VI
Deeply the luminous complex stir that came to him as he stood straining in the hall and gave up his hat and gave up his coat to the silent butler, that came through barring tapestries of blue upon mist of laughter and words, of feminine silks and smoke, of tinkle of frail china, made Tom afraid. He parted the swerving draperies as one cuts a wave, plunging into a sea. At once he was bound with this new terse element.
Fragments of Ohio still clung to him. He would have reeled in this dazzlement had there been space. But the room’s brittle density upheld him, pushed him slowly in the sense of its scarce visible grain. Tom was submerged smiling.
Already a force worked in him, digesting this dense life, making it a function of his own, making its subtle fumes a stimulant for the force making it a function. Tom’s mind groped, as he walked lightly, for an old-time hurt.... He had been badly cut in the wrist by a fall through a rocky road. For a month his cut wrist was bound close. When the bandage was off and the air let in, his wrist had seemed to possess a power of flight out of all proportion with his other wrist, with the remainder of his body. This had made for dissonance. It was as if only by good attention he held the soaring wrist in place. So now, his suddenly liberated will, as compared to all his body. Tom relaxed on the balls of his feet and had the adroitness to look about him. His field, this. In his two prematurely aged hands could he not toss this world? He felt power, he felt grace. His eyes gleamed. He laughed. Words, polished and caparisoned, flew from his mouth as if the Design fitting them to him were absolute, were mystic. Tom’s body was taut now. His mind had gathered in this reeling quality. But his body held to his will, as an artist sways to his violin. Meantime, still, the brittle density along whose imperceptible grain Tom flowed. Ladies with subtle ways of calling attention to their bosoms by suppressing them: their arms came angularly forth from the compressed and mysterious domain like spouts of energy—like escapes of self. So their arms, so their voices. At arm’s end a tea-cup: at voice’s end a word. Neither important. Sip tea, sip words. But the attention was engrossed in a deeper quaffing. These spouting shreds of self could be joined, could create a circuit, could release a current from heart to heart, from loin to loin. Tom felt this. He felt the suffused emotion of this splintering welter. He saw in the words, in the arms of ladies, sparks of invitation, fuses corruscating back to mute stores of combustible sensation. All of the afternoon seemed a disguisement, a limitless deferring of the reality of all the wills there massed. Tom wondered by what constant guard the fuses never burned to their full length, the explosives never went off: how they kept sheathed from this glitter of temptation. He perceived that the flames were cold and lightless. He perceived that the fires shot off into air: were free of substance: were in some careful way remote from the pent inflammables in every breast. And Tom had suddenly the vision of fireworks, blazing in a night above a score of hands that flashed white and calm in the broken darkness. Men and women displaying fire only outside themselves. Perhaps at the most, some inner rim of char.
He saw the goal of the grain-ward course he had been flowing. There was the hostess.
Her vibrancy was freer. She had space about her. In her true light at last, a certain glow that was warm, since this energy was not, as in the others, so instantly splintered off by the packed impingement. She was insulated but Tom could touch her. Her glow came forth: he found a glow of his own. He liked this Mrs. Laura Duffield.
He had the sense of her subduedness as of a charm weighty enough to sink in this pandemonium of flicker. He bowed to pick it up.
“I have fought my way through to you, Mrs. Duffield. Congratulate me.”
She held back her head; he saw the fading of her golden hair, the age of her throat, the indomitable blue of her eyes.
“This must be Mr. Rennard!”
She threw back her head still further, as if to send her laughter upward, and, boyishly, thrust out her hand. Taking it, Tom added to his vision the full ripe crowding of her breast—no longer firm to stand up alone—and the delicacy of her wrist.
She shunted him off almost at once: introducing him here and there, squandering the charm of her attention as one tosses showers of coin out of reach. He had no more of her.
But as Tom, having reached this goal of his progression, was now silted aimlessly away in wide, flat spurts of movement, he observed the crowd thrust together, into a unit, into a reason. It was so he carried it with him back into the hall, into the street. The crowd’s form turned crass as he seemed to understand the will that had brought it into being.... It was her house: she had created this turmoil. Why? Why, each Wednesday afternoon,—to make no mention of doubtless other times,—did this glowing woman need to congregate such spill of life, pack it into her rooms, feed it, coax it to place its stamp upon her? What joy could there be in what must largely stultify her individual world? Tom pondered. Was this greedy crowd somehow a vessel in which Mrs. Duffield poured herself? That it might carry her off? leave in the stir of her curtains, in the perfumed mist on her bibelots, a substitute for her own marks which should have quickened these? And if so, why?
Tom’s casual yet forever determined mind associated these impressions widely until he knew that such habits were a deep part of the City’s nature. He groped with his light.
“If I understand her, I hold her:—and all she holds. I’ll go again. I’ll see that this promiscuous call makes for a more intimate occasion.”
The occasion came. But already Tom had learned to like the gatherings he was pleased to call promiscuous. Their fumes curled into his nerves, made them willing for more. A hint of his new appetite in his condemnation to Cornelia.
“Business, my dear Sis: Business. And of the lowest degree of horridness.”
“I can see where it must help your connections.”
“Let us hope so! Lord!” Tom paced up and down before Cornelia’s latest cast. “If I don’t get something out of these parties I shall have bartered my soul for nothing.... Satan will have cheated me.”
“He never does,” answered Cornelia.
Tom looked up as if stung.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing extraordinary, Tom. I am convinced that folks who strike a bargain with the Devil do so, not for specific gain, but because they like his company.”
Tom glowed at her with a cold smile of admiration.
“Splendid!... What does it mean?”
Cornelia’s sharp shoulders shrugged.
“I suppose I like Mrs. Duffield’s parties?”
“I am sure of it,” she snapped. Then, quietly, like a mother to her son, “So stop protesting, like a dear man. Yes?”
It was true. Tom knew it, however, as well as his wise sister. She understood with a great clarity only a part of Tom. She did not know how, in these protestations, he pleaded against himself, not with her. There was a depth in Tom more cold to these mundane blandishments than the surface was warm to them. Tom’s conflict was deeper than the desire to conceal from himself and from his sister this worldliness which guided him about. It was a conflict rooted in his nature. There was a part of Tom that despised his conduct, hated his success, rose forever like a gaunt, uninvited guest to spoil his banquet. A ghost in Tom that was very much alive....
It was born perhaps near the hour of Tom’s birth in Dahlton. A very looming part of the world of Tom was this father whom his mother loved. His father was there. He needed to be taken. He needed to be taken as his mother took him. At the beginning, the bar between the mother and her child has no reality to the child. Mother and child are one to the child’s rapt omniscience. The tall, gray-faced man had nervous hard hands which were strong. Often his hands viced the woman’s arms till she screamed: they screwed her to a chair while his words lashed her: they turned her about to the door she was ordered to pass through. Then, in that dawn of the world, those hands left the mother who was cowed; they took the passionate sprawling flesh of Tom and thrust him to his crib, they turned him about so that Tom’s eyes gazed at a blank wall whose denial of sight was terror.
