He was sick of struggle. Was not all struggle a lie? Life was work enough. There was no repose even in strength. There was no repose even in pleasure. David thought of Constance. Yes: eventherewas work. Was respite in weakness? David doubted, seeing Tom, thinking of the pelt of his wit, the curves of his mind striving for attention. In death?...
Tom was back of his chair, standing above him. He put his hands about David’s neck, drew them close.
“What are you thinking?”
David was silent. Tom’s hands drew closer.
“I could choke you,” he said. “——if it weren’t that the cigarette smoke gets in my eyes.”
They laughed together.
David was sure he understood. Tom would change. Tom must change! When Tom changed it would have been by David’s help. Meantime, he must abide by him, not tire, and watch. For David could not easily endure the ways of his friend. He might well know what they meant: he need not therefore deny his unhappiness before them....
Yet unhappiness must be too heavy a word. Discomfort rather. The base of a friendship such as this between them must be happiness. For the base was solid!
David knew little how he built on this. Without faith inTom’s absolute fidelity to him Tom’s infidelities to himself and to the world must have been insufferable. But with this faith, all the rest of Tom—his excuses, his associates, his excesses—were urgent reasons why David could not turn from him, must come closer. Tom said: “You are my best friend. With you I am the truth.” This was the Law whereby David took him. All else Tom said, Tom did, was in its very contrast emphasis of the truth. All else could by it be redeemed and solved. Let the Law however not be shaken!
What if the Law was an invested fort he had at times to defend against misgivings? against Tom’s own behavior? Was he not full of an unuttered life that invested contradictions?
David’s contentment was unshakeable. It took to itself all hesitant things, made them over. He wanted to feel that with him as with Tom, the truth lay clearest in their lives together. How was he so different? In business? with Constance? He also had his sophistries and abdications. He took pride now in this kinship. It gave an added spell to the haven of their friendship where they withdrew from a falsetto world to the lone reach of the truth.
Soon David forgot the hushings altogether that were needed to create this haven. Subsided were his doubts with Tom, his blanchings when they drew close, the lack of visible background to their friendship. It was strange: their friendship was deep yet what vistas had it leading back to a common source, what forward avenues of life? It was full of fire, this friendship, yet where was its warmth? It was needful to him, yet what rest had he of it?
David who had sucked vision could forget....
CONSTANCE BARDALE had left early that Spring for Europe. David could not say that he really missed her. He had great pleasure in looking back upon the reality of them together: a certain satisfaction in the prospect of her return in the Fall. He was not prompted to wish to hasten that return. He did not know if this was missing her.
He was like the warming weather. He had his days of retrogression, even of chill, when his mood was overcast and moist. But there was ever the underlying progress into Summer. All of him seemed opening. All of him was turned toward some generous source of energy within that made him fresh and green. He was resilient with growth. The squandaries of the world had no effect on this deep calm of his state. He moved in rhythm and with no jarring upward. Even so does a flower, despite the crust and the stone it must push through. The observer might have deemed him motionless: a poor observer who could have said the same thing of the flower.
He had said good-by to Constance naturally enough. That was the most delightful thing about her. She compelled candor.
She moved among hat-boxes and deranged chairs draped with flowing garments.
“David, I hope you won’t be bored without me. Come. Good-by. You had better run along. You’ll only be in the way when aunt arrives.” She traveled with her aunt. “If you feel like it, write me.”
She kissed him swiftly on his lips—and even then, though in her one hand was a pair of shoes, in the other a pile of lingerie, and though her eyes were upon the door expecting her aunt to open, still there was passion in that moment. She was a wonderful woman: a true American in specialization. She had managed to pack her trunk and pack away her lover without placing passion in the bag or meticulousness on her lips.
David went satisfied, without a hint of her ingenuity in bringing this about.
And now his emotions were relieved of a fixed objective goal. They could waft outward, vaguely. David found delight in their vagueness.
It was the same, though less pointedly, with other dwellers in his life. Cornelia was always and largely removed. Unconsciously, David kept her and wanted her so. He saw her not more than once in a fortnight. He did not really see her then. He talked to her; looked at her; listened to the sounds of her voice which easily resolved into the accepted syllables of words. But he was deeply unaware of her. And sadly. Since she bled for this and was yet unwilling to shock her boy into a knowledge of his selfishness.
She knew she might have. Had she said: “David, you are far away. What is between us? David, look really into my words, look really into me. Don’t you see how I suffer when you remain outside?” David would have come to her indeed, like the half-tamed, clumsy cub he was, into her arms and begged for forgiveness. But that could not be. So Cornelia, also, was pleasantly removed for David. And this was good, since then he could read into the picture those details he liked: delete the others.
It was the same with Business. It was always so with Business when one so wanted it. David discovered that Business was more like a woman than he had discovered women:in its reticence, in its immediate response to his desire, either to be all taken up and quick with it, or to be left spiritually alone. He found as his moods veered and alternated, so followed what he could give to his affairs downtown. If he was full of energy to spill and full of fancies to weave, Business was a romantic game that grappled him and spent him. Mr. Barlow had taught him that. But if he was misty and gray and low, Business became a habit exercise that barely held his mind, unobtrusive and gray like his own forces. And without disaster. He could plunge into it, work upon it with every muscle of his body. Or he could hold aloof and run it with two disdainful fingers. He could thrust eyes upon it close, and have joy of its jungle of tropic passions, or poise it philosophically from afar, as a flat patch in his life where he grew his bread-and-butter. Now he was holding it endearingly aloof. It was an accommodating thing that used up just enough of his time and energy to leave him peaceful and ruminant at night.
Even Tom was away. He was gone West on business. David did not write. He made no effort to touch the actual departed friend. He dwelt with his own vision of Tom, unhampered now in his deep will to find it altogether perfect. For the nonce, this wearing struggle to hold it perfect was over. This Tom in his mind had no unfitting angles. Nor the Tom abstractly speaking to him from afar.
