“When Marcia marries Van Ness she must make me a wedge into his law business. I must absolutely manage that! Lomney and Rennard, of counsel for Van Ness, Stone and Company. Gad, what acoup!”
He had no thought of David. He had no thought of himself, save as the instrument of his own progress....
SO the days and the nights: the weeks and the months. Tom direct toward his several goals; David involute and hesitant, sinking, it seemed to him, forever deeper from mastery of self and from some vague light he yearned for. Each of his revolts from Tom had the same ending: found him contrite and dedicated to his own unworthiness. David did what his friend wanted. Even to the extent that when he was with Cornelia he came away disillusioned. He patronized Cornelia. He evolved a superficial concord with his relatives and their friends that left him free and fitted Tom’s measure of the way to handle such useful, lower factors in one’s life. He went with Tom’s friends when Tom took him along. His work downtown was satisfactory. He was industrious, tactful, busy. He was not happy.
“Perhaps,” he said to himself, “perhaps I do not give myself enough to all these things.”
He looked at his life and was amazed to find how little he did, even how little he went out, of his own accord.
Yet, his uncle said to him: “My boy, I am delighted with you. Do you know what you have? You have imagination. I am beginning to realize already on my investment of you. Come up, can you, this evening? Aunt Lauretta has asked the whole lot of Tibbetts.”
He saw Cornelia with fair frequence. She never asked him to come: and yet how happy she was when he was there! She disturbed him not at all. She let him go his way. She came seldom to their flat. But she was getting somber, it seemed to David. Older as well. The glow of her great eyeshad been a virtue in her homeliness. If they faded, she would be ugly. Sometimes David thought that they were fading.
“Don’t forget,” Tom said, “Cornelia is past thirty.”
But aside from these rather bleak activities, David found himself empty. He had no way of making joy and sharpness from his world’s encounters.
When he reflected, he was inclined to blame his dullness. “I am stupid!” he thumped himself with. And he reflected more. He decided to change. He did not know in this very decision the kernel of what he sought. Having resolved to change, he was changed already.
Perhaps it was the new year blossoming. It had been an unusually severe winter. All winters in New York are unusually severe, and most summers. New Yorkers have no memory for their chief source of conversation: a fact that serves to keep it green. But now came occasional mild days colored blue like the sky, keyed low like the clouds that dawdled over the City. The great town was no longer an imprisoned foe underneath the air. It went forth and the air and the town joined forces. David walked the streets with his coat flung wide so the breeze could seek him out and thaw those crannies of himself that had been frigid and asleep.
He made several excursions to the country—alone. They proved abortive. He found it painful to reach the drowsy earth with his drowsy mind. And yet the earth’s call was dear, now that the buds stood hard on the hard wood. He could not respond. He could not keep from trying to respond. A strain.
There were dinners and theater-parties with Caroline Lord. But one day David found in himself the courage to decide that he detested her. That this strapping, full-blown woman should take the airs of a secluded virgin was ill enough: but that, with all her experience of life, she should display avirgin’s judgments was unbearable. Was Miss Lord perhaps trying to impress him with her endless thrumming on respectability, her hymned pæans to the moral outlook? Why should she care so much for the standards of wealth, who was forever insisting that her family had been penniless but of high social value? Either this woman was ashamed of her own intelligence and enterprise or else she thought David would like to deem her so. David was not sure. Soon he did not care. Her vigorous solicitude for the manners and customs which she assumed weretheirshad an offensive note. It made David silent and reserved. It left the field to Miss Lord. So that the efficient lady preened herself and spread herself and paying no true attention to her friend had no idea of her effect upon him.
Tom laughed when he told him about her. David found that there was no difficulty in speaking to Tom about Miss Lord.
“But why should you expect something better of her?” Tom asked him.
“Well, sheiscapable——”
“Bosh, my dear man. Look at her straight. The only strength she has, I am convinced, is the strength of Deane and Company—a strength she sucks.” Tom had met her once. Since then, he had skillfully avoided all David’s efforts to make him join them some night at dinner. “Now tell me frankly can you imagine that lady, with her advertised virginity, her mincing mind and her stiff sense of right and wrong, careering in open battle? Don’t you see that she is something only in her position? Her substance comes from the fields whose produce she helps distribute at a profit.”
“She seems to be forever bowing to judgments like those of Aunt Lauretta.”
“Of course, since she gets her keep from the same place.”
David had many evenings alone. He found he liked them.He had never been included in more than a tithe of the whirling activities of Tom who, now, had added politics to his program. Tom was a member of Tammany Hall.
“The young men are profiting by the folly of the reformers,” was the way Tom put it. “They have learnt, Davie dear, as I hope you shall learn also, generally speaking, that you can’t win a fight without joining with your enemy. We have done with kid-glove pats at corruption. We are going to clean up the undesirable elements of the Democratic Party by first entering their stronghold. That is why we are going into Tammany.”
David had never managed to believe in the monopolized purity of the Republican Party, although his uncle had spent some breath upon him to that purpose. Largely, he was indifferent and neutral. He had a sense of guilt in his organic ignorance about such vital matters. He asked:
“Is your partner, Mr. Lomney, also in Tammany?”
“Lord no!” Tom exclaimed.
And there it was—the incomprehensible that was forever cropping out! Why, in view of what Tom had just assured him about Tammany Hall, this protest of denial regarding Mr. Lomney?
“Lomney is a Democrat,” Tom went on. “A Gold-democrat, of course. But he has no party affiliations of a direct sort.”
“What other sort are there, Tom?”
“There are the really important sort,” Tom smiled. “We are vitally concerned in certain franchise concessions: traction and gas and the like. See?”
“Is that the reason Mr. Lomney must not belong to Tammany Hall?”
“That is the reason, rather, why I should,” Tom paused. “We are in where we should be, and out where we should be. Understand?”
Emphatically, David did not. All he could make of this party business was that it was a kind of game. The nation’s money-boxes had highly veneered and colored surfaces. The Republican was more polished, the Democratic had more color. If one said, “I believe in the blue and gold design” did one mean, “I get into the coffers by the side that is painted blue and gold?” David had these little speculations and was properly ashamed of them. He knew they were the sure consequence of his being unable to understand.
When he dined alone he was least troubled. There was a Hungarian restaurant he particularly liked because of the delicious thick soups and the beer and the caressing music. He went there often and ate perhaps more than he should, and sat about drinking his beer very soberly and slowly, puffing at the superb English pipe Cornelia had given him for his birthday. It had an amber stem and the one flaw in the delight of smoking was that he needed to be careful not to bite it through.