Mrs. Rennard loved Tom’s father. Her senses had mostly pain of him, but passion also. Since her senses loved him, they needed to love what her husband gave them. Tom, feeling in these dim passionate days the aching presence of his father upon his world—upon his mother and upon himself—the visitation of his cruelty upon them—took him as did his mother. He shared his mother’s sensuous satisfaction in abject pain. Like her he made joy of anguish: like her, molded himself to love and to depend upon this man as the pain-giver, since such was the form of his love, such the burden of his support. Mrs. Rennard loved her husband, her senses took him. Tom looked upon his father with his mother’s senses.
His mother died. Curtin Rennard went to the child. He lifted him in his arms.
“Thomas,” he said, “you are to be a motherless child. Your mother is dead. I want you to pray with me to God—to thank Him for the cruel thing that He has brought upon us.”
Tom repeated his father’s words as his father spoke them. “My mother is gone, I bless You and thank You, God. She is gone, and I am alone without a mother. God, I thank You. She is gone to join the Chosen in Your presence. God, I thank You. My mother is gone—perhaps—to be damned in Hell. God, I bless You and thank You.”
Curtin Rennard took the child high in his arms: gazed into his frightened eyes: seemed pleased thereat, for he embraced him. Tom was happy then. He did not miss his mother.
He never missed her. All his will was fixed on the pain-dealing, passionate parent. His rival—his rival-self—his mother was no more there. He was more free to love, to suffer, to rebel, now that the great sick lover, the great sufferer, the unsucceeding rebel with her wide skirts and her clear wan forehead was gone from their world.
A deep and subtle relationship grew between the tremorous child and the thwarting, thwarted, powerful man, his father.
A relationship unmeasured and un-named in the peripheral vicissitudes of their ages and their minds. An eye unchecked by surfaces and the color of habit, drawn to the womb of life, must have found Tom’s love for his father in those days deeply atune with the love of his father’s wife who was dead: must have seen the bereaved love of Curtin Rennard astir for a new replenishment in all his children.
So deep a dream could not grow unchallenged in one as quick with reality as Tom. He rebelled. His nature munitioned itself for rebellion.
There was Cornelia. She saved herself from her father by making into an ideal her dim devotion to her mother. Tom took her as ally. Cornelia imaged her saving devotion in maternal deeds, she imaged it in clay. Her mother was sanctuary from the common danger. In Tom grew great love for his protecting sister: above all tense self-abandonment to his father’s greatest rival, the real world. Here lay freedom for Tom! His blood knew that the hidden love must scorch and shrivel in the sun. He courted the sun. He was in perpetual revolt against his father’s hold on his emotions: against his father’s closeted ideals: against the source of his father’s hold, his own deep identity with his mother.
Hence, Tom’s distrust of women, his devotion to Cornelia, the frenzied scatter of his forces in objective life. During Tom’s boyhood, he was almost a woman in his attitude toward women: in each of them he fought his mother, fought her betrayal of him—as of herself—to his dominant father. His love of Cornelia was at once a way-station for his self-freeing will and a substitute for the parental yokes from which he needed freedom.
Directly through her, indirectly against his father, Tom grew in love with imagery, with color, with the Symbol—the artist in Tom grew. From his passionate seeking of the outer world, there rose his power of success in society and in law. For the world loves the lavish spender of himself: it will run to the largess of his ruin as wolves to their meat.
Yet as Tom saw his practice swell, saw the doors behind which stood butlers open to him, the silent music of his blood went on. All these talents and emotions were reactions. Behind them stood the Image of a man—hating art, hating social intercourse, hating life,—of a man beckoning Tom back to an ecstatic, fabular peace. For that man’s hatreds also were reactions... behind them....
All that ancient lure was now resistance to the life Tom flung himself upon, even as all this life was his resistance to that hidden lure. He would consecrate his talent, he would build him his church, Success. But his mind ran against it, weakened the rock on which he builded. Cornelia was knowing. Here were depths beyond her vision. She saw chiefly the young man so soaked in his Puritan upbringing that he was loath to face the joys he had of his worldly undertakings: a very usual hypocrisy and of no importance, but one she hated since she was full of it also.
“I don’t see,” she said, “why you should be ashamed of enjoying Mrs. Duffield’s parties. Heaven knows we had lonely enough years, here, first.”
“You go with artists—with intelligent people. You have too much kindness to imagine how dull the rich and the successful are.”
“Nonsense! Their success speaks continual wise words. Their gold is brilliant.”
So they swayed back and forth, these two. They were equals. They had never become rivals—before David.
Laura Duffield invited her new friend to dine.
“Come early,” she said, “I want you to meet my son, before he goes to his usual party.”
He entered the drawing-room: a young girl and a young man were there.
“Farge and Marcia, this is Mr. Rennard.”
Their polite greeting was sauced in an expectant languor and a very harmless resentment. It was as if they were resigned to a bad habit of their mother.
Marcia, looking at Tom’s trimly rhythmic body, thought: “It is lucky Mamma is getting a divorce and must behave.”
Farge was too dull to syllogize but he twinged with a sort of envy and almost pondered out: “My friends are not freakish enough for Ma.”
Tom was seated and Mrs. Duffield was already in full talk.
He found it hard, listening to her, to take in these two. As she talked, she insisted on holding his eyes. It was as if she talked for no greater purpose. Marcia and Farge sat on a lounge just outside his range. They were looking at him. Farge smoked a cigarette; he had offered none to Tom. Marcia leaned far back, her legs were outstretched straight; she threw one ankle over the other. Mrs. Duffield made good the deficiency of her son. She never smoked, but she had full provisions for her friends. Tom felt how from ankle to neck this girl was firm and spare and full of a voluptuous relaxation. Only her eyes were taut, perhaps from poising him. She did not listen to her mother’s words. She hummed a tune very faintly: her upward foot marked time.
She got up. She jerked her shoulders, as if the gown that clung to them were an obtrusion. Perhaps the obtrusion was elsewhere in the room. “It must be late, Farge?”
The boy gave a limp hand: Marcia nodded sharply. Tom felt that Farge had not wanted to shake hands, and that Marcia would not have minded. He noticed that this girl was built very like a boy: and that Farge with his pudgy rondured body and pink cheeks was rather like a girl. Alone with Mrs. Duffield he found that he had been attracted by her daughter.
He was not sorry. This charm upon him made it easier to be charming. He told an anecdote of that day in court: he had been in court seventeen days before, but instinct made him say “to-day.” Talking, it came to him how far more naïve and fresh this oldening, troubled mother was than her young daughter. Tom did not understand this. He felt it would not have been safe to tell white lies to Marcia. He wondered why the strange weariness and slackness of the girl came to him as pleasure.
“Why, Mrs. Duffield, is the younger generation prematurely old?”
She laughed with her liquid laughter. She did not guess beneath his question.
“Why? Do you mean yourself? You are not prematurely old. Oh, I am sure not. You are mature. You have been forced so early to play a man’s part in the world.”
“That can’t be it. I see it most in young folk that do not work at all.”
“Well, not working at all is the part of the very old.”
“I am still not satisfied. I almost think that the shrewd parents of Competitive America have learned to palm off their own weariness on their children. Just like them it would be: a trick of the trade.”
