spoiled their first evening together. Perhaps now in a like case he might wish more strongly. What was there unusual—guilty—in that? He had no desire to seal David hermetically from the world. Surely he showed the contrary intentions. Was he not introducing him to his friends? David had had a full ten days, and he ten empty ones. Another time, David might be the eager one. What was he troubling himself about?...
David lay still and asleep on the floor. David was up, brandishing his arms, and his eyes sleepless as a day after hours of sun.
“I am off for a spin.” David was devoted to his bicycle. “What are you doing this afternoon?”
Tom seemed to search up and down with his head. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Good! Then, you’ll join us on our walk later on. We’re going to Bronx Park: and have a supper of popcorn—three colors—hot-dogs and sauerkraut and ice-cream soda.”
“Who are?”
“Why, Cornelia and I—and you.”
“I don’t like the bill-o’-fare.”
David’s face went a shade less light.
“Besides,” Tom caught himself, “I have an engagement. I promised to have tea with Mrs. Duffield. Fennido is to be there. She asked me specially to bring you, too.”
“You don’t seem to go out as much with Cornelia and me, as you used to.”
“My dear fellow, I am getting busier all the time. You know that. If you don’t understand, who should? You know that there goes into a date like this something other than free choice.” He walked up and down. David stood still. “Will you come?” Tom asked.
“I have this engagement with Cornelia.... If you ask Cornelia also.” Tom’s eyes dropped. He hummed a few high notes of a popular melody. He found his chair, slapped the Sunday paper into its proper folds on his knees.
“One doesn’t take one’s family to these chatters, Davie. Fortunately, since Cornelia would have to be dragged. How unreasonable you are.”
David stood motionless. He was wondering if Tom told all the truth. Tom took the offensive: “I’ll be blessed, Davie, if you’re not thinking evil things about me now. I don’t give enough care to my Sister. I don’t bring her enough into my life, into our life.” He sat back in his chair and thrust his sharp question into the indecisive vagueness of David’s “Not so?”
“Why—I didn’t say that.... But why do we go out together so seldom now? We three. Why is Cornelia here so little?”
“Why don’t you invite her?”
“I always thought that was for you to do.”
“The truth is, David, you see Cornelia plenty.” Tom had achieved the tune he wanted. He was out of the talk. By stress of David he would manage to remain out. “I havenothing against your friendship with Sis. I am happy about it. I had something to do with making it, you may remember. It is good for her—and she means a lot. But you must broaden out, man; at your time of life you must not crib yourself, even with a Cornelia. You have no idea of the gamut of human relationships: of their variance and wonder.... Why do you think I wished you to come with me, this afternoon? You see how frank I am. Cornelia you can have any time and always. But Laura Duffield will get weary of inviting you to meet her friends, if you continue to show such nimbleness in avoiding her. That is precisely what you need. Yes—a lot more, just now, than you need Sister.”
Tom was unanswerable. He did not press the matter further. He read the news. But David later trudging the deserted side-street, between silent walls, could not convince himself there was no answer.
“Cornelia,” he said, “come over to our place and spend Wednesday evening.”
“I have an engagement, Davie.”
“Then come Thursday. Or Friday.”
Cornelia stopped. “Let’s sit on that bench,” she said. “Quick!—before some one else——” Her first remark had been low, serious. A touch of brightness in her last words that made David look at her. As they sat, it was gone.
Carriages flowed before them. Motionless coachmen, immobile ladies, cramped frilled children passed like wooden figures in a carrousel. Only the horses lived. And yet not all of them, since their docked tails and their cruelly reined necks had an air of artifice.
“Listen, David. I want to speak to you. I should love to accept your invitation. But ...” she stopped.
David felt a strange commotion. Something within him was full of panic, wanted to get away. At most a fraternal fault was going to be found with Tom. Why then did hehave the sense that it was he who was going to be accused—and more still, justly? These gusts of emotion were ridiculous. Cornelia had as yet said nothing. Yet, at that moment, if a man had come up to him and asked: “Is Thomas Rennard your friend?” David would have stammered. Cornelia was speaking.