On this evening, as usual, he was not alone at his table. At this sort of place, where a sumptuous meal cost forty cents, one could expect no more than one’s own seat at the board. Mostly, men came and bowed stiffly for permission to sit down and were no sooner seated than they forgot him altogether in their torrents of strange words. Now came a man with his lady. David listened to them through the meal with an interest that might conceivably have flagged had he been able to understand the Magyar tongue. But the complete veil over their words made watching their faces and their gestures, noting the gait of their voices, a sort of game. It sharpened their personalities as these revealed them, and as the community of language must have dulled them. David took delight trying to break up the endless turgid flow into words and sentences. Mostly, he had delight in watching the woman.
She was a bursting healthy creature, not yet thirty but ripe and matronly and at her ease. She wore a pink gauze waist over a covering of creamy silk that lashed about the rondures of her breast as if its task were desperate against the fullness of all that flesh. She was not fat oppressively. Her form was impetuous against the insipid continence of silk and satin. Her cheeks and her lips were almost equally red. They were in perpetual motion with food or with laughter—at times with both. Her hands were short and slight: a wedding ring and two obtrusive diamonds overloaded the fingers. She seemed not to mind the floating gaze of David. She talked with greater lubrication when his warm eyes were on her. David, listening a little as at times to music, had the sense of clover fields astir with bees: cows brooding in heat and the smell of milk like mist upon the air. His pleasure of this buxom woman, whose fine hands showed her sensitive as well, was like his pleasure of warm spring days in his boyhood, when indeed the women had been drawn and dry enough but the fields very like this amiable matron, murmuring strange words across his table.
Most of the men and women he had known bore no kinship even to the soil they labored. This woman seemed a part of earth. It was a new sense for David. He leaned back, sweetly astir with his mood. It was over his loneliness like a miracle, like a sudden bloom of sun and meadow in the dank streets of the City. It glowed just so bright and wondrous, it was just so unreal.... He and the strange woman of whom he had no desire became one: there was a flower in this subtle penetration of her health and of his mood. About them the heavy clouds of smoke and the thick waves of words, all the heaving clamor of the room was like the shadow beyond the burn of a candle. And beyond still farther, the sudden laceration of the cars, the pound of the elevated trains, the wreathing weight of the bleak City....In the heart of it all the single being of David. He took in fragrance of this outlandish woman as a bee sucks honey. He was alone with fertile fields....
He got up, he went to the telephone in the side office of the café, he called Constance Bardale.
“This is David Markand. I want to come to see you to-night.”
She seemed to hesitate: then: “Yes. You may come.”
He had not seen her at all in two months. He had never called on her alone. He had met her a few times. But always she had that forbidding smile and the sinuous smile he had known first was hidden away. It was as if she pitied him for a certain deep defect. She never sought him out. When they spoke, she had nothing to say. She had not again asked him to call.
Now, all at once, though five minutes before he had not dreamed of it, he was to be with her alone! There was a sharp tremor through him as if he longed to leap but the time was not yet, so that he was impeded: a tremor like that of a race horse at the post.
He found her standing in a little study he had not seen before. The maid shut the door behind him. A clouded room in which two lamps pendant with gray silk shades cast a languid light. Herself within it. They were somehow close, wherever they stood in the thick room. She wore a straight and filmy housegown of lavender caught loosely back over her narrow hips by a golden girdle. The braided cord fell loose and heavy in front. The room was a place where glowed her gowned body. David was conscious how he was placeless within it.
She took away her hand at once, sat down. She left him to find a seat. She had said nothing. He could see her teeth and how she was faintly smiling, and that her teeth were cutting white against the cloud of her skin. Her shoulders were sharp and dear in the faint stuff of her gown. He could have said to himself: “She hasonthat gown. It is not she.” Her shoulders were articulate with little movements saying as much. Her arms came full from the folds of her drooping half-sleeves: her arms denied in their luxuriance the terse cut of her shoulders.
She left words to David. She did not help him find them. David took long selecting a place to sit. He took a chair and moved it and moved it again. He had to be in the right place for sitting: for talking, also.
She watched him, with an uncertain pleasure whose suggestion helped him since there was no hint he should hurry.
“It was very impetuous of me, I guess, to want to see you all of a sudden.”
“You see how much I mind.... Then before to-night you did not want to see me?”
“Did I say that?”
“I think so.”
“I did not, somehow, think of coming.”
“Is that the same thing?”
David paused. “I think not. I think if I had never wanted to come before I could not so suddenly have wanted to, now.”
“The wish burst out to the surface?” She seemed to be calmly annotating him.
“That must be it,” David spoke pensively.
“Then, you must answer me two questions.... Why didn’t you want to know before to-night, that you wanted to come? And what brought you to knowing at this particular time?”
She was leaning back in her chair and smiling; it seemed to David she was leaning forward and with serious face. As if this had been the truth, he reacted. He found himselfwithdrawing: slightly chilled at himself as if he had done an extravagant thing.
“Is there no such thing as a mere whim or mood?”
Constance Bardale understood his reversal in a flash. The contest was on: his dull playing to her hands was over. For a moment she had feared he was going to be sentimental. She was afraid of emotional words as a priestess of a desecration at her altar. Here he was, struggling away. Her delight released the energy of movement. A peal of laughter, low like her words; a somewhat mental laughter: flush of roused energy which in a more serious contingence must have turned into flight or pursuit.
She got up and redisposed herself on the couch. Her act was at once, in its motion, an expenditure of force and, in its specific nature, preparation for future outlet. David already found in himself the wish to go and sit beside her.
The fear, lest it be the false thing to do—lest she dislike it, rebuke him, misunderstand. Misunderstand what? David did not know, because he found that he did not care. He sat there now, measuring his wish to sit beside her with what was in her eyes—to find if it fitted.
They chatted. David knew less and less what he was saying, as he grew more engrossed in the problem of his desire. Did he dare go and sit beside her? He found no answer in her. Her look, like what she said, was oblique and opaque. She seemed impenetrable to his seeking mind, but in inverse ratio she seemed vulnerable to his fleeing senses. His mental will to measure the effect of his coming to her faded from inanition: his desire to come was less dependent on intellectual assurance.
He was unconscious of all this. Until, quiet and quick, he was up from his chair in a silence and beside her. Nothing had happened. He was dumb and he was empty, as if this coming close had been a mere beginning after all of whathe was about: as if he were still upon his journey. Nothing had happened. David leaned over to her face that was at profile from him. At once she turned to him. She gave him her lips. Nothing happened. He kissed her. He sat beside her silent. The sense persisting of a way half gone, of a will half done. He felt the sharp power of her body under a frail gown. Nothing had happened at all. So he took her in his arms.
She was looking with half-shut eyes into her self. Her lips were half shut. All of her. He kissed her again. Experimentally: he was trying to find a certain thing. His hands held the warm stillness of her body: against his hard breathing he had hidden softness. He kissed her. Then, he put her away. His heart raced; his blood panted after a sudden hunger and she sat there smiling. Nothing had happened.
He looked to where she was through a swirl of sense. What should he do? What should he say? How was it possible that she should love him so quick? that he had not known before this marvel of loving her?