That morning, he had received a letter. It read:
Greetings, dear friend:You were going to write to me first and you have not, and so I write to you, because I am thinking of you this evening, and that is the time to write, is it not? I have been thinking good things of you; it seems to me that your flavor has precipitated, and that I feel the form of you, as I never have this past short year. I find myself in consequence in an apologetic mood—and perhaps you will accept even thatand not be repelled, since you have accepted so many moods of mine, and been dear about them, and filled me slowly—I am aware of it now—with a respect and an admiration and, yes, something deeper than these, of which my actions and my omissions were scarce able emissaries. You are away now, while I am in Chicago—silently away, since you have not even thought of me to write to me, and I find that I do not blame you at all: that I admire your taste and your silence, and that I shall look forward to whatever response this brings of your deigning with an eager gratefulness that surprises you no more than it does me. Tom chastened: Tom in full view at length of a loveliness that he sensed and went for, perhaps as one goes for the summit of a mountain: the moment one is upon the trail, all one’s energies are lost in climbing and fighting snags and underbrush and rocks, and the summit is beyond eye and soon out of thought: yet is it the less foritthat the unblazed trail is dared? You are a very rare person: you have given me so much of myself that I shall be happy of you, even if I continue in this mood of being mad at myself that I did not give more. And yet what more could I have given? Would you take more, David? It is true that I have an excuse. You found me in the flush that was really the sign of a true decomposition, a deep giving away of my nerves that might have been ruin in one less trained to fighting. Or that might have been nothing in one less addicted to work. You see, work-to-success seemed necessary to me. When I do no work, my mind gets me into trouble: I am a geyser of wastestuffs: if I cannot empty myself into work, I am likely to empty some one else in a perverse replica of play. You have seen that, David. I worked while I should have been in some happy clime watching the skies and bathing and walking and smoking pipes of peace (if only pipes did not make me sick): I worked while the day’s task used more than the night brought of strength. I neared bankruptcy, but being an American that did not bother me—and I put on brighter colors for the approaching doom. In the crisis of eight years of this, you found me, David——: and what a dour childhood of preparation before it! Endless, endless. Working for Cornelia, working for myself—working toward nothing. For I am in it still. I shall try to put off the day of bankruptcy until I am fifty or more: then liquidate bydying. But you caught me in the first cold experience of being weak and sick and unable to spend prodigally and not feel anything but bulging coffers in the morning: in the first terrible condition of knowing I must work, though work was vile, and that no other work was present for my hands. That, does it explain my sudden horridnesses, my fevers, my cruelties to us both—your word? I am not cruel, Davie, I am full of love. Oh! why won’t you—you and a few blessed others whom I need the knowledge of in this fearful gorgeous world—why won’t youunderstand? Can you not see me going out into the streets of New York—yes, even here in Chicago—full of love for the dull men and the stricken women, ready to give myself to them all, if only they would take me—take me a moment——: full of love for the magic of their flesh and the mystery of their life and the splendor of their anguish? Oh! David, I love so much more than there is in the world willing. I am a sea of love cluttered in a basin. And when I am cried a little welcome, I mess everything up in my attempt to fit to a mortal measure. I have spoken to you—we have even quarreled—about little children. Don’t you see why? Why I was enraged at the idea of yourspeculatingupon whether you wished a child or no? Identification. Suddenly, I am a child, and I do not care a damn about reason, I want only not to be left outside and unalive by my beloved. Often when I speak to a man or woman, Davie, something bleeds in my breast. And then I have headaches, and the wise doctor says: use ‘brakes’—do not give yourself so much—walk the streetsindifferently. Easy, eh?Indifferently!When all of life floods all my senses like a corybantic passion: a perpetual sea of infinite elements each of which is attached to my nerves and to my heart. I cannot help loving people, so I hate them. For they are not what I would have them be: they are deaf and they do not love me. And children—whose lives go before me out of my hands and my sight like the horizon and the skies—is it a wonder my hands are stretched after them and that I suffer at my impotence? But, Davie, I am not cruel. I love—and I cannot reach what I love. My hard-headed lawyer friends quip me, calling mystic my wandering thoughts—the best of them. But I am filled with a sense of dimensions, flaring and parabolic, and the world their sense is comfortable in, is a strand of what I feeland see: and the magic that draws me to the world is the fact that it careers in an element outside myself. There, perhaps, imprisoned in the flesh of a woman is the thing I love—and I am outside—oh, fatally outside. If I open that flesh I am laughed at by blood and death. Life—life, I seek it. For I see it: and it is maddening to be alive.This is a funny letter, is it not? But you must understand, and never again call cruel the man whose eyes are forever full of the vision of loving, and whose body is a prison, a terribly real prison—and who knows that the world is a bewildering texture of abyss and reality, of filth and flowers. I shall go hunting, killing myself through life, David, simply because I am hungry. Do not forget that. I know the falsehood of the game. Do not forget that either. My real self, my mocking sense of life, my outrageous need of love, of love, of love—that will go silent to the grave, when the gods have had their laugh of it. For truly I am a little like a toyboat that the gods have placed upon the waters, and blown upon, that scuds its pretty maddening moment, steerless, useless, against the inevitable stop on the pool’s other side.Write to me.Tom.
Greetings, dear friend:
You were going to write to me first and you have not, and so I write to you, because I am thinking of you this evening, and that is the time to write, is it not? I have been thinking good things of you; it seems to me that your flavor has precipitated, and that I feel the form of you, as I never have this past short year. I find myself in consequence in an apologetic mood—and perhaps you will accept even thatand not be repelled, since you have accepted so many moods of mine, and been dear about them, and filled me slowly—I am aware of it now—with a respect and an admiration and, yes, something deeper than these, of which my actions and my omissions were scarce able emissaries. You are away now, while I am in Chicago—silently away, since you have not even thought of me to write to me, and I find that I do not blame you at all: that I admire your taste and your silence, and that I shall look forward to whatever response this brings of your deigning with an eager gratefulness that surprises you no more than it does me. Tom chastened: Tom in full view at length of a loveliness that he sensed and went for, perhaps as one goes for the summit of a mountain: the moment one is upon the trail, all one’s energies are lost in climbing and fighting snags and underbrush and rocks, and the summit is beyond eye and soon out of thought: yet is it the less foritthat the unblazed trail is dared? You are a very rare person: you have given me so much of myself that I shall be happy of you, even if I continue in this mood of being mad at myself that I did not give more. And yet what more could I have given? Would you take more, David? It is true that I have an excuse. You found me in the flush that was really the sign of a true decomposition, a deep giving away of my nerves that might have been ruin in one less trained to fighting. Or that might have been nothing in one less addicted to work. You see, work-to-success seemed necessary to me. When I do no work, my mind gets me into trouble: I am a geyser of wastestuffs: if I cannot empty myself into work, I am likely to empty some one else in a perverse replica of play. You have seen that, David. I worked while I should have been in some happy clime watching the skies and bathing and walking and smoking pipes of peace (if only pipes did not make me sick): I worked while the day’s task used more than the night brought of strength. I neared bankruptcy, but being an American that did not bother me—and I put on brighter colors for the approaching doom. In the crisis of eight years of this, you found me, David——: and what a dour childhood of preparation before it! Endless, endless. Working for Cornelia, working for myself—working toward nothing. For I am in it still. I shall try to put off the day of bankruptcy until I am fifty or more: then liquidate bydying. But you caught me in the first cold experience of being weak and sick and unable to spend prodigally and not feel anything but bulging coffers in the morning: in the first terrible condition of knowing I must work, though work was vile, and that no other work was present for my hands. That, does it explain my sudden horridnesses, my fevers, my cruelties to us both—your word? I am not cruel, Davie, I am full of love. Oh! why won’t you—you and a few blessed others whom I need the knowledge of in this fearful gorgeous world—why won’t youunderstand? Can you not see me going out into the streets of New York—yes, even here in Chicago—full of love for the dull men and the stricken women, ready to give myself to them all, if only they would take me—take me a moment——: full of love for the magic of their flesh and the mystery of their life and the splendor of their anguish? Oh! David, I love so much more than there is in the world willing. I am a sea of love cluttered in a basin. And when I am cried a little welcome, I mess everything up in my attempt to fit to a mortal measure. I have spoken to you—we have even quarreled—about little children. Don’t you see why? Why I was enraged at the idea of yourspeculatingupon whether you wished a child or no? Identification. Suddenly, I am a child, and I do not care a damn about reason, I want only not to be left outside and unalive by my beloved. Often when I speak to a man or woman, Davie, something bleeds in my breast. And then I have headaches, and the wise doctor says: use ‘brakes’—do not give yourself so much—walk the streetsindifferently. Easy, eh?Indifferently!When all of life floods all my senses like a corybantic passion: a perpetual sea of infinite elements each of which is attached to my nerves and to my heart. I cannot help loving people, so I hate them. For they are not what I would have them be: they are deaf and they do not love me. And children—whose lives go before me out of my hands and my sight like the horizon and the skies—is it a wonder my hands are stretched after them and that I suffer at my impotence? But, Davie, I am not cruel. I love—and I cannot reach what I love. My hard-headed lawyer friends quip me, calling mystic my wandering thoughts—the best of them. But I am filled with a sense of dimensions, flaring and parabolic, and the world their sense is comfortable in, is a strand of what I feeland see: and the magic that draws me to the world is the fact that it careers in an element outside myself. There, perhaps, imprisoned in the flesh of a woman is the thing I love—and I am outside—oh, fatally outside. If I open that flesh I am laughed at by blood and death. Life—life, I seek it. For I see it: and it is maddening to be alive.