“You know, Davie—it was natural enough—when Tom lived alone, he used always to come to me. I dropped in occasionally to look after him—his curtains or his linen—or of course, if he wasn’t well. Then, he’d be bundled over to my place. But I had ‘our home.’ Now, he has a real, liveable place—the better of us two. But I have the feeling, David, that this has not altered the old custom. Tom does not suggest my spending evenings with you.” Having said so little, she was afraid she had said too much. She went on: “Oh, course, he still comes to me.”
“Alone, then. We have not been together in your place since Tom is back from his vacation.”
“Yes, he comes alone.” Cornelia spoke this slowly, pensively. Her next words trembled swift upon each other as if escaping her thought. “I have the idea that perhaps he likes to have his place apart—— It was that way with his old room. When he wanted me, he came to me. He knew I was not that way: that I was always glad to see him. I guess, don’t you think, he still needs his corner for being solitary?”
“But, Cornelia—why then, share a——”
“Oh, that is different, Davie. Women are in the way.”
“I don’t feel that you are. Cornelia.”
“He does. He is a strange dear, you know. He feels that—that women are in the way. He must.”
David’s inexorable logic was a burden to Cornelia who loved it—even as his candor hurt though she was nursing it. “Then you won’t come, next week?”
“Not until Tom asks me. Only the first time I will feel like that. The first time, it seems to me, the invitation had better come from him.”
She wanted to talk on. She had so much to ask and to confess. She had not been invited to help fix their rooms. This was a most hurting difference. She had concealed it. She felt that her words with David had been stupid. Better silence than her feeble approach to speaking. What she wanted David to see she had most hidden. All her moods toward him were of that sort. Always, always. If she wanted to give herself, there she was turning away. Of course Tom was not helpless in such a matter as arranging his apartment. He had his own ideas. She had been sure at least that she would be consulted. One afternoon she came: “How do you like things?” They were complete. “Splendidly, Tom.” That was all. It was not the artist who was offended. The artist in Cornelia could always be disposed of. But the woman—the sister. She realized that David also had been but perfunctorily consulted. This was stillTom’splace. Thinking of that Cornelia forgot her own slight.
She looked at the boy beside her, looked up at him. They sat on the ground. A pine tree rose straight above them. David studied the split roll in his hand, with its long red sausage sticking out at both ends.
“I never know where to begin,” he chuckled.
Why could she not at least ask questions? What did they talk of, idle nights? What was Tom’s attitude at home toward David?Tom’s place.Did David feel this?
“First you must even up the roll and the sausage—bite off both ends. Like this.”
“That’s the rule?”
“The rule....” She was like a woman carrying a great load upon her back afraid to ease it, shift it a bit from the sore spot lest it crush her. She was silent.
David ate methodically. He enjoyed eating. The bite of the mustard was good on his tender tongue. He felt Cornelia beside him eating, not knowing she ate. The “hot dog” was gone: he felt in her silence a need of question which aroused his own.
He wanted to know the truth of this strange problem between Tom and his sister. He wanted to know if Cornelia was really somewhat sentimental, somewhat “the old woman.” He wanted to be sure that she was; that Tom was right, loving her, prizing her, putting her in her place. He wanted to be sure that she was not.... He did not want to lose a tithe of his respect for her—and for himself, sitting beside her close and wanting no change....
A pause, with the weight of their questions clear and compact—closing them in. He was beside her coming close. She was open. Could they not be open in this silence, whatever came? A tree, warm air, no one. Could they not stay open, whatever was born?
Cornelia stirred with anguish. She was afraid: she was afraid to look at David: for she was very open. He would pour in through her eyes, if her eyes touched him. All he—into her all. Why not? Her answer was a word of escape.
“——that party, tell me about it——” Escape from herself since already, she knew, David was within her. She could not drive him away. She had no will to. She could escape from herself.
“——I am not made for parties. But, oh, Cornelia? There was a man, a wonderful man! He played piano for us. He said——”
Their spirits had met. Upon the tiny separateness of their questions of Tom their spirits had met and tremorously touched. Now, their spirits floated in opposite directions; timidly, still eye to eye, but with contrary wings propelling them away.