He took her hand and kissed its open palm. It was cool. His hand ran up the naked flesh of her arm, thirsting, clamoring. Then, he dropped it and stood up.
He turned his back on her. He paced the little room. Once, twice: over and over. He stopped. He looked at her now as if he had never looked at her before. He was a little way from her. An abyss, an eternity of way which magic alone could empower him to pass.
Was he not friends with magic? Something spoke in him:
“You have only to step forward and take her.” He could not believe it. He had never touched her. Magic, magic....
She was a little huddled on the couch. A faint flush on her cheek and her brow. Her hands half clasped on her lap. Her sharp shoulders rounded forward. She was magical and helpless. David was strong against her. A pity came tohim that she was so sweet and so resistless beneath his towering brutality. It was the pity that was sweet and was resistless. Feeling aggrieved for her that she sat there prostrate, he felt that he forgave her, that he loved her, and how by this love she must at once be saved. It was needful to go forth and hold her for her own sake. Lest she believe he had sullied her, lest she fear he did not know what this was between them. To herself as to him it was needful that what had come to pass be good.
He no longer saw her. He was full of the wonder of her sweetness and of his pity. He was full of the wonder of that she was a woman and given up to him. He drew all of her against him....
He knew he was walking homeward. The familiar streets whipped past, the world swung like a sea over the horizon and swept backward above his head. He walked because it had been impossible to sit cramped and still in a car. He had to race with his emotions, else something had broken in him. Calmer he said to himself:
“Why go home? You’re not sleepy.”
He did not know where to go. A garish coldness, the rancid cutting of alcohol across the sidewalk—a saloon. It appealed to him as a challenge to an ebullient giant. He entered. He needed to whet the brilliant splendor of his mood against what was most sordid and drear in all the world. He went up to the bar and ordered a drink and let it stand, unable to bring its desecration to his consecrated lips. He was throbbing gently as if he had run and won a race:—these were remnants of energy to be disposed of.
The place reeled a bit and then closed in on him. Several fellows sagged at his side by the bar. One was talking:
“I guv’ him hell. Y’ort to ’a’ seen me guv’ him hell.”
The barkeeper went over the bar with a wet rag and itgleamed. He looked in the mirror at his thick face above the serried bottles with undisguised affection. He took a comb from his white vest and parted his hair afresh in its oily middle. He loved that face. He leaned back and was lost in love and contemplation. Through a side door, two women loose over a naked table. Their faces were paste, their eyes were red-rimmed above two little glasses of whiskey.
“I love her. I love her. I must love her. Why does she love me? Why do I never understand?” The wonder of the world was as remote from his mind as his thoughts from this naked room with its hard wood and faces, its brittle bottles.
One of the women tried to catch his eye. She was half nodding with drink and disgust. A rotten night. David saw her examining herself in the mirror. Her face was suddenly sweet. She opened her coat. She folded in and downward the starched corners of her waist so that her neck showed and the gap of her bosom. She looked up and smiled at David. She called for more drink and beat her hand in supplement to her call against the table. David left. Her flesh had sounded dead against the shrill-varnished wood.
Tom was propped up with a book, in his black dressing-gown.
“Hello, Davie.” He looked up but did not move. “Have you readGulliver’s Travelssince you were a kid? Take my advice and do! How that man Swift must have loved life to have hated men so!”
David thought this was nonsense. “What is there to hate in a thing we love?”
Tom laughed. “You talk like a god, David. Are you a god? Hate does not enter into love only where there is paradisal satisfaction. To what mortal is that granted?” He watched David stand pensively, glowing. With a searching smile: “Also hate may not enter where there is completedelusion.” David started. “To have perfection in one’s love, one must be a god. To have complete delusion one must be—an ass. Are you a god, Davie?”
“Good night,” said David....
The following evening, he was not to be with her. She had so many engagements. But she was going to break one so he could come, only three evenings later.
Through three days David went, repeating to himself that he loved Constance Bardale. Needful it was to his peace that he be persuaded of this. Good it would be for the new hunger of his life—to spread forth, make fresh dwellings for his spirit—if this was true. Yet all that had occurred was sudden and strange. All this woman was remote. This was why he had so fast retreated from Tom on that first night. Tom was very real: in his light, the new fire in himself did not appear. He was sure that he loved: a transfiguration had been made in him: the future of Constance Bardale must in some inscrutable way be one with his. Yet he could not talk of this joyous revelation to his best friend. Indeed, with his best friend all of it was dim. He did not solve the strangeness of this. He said to himself: “It is all too mysterious yet to be spoken of. Tom would not believe me. He would ask me what had happened to make me know.” Had David these three days seen Cornelia, he could have spoken. He did not know this since he had no plan to see Cornelia. He remained with his secret. Wondering, trying to wonder about it, his thoughts reeled in a dance with his upstarting senses. He could not even clearly wonder about it all.
The conviction was there, however: he was bound by a sacred tie to Constance Bardale. He made great what was between this woman and himself because he needed it great. Also he made it great because he needed thereby to justify it to himself. Was it not plain how great all this must beto Constance Bardale? He knew so little of her ways that he had no sense even of ignorance about her. She was a lady. She was one fortunate in every circumstance: handsome, intelligent, rich: not one to alloy or to misprize her value. This lovely lady had given herself tohim. A madness must have moved her. That madness love. Or perhaps something still more sacred: belief in his love, the desire in her heart that it should be requited. She had miraculously cared for him. But even this explained little—explained not at all her sudden discard of those womanly reserves that must be her nature, the swiftness of her bestowal. This could be explained alone by his own love’s plea upon her. She had felt and answered his love, before he was aware of it. She had done as women always by some mystery: given blindly where she was needed, not asked, not judged,—responded in faith and a sweet helplessness to the cry of man.
And all his life—whatever she wanted of his life—he owed to repay her.
Feeling his mighty debt to Constance Bardale, David thought of his mother; and of his mother with his father that last dim year he had lived, and of his questionings on birth and death and love. What he had seen and been taught then, the facts of his life had not disturbed since they were simply heaped upon it. His mother had great pleasure of her son. When he was near to her, her face brightened. When he came running and asked: “Take me with you, Mummy, to the village,” she would drop her basket and fold him in her arms and say: “Put on your leggins, Boy, and you may come.” It made her happy. Unendingly to give to him was, in her heart, unendingly to receive. So David learned of women: that they are mothers and that they hunger after their children and have great joy of them. His mother loved his father, but she had no joy of him at all. She took care of him, gave to him, also, without stint. But she seemed toreceive nothing of her bestowal. She never kissed him, as she did David. When he came into the room, though she was swift to respond to his desires, it was with heavy face and heavy feet. There was more: his father made hidden demands on other women, took something from them, took what the child had once heard called “liberties” with them. For this, his mother suffered and pitied the women. It was “the poor girl!” “How could you, how could you, Adolph!” “What is going to become of Emma!” So David learned of women: that they are the hunted of men and have no joy of them but only sorrow and humiliation. And David learned of men: that they can, in some miraculous way, make women sacrifice themselves, and love them, although this love is a burden and a blight.
