THE DARK MOTHER
_BOOKS BY WALDO FRANK_
THE UNWELCOME MAN
THE DARK MOTHER
THE ART OF THE VIEUX COLOMBIER
OUR AMERICA
THE
DARK MOTHER
_A NOVEL_
BY
WALDO FRANK
_She is Flesh moving through Flesh
She is Spirit_
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Copyright, 1920, by
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
_Printed in the United States of America_
TO
MARGARET NAUMBURG
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I 1
II 24
III 29
IV 49
V 102
VI 123
VII 162
VIII 175
IX 197
X 213
XI 252
XII 265
XIII 313
XIV 343
THE DARK MOTHER
I
The air moved toward the mountain: the waves and the trees and the earth
moved toward the mountain. All the world moved gently upward toward the
mountain like a Tide. The mountain moved downward toward earth, spilled
water and spread trees in it.
A full-grown boy sat low in a canoe with his hands in the sharp water,
and let it drift with the wind. The wind ceased: the wavelets stopped
marching up the backs of his hands, there was silence. The boy lay back
in his craft that lay in the water, sleepily and tamed by the wind’s
absence. His mind drowsed but in its sleep walked forth. The mountain
became a mood of contemplation. A cloud rose over the mountain faster
than the moon. There was to be no moon.
Away on all sides of the lake woods murmured. The lake was silence in
wide swaying murmur. The woods rolled purple and tumbled black: they
mounted atop each other to stark eminence against the sky: they huddled
downward into breathing valleys and the suspense of meadows lying with
wide eyes. The woods were shredded by noisy rivers: they stumbled over
rocks, fell away.
The sky dipped and the earth found it: the sky too leaped. Leaping away
it took the landside with it. All that was left of trees and water and
wide-eyed fields was haze, like a longing vision.
Within this lay the boy who was nearly a man. He was the tiny thrust of
a flaming outer world on the lake’s hard luster. He was immersed in
depths that made him see new stars.
He lifted himself and began to paddle. He paddled with clear brow
against night.
The canoe lurched and veered. The water swirled. A distant bird
fluttered from bracken. A pad of lilies went cutting in his path; a
branch broke off. A bat whizzed in the dark above his eyes. His mind
awaked in the disparate turbulence. It had gone forth asleep to the
world. It returned awake to its little human chamber. He saw near
things.
His canoe was still. His eyes shot on. A grove of trees was sheer
against the sky and his eyes.... Through the calm passion of the summer
lake with its clinging marges, through the cool strong lake tossing its
mystery in waves upon the shore that loved it, a grove of trees was
sheer against the sky and his eyes. A grove of trees was a crown on the
sharp brow of earth. A grove of trees was black with a great depth.
Their great black depth was a mouth: a silent mouth full of sound. They
stood there still above the lake and moved into his mood. They sucked
him.
He found he thought of them as one. He found he had long been still in
his canoe, measuring himself against them.
There was within them something hidden that sent him forward; something
hidden that drove him off. He was balanced.
The lake was light and cool and open. In the trees was great heat, great
closeness. The boy who was nearly a man felt he was naked and that the
trees would clothe him: he had delight of his nakedness as if he had
thrown off some bondage.
He looked about him, and the trees were in his eyes: wherever he looked
they were, like a love that a man carried with him. He saw the mountain
loom, the dense cloud over the world: he felt how strange was this lake
on which he was uplifted into a naked world. He let his eyes fall back
to the trees--his body all that time had fronted them--and understood
how it would be a terrible joy to be consumed by them.
The trees swayed. They were arms with eloquent sad hands.
He struck the water with his paddle. His canoe came alive. He was going
to plunge into the trees....
A part of him laughed for they were only trees.
The trees began to cut off his sense of the sky. They breathed deep ...
no part of him laughed. He glided. The trees opened their arms. Leaves
trembled and danced faintly. The world of sky swooned out: the world of
black trees swept his being.
The water that bore him whispered in language of the trees. It was not
of the lake. His canoe grated against a log, it nudged into a mound of
moss. It shivered back, it stopped. A slow dark singing....
The boy drew his shoulders close and was afraid, and was afraid even to
breathe, for what was he breathing? He was fast inclosed in a throbbing
praying Thing.
His breath beat against his eyes. He drove his eyes to look into the
trees. He saw chestnut-oak, basswood, willow. A circlet of stone tinkled
in the pool of a log. Trees knotted over the earth, gnarled upward
toward light. Young birch were a white chatter leading into the silence
of forest. He saw trees. He saw through trees. He saw black trees
flooded like sunny windows with a world beyond and within them.... He
saw what stiffened him, stopped his blood. A face. The face of a life.