They clasped hands.
“Good-by.” “Good-by, Davie.”
The true psychic reaction of their separateness together came to them both.... David wondered if Tom was right. He had a good time with Cornelia. Nothing fecund about it. Being with her led, if to anything, to gaps and to stops invisible, before which always they turned away. “Perhaps she is sterile.” “Why doesn’t she get married?” Sudden he had a grievance against Cornelia. Life to them must be two separate things. He was happy with her, but even that was a mere emptiness he would with youthful eagerness have sold for a rich battle of pain. She was a woman, yet no woman to him.... Cornelia walked away, knowing what David felt. All the way back to her rooms she felt David moving toward Tom, David doubting, David beginning to patronize and to take her in circumstance and reason.
She thought his thoughts. She followed his eyes as they turned away from hers, as they turned away from her. Her own were filled only with what filled his. Seeing with his eyes she saw her enemy. She saw her brother....
DAVID did not understand or question the spirit in which, the following night, he went with Tom to dine at the apartment of Constance Bardale.
She had watched him with large eyes at the table, where he sat mostly silent and very busy with the food that he found delicious. She had manoeuvered him later aside from the chattering group. They talked quietly together. David had no sense of her as yet, beyond the silk cold sheath of an earth-colored dress fending a woman’s body.
But he did not suffer. He said to himself: “I don’t know really what to say to her. But it goes all right.” He was pleased at this, grateful to her. He showed it.
The opposing group broke into laughter. It broke its confines. A tall massive man stood over the two.
“Constance,” he said, “you must hear this.” A thick, foreign accent marred his otherwise perfect English. He was an Austrian: head of the Stegending Galleries on Fifth Avenue where second-rate examples of second-rate old masters fetched first-rate prices. He stood very close to Constance Bardale, who looked askance at him with sly knowledge lighting the flecks in her gray eyes. She seemed to be saying: “So this is the best excuse you could find for breaking into my tête-à-tête? Don’t you see it is hopeless? No, of course, you wouldn’t.”
The Austrian’s sally had its success. It was a breach toward the hostess through which now the others began to flow upon her. The guests shifted near. David remarked how directly Mr. Stegending spoke to Miss Bardale. Unlike himself. But he took comfort in his partial isolation. He rested back in it as he would have in his chair had his self-consciousness not made him crane stiffly forward.
“It was Fennido’s idea,” said Stegending.
“I assure you, Karl, it was Con’s.” Fennido balanced himself with grace. In a half courtesy he thrust out an indicating palm toward his hostess.
“Mine?”
“Now wait.” Richard Fennido rose to his full plump height. David saw how large his buttocks were, like a woman’s: his small blue eyes peered from beside the curved nose like a bird’s. He was poising evidently for his sort of flight—in words.
“I said it was your idea, Constance, and I can prove it.”
A little woman at his side laughed prematurely. Her eyes seemed fixed in a sort of perpetual fright. This was Mrs. May Delano, and her great fear was not to appreciate and not to appear at home. Fennido began.
David found, as he talked, no need of the effort of attention. This Mr. Fennido did not notice him at all. He seemed to hold Constance Bardale with his eyes, the group about him with his shoulders that were curiously sharp above so plump a body. He was done. There was a breaking up. A new shredding of words, a new scramble from which another voice emerged, momently mastered attention, sank away.
David watched Tom. Not consciously so much as because he nearly always saw him, when Tom was there to see. He felt a strange thing. Tom, the casual, easy Tom, was uneasy. He was fretted by some sharp discomfort. His eyes wandered, his feet tapped, he lighted a cigarette and threw it away. Fennido talked again. A great talker. Tom gathered the sharp points of his nerves together: he was once more composed but with a tension that had in it the power of some prefatory move: almost a charge. In the ensuing scatter ofminds, Tom was busy gathering them together, gathering them to him. Ill-at-ease no longer. He was speaking....