There had been Anne. She did not disturb what he had learned of women. The self-bestowal of woman was a part, a great part, of the goodness of God. Woman had no need save for children: no joy save in the bitterness of serving. Anne was there like a sweet delirious dream in the fevered night. She had lain beside him and mothered his distress; she had given him of her strength to be strong in the morning. When she judged he had had enough of her, very calmly, very like a mother weaning her child, she had put him aside. All of it a sort of passionate nursing: the sort that the passionate nights with their drain of fire demanded. Anne had always been silent.
His heart’s way of woman remained. In a veiled moment, she came and offered up her sweetness to the yearning of man. A mystery—a mystery that now had come to him! In the flesh. In the lovely flesh of Constance!
She received him in the same small room.
David was momently chilled by her precise difference from the image of his three days’ thoughts. She came up to him and let her arms glide softly over his and warmed him.He looked down at her. He saw how the loose folds of hercériserobe parted and fell from her uplifted elbows: how, underneath, her bosom was held tight in a white band of lace. He thought that he might take that lace away and truly see this bosom, crush it with his mouth. He could scarcely see at all.
He checked himself. This was unworthy of him: unfair to her. He began to talk. But she smiled and came close to him again: she stopped his words with her body. Her eyes fixed on his with a plea that he need not talk. He tried to tell of his love, of his devotion, of his thanks, and she was stiff, impregnable to words. He kissed her, had her body in his hands, and there she was pliant, singing with response. So, soon she lay there under his eyes and he had forgotten to say the things his duty ordered....
At last he made a mighty effort.
He sat beside her on the couch. She was cool and straight beside him. She was like a beach that the tide had left and that the sun had hardened. Golden-smooth. Her breasts lay firm, her thighs rounded and fell like lovely scoopings of summer waves. She was there like a strand of the earth, waiting for the tide to return upon her.
David managed to speak.
“Constance dear,” he began. She laid her hand on his and he clasped it. She seemed suddenly afraid. “Constance, I feel that I have so much that I want to tell you.... Constance, it is only this that I love you with all my heart and soul: that always——” He stopped. There she was stopping him again. She had withdrawn her hand.
“Don’t, David! Don’t!” Her hand on his mouth.
He felt ashamed, ashamed of their nakedness together.
“You mustn’t use that wordLoveso lightly, David.”
He was all pale inside. He felt that his breast had suddenly caved in and that his heart beat hurtfully against its broken walls.
“I do love you, Constance.”
“No you don’t. Don’t be silly, David.”
“Why? Don’t you love me?”
It was strange how little he protested. He felt this. Already he believed her. But if he did, what was all this between them? What infamy?
She seemed to read his consternation. She lifted herself and kissed his eyes and his hot dry lips.
“You don’t love me. And I don’t love you. But we are very fond of each other.”
He was deeply ashamed. He wanted to move away: to cover himself. He did not know how. He did not dare in any way to move. He sat there, fixed in contemplation of the havoc these few words had made of all the structure of his thoughts: regarding the wreckage with dim eyes, but amazed most that the wreckage did not move him more, leave him more empty: that life—and this—should still be possible.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
“Constance!” It was a cry of help for his dreams.
“You are a darling. I shan’t risk losing you by not having you know me and yourself as we really are.... Why, David dear? Aren’t you even fond of me?” She had her arm about him. “Kiss me, then. There.” She was half laughing. She was a bewilderment of delight upon him. She was half laughing at him.
Like a mirage, split by a stroke of the sun, his picture of their love faded away. He had not defended it. It was no more. Yet he was not empty. He was less serious, less loaded than before. It had been a mirage of paradise in a desert. It was gone. But the desert through which to trudge to reach it was gone also. Here was green earth.
He held her differently already. She seemed no less happy.He was more aware of herself, more intent on giving her pleasure. He thought less of his own heart and its desires. He found his own joy, now, in bringing joy to her. It was all marvelous strange, he knew vaguely in the back of his head. He had abdicated loving her, she had declared that she did not love him. Yet he was content, he was happy. He had been wrapt in the solemnity of his emotions like a priest at prayer. Now, he was all out of himself like a boy lost in his play. And yet he seemed stronger, more contained, fuller of life. He knew sometime he should have to think all this out....
She took his hand and led him to a glass in which he saw their faces together. Hers was laughing quietly. His was neither serious nor mirthful: full of a sweet surprise.
“Look at yourself,” she said.
He remembered once when he had been a boy at School and he had wrestled long and hopelessly over a problem in mathematics. His teacher, of whom he was very fond, came and leaned over him so that her waist touched his shoulder. She made a quick calculation on his paper. The problem was solved.
“There now. Wasn’t that easy? All that fret and trouble——”
He had felt a relieved gayety go through him: half the help, half the nearness of the teacher. He was reminded now.
“Look at yourself,” she said. He looked. He saw his face like that of a rather unknowing boy upon whom a good-hearted friend had played a delicious joke. He was aware of the face of Constance: it was just beneath and beside his own. And it was laughing under the passion of her hair. He saw that he was laughing also....
He was glad this time to find Tom at home.
“My! My!” Tom bantered from his wonted corner.“You are getting gayer all the time. What larks are you up to, anyway?”
“I have been to see—Miss Bardale.”
A steely glance went through David.
“Oh—she.” Tom spoke. And David knew that never, never could he speak of such things to his nearest friend. But he could speak of some things.
David came up to him. “Listen, Tom. Am I ever going to grow up?”
“I hope not, Davie—altogether.”
David sat down beside him. Tom went on: “I rushed home after a business date for dinner. Hoping to find you. I wanted to see you to-night.”
“Why?”
“For no literal reason, David.... Does one have to have a literal reason for seeing one’s friends? Eh? Does one?”
Suddenly, David was uncomfortable. He had felt strong entering the room. He had asked Tom if ever he was going to grow up because just then, perhaps more than at any other time, he felt mature. Now this fine mood faded. It was very strange. He could not adjust to Tom the discoveries of life he made without him. Three evenings before he had come home dancing with romance and Tom had cut his clouds. Now here he was, realistic like a god taking his mortal holiday: and Tom spoke of having missed him and of the love of friends. What was wrong here? Why could he not get rid of the ridiculous idea that Tom was always spoiling his pleasures?
“You don’t care for me very much,” there he was saying, “You don’t even come home anxious to see me.”
“I did to-night, Tom.”
“Yes: after an evening with our fair Constance. I am restful, eh?”