“It is nothing but sophistication, dear Mr. Rennard. We old folks have the naïveté of savages. Our children are civilized. That is all.” She examined him. “Does this weariness repel you?”
Tom watched sharply without heightening the look of his eyes. She had no idea whence had come his thoughts.
“No,” he ventured. “That is proof, I suppose, that I am touched myself? It attracts me rather. Of course, not weariness alone.”
Mrs. Duffield was weary: endlessly weary. Often she flung herself to bed with a horror of the needs of her toilet. Often she awoke in the morning with the demands of getting up a mountain in her path. She took Tom’s words to herself. She would not have to grimace her weariness away. It would be pleasure to be with him.
Soon they were friends. When he came in to her, she thrust out an arm in greeting, and did not budge from her lounge.
“Make yourself nice and at home; or I’ll have to get up and do it for you. I’m so comfy!”
Her weariness went before her admission of it with him. He stood over her; she was aware that his eyes could see within the negligent folds of her flimsy housegown. What did it matter? They were friends. Once she said:
“Make believe this is an evening dress. Then the décolleté won’t shock you.”
“Then also, it won’t interest me,” said Tom.
She needed to know everything about him: that she might help him.
“I’ve made up my mind on that!”
She told him of herself more and more: more and more easily. She told herself that she could not otherwise gain his confidence: and she needed that really to help him, really to be “friends.” In truth she craved his help, she was glad to purchase it with whatever aid her place and her connections might afford.
“It is hard to speak of such things,” she said, half sitting up on her lounge, with a bare arm falling straight toward the floor. At once it was easy. The ease of her lying there before him and the glow of his eyes taking her in were a lubricant to her words. She could never have spoken so at first in a tailor-made suit. She would have laughed with the freedom of sincere denial at a friend who ventured to link the exhibition of her soul with the exhibition of her body.
It was through Laura Duffield that Tom came to his real establishment in practice. Gilbert Lomney was her cousin. For him, Laura was a brilliant woman who somehow had managed also to be good. He had great admiration for her, not a little fear. It was by her strategy that “Lomney and Rennard” was brought about.
The City had welcomed its own stuff in Tom and Cornelia. The City had come from the same sort of place. At the beginning, Tom felt this not at all. He was frightened by the City. He did not understand when its heights bent down and touched him. Each suppliant before New York goes through the same amaze as the unfriendly Town proves lewdly hospitable. Few dare to admit her wantonness since the avowal would take from the measure of their prowess. In the early bewilderment of being taken-in, of finding a naked mistress in place of a shrouded goddess, the critical faculties are struck to sleep.
The years of the preparing of success in Tom were like the growth of love in their delirious simplicity, the sort of wild progression that one finds best revealed in mathematics. A true tumescence. Tom found some one who liked his humor and his freedom. He introduced him to a strategic hostess. There was opened a breach in the trenched City. There was more than one of these amiable friends. Each multiplied opportunity at a geometric rate. Tom was soon in a position to choose, and from choice comes judgment. He was soon surfeited with chances, and from surfeit comes disillusion.
To be alone in the City requires a technique that only the child born in the City or the genius may possess. On all sides of Tom were people ready to be amused, ready to use him, ready to use him up. No bright young man without the taint of an uncomfortable message need go to waste in New York. Each clever little thing he does or says will echo, until, if he does not take care, he may be deafened by its rebounding clamor. He may drop like a pebble, he may sink straight to the oblivious bottom of the lake: but not before myriad wreathings forth have made him the hour’s center of a rippling world. If he step forward, he will step on some one’s heels, and that some one’s friends will, for this chance beneficence, cherish and advertise him. If he step back, the same thing will occur. If he stand still, he will obstruct the one behind him who is moving forward, and this too will net him a sincere appreciation. He must be a genius or a willful man to escape acceptance by the City.
Tom Rennard was neither. He found that the man in whose law-offices he learned far better than in law-school appreciated him and, when he was admitted to the Bar, sent him work. He found, arguing a trivial motion, that he was eyed with interest by nonchalant attorneys as he stepped back to the counsel-table. He found that his brain could be sold if at first he were willing to sell it cheap. Lawyers too busy drumming business thought they were exploiting Tom when they employed him to be of counsel in some tort case and let him do the work. Several dull fellows with gratuitous patronage stuck to him regularly until they found themselves with fees in their pockets and with their sinecures entailed. Tom had a way of making a Judge smile that the men of the Bar respected as they would not, in a lifetime, respect Justice. He was quick to see that the able counsel acts, before the Bench, not as a lawyer but as a man: that the tricks of erudition and the flourishes of oratory gleaned from law-school had best be packed away. His average Judge was a shrewd politician who, above all, must not be made to feel his juridic ignorance. What he required from counsel was a mirror in which he might see his power reflected: and his power consisted not at all in judicial learning—display of that was an embarrassment—but in a canny sense of men and use of means. Tom talked to the Bench, man to man, asking-man to man-who-hath, with a candor most attorneys needed twenty years to strip to. His attitude brought reward. Judges leaned comfortably back and talked things over with him. When he reappeared before them, he was remembered.
“But do you think, Mr. Rennard, that this point is pertinent?”
“Yes, your Honor, I do. And I am sure if you will just recall to mind the case of Larson versus Mann—the question is one that has long interested me and I looked it up——”
Who was this Mr. Rennard? this young and unknown Mr. Rennard who had a way of warming the air of a court-room to his own purposes? The question was asked: the questioners answered it. They gave him respect before he had clients: they gave him the beginnings of repute at a time when he had nothing else. Hating and fearing each other, they wanted Rennard on their side.
Tom’s advance in the social world was synchronous. The ladies who give teas are the sort who care for unattached young men. They are unhappily married, or at least unsatisfyingly so: if they have children they wish to get free of loving them too much. Grown sons can be admired safely in a surrogate: grown daughters can be restrained from mastery in a fierce competition. The smart young man may be a weapon and a drug for the woman nearing forty with social honors to defend. He serves to protect her from life and to supply her with it. The relation has its hazards. It must run the course of the golden mean. The man must not really love, not really win his lady. For her sake, as for his. If she gives herself consciously to him, she will begin at once to bully him like a son or to use him up like a husband. He will become both son and husband instead of the escape from them. She will simply repeat her family failures concentratedly upon him. He will no longer provide a cure for her life. He will stand on the brink of disaster or dismissal.
Through no prescience and no conscious cunning; rather by the balance of his nature, Tom was made for such a rôle. And Laura Duffield needed him.
Meantime had come the climax of her troubles, Mrs. Duffield was getting a divorce. It was being borne in on her that her husband was nearly bankrupt and that her alimony would be in ironic contrast to the demands of her position. Her way of living was no small part of her “morality.” It was menaced.