He spoke for a while, wreathed in the comfortable silence of the others. David’s eyes, moved by an impulse he was not conscious of, wandered. They met the eyes of Marcia Duffield. He looked away, shocked by a current which had flowed momently between them. David knew Tom’s words held him unpleasantly; at times held him not at all. What was the interest in them, what their motive, beyond Tom’s wish to speak and to hold interest? David sensed this: sensed the rebuke he felt in this for Tom. As his eyes went back to the eyes of Marcia Duffield it came to him that she was feeling similar things with him. In the brief meeting of their eyes, it was as if they had discovered one another in themselves.
This was absurd and impossible! Marcia Duffield? David’s mind could not grasp this flashing intuition; it slipped leaving no conscious mark. He looked harder at the others in the unwitting need not to look again at her. Already, what he could carry with him of that strange momentary kinship across the room was reduced to the sense of bright, black, hard eyes, filled with a wistful question.
He was aware of King Van Ness: perhaps because that solid gentleman was always looking at Marcia. David knew who he was: Junior partner in Van Ness, Stone and Company—son of a great banker, doubtless a millionaire. Van Ness sat as if between two fascinations: the voluble one that was principally Tom, who at times caught him and sent him stiffer forward in his chair; the silent one, Marcia, who never looked at him, but the stirring of whose hands and mouth was at once reflected in his ways—like the image in a dull steel mirror. Van Ness was heavy and tall, not stout. His big bones and the heft of his arms and legs gave the impression of extraordinary weight. Their heaviness proceeded ratherfrom his mood than their own heaviness. Van Ness was heavy, not because he was great in bulk, but because he was small in spirit. The unlit stretch of him was a sag and a pull downward because he lacked the lift of mental resilience. His head stated this. The forehead was large and bulging. The brown eyes opened wide and were far apart. The nose was long, straight, clumsily rather than strongly molded with unmoving nostrils. Van Ness wore a black mustache, a straight-cropt bristly brush: his mouth was small and unperturbed; his chin jutted forward with a counterfeit of power that was mere lack of curiosity, unresistance to the proprieties and manners birth had brought him. This was King Van Ness: supremely gentlemanly, supremely rich, supremely dull—impregnable. He stirred in the talk of Fennido and Tom as a heavy vessel creaks at anchor in a choppy sea....
David heard Tom again.
“We had it out, until seven o’clock that night. I came home exhausted.”
Tom glanced at David. Not long or sure enough to see him turn pale.
“But it can’t be! It’s a lie!” David said to himself. He remembered the evening Tom referred to. He had come home at six. Tom lay on the couch. In excellent spirits. They had gone to Brown’s Chop-House for dinner. And yet—David, as usual, had no positive proof. Perhaps a mere exaggeration, a mistake in the day. Why was he always so eager—so afraid—to catch Tom in a trivial falsehood?
Marcia was speaking to him. Van Ness had roused himself to a rare gust of words. Serious words, half-angry. The question of labor-unions. Marcia drew Tom aside.
David saw how her eyes were close on him and how her breast stirred faintly. He saw that Tom was watching only with his ears: his eyes wandered to the talking banker. Ina pause, “You must have had your wits about you!” he threw in. He had heard every word.
Van Ness was flattered. Tom threw his head back, looking at the big man in a way that drew a line between them. Van Ness came up, he seated himself beside the pair. Marcia’s lips curled as if they had been stung. Van Ness beamed on Tom, as he might have if Tom from great natural kindness had done him a good turn. Marcia was stiff in her chair, looking away. She seemed to be suffering and not to care for the instant if others saw it. Then, her face covered. Why did David sense bravery in that? Marcia thought she could wound either man by being affable to the other but she wanted to wound both. Then it occurred to her that smiling on Van Ness might delight Tom merely. She knew his game. He was done with her. He was putting her away, neatly, satisfactorily—as he did, doubtless, all things. The bitterness was, she could not but fall in with his plans. They were her plans also. None fitted them better than King Van Ness. If only Tom were not thrusting her into his arms! If only she had the madness, the courage to flout Van Ness in order to spite Tom! She believed she might. But if she failed, thereafter, to marry as well? her humiliation would still be before Tom: he would laugh at her, or pity. It was all one. He was capable of saying: “Why didn’t you take Van Ness? Don’t say I stood in your way!” Marcia knew she must take him, some time. If only she could in the passing send an arrow to the man who, having been her lover, had now the impudence to tell her: “I am your friend, Marcia. I am deeply concerned.” Her friend! She had never been able to discover her successor. She sat now, finding in her negative aloofness the one sure way of not satisfying Tom in an attempt to hurt him. He took pleasure so strangely!