David blushed. How unpleasant Tom could be! But hewas sorry he had blushed. For Tom looked sharp at him: his face seemed to be coming forward as he looked. Then, he dropped back into his chair and took up his book. With his eyes on it, he spoke casually:
“Since you are so friendly with Constance, perhaps you can tell me: has she gotten rid of Stegending? Or is he still agonizing?”
David turned pale. “How should I know?” he muttered.
Tom smiled at once, knowing he had hurt him.
“It is always a mere matter of time till they want to marry her. Then,” he chuckled, “it is—as the doctors say—a mere matter of hours.”
David felt the need of striking, as if it had been striking back. Although he had no accurate sense that Tom had attacked him.
“You are funny, Tom. You say I never come back anxious to see you: and you seem to find fault that I’ve been out amusing myself for a change. As if you weren’t out ten times more than I.”
“I go out for business. If I had my way I’d stay home every blessed night. And tell the hostesses to go to blazes.”
“Well, I like to go out for pleasure.”
“By all means, Davie. But don’t have too much. You may get tired of it. Then what will you do?” He laughed. “Perhaps then you’d have more time for your middle-aged friend.”
His mood was changed. The will to hurt was gone. It was as if in its fulfillment he had been assuaged. Tom looked at David now with a warm candor. And David, looking at Tom, realized that this was a great joy—this talking with his friend: it was clear and deep and right: and what had come before was already dim, had already lost its taste. Even as he looked back for it, that seemed less real than this.
Something of the essence of these thoughts Tom found and was glad.
“Come, old man,” he said. “Light your pipe: let’s have a chat.”
In a way so gradual and smooth he had no heed, life was going well with David. He was relaxed before all its elements that met him. His mind, instead of sallying out to measure and contest each meeting with reality and to reduce it in vassalage of his own subjective world, receded now within itself and what it found disguised, remolded into consonance with the world meeting him.
His easy acquiescence in Constance Bardale’s sense of their relation brought him reward which his new mood could value. The delusion of love was rent away. Remained the reality of passion to be accepted or denied. He was in no mood for denial. Tacitly he let slip all he had dreamed of woman, all he had dreamed of love. He had no thought of a next-coming step with Constance. He was not open to surprise or worry. He was calm, contained. He was the very lover she desired.
And proud of his success. Proud of his conquest of one whom a naif part of him still found miraculous and remote. At her parties now he fell back into a silence and reserve of a different meaning. He knew himself the secret master. The homage of her guests to Constance was homage to him. Men feeling for her with tense nerves, warm eyes; women seeking her secret in her words and gestures, envying her power, glad to share in its largess and pick up the aroused senses of the men that she sent retreating from her—was incense to David. He could afford to recline away from the conversation: he could dare outstay the last of the guests and hold her one moment in his arms, drink in one draught the wine of the evening’s excitement upon her lips before he left her also.
He did not see her too often. She saw to that. She had a tact and a control that were artistry. And a consciousness of this that made her jealous of her standards, steeled her against lowering them, filled her with a firm discipline of pleasure. She designed the mingling of their lives with restraint and omission, with emphasis and grace of color. David breathed the well-being that must rise from any poise of forces. He had the comfort of the part in an harmonious whole.
Now this well-being wreathed forth into the other, the deeper phases of his world.
He moved toward a different attitude in his work downtown. Here the violent yet canny preachments of Tom helped also.
“The weak man,” Tom said, “stays in business and yet despises it. So that the one End of business—success—escapes him. Of course I am not now talking of the mediocre fool who respects business—as he is told to—and ekes out his pittance blacking the other fellow’s boots. You are beyond that, Davie. But there is another sort of fool—a more intelligent sort: the man who ‘sees through’ business, despises it and therefore muffs it. He is unreasonable also. If he can’t stand business, let him clear out! If he decides to stay in he is a fool not to win. One must of course despise business. One must know that it is the scramble of rather lowly-evolved and very greedy persons. One should be conscious of the gullibility and venality of bankers, of the wastefulness of manufacturers, of the opaqueness of middlemen. It should be clear to you that the elements that lift up the Rockefellers and the Morgans and the Hills are chiefly the singlemindedness of the stupid, the unimaginative and the dishonest. But what sort of a fool is it, David, who being aware of these inferior forces permits himself to be worsted by them? That seems to me an altogether illogical conclusion. It seems tome that just this knowledge should make the knower come out on top. In other words, the man who has brains enough to despise business should be the successful business man: not himself but the mediocrities should become the victims of his disgust. Therefore, David, through the very clarity of your vision into the nature of affairs, you must master them. God, man! would you be anywhere saveon topof such a muck-heap?”
Tom had not failed to help make David’s vision clear. As he said:
“Law is pandar to all of business’s ugly lusts. I ought to know the system’s filthiness if any one.”
David took these tirades with a grain of salt. He was convinced of the Quixotic extravagance in Tom’s idealism. Yet, the essence of his teaching must be right. David believed he knew this, now. Business was indeed a scramble in life’s gutters for food: the unfortunate way men had of getting their bread. But what was one to do? There was the bread in the muddy gutter. Plenty of it, plenty to go round. Tom had assured him that the economists who said “No” were slaves of the scramblers. Let him just read Kropotkin. Production was in a state of wasteful anarchy. But men had somehow preferred to ship their fair food from the fields where it grew, and drop it in the filth of a million scurrying feet, in the gutters that were rutted and befouled by years of greedy commotion. Here they preferred to fight for it like pigs nosing to a trough: to expend their energies and debase their spirits for its hoarding and for the depriving of others. It must all have been in some way deeply needful, else why should this idiotic condition have arisen, why should the simpler way not have been found, by which all men might have what they needed to eat—expend the rest of their forces in higher works? This was the rule. David must scramble along.
“The one danger,” said Tom, “is not to understand. The one degradation is to exalt this pother, to make a noble thing out of the job of earning one’s living. The cult of Business. You see it everywhere. Men must worship: it is easier to worship low than high.”
All this was sound enough, thought David.
On his way down Wall Street, to and from his office, he saw a spectacle strangely near the gutter metaphor of Tom. David remembered how this sight had at first aroused him: how quickly it had become an unnoticed feature of that downtown world so that, if he had missed it, in rain or in snow, he should have known that a great dislocation had come upon the Temple.