Deems Duffield was a broker. For fifteen years he had made a debauch of his life and won from it a rare measure of content. When at last Mrs. Duffield decided on divorce, his fortune—his last fortune—had gone the way of his self-respect. It was plain that there would be difficulty in keeping Farge at College. Fortunately, Marcia had no educational conceits. She was at ease with a few lovely gowns: she was informed with a spirit of shrewd economy that amazed her improvident mother. Duffield seldom saw his children: which Marcia considered rather silly. “Why not? He’s delightful company.” She had the wit to enjoy him, perhaps potentially the depravity not to be concerned with his. But Farge was dully loyal and not on speaking terms with his prodigal father. Duffield’s ruinous irresponsibility had broken his son’s spirit. In the example of his father’s evil charm, Farge lost that brusque approach to the demands of life which mark off certain men from the hordes of the mediocre. His cynicism was inept, his anger impotent: his confidence was gone. Adversely, her father’s nature went toward the making of Marcia. It taught her to swim nimbly between rocks, love danger, understand the world. Her cynicism became a deadly intuition of the channels of success: her anger was a sheath preventing the incisions of sentiment and pity: her break with childish faith marked the emergence of a design based on that faith’s falsity. It seemed to her a trait far too emotional in her mother to be angry at the man who had ruined them all.
“Leave him be! You know he’s amusing to talk to. Never worry, Mamma. Soon as I’m tired of this I’ll get married and fix you for life.”
There was no slightest doubt in Mrs. Duffield of Marcia’s capacity to keep her promise.
From her confidence in part came the inspiration to bear up, to borrow dangerous sums of money. For years the Duffields had been spending twice what came in: he on his Broadway favorites, she on her social equipage. But even after Duffield’s strike against paying for his wife’s affairs, even after the first skirmishes of the divorce with their cold proof that the clever broker would be able to escape with a scant alimony, her social functions remained brilliant, her head remained high. Laura Duffield was playing the rôle her faith, her one faith, sanctified. She needed the confessional of youth for the strength to do so.
One last time, her husband called on her. A smooth, stout, suave man: smartly groomed, full of sweet words, twinkling of eye.
“Laura,” he said, “it will be bad business for us both if you insist on this divorce. And the worst goes to you. I can weigh in to a mighty small income, of which half, dear, will be yours. Most of my winnings are of a sort, my dear, that it would make Justice blush to have to rule on. So, considerate gentleman that I am, I must hide from the Judge what might prove embarrassing. Hand in hand, you and I can bear up and have no fear. For all that is mine is thine. But, dear, if you insist on this legal separation you must be satisfied with what will turn out to be your legal separation from my money. You would faint, beloved, if I told you what you may expect.”
Mrs. Duffield saw the very grim reality in his threat: knew as alone the social officer knows what misery of deceit and sordidness the want of funds must bring to the fulfillment of the one life she could live. She answered:
“I can’t stand any longer the thought that you are my husband. I must be free of that. I am unclean and I am taking a bath.”
Duffield smiled.
“The bath, my dear, you took some years ago. Why repeat it in public?”
She winced.
“I have no wish to resume relations with you, Laura. All I object to is this exhibition.”
“Unfortunately, it has to be. I relish it no more than you. I deserve it less. Our marriage was public. My cleaning my hands of you must be public also. If you were so considerate and scrupulous as you pretended, you could save us much by not defending the suit.”
“I may be considerate. But if I am hit, I hit back. I have not objected to your virtual quarantine of me, these past ten years. I have behaved and kept up front. I have shown in at your parties and paid your debts when they grew troublesome. The only time, my dear, ever to pay a debt. But if you insist on placarding my love-affairs, I’ll fight.”
“Very well. Go and do your worst. I shall of course get the dirty end of this. I have, all my life. But don’t expect I’ll make peace with you.”
“Laura, you are a fool.” Duffield stood up.
“I know I am. I am sort of glad, that you think I am a fool. It puts me miles out of reach of your kind of wisdom. I know I am a fool. You had your share in making me one. But even you shan’t succeed in making me a coward.”
Deems Duffield sighed and drew on his fawn-hued gloves and sent a little whistling note through his shut teeth. Coming up to his wife, he looked at her and slowly shook his head. He placed his hands on her thin shoulders: their eyes met.
“It’s a fight, then, my dear?” He said this pleasantly.
“I am sorry, Deems, you have made such a ruin of our lives.”
“I am sorry, also, Laura.”
He drew her quickly to him. He kissed her forehead and stepped back.
“Good-by. You are the best thing I have ever had, and I hate to see that I have lost you. But it’s not the best things we need most, my dear. It’s the ordinary things. Often in life, we have to get along without the best in order to have the common.”
She stood breathing deeply, white and strained from his words. In her mind was a racing kaleidoscope: how he first had kissed her, and taught her love; how fearful she had somehow been, and how he had fallen away. In her soul was a sense of guilt. She said nothing: he was gone.
She rang the bell.
“Delia,” she said to the entering maid, “I have changed my mind. If any one calls this afternoon, I am in.”
She threw herself on the chaise-longue and picked up her novel. The Egoist of Meredith. Its crystalline obscurity distressed her. It seemed so far removed from life: so frigidly in diapason between the Sun and the North Pole. She threw the book away and scribbled a sentence on the edge of a newspaper that lay near her hand.
“All marriages that turn out monstrously begin as idylls. Indifference at the start is the one defense against horror at the end.”
“How I wish I could express myself!” she sighed. She tore off the edge of paper, crumpled it, thrust it in her corsage. Marcia was there.
“I met father in the street.” Marcia made no further greeting to her mother. “He seemed in fine fettle.”
Speaking she crossed to her own room. She shut the door. Her thought ran: “Papa hasn’t Mamma’s family but he makes up for it in liveliness.” She examined herself in the mirror and took off her hat. “I wonder whether it is a wise thing to confuse marriage and love. I wonder whether the woman must always get the worst of it, like Mamma. Perhaps not. Mamma is the so-called innocent one. Perhaps the rule is that the innocent one, of whatever sex, should get the worst of it. I’ll remember that.” She had dropped her suit on the floor and slipped into a blue crêpe de chine gown that hung straight and square from her shoulders. Within it, her body moved like a still sure mechanism. “Oh, well,” she said, half aloud, throwing herself on her couch and taking a book, “the sins of the parents shall educate the children unto the third and fourth generation.”
She remembered her unopened letters on the table near the lamp beside her. She reached for an ivory paper-cutter and began to open them.
One of them, from an unknown hand:—
Dear Miss Duffield:
I have something of interest I wish to tell to you, and I must see you alone to do so. Will you have tea with me, say at the Orange Tea-Pot, next Wednesday at five? You will catch the reason and the caution implied in the rather unfrequented place. It is not bad, though.
I hope to see you, and am,
Yours most sincerely,
Thomas Rennard.
Marcia read the remaining notes: placed them all back in their envelopes upon the table: took her book. She read for an hour. She called the maid, ordered a bath, undressed. She stood for a moment before her cheval glass, hesitant to throw her bath-robe over her nakedness. With a free delight she watched the bright strength of her body. Her hips were slight and firm: her breasts were two swift standing rondures: her abdomen drew tautly down into the straight and narrowly set legs. Marcia knew from statues she had seen that this faint triangle of strain, tracing and pointing downward at her thighs, was almost masculine. There was voluptuousness in this: and in the dear black hair falling about her body, making its whiteness burn. Marcia hated that flabbiness of mind and form which she called feminine. Coquettishly, as if to bar another’s pleasure, she threw a robe across her shoulders. She seemed to be outside desiring to be in. With the check to her nibbling sense, her mind went free, and she began to think of Thomas Rennard.