David was next to Mrs. May Delano. She straining to take some humble part in the near tête-à-tête of Fennido andStegending with Constance Bardale. She discerned David’s separation from the group: deduced therefrom his inferiority. She was afraid to give much heed to him. She was a proper, nervous little woman. She had revolted from her world because she was so like her stodgy mother, so much attached to her thrifty and careful father. She had married a mentally inferior Irishman because he owned two theaters on Broadway and was hence in touch with “art.” All her life was a pursuit of “interesting” people: in reality a retreat—equally vain—from the middle class whose manners and beliefs rooted in her soul. Her simple Jewish family took up her husband with delight. “I think, dear,” he told her in order to give her pleasure, “I think I have more good Jewish friends than any other sort.” She was, indeed, miserably married....
David was not averse to her leaving him alone. He felt what this woman was, since he was untutored in the symbols of her pose. He wondered why Mr. Stegending bit his lips.
Fennido was lyric against the baited Stegending’s silence. Stegending brooded and tried not to listen to the intimate badinage of Constance and her foil. His eyes rested glowering, stiff on this supple woman; wandered off to some dimmer focus. A strange sorrow pervaded his hard face, the sorrow of an animal rather than of a man. In this state, David almost liked him. He looked less wise, less strong, more full of life when he was full of this strange sorrow. Constance Bardale snatched him back from his withdrawal; with a word fixed his eyes once more on her. It was as if she needed him there in order to go on with Fennido. Stegending’s face sharpened, it fell again into its mold of human cunning: it was nearer this woman, farther from what David had cared for in him.
Constance got up; she took May Delano by the hand and placed her glowing in her chair. She turned her back on thetwo men who watched her slipping from them as one stares at an impossible offense.
“Well, Mr. Markand, are you coming to see me ever of your own accord, or will I always have to wait till there’s a dinner?”
She sat beside him, bringing her chair still closer. She smiled with her full face and her sinuously deflected body.
At once David knew that this which was happening to him was like the other things which he had watched. He was part of this buzzing world. But outside of it, so that he still could understand.
“I think I shall come, Miss Bardale. It is awfully good of you....”
“It is not good of me. I have no one in my place out of kindness. With me, I assure you, charity stops at home.”
David flushed at the abrupt nakedness of her compliment. He gathered from the candor of her example the courage to look at her as she had looked at him.
She was not beautiful. Her skin had a strange olive tinge: it was fleckless smooth: it was not transparent. Her hair was heavy, not fine. He noticed her wide short hands. Capable hands. The sense of her flesh, under the quiet silken sheath of her gown had a disquietude and a heat that won him. For the first time he realized how a woman whom he was able to know not beautiful could be desirable. She made a direct call upon his senses. His senses answered.
“You can’t possibly like me, yet, Miss Bardale? You do not know me. Why, then, except to be polite——”
She laughed. Her laughter went into words.
His head was left out of it. She was a body. His own body told him. Suddenly her talk and his seemed remote from the main purpose of their nearness as if they stood in opposite corners of the room, tilting at each other with long sticks.
He had to go on tilting. He could not come nearer. However inclined he was—and to his own amazement—to drop his guards.
Her talk, he vaguely knew, made easy his sitting there. In the same distant sense he felt that his defensive parries were not unworthy. But all of this was not very conscious. The part of David given to their talk was swimming along with a free stroke that the heavy touch of his deliberation could only have disturbed. Indeed, a part of him was absent, and was busy elsewhere. Their words rose up like a pelting fire. By its light, David could look beyond, could peer into the spiritual corners of the room, could see their darkness.