It was the sight of the curb-brokers. There they stood crowding the broad street with their bodies, clamoring the air with their cries and their scurried gestures. David went close to watch them: for they were a thick knot on the street, they were like a swarm of bugs overrunning a lump of refuse in a road. To distinguish more than the blotch of their thronging and the low drone of their noise from which sharp voices pierced, one had to bring near one’s face. David saw, now, that they were mostly young men, rather shabbily dressed since they must be prepared for every weather and for any scrimmage, with sharp faces—very red or very pale—in constant motion. Their eyes darted, their mouths worked, they dashed notes in little books, thrust forth hands above the gesticulating mass and spun away to other knots of the buffet with hats over ears and upturned collars. They looked up at the high windows. There, perched half outwards in rows were other men, behind ranks of telephones that they perpetually shrilled in, and thrust from them. They leaned out, with contorted fingers signaled to their colleagues below. Hands jutted from the crowd, fingers twirled answering signals. They used the language of the deaf anddumb. If David had not heard the incessant burr of their voices above the shuffle of their feet, he might have taken them for deaf-mutes. A same something strained and unquickened about the muscles of their throats and jaws which he had noticed in deaf-mutes. He understood that only by signs and battle-calls could they in the street and the men perched in the windows carry on their communications. He admired their adroitness. The disturbance rose and fell: had its hours of thick frenzy and its streaks of deliquescence. But it was unending.
David had learned that the curb-brokers dealt in securities not listed in the new Exchange that stood like a Temple beyond the turmoil of the street. No other difference. So he knew these solemn walls were hypocrites. Within them, older men, better clad, better-paunched, buffeted and bid and bounced: at times—he was told—floored each other, blackened eyes, broke noses. All one: the naked and the canopied gutter: the scrimmage under sky and the scrimmage under marble. Buildings tiered and teemed, and in each cranny a fight. With polite tricks, men plotted and plundered, swung the whole of their vast might of concentrated work into the anarchy of Distribution. To the end of deflecting from its even channels the sap of Toil to their own bellies. Scrambling masters and myriad slaves who had not even the grace of scrambling for themselves.
David saw how he was in a Jungle. A high and splendid Jungle whose call to the hunt the minds of men had made complex and beautiful, but had by no jot lessened. On the high seas and in far countries they wrangled with fire and steel: in the curbs of the City they wrangled with their bodies: elsewhere they wrangled with sinuous thrusts of their brains, deceit of their mouths. But everywhere they were at a single, sterile Game. David had been willing to accept Tom’s symbol for it all: that black swarm of men,blotching the canyoned street—the brokers at the Curb. He knew it for what it was.
Now, David was beginning to see by a new light, to find different colors. Immersed in the struggle himself, he found that it had its appeal like any contest: its occasions for fun and romance, its release of the generous and the brave from the welter of uglier instincts. The strange thing about Tom was that he kept the attitude of the outsider. Perhaps therein lay his strength, the element of caution and command above the Battle. But if David knew from his boyhood what a terrible thing it was to watch two men beat each other in the street, he knew as well what a thrilling thing it was if he were one of the beaters—beyond pain and reason altogether, given up to the ecstasy ofbeating. So now, however arbitrary the rules, wasteful the blows and trivial the ends, there was a pleasure in this clinch of wits, a catching curve to this conflict. The glamor might come, as Tom insisted, from the prodigious expense of will and energy in those who struggled together. But glamor it was.... Was all glory on earth the glory merely of him who could see glory?
David moved to his new poise in the world on wings within him like the wings of a seed. He was part of that Spring, he would bud with it: he too sought sustenance for his green shoots, his frail flowers. His affair with Constance shed mellowness like a sun: his relation with Tom inspired at once a taste for mastery and the need of seeking it elsewhere since to Tom he was subject. In the particular detail of finding his life downtown an exciting game, there was his new Chief, the credit man, Mr. Christopher Barlow.
A little gray-haired man with blue eyes sparkling: a silent man who seemed unconcerned with giving him the most perfunctory explanations of the work he expected him to do.
“How the devil can I give satisfaction if Mr. Barlow declines to show me how?” said David to himself: and lookedat Mr. Barlow: and found he was not near so ill-at-ease as the occasion called for.
Mr. Barlow did not ignore him. His eyes dwelt on David, reticent, timidly, as if he feared to intrude even with his eyes. But it was no professional attention. The embargo was strict on business. David had his desk. What should he do with it? He pondered—pondered long since there was nothing swift in David at all. He resolved to take matters into his own hands.
“I am here,” he decided, “I have to do something here. I’ll look about....”
He began to eye, finally to study files, to go through ponderous credit lists, to decipher, by the process of comparison, the marks he found against the names of customers. He read the classified papers on Mr. Barlow’s desk: those on the Wicker trays, before the stenographer filed them. Mr. Barlow saw him prowling. David was quite sure the sharp, kind face lighted up and the eyes twinkled. Mr. Barlow blew a sluggish ring of smoke from his cigar into the air, thrust through it with his pencil and exclaimed: “I got you!” to the ring. Cryptically enough. Yet it was such behavior that limited David’s discomfort. Mr. Barlow seemed quite manifestly pleased. He would go on prowling.
This continued for several weeks.
His uncle burst into their office with rustle of spread papers flying about him like sails. He made for Mr. Barlow’s desk without noticing David.
“Oh, Mr. Barlow: I wonder can you help me in this matter of Dehn and Penny. You know, they have sued for that fall shipment. Yes, of course: the shipper is responsible. But it’s a complex case. Whereabouts do we stand as to the next ten years, should we decide to compromise?”
Mr. Barlow made a coördinated reach for papers that were carefully set away in different drawers; at the same time herang for his secretary. As he took a pad and began annotating: “File C-9, Dehn and Penny, Miss Loman,” he said and was at work. Mr. Deane was doubtless aware of the dispatch of his Mr. Barlow. He did not seat himself. He stood there, patiently waiting. He hummed a tune and beat time to it with the tip of pencil on Mr. Barlow’s desk. With a cloudy gaze he took in the cluttered room and David in the corner: then suddenly was lost in contemplation of the ceiling.
“Here you are, Mr. Deane.” His uncle was startled as if from a revery. It was an effort to take his gaze from the fly-specked ceiling down to the pad of paper with its squad of figures.
“Hm—yes—Hm,” said Mr. Deane as he studied the array.
Mr. Barlow gave him sufficient time to study the report. Then, “There are two human elements besides,” he said, “Faraday is an erratic salesman. He may possibly lose us the account.” Mr. Deane nodded thoughtfully. “And on the credit page,” continued Mr. Barlow, “their new treasurer, Clumberg, is a man of intelligent imagination. His investment in Dehn and Penny means confidence, and his presence there means improvement. He is the sort of man who may be guided toward us by this very matter.”
Mr. Barlow was silent. Mr. Deane stood a moment rigid in speculation. Then he relaxed. He had found his decision.
“Very good. Very good. Thank you, Mr. Barlow. It is a good risk.” He turned to go.
He paused at the door. His face was relieved of his stern cloud. In the wreathing of his mood, his eyes wreathed also and took in David: this time, not as a part of the office’s equipment, but as a young man in whom he had an interest.
“By the way, Mr. Barlow,” he had David in his eye, “how goes our young rascal? Is he behaving himself?”
“He is making progress.”
Mr. Deane chuckled a bit with his big stomach and disappeared.