How was he able to be sure she would not take his presuming letter to the lady he was assiduously courting—and exploiting? Marcia caught herself so forming her question. She tried to change it: “How does he know I won’t?... Well, I will.” She wondered if she would. Imperceptibly, she had returned to the first form of her question. She resented Tom. Her mother was working for him with far greater will than any of the other “friends” had been able to inspire. It was dear already that this young flasher from Ohio was going to have the dull but golden Lomney for a partner. A bit dangerous, thought Marcia. What if next year, her mother tired of him? What if he proved too false? Marcia smiled. There seemed small doubt of that. There he would be, deep in their Group, inextricable. Matters must not go so fast. Marcia must delay them. She pictured the pair, lost in their confidences, and was troubled how.
She came back to the note. What had heartened him to send it? Was Mr. Rennard after all a rash importunate, one easily ruined? Marcia did not doubt the true purpose of the note. He wanted her to tea. He could not pay attention to her here. That was enough. Did he truly desire this enough to risk his hold on her mother? A dangerous—compliment.
She went over the always chance occasions she had seen him. Never alone. She had felt the pointedness of his glances toward her: caught him talking to her mother with a strained interest in her own mood. She had tested this by changing her mood and watching his rapid awareness. He was a curious man: bright, lithe in all senses, unbelievably hard, yet fraught with a glow that she was sure impact might turn to fire. She wandered over his personality. She felt he was too clever and too sensible to be sincere. Yet his standards seemed too directly those of his intelligence and strength to lend reason to insincerity. She did not know. She did know she would have tea with him: and say nothing to her mother.
It was easily reasoned. “I’ll control him, myself. If he goes too far or too fast, I’ll have the weapon of a word to Mamma. What a brazen, simple country boy it is!...”
She went: she was right at least in this, that Tom had nothing to impart to her “of interest” beyond that he liked her and of course couldn’t see her really at her mother’s. In all else, she was wrong. She could not understand this sudden, cold-passionate man. In writing to Marcia Duffield, he had not understood himself.
“Perhaps I’ll know better when I have talked to her across a table.”
She came with a spur of adventure. She was trapping her foe. While he reveled in his success, letting his pleasure out, she would enmesh him. Thereafter, should he ever move in a direction she did not like, Marcia would soon show him in whose hands he was. Marcia was so astir with her scheme that she thought herself cool and collected. She had a dogged affection for her mother: a sort of animal loyalty in which was properly admixed a very human loyalty to herself. Here, she was quite sure, there was question only of her mother.
Tom, meantime, waited and went over in his mind the impressions in confidence of which he had dared write his letter.
“A girl absolutely incapable of carrying an altruistic act to an end... and yet—a Christian! If she resolved to serve her mother by telling her I was flirting with her daughter—and she is convinced that this would serve her mother: she must be hostile instinctively to her mother’s friend—she would have to be sure, first, she did not care for me. She is coming to-day to find out. It all depends on to-day. If she does not like me she will betray me with a sense of serving her mother. If she does like me, she will take secret delight in making her mother a fool.... Dear little fool herself! If she knew how much I love her black straight hair and her white straight body, how little I care in contrast for her mother’s interest in my future! If she knew—well, she must know.”
He went forward, seeing her at the door—seeing the shrewd determination in her face as she came forward to him.
“Miss Duffield,” he said, “you are not going to make the mistake so many make of thinking what I do a deliberate thing. If you will examine my note with care, you will find in it all the silly guile of sudden inspiration. I am a creature of moods.” He looked at her as he had wanted to, across the table. “So are you, Miss Duffield.”
“How do you know?”
“Why else did you come?”
She was not so foolish as to say: “There might be other reasons.” She was not so willing as to admit his statement. She was silent. Tom began to laugh: a clear, long laughter. When he was done, they both knew he had laughed something away.
The rest was easy. Marcia was certain that Tom was the contrary of canny and deliberate. He liked her: he had done a direct thing to see her. He was unworldly as ever a man must be who understands a woman.
And she liked him. She liked the respectful way he spoke of her mother. Somehow, it gave her a sense that he was trustworthy: although she had no thought of why this quality should particularly interest her. She liked the assumption in his words of her superior perspective.
“Of course, Mrs. Duffield would not understand our coming down here to have tea together. Dear lady! Does not a tinge of deception have to go into a sincere relation? Every mother must forget her daughter if she would live. It is the duty not alone of her friends—of her daughter also—to see she may. For her to know the truth of you and me would be, not to know the truth from the standpoint of her and me, but an irrelevant, damaging lie.”
He said these words, not pleadingly, not in argument, but as two co-religionists perhaps might mention an unmooted point: or as two students might discuss a lesson they had learned together.... Tom had, not an enemy in the house of Duffield, but another ally: a subtle, an amazing one. Far from having been delivered into Marcia’s hands, the hastening events laid her at least equally in his.
They balanced the accounts....
Marcia was wine for Tom. Never before had he been so held by the body of a woman. Never had he dreamed a woman could so swing with both reserves and desires: so without effort, without stint.
She filled his room with miracle. She filled his life with the ease of power. How did this come about: this wonder he had in touching her cold skin, in meeting the hardness of her teeth, her soft lips? What was this Marcia?
Madness.... Madness in sanity as wine in a cool cup. She came to his warm room. She did not kiss him. She did not speak. She did not stir. She was there.
She felt a flame rise near her. It would soon catch her clothes, burn them up. Her it would temper, make mellow. She stood, looking at the flame, this subtle man, who held back his hands and whose eyes were on her. What should she do? Why did he not come forward? He burned straight, there across the room, like a flame in a windless world. Always his hands held back. Her clothes sagged to a dulling weight.... Marcia stood swaying with the need of burning. Would he not help? Then she would help herself. Delicious fool that he was!
He was perfume and flame: each pore of her was big with him.
Tom watched the firm, still whiteness of her self emerge from the lie of her clothes. No woman. She was a god. She was a pillar of purity and strength. No lascivious rondures and flauntings of flesh, no softnesses. A human form stripped to essential grace. An instrument of living, spare and direct like a command, flaying like a rod, swift like his passion.
They loved.
They gave no thought to the Shadow—the long intricate life-way of which the passion of woman and man is the mere flaming threshold. Both of them knew this. Each drank, in the other, a secret satisfaction whose mystery and timelessness thrilled them. They did not understand themselves or each other. Their love’s dissidence from the plodding and gluttonous way of husband and wife was a brew sharp, sweet, wild: they were drunk in it together. No more they had in common than their intoxication. Themselves, each other, the nature of their love—all was unknown and secret. They scarce spoke of it. They drank and were glad, and were never content....
Out of the silence of each, they came again. The subtle liquor worked its miracle; they were one into a flame whose leaping walled about them—disappeared as a song stops—leaving them their silences. These carried them off, each to a far deliberate world. No memory, no reason: absence of desire. Until such time as a rising murmur in their separate silences swerved them, flung their silences once more together.