There seemed no affection at all: no fellowship. Even for themselves, these persons had no affection. Their egoism was a hard and desperate passion: fruit of some perennial resistance. David could not have reasoned out why this should be: how affection must die in a hot contest: how either it must die or it must share the intensity of the combating forces and turn to passion. The way of these men and women toward themselves had much the way of animals fiercely competing for food and for love. In a less bitter contest they could have played together: like children or like animals that are fed and tamed. Now they were playing at playing. David felt, in this, their wide distinction from animals. A whole array of impulses and thoughts muddied and distressed what might have been the clear flow of natural conflict. They were whipped up into a delirium of broken starts that in the end lacked all direction. Endlessly at work, in the upholstered room, under the gowns of silk and the starched bosoms, a scrimmage of cold desire. Some things each desired of the others: a body, ruin, disappearance, help.... David thought his impressions strange. Surely, he was mistaken, seeing nonsense?
No doubt, however, of what Constance Bardale was nowabout. He had no idea of her goal: it was plain she was testing him. As surely as if her capable hands had moved over his body, she took his measure.
He knew now what he was doing, with his parries. To defend himself was to accept her gage of battle. He was meeting Constance Bardale in the field she had chosen. This was precisely what he now no longer wanted to do. He became silent. And she who knew a way for his defensive was helpless against his retreat. Against his resistance, she could display her forces, but she was scattered and spent in the emptiness before her. David sat back in his chair, looking beyond, thinking, and gave her nothing.
Constance Bardale got up and left him. “Let him stay alone if that is really what he wants.” She thought in the falseness of a moment’s pique she had been moved to rescue him from a painful solitude among the chatter of others.
As she sat again, talking elsewhere, she had David in mind.
“What is it?” She recovered herself. “Is he a ninny or was he just bored? I don’t think he’s a ninny.” She had intelligence to know, at least, that he had not been frightened. There had been a calm in his sudden withdrawal which was the contrary of fear.
She took his hand at the door, and now when the invitation she had so unconventionally stressed would have been a mere matter of form, she kept silent.
“Good-night, Mr. Markand.”
“Good-night, Miss Bardale.”
He was very serious and far away. She had the wit to smile and turn to the others....
It was a crystal night of autumn. David and Tom could not think of taking a car.
David was sorely troubled. He was glad Tom made no effort to talk. A question from him would have thrownDavid into panic. It was about Tom he was troubled. And about himself.
“I am afraid. I am afraid to meet a woman flirting with me. I am a coward,” he muttered to himself. Constance Bardale had understood him better. She had glimpsed under his sudden tenacity of refusal to meet her, to meet even her eyes or her laughter, some deeper preoccupation which her profane self must not be allowed to enter. But David walked with a sense of discomfort—wide and profound—as if all life were a garment that fitted him ill. Tom was a mere most sensitive spot where the ungainly garment caught.
He had the sad conviction of Tom’s dishonesty from the fact that he went so well in that dishonest group: of Tom’s equal striving to overcome, to grasp, to possess, he could have no doubt. It was all very ugly to David. That did not matter. It mattered painfully that Tom should be ugly! Tom was his friend whom he loved: whose life he was entering more and more. Who was at fault that these constant doubts flared up against the passage?
Now he wanted to talk to Tom. Tom always took these doubts and talked them away. He wanted Tom to dispose of the night’s new accumulation.
Tom walked on. He seemed troubled also. This was a new thought lancing into David. His own misgivings were a shade less clear. Tom was troubled. Perhaps Tom had a grievance against him? If he did——
“What makes you so silent?” he asked, before he knew: reflexedly as one jumps from a danger and then looks to know what it is.
“Do you want to know?” Tom’s voice was hard. “I am going to tell you, David. Sometimes you make it anything but easy for me.... These were my friends. For my sake, you might have tried to be a little pleasant....”
“Wasn’t I pleasant, Tom?”