David was bewildered. He had not been sure that Mr. Barlow had noticed him at all, much less, observed if he was making progress. He thought the best way to hide his rather uncomfortable pleasure was by burying it in a litter of accounts where personal data concerning tobacco dealers—their wives and their habits—mingled fantastically with cold figures. But of one thing David was already sure. He was groping confidently in a labyrinth of business detail to whose end he had been offered no key and no direction: he was assistant to a man that ordered him and asked him nothing whatsoever. Yet he liked that man immensely. And he observed to his surprise that he was working harder than he had ever worked. He was soon to know that also he was learning faster. There was in the queer antics of Mr. Barlow a design. In a tacit way, he had been set to a test. In a hidden way he was being watched! Business was a brighter thing. He came each morning to his work with his nerves tingling. He was eager to plunge in and pull out more prizes of knowledge. Since the standard of Mr. Barlow was so dim, David put it high and worked the harder to attain it: put it at the height of himself.
Then, the business of his office dawned on him as a mystery no longer. He seemed to know where he was and whither he was going. The mists were lifting, there was a pleasant terrain under his feet. Mr. Barlow said no word. But David felt like swinging his arms.
Evidently even this secret impulse was no secret to Mr. Barlow.
“Mr. Markand.”
David startled. As he got up from his little desk, he felt as if he were at the beginning of a race he had long prepared for.
Mr. Barlow handed him a batch of papers; “Make a report on this,”—and resumed his silence.
David went back to his corner, his hands a-tremble as if he held at once a testimonial of merit and a maze of magic words he must by some fantastic grace decipher. Would he prove equal to the test? He looked at what was in his hands. With difficulty, he focussed his eyes and read. He seemed to know! Very slowly, step by step, he followed. All the papers he had surveyed, all the correspondence left—by accident, he wondered?—on Mr. Barlow’s desk swung now into line like an army of reserves to help him. He met his battle, he was half dazed by his ability to advance against these intricate problems. He gained confidence as he moved. After an hour’s work:
“Mr. Barlow,” he said, as if he had said the same thing a score of times before, “I shall have to make a couple of visits for this report. I must go to the stores—and——”
He dangled.
“Well, then—why don’t you start?”
In the relief he had of the answer, David knew the depth of hesitance that there had been in his announcement.
He went and succeeded. He was a little amused to find in himself that he liked every one he met in his visits, and that despite this fact his report was unfavorable. Mr. Barlow made no comment at all.
“It must have been an easy one,” said David to himself.
But he realized that he had had a bully time: he was winning his spurs.
Occasionally now, Mr. Barlow broke his silence: in the unobtrusive way with which he kept it. David was bewildered at his chief’s understanding of him. He had an uncanny way of choosing subjects for chance observation that came close home.
“Could you find anything more human,” he once asked,“than this job of ours? Yet it deals with the cold matter of financial credits. The point is, Mr. Markand, there is no such animal as the ‘cold matter of financial credits.’ There’s human warmth, human smartness, human weakness everywhere. You can just bet there’s never another thing. You know it in a play of Shakespeare, don’t you? Get to know it in this play and you’ll have fun.”
Mr. Barlow indeed seemed to have fun.
“Well,” he greeted David, “ready this morning to sail the Spanish Main? Let’s see,—hm,” he was slicing his mail from one hand to another as one does with a pack of cards, “let’s see what’s on deck to-day.”
It was hard to guess how old was Mr. Barlow. His short-cropped hair was uniformly graying: it had been black, it was now neither black nor gray. He was clean-shaven. David noticed two wide, deep folds pleating the cheeks of his generous long face. But the air of Mr. Barlow was young. David did observe a certain resoluteness in his good humor—a consistency perhaps too nurtured. At times, when his eyes wandered from his work and he sat there rigid, slowly beating his hand from the supported wrist upon the table as if to some inner rhythm, David saw a gathering sadness in his eyes. Before it could spread to the rest of his face Mr. Barlow routed it. He got up, he walked up and down, his little body had the lithe quickness of morning. He shrugged his sharp shoulders quite as he did when he smiled. The sadness was gone....
It could not be long before this new bloom of contentment reached where Tom and David stood looking at each other.
It was come and working over him as does all bloom: subtly, hidden away in the slow hours, swift alone in the achievement and perhaps in the passing—a thrust here ofgreen, a burst there of bud, the alternate warm cradling of sun and shadow....
He was alone in his room. By breaking early from his work he overtook the long rays of the sun of afternoon pointing across his window into the East where the night rose. He squatted on the floor with crossed legs, arms folded. He stayed unmoved, and let his thoughts swirl about his gladness like birds circling a light-house.
Swift shadows were his thoughts against the tower of his vision. David saw he was alive, and felt it good. Surely life was a miracle none could explain. Surely to approach the miracle was to confess it—bask in the glow of knowing life unknowable. He had a vision of the world of men and children and mothers—endless millions massing down the ages. All of them had eyes upturned, had eyes and lips full of prayer. All of them were on their knees. All the men and mothers and children of all ages were praying before the miracle of life! He thought of Science—he thought of Darwin, of the makers of systems and machines, of the weavers of dogmas and rules. He knew that all these were parts of the miracle and somehow good. But what did they know and what did their saying amount to? Could one of them explain what and whyLife was?the ecstasy of this teeming, whirling earth flung like a fleck of dust upon the whirlwind of countless worlds that, in their turn, lifted a shred of flimsy scarf on the tempest of unending Space? They could not explain. Their absorption in some speck of knowledge ended alone in this: that they forgot they could not explain ... so lost the one approach they might have had to the ecstasy of life. Their little speck of knowledge blotted their vision!
David sat thrilling with the thought of this adventure—this greatest of surprises:—he was alive! He seemed large in his vision, strong. He realized that Tom did not have this vision. He felt himself larger and stronger than Tom.He felt tender toward him for this. He forgave him everything, since everything was trivial to this: that he was stronger than Tom and loved him, and must therefore care for him. Out of the dim vision of all life, there crystalized for David a vision clear and single of his relationship with Tom. But in its superb folly, never could it have been engendered save for the truth of David’s wanderings among the stars....
So he was really stronger than his friend? And he had been unjust with misunderstanding? There were discrepancies of words and action, dubious things in Tom? Then let him out of his overflowing strength observe them.
Tom said to him: “You are my one real friend. You must believe that.”
And: “Whatever I may say or do with others to deflect me, to you I am the truth.”
Tom said these things often, because often puzzlement was in David and doubt near. Tom said to him: “Your standard of me, David, is a great injustice. Its height is unfair. I am not strong, David, I am weak. I admit all the hateful things you see in me when we go out together. A sort of drunkenness quivers through me. I have to say clever things, I have to please, I have tocontrol. Damn it, man! you don’t despise it half so well as I. But, Davie, I am not like that, am I, when we are alone? Why won’t you judge me by my real self? Tell me, do you judge anything else when it is hidden and sick?”