All this, merely the spill of Tom’s full life; prelude in hers. His work prospered. Tom had the genius of diligence. He poured himself no more into his affairs downtown than into some unremunerative affair at a friend’s, where the price of applause was exhaustion. With Tom, exhaustion was breathing space till the next passion. So he prospered in work and in play. Laura Duffield was his devoted friend. Gilbert Lomney was his partner. To both, as to Marcia, he was satisfying in the measure that was wise.
Upon this heyday of his success, David now blundered as a dull boy stumbles over another’s floor-full of tin soldiers.
There seemed no cease to the miracle of Marcia: to the delight of the insatiety between them. Laura Duffield was divorced and more than ever with her new gallant friend. In her family and in her world, he was a secret champion, a strong prop. His relations had wreathed out. He was welcome in many houses: he was a chord of many circles. His partner had come to worship him with a canine fidelity. Lomney was so dully at home in his desirable set that he no longer felt its desirability: he was convinced that in introducing Tom he did the set a favor. Tom did not disillusion him. He laughed about it with Cornelia, and made her partner of his pleasures in order to keep her partner of his reserves. With her to see on the morrow, Tom took to the gilded foyers, the gilded youth of the City with a cool grace that lissomly assured his comfort and his usage. Laura Duffield gave him a gesture of confidence; Marcia the glow of triumph: his law affairs the agility to move forth and back with telling unconcern. Cornelia gave him what he needed of a home. He was a splendid product of the City. Now, David Markand, with his dear clumsiness, to clog and clutter it all.
Marcia felt it first, felt it before he did.
She sat on his bed; she looked at him where he smoldered in a corner smoking intemperate cigarettes. It was a mood, she thought; she said nothing. She put on her clothes.
“Good-by.”
He tore apart his revery. “Good-by.”
But the edge of his love was dulling. Always now, he was likely to leave her side and sit away from her and look away and smoke: while she lay aching with blinded desire, watching him, pressing her breast with angering hands till its pain stop the pain of her heart.
She sat up suddenly so he was forced to look. His eyes were upon her whom they loved; yet they were distant, they were lost in a mist, they did not see her. In her beauty she stood up to him, all her clear straight agile body calling him close: he bit his lips and his eyes were looking beyond her.
Then she said: “There’s some one else, is there not, Tom?”
He did not look at her eagerness. He shook his head.
“There’s another woman.”
He was angry. “It’s not so.” More force spilling away that her body yearned for. This urged her on.
“There’s another woman!”
She needed his focussing upon her, even if it were but in wrath. She stood over him now. She knew he loved her so, with the lines of her body shrill and clarified in standing. Tom was white with anger. He grasped her and broke her in anger. She laughed in love....
He loved her as never before, that afternoon. Because he loved her as never again.
The year that David lived alone was the year of Tom’s struggle with him. It was not a question of changing his life. It was a question of capturing the subjective opposition, as it came forward in the nearness of his new friend.
Tom knew a way. This inner inhibition stood objectified in David. Let him capture David. David was his old love of giving instead of constantly taking, of being calm and passive instead of constantly pursuing. In him, Tom saw the restful cleanliness of despising this race he was running hotly: the futility of spending one’s dreams upon a contest that was never done and whose prize was death. He would not give up his entry. He needed the mundane sense of power, the badge of success: he was too sensual to forego the liquor of attention. But he needed also to still the voice that kept saying: “Fool!” By the old process of projection, he now saw these words in the eyes of David. If he could have David, he could have silence.
He watched him with a growing steadfastness and a dwindling clarity. He knew at last that he wanted to win him. He knew that the affection between David and Cornelia stood most in his way.
All that year, he studied David. He came to understand his habits and his moods. He inserted himself upon his groping friend with the deliberate reserve of a chemist applying weighed ingredients to a solution.
The measuring was no easy task. David was within himself. He was hidden. It was plain he showed more of his mind and spirit to Cornelia than to her brother. They spent evenings, late afternoons together. Walks on Sundays became almost a custom. Tom was frequently along. There was no slightest wish to bar him. But Cornelia encouraged those very traits in David that must keep him intractable, secure to himself.
“And the world,—and the world?” Tom argued. “You are living in the world. It touches you on every side, at every instant. You are wrong to try to ignore or to despise it.”
Usually, Cornelia answered for her friend.
“We are the world, if we choose to have it so. What you mean by the world is only the gross and the impure. Why alloy yourself with that?”
Tom laughed. He knew this was David working upon his sister. Her life and her work were essentially conformist. She was no hermit, no rebel. She had had her great revolt, she had settled. She was not so very different from him. But Tom was too wise to say these things before their friend. To humiliate Cornelia before David would have the effect of estranging him. David would judge him and not understand. The idea that he could influence Cornelia was beyond David’s belief.... All this behind Tom’s laughing.
He kept silent, above all kept pleasant. He saw Cornelia’s motherhood once more hunting and hungry. She was going to preserve David from a hostile world, though it be with her own body. He watched her passion and David’s dispassionate compliance. He worked his own will when they were alone.
“Cornelia has a habit I can well enough understand of wishing to make my friends into what she would have liked to be, herself.”
“Isn’t she what she would like to be herself?” asked David.
Tom smiled, and was serious. “To succeed, for most of us, means breaking through an iron barrier. Even those of us who do so cannot escape a little maiming.”
“You are so violent in your statements, Tom!” The idea of Cornelia maimed was nonsense to him.
They went on talking of her new season’s work.
“There were a number of unfortunate little changes she had to submit to in her exhibit. I was heart-broken. But thank the Lord, Cornelia is sensible. Else, she might be a good artist but she’d be broke.”
“Why won’t they let people alone, when they have beautiful things to say?”
“Oh, they will, quick enough! Strictly alone. They’ll not pester them with orders. You mustn’t take Cornelia’s art too seriously, David. It is chiefly her art of living. If you think her very pretty statues great, you’ll be taking to heart every word she tells you....”
All subtly merged with his love for her and his loyalty and knowledge of the years when he had slaved for her and given her her chance. David could not bring himself to the consciousness of an objection. He said to himself:
“Tom is simply honest beyond any honesty I have ever imagined.” He was right. Tom was. He was not disloyal to his sister. He said no word of untruth. He was as kind and as loving as he had ever been. As ten years before, he would have sacrificed much for her welfare. But she was playing a game against him: and he answered.
David came to believe the hot-and-cold of talk with Tom and Cornelia Rennard an atmosphere implied in friendship with such clever, exceptional folk. He began to feel that Tom’s candor was to be prized, even if it was not always easy to interpret: and that Cornelia’s warm encouragement was to be discounted, since it meant escape from the ungenerous reality Tom told him he must soon or late confront. Because of, and in spite of her sweet charm, Cornelia somehow must be discounted.
He was sure he cared no less for her. He was a man: he was understanding a woman’s natively circumscribed philosophy, her natural taste for a reserved and personal world. Cornelia stood already, artist though she was and rebel at least in one gesture of her life—for Family. Tom was the world of affairs and of adventure. Oh, yes: David began to see all that. So of course he could understand the little flares of strain between the two. When Cornelia’s attitude implied a rebuke of her brother’s ways, he must listen sweetly to her words—as true to herself and her world—and not too seriously apply them.