This is a funny letter, is it not? But you must understand, and never again call cruel the man whose eyes are forever full of the vision of loving, and whose body is a prison, a terribly real prison—and who knows that the world is a bewildering texture of abyss and reality, of filth and flowers. I shall go hunting, killing myself through life, David, simply because I am hungry. Do not forget that. I know the falsehood of the game. Do not forget that either. My real self, my mocking sense of life, my outrageous need of love, of love, of love—that will go silent to the grave, when the gods have had their laugh of it. For truly I am a little like a toyboat that the gods have placed upon the waters, and blown upon, that scuds its pretty maddening moment, steerless, useless, against the inevitable stop on the pool’s other side.
Write to me.
Tom.
David’s day was pitched by it still higher. His moving through the life of the City had a lyric lilt. Its meanest shred came to expression in the tune he hummed. Until Mr. Barlow said:
“Is that the one song you know?”
David stopped. His energy was only for the moment without outlet. He jumped up, and used it to propel his body.
“I don’t feel a bit like working, this afternoon.”
“There you are, thinking of this as work! Can’t you get cured of that, David?”
The young man stopped at the desk of his Chief who had become his friend. He was pensive. He put one hand on the blotter and looked beyond the labyrinth of papers.
“How differently you and my uncle look at business! He prides himself that it is the most serious and laborious work in the world.”
“That is his play,” Mr. Barlow twinkled. Then they laughed together.
“You see,” he went on, leaning back in his swivel-chair and blowing the first fragrant puff of his new cigar into David’s eyes, “you see, my boy, your uncle is a romantic figure. That is why he takes business so realistically. I am a new generation: oh yes I am, despite my age! I am a realist: a man who sees exactly what there is to see: that is why I take business romantically.”
David thought this a bit topsy-turvy. But he had no way out; he started figuring Mr. Barlow’s words. Mr. Barlow kept blowing fragrant puffs up toward his face.
“That,” he went on, “is the reason why your uncle is so much more successful than I am.” His soft red lips curled cheerfully and he sent a mighty wreath of smoke as salutation against David’s nose.
David pondered. His uncle, who saw too little of the world even to understand the slightest of its parts, was by his ignorance able to take Business as the whole, throw all of himself upon it, and be rich. Mr. Barlow understood the pattern of life’s parts, was able to make a pleasant game of that portion of it where he found himself. And he earned an excellent living, even if he was not rich.
“You are happier than my uncle.”
At once, Mr. Barlow was pensive.
“Happiness is the biggest fraud of all, David. Have no dealings with it. If it tries to make terms with you, cut it dead.”
David noticed a peculiar trait. When Mr. Barlow’s face was in repose, as now, there was a sweet sadness upon it. But he could change this. It was as if he were aware of David looking at his sadness. His quick clear eyes began to twinkle as if this were in itself a joke.
“We must not compare happiness. That’s all nonsense.”
“What then is serious?”
“What is serious?” He leaned back and took David in. “It is serious that you should leave this office this very moment and go meandering as your fancy prompts. Go!... Get along.”
David ran for his hat.
“Well, that is for my happiness, is it not?”
“It is not! It is for your health.” Mr. Barlow looked very stern.
David hesitated at the door. He came back to Mr. Barlow’s side and once more, this time timidly, put his outstretched fingers on the blotter.
“You know how much I appreciate you, don’t you, Mr. Barlow?”
Mr. Barlow took up a letter, screwed his glasses grimacingly to his nose, and began to read.
“David,” as his head moved swiftly from side to side in pursuit of the words, “you are wasting your free afternoon.”
Now David was not wasting it. In his pocket was the letter of Tom. In his head was the cheer of Mr. Barlow. Before him and above him swarmed the amazing City....
He was on a street full of department stores. Women of all ages hurried past him, talking, ceaselessly talking. In their hands were the signs of the battle they loved to wage: packages, purses: in their eyes the promise of further conquest. David felt that he was in a strange, not hostile land. He was tolerated here, because he was not noticed. He stepped into a long, dense building. Endless counters packed with women led away in the bustle and gloom. Voices were not so high as the press of feet and the surge of skirts. Stiff men stood above the buffeting hordes like monstrous curios in their white linen and their flaring somber coats. Gaslamps tremored under the oppressed ceiling as if they stood guard against aninvasion from below. It seemed that the frangent feminine commotion would swell, rise and sweep them out. David was stifled already. There was no room for him, there was no room even for air to breathe. He was in the street again. Here the flood had interstices of day: the day broke with its blue gleam upon the ranks of the women: splintered, but entered in and spread a living lightness through their heavy marches. Here one could see, not a mass alone, sweeping the street, but individual women with faces and eyes. Here even one saw pretty women.
David had not known how many pretty ones there were. It was bewildering, this extravagance of nature. The street was of stone and brick, it reared its jagged way through the world, loaded with the metallic cut of cars, flanked by the sibilance of uneven roofage and façades and the clamor of advertisements; it fell swift into smallness beyond a Square. Here it was arrogant, it domineered with its wide high skirts of stone and its bonnets turreting aloft—the shuttle of feet like a leather lathe beneath. And yet, immersed in it, David found that it was soaked in charm and that it drew his senses. For he had picked out the presence of women: women that had lips and warm bodies and whose arms could hold children. At once these were the street and were greater than the street. In their domain he was walking.
He was not wasting his free afternoon. This was health indeed. It was health to feel this pour of a thousand homes upon him: all of these homes’ secret tenderness and passion. It was health to shake his head at the hard buildings, and know them worsted by women!...
But tiring. David boarded a car.
The car gave a lurch. The movement split the car’s inhabitants into two separate groups: they who smiled and they who grumbled. David was smiling. Clumsily he righted himself, he found that he did not wish to change the positionof his eyes. They were looking at a little girl, who had been smiling also. But now, the two were serious looking at each other.
She was a little girl riding beside her governess. She had great black eyes. The gleaming iris almost crowded out the white. She had brows that were high and thin and arched and between her brows and her eyes the flesh was dimpled.
She tilted her head backward and smiled at him.
David gripped his seat with his two hands, and smiled at her.
She was beside an opaque cutting thing that was a woman and was a governess. Thick glasses tied to a black string that ended in a hideous enameled clasp on a white starched waist. Eyes shiny and convex like the glasses. Nose pointed down, mouth cutting in, chin pushing upward. And beside her a loveliness that came across the car and that he held now far from the car and the street, in his silence.