He saw the white face of a man....
* * * * *
Chairs were thick on the porch: thicker still was the talking. David
alone was silent. He was the sole ear in a close texture of words. And
it was raining. The guests at _The Villa_ were profuse in lamentation of
the weather. “What a day!” “Won’t it ever stop?” they said. They were
insincere. They were glad of the rain. It held them close together on
the porch where they could talk, where there was much warm human flesh
to talk to. David did not need to listen. He sat very still and looked
beyond the porch. _The Villa_ stood on the brow of a hill above the
lake. His eyes fell down a flaunting cornpatch; the carriage road
dawdled within low shrubs and the lake cut out, lead-blue and harried by
the rain. The trees were gray with the rain, the tall grasses of August
gleamed with it and swayed. David saw it sweep, like a phalanx, over the
water. His senses dozed in the rain and the voices. The harsh note of a
chair creaking was a rare break in cadence. Over the eaves of the porch,
the drops gathered and broke in a quick flurry; there was a pause while
the drops held, swelled, burst again. He saw beyond the two great elms
flanking the house how the clouds were a veering maze of mist, how the
lighter gray swerved down from the dank mass and filmed in shivering
water toward the lake. He saw in the pent gray faces of his neighbors
how the words gathered and broke forth.
This passion of talk was a new element to David. He sensed its kinship
with the play of the clouds which he knew. His mother had been silent.
In Mr. Devitt’s shop where he worked, the boys spoke when there was
need. He had heard girls chatter chiefly from a distance. He dwelt on
two planes. Part of him moved beyond the hotel porch. It shared the
drowse of nature, it was drenched in the warm rain. The trees were
subdued and satisfied. They were like women after words of love, they
were like women glowing while love worked on them. The ground was still.
When the sun came the ground of the woods rang with life. Now there was
quiet. David thought of this: how the earth watched the trees, was
slumberous and drank its potion. This was the forward part of David. In
the back of his mind was the porch and the parlor where the children had
been banished.
Each of these human beings seemed to have a passion: it was the burden
of all their words. They could talk nothing else. They could partake of
nothing foreign to their passion. If they could have changed their
pasts, they might have spoken a different thing. David, relaxed in the
play of words and rain, saw how the faces of these men and women were
stamps of life: how life had branded each as with a burning iron.
He thought of his mother. Did she have a mark and a passion also? David
was out of the group on the porch. Its passionate tourneys of talk were
far away and yet their character was sharp. When he awoke in the morning
in the room that had always been his--he would never see it again--he
sat up in his bed, he looked about at the strange salience of familiar
objects. The yellow oak bureau, the picture of Washington crossing the
Delaware, his own black boots, his own gray cap stood forth with an
uncanny clearness as if he had come from a two-dimensioned world. This
feeling passed. Now here it was again, as he listened to words. He had
it watching away at the drenched woods and the lake. His neighbors,
tense in their chairs, took on the conciseness of automata. He felt them
pour into words, he felt the unease of their restraint when they were
interrupted, forced to listen to another, he felt how they crouched in
these forced silences and hurled themselves back into speech at the
first hint of pause. In silence they lay flopping like fishes out of
water. Words were their element.... And David saw the breathing of the
woods, the warm comfort of trees that had grown up together and knew
their silences. They were clothed in a sweet sanctity of resolve and
repose. They took the rain with faint bowed heads. They were alive, in
David, and very thoughtful. For suddenly they too were remote. They too
had the sharpness of the completely strange.
David had slipt from the reality of men and nature. He thought of his
mother. All life about him was marvelous and clear like the objects in
his old room--he would never see it again--when he saw them with eyes
still full of his night’s dream.
She had died that May. Until a few years ago she had talked a great deal
with him. Their talk dwindled. The open space of their few words became
an easeful place for him to lie in. He withdrew more and more to it. She
died almost silent.
They lived together in the white house where he remembered his father.
His father left his violin, left always David’s picture of him. A heavy
and loose man, ashift in his clothes, with long dead hands that came
alive, at times, playing gigues. Then his feet danced along and his
mother’s eyes were rigid. David played his violin when it was all of him
left. He looked at his hands and began to play out of tune. His mother
had no ear for that. She said: “Why do ye stop, dear?” “Mother,” he
said, “aren’t my hands fat and childish?”
His father died ten years before. He remembered storms of temper and
showers of affection: he remembered pourings of words. He could catch no
memory of his mother’s words woven into his father’s. His father’s voice
and his mother’s seemed separate always. He wondered what this meant.