Pure Tom all this. But only Cornelia knew it.
“What on earth are you trying to do with him?” she asked her brother.
“My dear Cornelia, how you talk!”
“Listen!”
There were similarities enough between them. She also could drive full force toward a single point: whip her intensity till it became almost a deterrent to the average dull person. But Tom could meet her at any pitch. He had one talent which she lacked and he knew this and would ruthlessly exploit it. He had a ready sense of the ridiculous: a light riding mood with which to damper her flame.
Cornelia swung upon him and thrust out her hand; her eyes blazed: “Listen!”
Tom, on the couch, curled his legs under him; he straightened like a schoolboy before his teacher, and threw a mock-serious frown across his face. Cornelia’s onslaught could not resist. It turned into argument—argument gradually stiffer, less alive against his mocking.
“David is not fit, Tom, he never could be, for your sort of life.” He was still. “What he needs, it seems to me, is a training that will permit him to develop what is deepest and truest in him: his sense of reserve, his great purity of heart. The finest thing about David is his nature’s implicit criticism of the life about him.” Tom still listened. “If he is flung into a sophisticated life, his own incorrigible innocence will merely thwart whatever he does: while that life goes on thwarting his nature. He will be nothing, arrive nowhere.” She stopped.
“You women have a genius for simplifying reality!” Tom threw this out in order to gain time. He knew it would goad Cornelia into eloquence. Any disparaging generalization on her sex did always.
“Indeed! Well, you men have a genius for complicating reality till it’s as false and absurd as a wired and painted and lace-draped lily. A fine botch you’ve made of your reality. Every step of the world is so cluttered with barbed-wire rules and pitfall standards that only an acrobat can keep his feet. Why don’t you answer me? David is no man to go to the top, tricking and beating every one else down, is he?”
“No.”
“He is a simple, gentle boy. That’s what he must remain.” Tom smiled: Cornelia answered his smile. “Fortunately, he has an excellent place at his uncle’s. There is design in that. At least, there is luck. It means something. It means the pure and the brave in Davie may have a chance to grow in peace. We need that. We’ve enough of you acrobats.”
Now Tom was ready. “David’s lovely sense of right will be as useful, unless it comes in touch with the real world, as a violet under a hedge.”
“A violet growing under a hedge is sweeter than a violet crushed in the road.”
Tom knew he had talked nonsense. He always did when he would not face the sincere part of him that wished to speak. There was no time to lose. He must tell the truth.
“I am not trying to corrupt him:—I like him, Cornelia: I want him where I can be with him. So long as he stays in his ivory-tower of dreams I cannot have as much of him as I want. But, Sister! I am no prince of darkness. If I have plunged into chaos it is because that is where the money is. I am lonely there as a good angel would be in hell. I won’t be with David. I tell you, one can be lonely and untouched even at a Reception, one can be guileless even in a courtroom. I am. These things pass over me like sticks and stones—smarting my skin. I do not want to change David. I want him near me. I want him to change me. Your mistake is the horror you have for surroundings that you know nothing about. A usual result of ignorance, my dearest. David will be as unchanged, certainly, as I.”
“Why do you want to drag him into your noisy world?”
“I can’t have a friend, by long distance.”
“There’s something more in it than that.”
Tom looked, not to deny but to learn. His face was open, sincerely in search.
“I don’t understand,” she went on. “If you really wanted him to change you, were willing at all to be like him, you’d meet him half way. I have seen how you ply him with your cynicisms, heckle him with your invitations to ‘begin to live.’”
“If I met him half way I’d come back with half a practice.”
“Nonsense! You could live your professional life without him. Social demands don’t go into one’s intimate hours. There is something else. You really want to take David about with you—into the thick of the scrimmage. Every word you say to him is a sort of preparation for his entrance. Why?”
Tom was silent. He loved his sister’s trenchancy too well not to admit her points. His doubts brewed energy. He got up and paced the floor to slough it off. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he repeated. He stopped.
“Cornelia, I may be queer.... I guess I am a man of action. What else is there to do with him?”
She looked at her brother soberly. She knew he had touched a deep chord.
He went on: “My muscles seem to be very near my nerves. My muscles must move, as soon as my nerves feel. Do you understand? If I am glad, I dance. If I am hurt, even now, I am liable to cry. You know that. Don’t you remember, Cornelia, at the Farm, when I had made a particularly perfect mud-pie, how I brought it into the house and placed it intact on your table—even though it meant a mess and a licking? It was mine: I had to bring it in to you. Well: David can teach me dreams and truth: but I’ve made a mud-pie of the world. He must share it....”
He had his days of offensive against Cornelia.
“You want to make a child of him. You want to keep him a child. Motherer!”
“He is a child.”
“Aren’t you glad?”
“Well, if I am? Mayn’t one be happy with something that one finds?”
“What of David? He can’t have you for a mother all his life. Some day he will be compelled to sally out.”
“Sally out where? He can have me always as much as he has me now. We don’t need to outgrow our friends? Really, Tom, you have a vision of the world that compares with Don Quixote’s. Giants and windmills.”
“Very good, dear incorrigible Motherer.” He came close and his arms enlaced her waist: their cheeks touched. “You shall always have your two boys to make behave and keep at your breast. So long as you live.” Cornelia swayed with him, smiling. “But between feed-times, you shall let them play in the streets.” She struggled away.
“You’re horrid—you’re cruel!” There were tears as she pushed him off.
Or his days of strategy....
“I am doing my best,” he said, “to undermine you with him. There’ll not be a shred of you left in his heart, dear Sis, when I’ve done picking you to pieces.” Which was precisely what he was about, and whose telling disarmed Cornelia altogether. Surely, if he were in truth betraying her, he would not be telling her about it. So she reckoned. While David argued that Tom’s often disquieting reflections on Cornelia must in some deep way be related with the real love he knew he bore her. With this true, there could not be betrayal.
The two young men were together more and more. They sat in Tom’s warm room; their words were of high things. They knew that these were things that were not. Tom knew these things would never be: David that they must. They met in the present of life as two might take hands down an echoing corridor: close, though the one thought at the passage-end was life; the other death.
From these talks came the sense of his emptiness to Tom as he began to feed. He knew it only in the yearn he carried with him more and more for somewhat he lacked, in that nausea for the present which was dooming his love for Marcia Duffield, and making of his professional affairs a clear, cold, removed design that he learned to trace with the tips of his calm fingers. The mood helped him with Cornelia.
He went to her morose, and said kind things—angry things that in their conveyance of his troubled spirit stressed his apartness from David.
“I have been at it again, Cornelia.”
He sat abject on her couch, laid his hands on his feet with a gesture of humility in which alone a Hindu could have seen the pride. His eyes dwelt on his sister’s cast of a pretty boy—a boy with laughing hair and a face that was a flower. Tom’s lips were still. It seemed his eyes that spoke. He loved when he came to Cornelia’s place to cast off his coat and flare his collar wide from his tense neck. The muscles in his throat seemed over-stressed for the low tone and the small volume of his words.