It came to David softly that he loved this little girl. She smiled at him, as if she thanked him and were glad. Could he put his love in a smile and give it to her?
She stirred in her seat. She tossed out her legs, first one, then the other. She threw herself back so that her legs thrust out, she met him fully and beamed on him.
She was unafraid, beyond all he had ever known. What could he give her, and do, to show her his love?
He had his eyes and his smile. To give her his life with. He put words into his look at her: till his eyes had tears of their fullness. He said to her so:
“Little girl with the gray fur bonnet and the gray fur coat and the laughing soul, I love you. I have never seen you before. I shall never see you again. I shall always see you——”
She was smiling so clear! What did she know? What did she not know, perhaps? Pain stopped the words of hiseyes. He got up. He passed her. Why could he not touch her, why could he not come and play with her where she lived? A little girl!
He stood in the street and the car groaned past him. She was kneeling on her seat and her face pressed against the window. She was motionless, gazing into him with serious lovely eyes while the car swung her away into the trackless future.
David’s lips moved: “Good-by. I do not understand.... Do you?...”
She was gone.
Many things were gone.
David, walking the dim sunless City, walked as through himself. And as he went he missed the lights that an hour before, of their own cheer, had lit the corridors of his being and made him all, all of the City, so glad a habitation. He missed these things, he learned how many they were.
He did not think of the strange little girl. She had been fleckless beautiful. She had been more than that in the miracle of her spell upon him. For this he groped. In his mind was the vision of her budding life, sweet, ineffably sweet like an unopened rose in the dew of the dawn. She had left a wound in his heart—the stab of her vision—from which now his blood seemed unstintingly to flow.
He thought of himself alone. Sudden all his proud contentment was away. Not clouded, this time, as it had been so often. Away. It was gone surely, like the little girl.
His contentment. What then had it been? The parts of it that were no more he could piece together into a memory of his contentment.
It had been a haze covering the way of his feet, blinding his eyes, wrapping him in darkness. He saw now. He saw that his feet had carried him a way different from the haze of his contentment.
He thought of his emptiness. He seemed to recognize it, now, as if it had long been there. The absence of Tom and Constance—was this the absence of two great parts of his emptiness permitting him at last to know them—since their absence was in a measure their negation, the first timorous return from an emptiness that filled him to a fullness that he lacked? He could not go in very far. His mind was strangely cramped with pain. He knew much, however. He knew he did not love Constance and that there is no substitute for love. He knew he did not fully respect his dearest friend and that for this there was no solace. Most of all he knew his life was sterile: despite its blandishments and its colors, its devouring of hours, it lacked something he needed. Something he needed as he might thirst for water in a land that held everything else.
Sterile work: sterile friendship: sterile embraces. It was not so simple as this, but here was the germ that desiccated him, turned his impulses from action, deflected life from living.He did not live.Thence came that he did not risk, that he went safe, that he won materials and pleasures. To what end since he did not live? He compromised with love, he compromised with dreams. That was the technique of his succeeding: to cheat his body into love-affairs, his mind into business, his loyalties into friendship. To what end since he did not live? And if the miracle was, that life lay in the risk rather than in succeeding, in love rather than in the love-affair, in the dream rather than in any fact?
Oh, he could not understand. He did not know what to do. If his ways were wrong, his relations false, how could he change them? He dragged through a morass, not knowing.
Now suddenly, his clear thoughts held within them, as if in an embrace, the little girl. He saw the resilience of that fresh young life: its pride, its firmness. He saw how it must stoop and bend andgive, if it would avoid the pains that waited itgrowing into the world. If it would win ease, it must lose—lose all that made it lovely! Lose its fine fresh sweetness. David pondered on this. Would that election satisfy him? Would it be well to see that loveliness gray away in price for the escape from pain? He heard his answer clear. At all costs the bravery of youth, the firm coolness of which her flesh was symbol—at cost of any pain, of all defeat!
A deceiving gladness came to David: a gratitude that he was still somewhat like that little girl.... Had they not smiled at each other?
THE train swung Tom southward from Chicago about the duned neck of the Lake. The sun broke at last in clear sky upon him. The everlasting smoke sank behind like dust of a departed battle.... Tom had the vision of the town of his childhood.
The train was swimming up the path of the sun. The world cut flat from the train’s stride like a sea from the prow of a racing vessel. The horizon swayingly scooped: trees low and faint in the shrill sky, nude in young leaves, lascivious in blossoms, almost bowled over by the roll of the world—and the blue belch of sturdier chimneys beyond, scattered half-acres of hell spewing soot and shadow over a scarred and flowered prairie. In his eyes now an old sick town....
The long street swooned under foliage. Trees crowded between the two rows of houses as if they had burst them apart. Under their arrogant verdure the little wooden boxes of men crouched and were smothered. A man came out from the dull pressure: he walked into the sway of the trees: he went forth to his toil: he was immersed in the redundance of fields.
Tom went back to the town of his childhood armed with his intelligence. He thought he saw with understanding. Through the window of the train, he found his face fleeing across the prairie. “I understand,” he whispered to himself.
“I understand the tyrannies that oppressed my people: the tyrannies that formed them. The vastness of the soil and of its fruit: the dying spiritual world my fathers packed with them from Europe, and into which they tried to cram—whatnew bursts of passion, what new world’s splendors! I see what treasure and promise were these fields and hills—and the little hands, the littler minds and tools with which to work them. Of course, there came blindness upon the dazzlement, penury upon their drunken spending, fear of the Spirit upon their rape of the Earth. What masters my fathers must have been not to have been mastered by America!”
Tom understood why the men of ripe New York were shrunken midges beneath the stuff of their buildings: and the still unuttered fate of Chicago: and why Chicago, with its long soiled lazy hands, had held his heart.
“I am of the West. I had forgotten—but I am of the West! To think that ten years of New York could have made me forget. Chicago claimed me!”
New York was a place of exile. There they whose lives were done or were denied builded State upon the principle of their death. New York was a gaunt, ghost City: a dwelling place of shadows that towered above men.
What was New York against this splendor of plains, against Chicago? wide crude child city with the loud voice and the playful heart, with the swift gait and the lumberly laborer’s mind? What was New York against the love of his discovered home?
Tom began to wonder what irony had drawn him Eastward.
“The promise of life?” he whispered to himself, “the promise of life?”
His chair was toward the window, he spoke to his reflected face and the fleeing plains. A knoll of green flashed past with a stream curling and in the shadow a clustered farm: the remembered scent of clover and the warm sweetness of new green life were a cloud over his mind.
“I wonder, does the lure of death come always disguised as a fulfillment? Perhaps, when a man takes his life does he hope to achieve it? Cornelia and I—God! how we wereglad of the calculated pavements of Manhattan.” But surely, he had left death behind? Was he growing sentimental? What a strange mood he was in. His father, the dilapidated farm—life, that? Very well: law, the nervous flutter he called success in the city—life, that, more? He shook his head. He saw he did not understand after all.... And yet, America in Chicago—Chicago in the American plains—gripped him and called him as never before....
Chicago? where Industry, a dirty giant, flung and heaped its refuse upon the dwellings of men? He could not understand. But he felt a poignance—of symbol—in himself yearning Westward, yearningbackwardagainst the way of the train to where America lay impassioned beneath the coming sun.