“Did you stir yourself to be? Oh, of course, I know what’s in your mind. ‘This is easy forTom.Hetakes to all that frivol naturally.’ Well, I assure you, my dear friend, you are mistaken. I do nothing of the sort. But I have a sense of the world and of the need of living in it. That sense at times, fortunately for me, is greater than my sense of my own importance. Your sulks are nothing but conceit. Believe me! If I am distressed, it is because I am anxious. I want you to grow up. I take you to places where you meet mature and interesting people: people with minds. You might do me the honor of trusting my intentions: enough not to sit there as if I had taken you to a dime museum.”
“Tom—— I am sorry! I did the best I knew how.... Something made me melancholy—yes.”
This was all wrong, all wrong, David was thinking. Yet how could he right it? Tom had no real grievance against him. It washewho had the grievance! Why did things always take this perverse turn? Why was he always in the wrong? This time hewas not.... Tom spoke on. He too hated the superficial form that social intercourse seemed fatefully to take. But under it the play of minds, the approach of men and women to each other was good: justified the forms and the conversations. He was no creative genius to revolutionize society. When David had succeeded in finding a more satisfactory way for friends to share their thoughts, he would be happy. Until then....
“But Tom—why did you, why did you have to make up stories that aren’t so?”
It was difficult for David to ask this. All his being and courage were summoned to the effort. Why should he need his courage?
Tom walked quietly on. David felt his vibrance. Either he was in wrath or in pain. “So that is it?” Again he was silent.
At last: “David, my friend,” in a low still tone, utterly changed from before. “Davie, you make me worry for you. This is not a mere lack of a sense of humor. This is something deeper.”
He went on quietly. His words cut into David like curved knives. Silently, David resisted. But the points of attack were too many. Attack whirled about him....
David was always looking for faults in him, doubting his honor and his word. Why? Had he so little faith in his friend? Let David tell him, had he given him cause to believe the first ill thing about him vagrant in his mind? David shifted to answer. Tom was attacking elsewhere.... David had no sense of proportion. He seemed to take from his remarks nothing but sources for quarrel. Or was it unwilling rather than unable? David was sure he could here give satisfactory answer. He was perhaps too serious and dull: he took everything Tom said so deep to heart! No cause for anger, really. Tom had veered far.... Oh, this was no exception. There were many things. The truth was David thought only of himself: David was selfish.
“Why should you always sit in judgment on me? Supposing I began this trick with you of weighing your deeds and your words to see what direct pleasure they brought tome, as a miser might sift dirt to find the grains of gold? Do you really think Icouldn’t?”
A list.... The other evening, when Tom had had a headache, David had gone around smoking and whistling. Did David recall the time Tom had broughthimhis dinner? And the pique of David because Tom could not join him and Cornelia on some insignificant walk. As if Tom had broken a tryst. How David had his silences for a week, because of things like that. Did David perhaps remember how he had honored Tom’s desire to see him on his return from his vacation? honored it by dragging a dull outsider along for dinner.Let David think of himself wiring so to Tom. Perhaps he thought Tom’s silence meant he was not hurt that time when he broke their theater date because he had forgotten it was Lois’ birthday....
“But you said you could easily find some one else.”
“Yes, David. I am not like you. I was afraid, if I made it hard for you, I might spoil your evening. I put you at ease. The truth is, the tickets went to waste. Yes, both of them. I had set my mind on that evening belonging to us. Do you think I cared most about seeing Annie Russell? I did not choose to go with some one else, on the occasion when I had chosen to go with you. That night, if you want to know, I sat in the Library of the Bar Association and read law. It was not my sense of justice to spoil your evening which you had chosen to spend with your cousin Lois, because you had chosen to spoil mine.”
“You know that isn’t fair! You know I went to the Deanes, because I had to. Out of a sense of duty.”
“You have a sense of duty toward your frivolous cousins; none toward your friend. I admire your distinctions.”
“But, Tom, they would all have been insulted!”
“Whether I was insulted had no importance....”
So it went. David was inexorably and forever in the wrong.
“Your cousins, your uncle, your aunt. I am to judge you care more for them than for me. They mean more to you. Doubtless their ideas, also.”