“Clay is a happy medium,” he said. “That boy is nearly enough your boy to make you nearly happy. Clay is a possible element for our wills to work in. But human flesh, and human mind, Cornelia! They are weighted with a past so deep and so remote we are helpless before it. I know. Remember a joke I used to play on you? The uncut grass by the barn: how I made you try to stand a stick on end whose tip was fastened to an invisible string? And whenever you thought you had it balanced, I’d give a little jerk and the thing toppled?”
She stood off from her figure. She came forward; her finger touched a plane into shadow; she stepped away as if there had been some vital shock in the swift contact.
“Well?...” she said, not letting either her words, or his, eat beneath the surface of her mind.
Tom knew he could spread a bath of acid that might take its time in eating downward, yet leave its mark.
“I think, Cornelia, I have the same love as yourself for making forms. But there is something perverse and accurst in me: something that keeps me from spending my appetite on some reasonably complaisant substance, like clay or pigment or even words. Like you.... I must of course write my poems in human life. And, Cornelia, it doesn’t work.” He paused. “I dined with your friend, David, last night.” Again a silence. “I ended by running off to a trumped-up engagement because I simply could not stand his bland stupidity any longer.”
He got up and took a cigarette and lighted it. It went out at once. “I am a fool,” he said.
Slowly he began to tell the wall against which he pressed his cheek, half plaintively, the misery of the man whose medium is action. Cornelia destroyed her boy’s nose. She remodeled it. While he talked, crouched with his cheek flat to the wall, she hummed an aria from Lohengrin—desultorily, false-simply, with evident satisfaction to herself.
“Is there no mellowness in America? Is there none of the sweetness of ripe soil? David can be as vulgar as Ruth’s carpenter-lover. Sometimes I wonder is the chief product of American activity to be sweat. Bah! We sat there: and David lectured me. To the effect that truth and beauty are antagonistic and we must side with truth. When I asked him what was truth, he answered: ‘Morality is true,’ When I asked him, ‘Pray what might Morality be?’ he said: ‘If you don’t know, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! If you are going to be flippant, we’d better go back to our last subject.’ And, Lord of Hosts! our last subject had been Balzac!”
Tom was gone. Gone so abruptly, the door stayed a-jar behind him.
Quickly Cornelia threw the damp cloth over her model and seated herself on the couch; she held her head tight in her two hands. Her mind was quick with the sharp-eating lines of her brother.
“They will never get along. Never. Never. They are so different: as different as...” She stopped: she said to herself that this was her brother whom she loved, and how could she think unkind thoughts of her brother? It must not be. In the stifled conflict, she was moved. She got up, flung wide a window.
Night. It was cold. Gas-lamps blinked and strutted through the air. Their lights were false: they brought out only darkness. The street lay low and reeled and swung away on either side like the deck of a pitching vessel. The vessel was the world. It crashed through a sea of love that spumed upward to Cornelia’s eyes. Her heart’s heat condensed it; there were tears. She had a sense of the bleak urgency of life: of its passage and of its passengers. She had a sense of the element through which she and those she loved and the vessel plunged: how it was a sweet element and dim and how hard it was not to forget. Surely, all thought in her cold day was a denial of the Sea through which life was a passing: denial of all save the vessel: denial of the terror of its movement and of its passionate immersion. She, also, forgot. She, also, was a coward with the rest before such words as “religion,” or as “mystic.” The salty tang of this Sea beyond her plunging little world was in her eyes and her mouth: all her body wept silently....
The cadenced strokes of an elevated train knocked at her mind. The truth faded.
Cornelia brushed back her hair from her brow. “You are a silly woman,” she said aloud. “He doesn’t care for you really. You don’t really care for him. He will go away, and marry. He lives after all in a different world. Tom and I will console each other.”
She was relieved at her brother’s bitter mood. She was weary, as if she had been on a great journey. She lay on her couch and closed her eyes.... The air of her room was thick and was running in massive current. She felt herself swept along. The tickings of the clock on the mantel tore past her and caught in her dress like little strayings of straw. The air surged over her head; she saw a house flung upon its current and dipping across her window. Where she was it was quiet. Tom came up to her; in his hand was a gleaming scalpel. “I am going to mold David’s face,” he said. She said: “You can’t, Tom, because he is done: I have done him already.” Cornelia looked at her model of a boy: it was all wet: suddenly it sprang and David threw himself upon the ground, and broke. Her father stood over her hurting her wrists. Her wrists hurt in his fierce grasp: but she felt how her father had no hands and was armless. He stood towering beyond her, high, and hard like a stick. Cornelia knew that a string was attached to him, and that Tom held the string: he was going to jerk it, and then her father was going to fall. She was afraid: her father was going to fall on her and she would be crushed. She saw that he was a child, she was full of pity. Her face was upturned toward him. He was above her. She felt she was going to kiss him.... Over her eyes, there was David, peering through turbulent shadows into her, curious to see, since her eyes were open and she was not asleep, why she had not heard him enter....
The mood held. She remained in that palpitant hinterland where all the nerves and senses of herself met all the beings of her past. David impinged sweetly upon this swerving world. She lay, scarce breathing, looking at him with eyes that denied the rest of her.
The world where he could thrust in his head without violence receded. It went. Again, her senses were enemies, strangers. That was a man to whom she had not given herself. Her senses stormed her recovering mind. “Why does he not take me in his arms?” they pleaded. She was on her feet, shutting herself away.
“How you frightened me, David! I guess I fell asleep.” In her panting words, she was gone from him. She could dare to say: “What a pleasant surprise, your coming! I am so glad you came.” She gave him her right hand: the left hand followed. He held them both: she drew them from him.
“I thought I would chance it. Have you had dinner?... What were you dreaming about, Cornelia?”
She laughed, her low, stalwart laughter. “What would you imagine?”
“You looked so strange, so far away. As if you were in a spell. Even now, you are not quite out of it.”
“I was in myself, I guess.”
“You won’t tell me what you dreamed?”
She looked at him.
Big, burly boy, with his blue muffler over his throat and his hands hanging so limp beside him. He was so at ease, so friendly curious, so cool. While she was white inside with the need of telling. It was impossible. In the shadow, a pain viced Cornelia’s homely face—lent accent to the wrinkles already upon her brow. It went, leaving its sharp bite.
“How have you been, David?”
He might still ask her, force her to tell him.... David began to talk. He rambled along the flowered paths of his own green life. He forgot about her dream, he forgot about Cornelia. As her chance of self-bestowal, of drawing him back with her to the self-land she had left, faded before his dear indifference, Cornelia’s hands were fists, her soul retracted with hurt.... He chatted.
She left him to put on her hat. She saw herself in the mirror: plain Cornelia, Motherer! who had found her boy at the age when boys go forth. Her mouth affirmed the bitter resolution that must make it hard: her eyes fought against their tears—David was there—with a dry will that must dull and dim them. The ineffable glow of confidence and of the sense of being sweet faded still farther from her face, leaving it older and less sweet.
So she returned to David: they went out to dine.