He stepped into New York, its life came to him through splinter of movement with a sharp pathos. The dust of their traffic were these men and women swirling slow: their impress upon the places they had built was naught. An air of enervation lay over the clefts of houses, seeped down into the channels of men.
Then Tom lost the sense of separation. The great Metropolis came like an iron cloak and made him invisible....
Out of the confusion of his life he saw some things clearly and aimed at them: he saw some things vaguely and these he avoided. He sensed that the vague things were the vital: were of the color and stuff of that confusion which was his life: and that the dear things were trivial and lying.
Marcia Duffield and King Van Ness were not yet engaged. A particular and naked problem. Tom feared the cynicism of the girl he had loved. “One thing, one thing alone can spoil this,” went his thoughts. “If she out of some moodabandoned her resistance. She might for spite, bravado, bitterness, what not? One such false gesture and Van Ness stops the hunt. He might possibly do an injury to himself: grow thoughtful for instance. But he’d never marry a girl that let him kiss her without a diamond ring.”
Laura Duffield held out her hand for his. “I am young yet. This is my only life. What am I doing with it?” Tom thought and clasped the hand of his friend and laughed—the lust of the Game, Van Ness, Stone and Company to be pried open, the delicious recalcitrance of Marcia to be tasted and crushed—and forgot.
“You are worrying about something? What is it?” At last he was conscious of Laura Duffield: his trivial words were over.
She was ageing. There was a drawn tightness about her eyes, a sag at her throat. It was a day on which she was not looking well. And looking well was coming to be an art, these years of life when art grows difficult. Debts. The incredible burden of holding up her head.
“Come and sit beside me, Tom.”
She was graceful. The couch was low. She sat ensconced in a corner, her outstretched arm hung in a flimsy sleeve, color of faded violet. Her skin like the sleeve was dim. Her eyes and the stones in her rings were bright.
“You are so quick to understand. I am going to tell you. I’m worrying about Marcia.”
“That won’t help us, you know.”
“Why can’t she make up her mind to love some one?”
Tom laughed. “What a lot of contradictions in a little sentence!”
“I don’t know—I don’t know what we may have to do.”
She seemed, after all, resigned. If Marcia could love no one, with her mind or without, let her stay single.
“She hasn’t accepted Van Ness yet?”
Laura Duffield shook her head.
Tom thought swiftly.
“Where is Marcia? Is she in? Tell her I am here?”
The mother arose and called the girl. Marcia came to the door, stood silent.
“Hello, Marcia. I came to see you, this evening. Not your Mamma.” He believed it. He wanted to be with her—all else was a pretext.
“Yes: and it’s lucky too,” Mrs. Duffield bustled to her desk. “I have a thousand letters to answer. Do be dears, and leave me alone.”
She was settled and her back was on them. She was looking better. Such confidence she had in Tom!
He followed Marcia. She went to the opposite corner of her room: near her cheval glass. She stood there. Tom closed the door, let his weight lean upon it, then seated himself in a broad arm-chair. Her whiteness was taut: her black hair and eyes were hot. A tremble swift and faint sang through her. She found she could not stop it. She moved and took up an ivory brush, she strove to let her trembling flow from her two hands to it. It was a very long time since Tom and she were alone.
“Marcia, please sit down.”
She complied at once: she flushed with anger that she had. Tom came and leaned over her. He looked obliquely at her great black eyes and the sharp perfection of her chin and the way of her white throat. He put his open hands on her hair, he turned her face upward toward him. He placed his dosed lips on her parted ones. His hands slipped down her face, her neck, her body. He stood away. She said:
“Why do you do that, Tom?”
“That is how I feel.”
“Don’t lie, Tom.”
“I am not lying, Marcia.”
Her eyes blazed up. It was a burst of bravery and challenge. They crumpled. She hid her head in her arms, she wept.
Tom put his hand firmly to the back of her head where the hair was caught away from the neck.
“Listen, Marcia, I am not lying. Listen, please, Marcia.”
She was silent, if she was still weeping. She did not raise her head.
Tom leaned and kissed her neck. The faint scent of her hair in his eyes.
Marcia straightened sudden. He met the attack of her gesture.
“Now listen, do you hear?”
She stayed balanced, looking at him straight: her eyes filled with an ironic hunger. So Tom wanted her. He began before she changed.
“You have never understood me, Marcia. I can’t blame you. I have never understood myself. I am honest with you. I have always been. Perhaps it was expecting too much, dear, that you should be able to stand that.... Marcia, I care for you now, as I did before, more than for any woman in the world.”
She dropped her eyes and began to finger the embroidery of her chair.
“I go through strange tides, Marcia. I cannot help that. Most men have hypocrisy to hide these ebbs. Most women have passiveness. I have neither. So I suffer.... Marcia,” he went on, “I do not want to lose you. But also I do not want to hurt you. Can’t I have you, without hurting you, Marcia! It was because I had not answered that question, that I forced myself away, forced myself cool.”
“What do you mean, Tom?”
He took a chair and brought it beside hers and seated himself. With a great calm he heard himself say:
“Marcia—will you marry me?”
“I should love to, Tom.”
“We could manage. I might even gradually start to pay off your Mamma’s debts. A little flat. Two weeks at the seashore. A cook....”
He spoke very seriously, with each item stroked the slender pearly hand he had taken.
Marcia withdrew it. “Don’t be a silly, Tom.”
He jumped up. He drew her after him: he held her close, kissed her throat.
“It is not impossible. I want you, Marcia.”
“You have had me.”
“I have never had you.” He thrust her away and walked to where she first had faced him. “You know I have never had you, Marcia. How can you—oh——!” He threw up his arms and stopped.
Marcia came closer. “Tom,” she said, “what do you really want of me?”
“Yourself....” He paused. “But without the sense that I am harming you. Yourself, without restraint.”
“Why did you leave me, Tom?”
“I’ll tell you. Despise me, if you will. I’ll tell you. Because I had a guilty conscience. Because I thought not alone of your future but of your mother. Because I seemed unable to be either your lover or your husband.”
She smiled.
“You’re not the sort of man one should marry.”
“Unfortunately I lack qualifications.” He put bitterness into his voice. She was sure—and glad—she had hurt him. “But civilized standards have nothing to do with love. I could love a woman, if only she were in a civilized way disposed of, so that we could afford the luxury.”
Marcia laughed and placed her hand back in his.
“Why have you never put things this way before?”
“Never put things this way before?” He was amazed. He burst out laughing. “Really, my dear, this is too ironic. I had given you up: I had given you a free hand to marry. I was prepared to lose you permanently rather than stand even temporarily in your way. But you did not marry. What did that mean? I didn’t know. How could I? But what should keep me from hoping? Any fool may do that. At least there was the circumstantial evidence that you had not married. That is why I came to-night, Marcia. I came to ask you to marry me. To plead with you. For the first time I was prepared to sacrifice you for my own desire—altogether. And now, when I am acting my most selfish self, for the first time you see the sacrificial mood that I was in before!”
She placed her arms about him.
“Strange contradictory dear.... You shall have me, dearest. Wait and see how soon. I think I never wanted you quite so much.”
“Marcia!”
“Don’t let your feelings blind you to reason, Tom.Ourfeelings. You don’t want a wife. If I was rich—or you were—even then, would you want a wife? You wantme. I you. Without alloy, dear. I’ll marry King.”
She smiled brightly.