He flayed David’s smugness: his cowardice: his failure to grow up. David’s sentiment was perfunctory: his sensibilities were dull: he had no recognition of what was going on in the minds and hearts of those who should have been dear to him. Loving meant taking. Tom flung him dolorously down to a level with that cousin whose company he had preferred and loyalty to whom, as against Tom, he hadelected. David followed by the side of his tormentor, as by the side of fate....
Near where they lived was a little Square. It lay blue beneath the green haze of the lamplights. It was timid there under the sweep of the City. The buildings and the high flare of movement over the night made it deep like a well. Tom and David paced round it. Their steps were harsh to David as if in dissonance to the Square’s sweet reticence. They knew they must have this out ere they passed through the door.
A dull weight was on David. The crystal night was black and through the blackness pain flashed like lightning. All this was within him. About all this was he, numb and unable to feel himself. He knew the dark by the lightning.
It was not the sense of wrong that made him suffer. It was the impediment to that sense. Had he been able to are noble and I am unworthy, it would have been easeful and sweet. He had great longing to do just this. It was the something hindering him that hurt.
Why was it? He had no answer to Tom. One by one, his objections had disappeared as he voiced them—his objections to Tom. Was it perhaps that he was proud and vain—not big enough to avow his faults? Oh, if it was but that! And then, the hateful alternative that blocked his emotions. For was it, perhaps, that he had not really voiced his objections?... that all of these words were far from the true misgivings?
David did not know. He knew that at that moment he yearned to be fully convinced, to be convinced that he was fully wrong. He needed to force himself. His mind told him Tom was right. His heart willed Tom be right. Let Tom be sincere and the perfect friend: let him be the lacker! His mind argued, his heart sang for this sweeter way. They forced him through the forms of acquiescence.... Something neither mind nor heart could not, would not submit: waved frantic and helpless against all the world. This, the bleak hurt in David.
The battle was manifestly over.
They stood in the hall of their flat.
Tom was smiling. Tom suffered also. In his smile, as he put forth his hand, was a plea for forgiveness.
In that gesture, Tom spoke his deepest truth. He had been indeed on the defensive. Attacking David, he had fought for himself: fought for his place in the heart of his friend: fought to cover from David and from himself the flinching part of him which shrilled and manoeuvered for attention, plotted for power. With his soul sick in revolt. David’s rebuke was the rebuke and call of his own nature. Since David embodied this, Tom needed him, needed him to love him: also, since David embodied this, Tom needed to destroy him.
In the silence of the hall, the true Tom spoke. As if he had said: “I have said nothing. You are my better self, my deeper self. Stay near to me. Forgive me.”
David saw his gesture. He understood that it was sincere. He could not read its context. He needed no more than that it was sincere.
A sweet flood suddenly was over him: the certainty for which he had thirsted.
With both hands he took the hand of Tom. He held it close. His eyes were full of tears. It was David who spoke: “Forgive me!”
In the morning, David awoke full of weariness.
Tom bounded bright from his bed.
At breakfast he was loquacious. He teased Mrs. Lario. He had long spells of laughter over his attempts at Italian.
The heavy woman waited on them silently and let hispleasantries rebound from her like rubber balls. She was devoted to her “wonderful Mr. Rennard.”
“Let us get David to speak Italian,” he said. “David is altogether too provincial.” He threw out the terms he had picked up as if he were pelting David with them. David stirred languidly. He was full of sleep.
“Well, I’m off.” Tom jumped up, before David had finished. “Have a case to-day before Justice Bayne. Wish me luck, Davie. The problem is to keep the old fellow awake. Otherwise I’ve no chance. If he sleeps, I lose.”
He stood in the doorway, his eyes flashed, and laughed.
“You ought to see him, Davie, when he falls asleep on the Bench! He gets deeper and lower—in his swivel chair. His legs are always crossed. As he slides down, the upper leg grates in such a way on the other as to lift its trouser gradually up. Down goes Bayne: up goes the trouser. Till the leg is bare, and the garter visible. There is the Scale of Justice for you. Ha-ha!” He was gone.
As he raced to his elevated train, the last evening raced with him. He was going to his Office—to the law—into the world.