Tom said to him: “You didn’t like the way I was to-day with Durthal? Oh, my dear fellow, it was plain enough. It was written all over you. My only wonder was what poor old Lars was thinking. What a dear, black grouch you can be, Davie.... Well, why should I not be cordial to Lars? Why should I not pay as much attention to him as I wish? And more than I do to my best friend—yes, my best friend whom I ignored? I know that, Davie. In company I donot need to pay attention to you. You are not part of company. If I ignored you—logical, eh? I haveyoualone. And if, in yourself, you do not know the difference in the way I feel toward yourself and toward silly, empty-headed Durthal, do not expect me to make it clear with a room full of fellows. Because I won’t!”
“Do you think Durthal empty-headed?”
“You know he has just enough stupidity to make an intelligent professor of Swedish drill.”
“And Darby Lunn?”
“Lunn has talent, David. Whether he will ever amount to a thing as a painter is another thing. I doubt it. He is a bit mad, you know. Nurtures all the nonsense of his will with a great pride instead of trampling it under, as a true artist should. What I am trying to help him toward is knowledge of the folly of extravagance and wildness in so sober a calling as Art.”
“But you are wild with him, Tom. You talk nonsense and you act nonsense as I have never seen you do with any one else!”
“If I didn’t meet him on his own ground, what chance would I have of drawing him off it?... Really, Davie, you are a joke.”
“Are you very fond of him also?”
“Not also—and not either. I am interested in Darby’s hopeless talent: and in Durthal’s efficient helplessness.”
“They both believe, I am sure, that you’re devoted to them.”
“Well: they are devoted to me. Why should I not let them think what gives them pleasure? Do I harm them—does what I let them think harm you?" ... David often wondered if each believed himself Tom’s “only friend.”
But now he knew these doubts unworthy. He had a strength with which to exorcize them. He knew thathewasthe real friend. He knew that Tom was not altogether conscious of his motives with such “friends” as Lunn and Durthal. The truth was, he loved power: loved the nearness of those over whose minds he was ascendant. Unconsciously, he fed to each a subjecting mental and emotional food. This was but one of the details of Tom’s curious character; David now understood.
The truth was, indeed, that Tom could be insincere: deeply so, never. His insincerity was superficial. It could come into play the world over: it went like a mist before the sun of their friendship. David must learn a difficult thing: to believe his friend when he spoke truth, to be unshaken when he scattered counterfeits. Was not the reason plain enough? Tom was sensitive beyond measure. As no one else he felt the scorn of life, the scorn of human imperfection. Among the false works of man he had to move about, to hunt and earn his living. Tom’s passionate disgust for the Law! How his too fine sensibilities were agonized by the Law’s lying ugliness: so that his native pleasure in its practice went and he had no eyes for the Law’s better side. Or, if he did have pleasure in the game—and he must while he played it—how quick it died away before the soreness of his nerves! Tom could not admit of the need of life’s imperfections: not face the imperfections in himself. Yes: that was it. When these imperfections called for their hour of air, they simply cast the real Tom out where he would not interfere. That was why the love of power and applause, when it did come to Tom, came like intoxication, overwhelmed him so that David looked in vain for his scornful and uncompromising friend. Now David would look in vain no longer. In the very perfection of Tom’s worldliness, he saw the measure of his contempt. As if Tom said: Here, my fools, you want me to dazzle you and play you? You shall have your fill. You have no interest in my real thoughts, my real self? You shall have no peep atthem. The more, now, Tow hid himself, the more David found him.
All this David discovered for himself. All this, in many conversations, hinted or thrust sharply in, Tom had been preparing him to think. Tom—and an April sun upon the seed of himself....
David glowed.... What marvel what difference there could be in the same things! His cable-car flung grating shrieking on the corner: an adventurous jest which once was an ugly jolt against the tempo of his way.
The City!—the miraculous City! No trees, no fresh sod greening: an ailanthus bursting here and there through cracks—gray cold—in the pavements. But men and women in the streets! Now he saw what teeming creatures these were, the streets and their women.
Streets and women big with laughter and children. Teeming streets, teeming women.
It was hard to recall how dead he had been that winter. It was hard to recall the streets. Gray mournful fissures they were, cracks by the cold upon the flint of a barren star: ruts in the crust of a dead world. Upon them the chill refuse of chaos was cast down. Soiled snow, soiled creatures. They crawled from their crannies and over-ran them. They bore in their eyes the Sign of exile in chaos.
Now different streets—budding teeming streets: different himself, glowing through packed streets.
Women sat in shawls on the housesteps: doors opened into reeking, into pregnant darkness: children in rags among filth of gutters: horses rattling their carts through laughter of children. Mothers had gray long breasts—they held them to sweet red lips. Mothers had shrill words—they spoke love. High noon came on the precocious sun of Spring and clarified the crevices of filth between the Belgian blocks. Odors rose to the sun not sweet like the smells of earlier Springs. Andyet no Spring was fertile like this Spring. No stir of field with young grass, with young flowers, with margin of maples ruddy in hard buds, keen in the glint of birds.... David lived. David for a moment saw with his eyes how his eye-lids were shut down against them. David saw....
Blackness ... ultimate texture of all colors ... light. A world of infinite color, infinite flesh: himself within the world, himself carried within it through it. Himself of the breakless tissue of the world. Flesh of sweet smells, sweet odors, sweet fluids. Flesh altogether and altogether about him. He altogether touching all Flesh—and All. David knew through his shut eyes, walking the world, how he was carried within a world of ceaseless substance: how he was substance within it: how his moving and knowing through Flesh was Spirit.... He walked—he worked—he ate. He had a woman’s body, he earned the bread of a man, he held the love of a friend. Flesh, all. And his moving through Flesh, his moving through infinite immersion through the Night, through the World of Flesh—Spirit and Dawn.... His eyes were shut. But his mouth was open! David saw with his mouth. And though he knew not he had seen, there was within him, there would be now forevermore within him, life of a vision.
The world was a Dark Mother. The Night of the miracle of worlds was fleshed and was a Mother. She moved in infinite directions an infinite path. She was moveless. And he within her, moving with the world toward the movelessness of birth.
David was unborn. But his mouth sucked vision. Sucking the Night sucked vision. He slept again. Slept long.... Slept years.... But he lived.
David and Tom came back from dinner: they sat together for a last smoke in their room: the world they willed came tobe. David lit his pipe: it was the one smoke that gave him comfort. Tom sat gloomy, nervous, flicking his cigarette until he had destroyed it, lighting another. He tore open his collar as if he needed air. He whistled the last half of a tune, stopped, met David’s eyes and broke from the strain of their mutual discovery by jumping up and gazing into the night. David did not budge. The room was filled with a strange restraint. Somewhere a struggle was, in which his mind grappled against a sinuous opponent. Why did he have to struggle even with his friend for the friend he wanted?