“Do you know why I put it off? Because I thought it might mean real captivity. It must have, Tom—without you, there, to rescue me. Oh,” her face darkened, “I could not stand the thought of him without the antidote!” She was silent, brooding. Her eyes seemed full of the picture of her life with the dull rich man. It stifled her, blinded.
“I could not have stood it, Tom. I can now! Without you, it must have meant prison. Now, it means release—adventure. Yes!” She seemed to be emphasizing her resolve—bringing it clear before her eyes to see it. “You’ll see that I am game. I am almost happy.”
She sank down in her chair, and smiled at him; tears kept her from seeing how he smiled a bit wistfully away.
She needed to be silent. If for no other reason, for the tears.
She wanted to ask him simply: “Do youloveme, Tom? For Tom, if you didloveme....” She did not dare her question. She did not dare, even in her silence, to conclude it. She was afraid of his answer. Both for him and for her she was afraid. Both of his “yes” and his “no.” After all, her mind faded and veered, she had better marry King. It would be going on.
She was dry-eyed.
Tom took her hand and kissed it.
“What do I really mean by all these things I do?” When Tom was alone his question came often, came without answer. When he was with David, it hurt and these things he did were like ash in his mouth. But even the hurt was better than the reverberating silence. So Tom fled solitude.
But what of David? What did he want of David? Was he glad of him or bitterly, passionately sorry? Did he want him close or far away? His acts and moods, were they designed to hold or to repel him?
Tom was at a pass where all these things were chaos. The clear facts of living were straws in a heaving sea: straws he reached for. He went brightly about his profession. It prospered. But it became more and more a thing to hide from David. And all such things were more and more to be hidden from himself. Marcia was engaged. He feared her marriage which he had manoeuvered, vaguely, as the time of a demand he could not face. Also he looked forward toher marriage: the senses of him: his blood and his wits as well. Marcia’s marriage must be a function of both.
He tried, close to David, to blot out his conflicts. He tried to realize that it was David himself who brought about the conflicts: and to pursue the rational conclusion that it was David who must be blotted out. His reasonings had the way of playing him into some dark dilemma. The forces driving him toward the constant agitation of his wits seemed all too clearly irrational and heart-sent. He could not isolate the verbs of his reason. If he did, he found them without subject, object—dead waifs of sound flecking a hollow mind. His reaching for the true drive within him left him a streak in imponderable Space, as if he had grasped a Comet. It was better to be confined to straws.
The schemings pertinent to Marcia, straws: the intricate work downtown, straws also: the being with friends, the satisfaction of his senses, straws again. The effect upon his mind—this passionate bestowal upon work he could not respect, upon pleasure he could not enjoy—was a slow desiccation. He was dry, cynical, erethic. He needed to rouse himself to heights of activation: his work called for no less. And the impulse rousing him was ever one he was cold to. A strain on his nerves. As in a man making himself drunk with drink he forces himself to swallow.
Needfully, since this vast disharmony gained on his life and since each part of it warred against the others, Tom came to bestow upon its various factors the quality of respite and escape. He needed a makeshift harmony in order to live. One instant of admitted anarchy in our minds means madness: in our bodies death. Since discord was there, it must be balanced with other discord. One group of his thoughts swelled, sagged out of place: he propped it into a semblance of poise with another hypertrophy. So discord propagates itself. Life went on.
David was there to cleanse him of the tastes of his worldly work, restore his self-respect, give him a vantage point against the scheming Tom of the day. His other friends—shallow, quick fellows ready to give what he asked and forward-coming, helpless women like Laura Duffield—were there to balance the reticence of David, ease his diseased hunger, throw him momentarily free of the strange dissatisfaction of his one satisfying friendship. The function of work was to sustain him, flush his energies until such time as he knew how he wanted to play. Marcia was compensation for that in him which could not look to David. David was compensation for that in him which was ashamed of Marcia. His hours with David and Cornelia were sleep in which he lived as he dreamed, won strength to face the waking: his hours of work were respite from the starved clamor of his dreams—a way of winning time from their insistence.
So his life stumbled and shook ahead. It held together. But it was textured of half-true, half-meeting elements. Its hazardous solution caused a continual ferment. The sign of ferment was his growing pain in a life stumbling, shaking ahead.
He walked down a Square with that lithe pacing stride of his. Half clenched fists swung at his side. There was a fairly constant strain in his eyes that lifted them in their sockets. With teeth tight set, he hummed a tune. Energy was forever thus escaping from him. When he did nothing, he fell at once into a state of preparedness for flight. He wanted to get away: get out. He could not. Life gripped him and he loved it. But much energy was born of this deep impulse to escape. He scattered it about. Much he applied—and applied to perfect the conditions of that very life from which his nerves rebelled. His vitality in talk, his speed of impressions, his plasticity of posture in the world grew from this energy. So that he shook along in a vicious circle. Muchof his power to throw life into his work came from the secretions of his dissatisfaction with it: from the energy of his dissatisfaction. But life is full of such mechanical paradox. All of civilized life is such a one. Many a man succeeds in the conscious world because of the failure hidden in his heart.
Tom stopped. He was before a crumbling brownstone house: a rusting iron grille, a gate thrown out on useless hinges. A tiny plot of grass flanked the narrow walk. The soil was rocky: sediment of the City—cans, flakes of cloth, splint eyes of glass—choked the slim green. From the low stoop the house flared up, soft in decay.
Tom turned his back on the house. He looked North on the Square. In his eyes was a hunger for open places. His glance consumed the narrow breadth of the Park with its dapper walks and its trees. It broke impatient on the row of red-brick houses. It spent itself. Tom’s gaze narrowed. He turned and went up the stairs. They were dirty and dark—four flights. Odor of mildew and misspent lives seeped from brown plaster.
He struck his fist on the door. Behind him was a hall painted the color of stale chocolate. In the center of the fly-blown ceiling a sudden cupola, picked out in glass—green, yellow, blue. Sky came through dim and soiled.
A young stout fellow opened the door and gave a cry of pleasure: let Tom in.
“Hello, Rennard! Flora. Florissima! Company’s complete.”
Tom pressed Lars Durthal’s hand. “Hello, Lars,” he passed him.
A long narrow table spread in the square small room. The heavy mantel was ribald with knick-knacks of varicolored glass, purchased in useless shapes at Coney Island and Asbury Park. Their gayety, adance in the boxed mirrors of the yellow wood, seemed irrelevant above the table, with its highunlabelled bottles of red wine, its mounds of Italian bread, its platters of cervelat, tomatoes, sardelles. The table’s order was disturbed by its broken wreath of guests.
Most of the diners lounged already in their chairs. Between laughter and smoke they sent their eyes lazily toward the kitchen. They had begun with their wine.
“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” a slender fellow spoke, upon whose long neck poised a head remarkably round and small; within his face with its fat sanguine cheeks the eyes and mouth and nose took up an inconspicuous space.
“Good evening, Marquese.” Lagora was a nobleman: a dealer in marble according to his one report, in Italian oils and spices according to his other. A clever, shifty, cloudy fellow with hands like a girl’s.
Tom sat down with an air of temporariness beside him.
“Well, Dounia—comment ça va?” He leaned and placed a finger on the cheek of the woman across the table. Dounia Smith put down her glass. “I’ve no cigarettes.”
Tom placed a box in her expectant hand. They were enormous hands: gaunt, naked, acquisitive, with a wrinkle about the finger-joints that was sinister against the smooth calm of her wrists. Behind her hands, Dounia Smith rose diminished. She was tall, handsomely cut: her hair swept black and low over her temples: her eyes had a gray slant that offset the thin lips, the sharp tilt of her chin. When she lighted her cigarette she showed all of her teeth. They were white. But as the gaunt huge hand came near her face, the rest of Dounia Smith went into eclipse.
A man came up, neatly and drably dressed, with a red tie that flared against the pale primness of his face.
“Glad you’re here, Rennard. Business particularly boring, to-day. Fun particularly needed, to-night.”
This was Christian Hill—sedate, rebellious—a man of business who craved intoxicants of life. All his sentencessounded like telegrams. All his money, too sanely earned in a broker’s office, was at the disposal of his search for madness. He looked on Tom as his ideal. He would have sold his wife into slavery for a lust sufficiently great to make him commit the folly.
“I want to introduce you,” he beckoned toward a girl that had sat yonder beside him. “Madeline—this is Mr. Rennard—Miss Gross.”
She came sidling. She was richly clad, very blond, very powdered. Beneath the simper of blue eyes, the hot curl of placid lips and the ringlets of blond hair teasing her tiny ear, Tom saw that she was Jewish.
He took her tiny hand, gloved in fawn-colored kid.
“It is nice to have you here, Miss Gross. I hope our rough manners won’t shock you.”
She propelled herself a little nearer.
“Oh, please do, Mr. Rennard!”
“You want to be shocked, Miss Gross?”
Hill intervened. “But you can’t, Rennard. You don’t know my little Madeline.”
The little Madeline simpered and tapped her escort’s mouth with the back of her gloved hand.
“How do you know, Christian? Just becauseyoucouldn’t.” Bending her body back, she threw her head back also. She gazed at Tom through the lashes of her half-shut eyes.
Durthal came up.
“Your place is there, old man. Between Lunn and me.”
“Good evening, Flora. Say, you have room for Markand? I made him promise he’d be here.”
A thick-set woman, with face incredibly composed and large bare arms crossed over the gray width of her dress, nodded to Tom and to the others.
“Good evening, Flora.” “Hello, Flora,” the greetings came.Flora did not budge from her place in the kitchen door. Hill dragged Miss Gross through the scatter of chairs.
“Oh, Signora Sanni,” he said, “I want to introduce my friend.”
Flora Sanni wiped her right hand slowly, methodically on her apron.
“Buena sera, Signorina.” She took the gloved hand, dropped it, turned about. Her eyes were steel. She had taken longer to wipe her hands on her apron.
Tom moved in Durthal’s power toward the nearer end of the table.
A young girl shut the door.
“Here you are,” muttered Lagora.
She nodded timidly to her neighbors—maliciously to Dounia Smith, a defensive malice—and sat down beside the Marquese. He drew close his chair. The two began muttering together. Lagora leaned forward. The girl bent back from the thrust of his mood and his body. She was a frail creature—a tissue of harried nerves with great black teeming eyes. Her hand tapped on the plate. She lit a cigarette, inhaled a great gust, emptied Lagora’s wine glass and then blew out the smoke. Her body was draped in a short tight smock of blue hung from her shoulders. Her tiny breasts stood up in it quite clear. Lagora’s brows worked up and down. Her big eyes sharpened and cut him. He looked at her twitching shoulders.
“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” she cried as she passed him. She threw up a diminutive hand. Her breasts bobbed.
“How are you, Lettie?” Tom, taking her hand, had the sense of Lagora smiling with snakish eyes. He passed on.
A lumbering boy got up, nodding and saying no word.
“Well, Darby?” Tom sat down. “I’ve not seen you in a week.”
“A long time,” synchronously growled the other. Tom heard him and laughed.
“And the painting?”
Tom and Darby Lunn were lost together in talk. From the table’s farther end Durthal saw them together. The laugh of Dounia Smith, the shrill sneer of Lettie tossing her heels, the mutter of Lagora were a wave, gathering, crumpling upon the calm of Signora Sanni. Durthal extricated himself from Hill and Miss Gross. He headed through the disserried chairs. Stretched arms reached for wine and tastes of antipasto. The evening splintered and swirled. Food would draw it together.
Durthal stood over Tom.
“Here, old man. Change over. You sit between us.”
Finding his seat, he also had the sense of haven beneath the spray and scatter of the room.
Of the three, Tom was the only one whose voice carried beyond them: laughing. Dounia Smith eyed him with a tilt of her head. A finger, like a talon, flecked her cigarette. Her brows were thin and straight like the stroke of a sharp pencil on hard paper.
Flora Sanni stood above the table, with a vast white bowl ofminestrone. The crowd coalesced.
The table narrowed. The chandelier, relic of fluted brass and drooping crystal, took on the tawdry tone of office and gave its light, self-consciously, heatedly, like an old servant, too laden with memory and years to want to work for so crass a gathering. The carved clock ticked: a clatter of plates drew down bent necks, beading foreheads. Sharp streakings of sound ribboned the table: swathed it: covered it with a warm liquidity. Then the whipped undertone of selves seeped up again, lapped over the inorganic sound, deluged it, drowned it in angular surge of assertions.
The door gave a knock that was heard at last....
David had followed upstairs a pair who were held to slowness by the constant claim of the woman that she was too weary to go another step.
“Come along, Phoebe!” The man had a high straight back. He wore a soft collar that bared his neck. David observed that it was wiry and clean. The hairs were clipped high from it. David had time to observe. Whenever the pair came to a rest, he rested behind them. Something impeded his passing. Timidity in part. The disclosing thereby that he had overheard them, that they were moving too slowly. His own scarce unconscious resistance to mounting those stairs at all. He hated the place. But he had no reason to give to Tom. And Tom took offense at his not wishing to come.
“Why, dear man. Don’t you like Flora? I think Flora is splendid. Such poise! Or is the place too noisy for you. David? Davie, you must get accustomed to dirt!”
A vehemence in Tom that silenced David. Doubtless this was life, and life no thing to shrink from.
“But I do like Flora!” He could not add that he felt that Flora did not like him: did not seem to like any one who came there: nor the feeling that if she had known him different and uncomfortable, perhaps she would have liked him.
“Well, then!” said Tom.
The stout lady was sighing. “Why we ever come here, Jack! These stairs!”
“You know it is lots of fun, Phoebe. Go along now. You like it as well as I.” He spoke immaculate English, and urged her with a slap on her rump.
“Well, the people——”
“——the food?” he chuckled. “The mysterious bottom of Signora Sanni’s pot. One more hoist, old lady. Th—th—ere! Where else, pray, can one meet such a delightful assortment of bulls?”
“Don’t call them bulls, Jack Korn! Call them detectives.”
“Here we are, dear.”
David and they entered together.
“Korn, Iamglad to see you!” Tom reached over the table and greeted him. “How’s business?” He had nodded to David and Korn’s woman with a perfunctory politeness.
“Meet my dear friend, Mr. Korn,” he laughed. “Same profession as myself.” The three sat opposite Durthal and Tom and Lunn. Mrs. Phoebe Raymond was on one side of David. On the other sat Dounia Smith. All of them laughed, except David.
He looked at Korn. A big, athletic fellow, clad in somber serge. He had black hair and a significant nose.... Why had all of them laughed?
“I have never seen you here before, Mr. Markand,” said Phoebe Raymond.
“I—I come quite often.”
“Well, I don’t,” she looked full at him. “One gets so little time.” Her round face was pretty. But it was fat: its petite features were lost in flesh. Her bosom obtruded like a robin’s breast. David seemed to see, investing the round comeliness of her mouth and nose, layers of sloth and greed. A scaly dimness was already over the blue eyes. “I like small gatherings more, don’t you?” she confided. “One could get toknowa person then.” David had the sense that if he drank enough of the wine Mrs. Raymond would seem very pretty indeed.
He began to eat. Words pattered and burst about him. The food had an exotic charm. The air was full of heated eyes and bodies. Glances and edged remarks trembled like flung spears in the flesh of the women. David kept still and went on eating.
Phoebe Raymond tried to engage him in talk.
“My husband and I were in Maine at the time. Do you know New England, Mr. Markand?”
“Of course he knows it! Can’t you see it written all over him, Phoebe?” It was Tom drawing her away. “How dare you talk to my friend about your husband! Have you no sense of decency?”
The immediate half of the table was his. He played it like an instrument. His eyes were too bright and too hard, thought David. He had little to say to him. To Durthal and to Lunn, to the women on David’s side, to Hill even and Lagora, he had more to say than to David. Most of all to Korn. But he looked often at his friend—sharp glances while his attention swathed from right to left. David was enmeshed in his running comment: all Tom said seemed to run through him and knit him.
“It is hard not to be moral,” he said. “One is pushed so into good behavior.”
Jack Korn sat back smiling. He was a strong man. He was very quiet.
“What do you think of good behavior, Korn?” Tom asked him.
“It is as good a game as another.” He paused. “Surer.”
“But why should we want to be sure? Since we are already sure of death? Look at Dounia, there. She has never done a risky thing in her life. Run over her investments. Burton, Klein, La Soule—all good gold bonds. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, my dear. You remind me of Markand’s uptown relations.”
“And what are you crowing about?” Dounia retorted. “You’re as safe as an eel.”
“I have at least the good manners to be ashamed of it,” Tom laughed. “To hide it and even lie about it. I am gaining strength.”
He looked admiringly at Korn. “Here, old man, I drink to the logic—to the beauty of your life!” He held forth his wine glass.
Korn raised his to his eyes, nodded and sipped. Tom drained.
“Did you get that, Davie?” he said. “The contempt Korn showed in answering my toast? I do not blame him. I’ve never earned his respect. Think how he must despiseyou!”
Korn did not turn his head. Lunn grunted and smirked—in his plate. Dounia and Phoebe came to David’s rescue.
From Dounia: “I am sure Mr. Markand is br-raver, much b-raver than you!”
From Phoebe: “Jack, deny that you despise Mr. Markand.”
Tom drove ahead. “But I’ll earn your respect yet, Jack Korn. I may be earning it now....”
Christian Hill was nudging Miss Gross.
“He’s a wonder, is Rennard. You must get him. The other man, the one in the black suit, Madeline,he—he is——” Hill whispered in the young girl’s ear. Her fork clattered: her little eyes lost their dim cunning: became bright and large.
“Really?” she gasped. She gazed at Korn and was speechless. Her hand went to the old bead bag in her lap.
Talk like a comet drew to the head of Tom and Korn. They held it: they swung it: it was a dazzle of gyre to the jerk of their directions. At the farther end of the table, Signora Sanni came and went: sat imperturbable. She was a woman of more than forty. Disillusion was sweet in her firm, strong face. It was a preservative. It did not keep her pretty, it kept her content. Her features had set. It was as if they had thrown away their woman’s tricks of blandishment and surprise: as if they had sold their power to impassion at the price of passion itself. At her side were Lagora and Lettie Dew. These three alone were intact from the ebullient pull of the other end of the table. Lagora was incapable of an objective interest. He ate seriously, he spoketo Signora Sanni, he nagged Lettie. The eyes of Miss Dew wandered from their circuit between her plate and the ceiling, to David. For a moment, their gaze softened; something swam in her eyes, something stirred like a cloud’s rift in her mind. With a violent gust of smoke—for she smoked incessantly—she blew it away.
“But I maintain,” Tom said, “that the law makes the game all the more delicious. The more rules, the more brains to overturn them.”
Korn smiled and nodded: “Goethe put it—‘In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.’”
“What does that mean?” Tom was held up.
“Just about what you are saying,” replied Korn.
“Well, then, Goethe is right.” Every one laughed except David.
Tom raced: “I like obstacle races: I like hurdles. Society is made up simply of men who run flat, like you, dear Korn, or go in for steeple-chasing, like myself. Now, I have a friend—tell me, Korn, what do you think of this for manipulation ...?”
It was amazing, thought David, how little Korn said for one who held such sure attention.
“——with the girl married, he controls her life. Do you see? Of course he must pay his minimum—let us say his taxes—for that. But say what you want, love or no love, there’s always about the same ratio of satisfaction in a love affair. Eh, Dounia?” he baited her. “Come, Dounia, tell us for once. Down with the veils. Is there so much difference whether you love the man or not? I am convinced that woman’s pleasure is utterly subjective. Who gives it to her is of no consequence—unless she lets herself be imposed on by Society’s mandates, standards, sentimentalities. Won’t you enlighten us, Dounia?”
She looked at him with a defensive sharpness. How didhe guess how women felt? how utterly subjective passion was—at least in her? Phoebe also stirred back in her chair. His arrows were scattering too near. How could he tell—he was peering mischievously at her—that she strove often to forget her man in order to be happy with him?
“You see, she won’t tell. These women who think that being dumb is being secret. As I was saying, he controls the lady. And she controls her husband. And since he is high in power in the world downtown, my friend controls that also. No prettier, no more outlawed game could be imagined. I maintain it is pretty enough, Korn, for your praise.”
Korn chuckled. Tom raced on.
David had the sense that in a circling way he was the goal of Tom. Tom threw out flaring lines, struck here, flung there, with himself as center of his operations.
He lost this sense. It was replaced by the poignant one that Tom ignored him. If anything remained of the earlier impression, merely that the avoidance was planned. Tom paid more heed to every one in the room! His attention was flattering and was canny. He baited Dounia, but Dounia could not bait him. Durthal and Lunn were subsidiary strings that reënforced his theme: and the women. He wove his complex music with the lives and thoughts of all those present. And when he noticed David, it was to prod him—to hurt him.
Then, still another sense. David began to feel himself separate from this noisy element he was immersed in. He put forth spiritual fingers to explore it. He drew his shredded findings in; he began to explore himself.
He felt a hazardous balance, swung safe from fall by an impalpable thread, between himself and this room: himself and Tom. Even the gaslights, naked and stiff and hot, were elements of Tom. He was on the other side and was alone. But there was a joy in the experience of separation. He wasapart, impregnable. He could poise somewhat the laughter, the surge, the flection about him; arrive at himself.... Was he impregnable after all? Why, then, hurt?
... Wine soaked soft these men and women—these prisons of sense. Sense swirled unhindered upward, danced with spiraling cohesion beneath the gasjets....
The door pushed open again. A man, dull shouldered, with heavy head and tread and unlit eyes, came in and nodded and sat down at the end of the table beside Korn. With the door wide for a moment a strange world stood in the hall beside the room: a world, cool and hidden.