They had lived in Boston, his father had been well on his way to fame.
There he was born. They left and their leaving was woven into the
contrast of his father’s humors and wild words, his mother’s rigid eyes.
Adolph Markand had stopped performing with his violin. He became a
teacher. Little girls and young women rang the bell and were secreted
with him in the parlor. Sometimes no music came through the hour. His
mother grew nervous in the kitchen. She dropped a dish. She said:
“David, go into the parlor and fetch my sewing.” He stepped to the
door. “Wait,” she called. “Don’t bother, dear....” In a rasping voice:
“Why don’t you go out in the garden and play?”
His father died. A mighty man who was an uncle came up to them from New
York; Anthony Deane, a man within a white waistcoat, under a stove-pipe
hat, a man who was his mother’s brother. He said to David with a
god-like unction: “You and Mamma will stay on at the house, never fear,
my lad.” He patted his cheek with two round ringed fingers.
The funeral was a mellow flat in his mind; one moment, like a hill that
stood sheer above the field where he lounged on Sundays, marked it
forever. His mother was dry-eyed and so was his uncle. They were busy
and pious, they did not weep. Yet his mother was sad. He was sure of
that. He felt a terror in her lack of tears--a portentous suffering
beyond the relief of his own. They stood over the grave and the body
went down. He could not keep his eyes from his mother. He said to
himself: “Look at that box, that’s father; that’s the last time you will
see him.” It was no help. His mother was beautiful and tall, her black
dress was a delight. He loved her black dress that showed off so well
the soft white hands, the pale smooth cheek, the warm heaving of her
bosom! Her eyes were large brown eyes and they were dry and there was
sun in them: she did not fend them. Her eyes looked at the coffin of her
husband, rigidly as if he were dancing instead of still and hidden in a
box. Then they turned away: his mother looked at the girl who stood
across from her, near David. A soft round girl named Letty who had red
eyes now and was his father’s pupil. The deep commotion of his mother’s
breast was gone: she threw forth her hands, palms outward as if there
was some one against her. Tears came. His mother sobbed and covered her
face, she almost fell. His uncle led her away. She wept a long time.
The next morning, again, her eyes were dry and her breast that he so
loved again moved deeply.
That was many years ago when he was ten, and he had lived close and
alone with her for ten more years. His mother did not breath at peace,
like other women--like other people. David’s mind flew to another
happening and stayed there....
A girl came in with her machine, it was the first year he worked in Mr.
Devitt’s bicycle shop, now he remembered. He must have been fifteen. He
was already tall, the full golden down on his cheeks and lips disturbed
and inspired him. It was a splendid brand-new _Eagle_ with one of those
coaster-brakes that seemed a miracle even after he had learned to put
them on, take them apart. Mr. Devitt and Joe were in the shop, but she
stayed there in the door, balancing a moment, and came to him straight.
The front tire was punctured. “This won’t take but five minutes,” he
said. “You’ll wait, won’t you?” No one in the shop noticed how she stood
there before him, with her feet slightly apart and firm, and in some way
made him look at her--as he had never cared to look at a girl. His heart
beat fast: he saw her. She had a soft throat, she had bright hair, her
body was slender music. She said: “I’m in a hurry: couldn’t you bring it
to me? My name is Miss Marshall. You know--Elm Street.” It was near the
time for going home. He thought that he did not wish to take it, but it
was near the time for going home and he could not say no. He went. She
came slowly to meet him: she took the wheel from him very fast and
leaned it against the tall grape arbor. She paid him his money. He moved
away; she looked at him; and her eyes held him. He stood there fixed;
her eyes went up and down the arbor and the garden. Up and about went
her eyes and their meaning was clear: they could not be seen. She
stepped close. She placed her hands on his shoulders, her eyes were now
under his. David looked down from her eyes to her soft still bare
throat--to her body. He could see her little breasts like apples within
her blouse. He saw that they were quiet. They were round and hard and
quiet. A strange will crept over David: that they should be soft and
heaving. For this reason his arms went over her, he kissed her mouth.
He held her at his arm’s length. Her face was white. There was mist over
her look at him. Her breasts moved! Deep, hard she breathed and her
breasts moved! He was afraid. He wanted to get away. He was a little
sick with what he had done. He left her. He did not kiss her again....
The guests raced, the woods brooded, near David sitting with his past.
The rain let up.
Trees rose higher and more sheer, they were black in the sky. A faint
wave of air came upon the grasses: they were a film of green and yellow
and purple over the ground. The grasses flowed into the air where the
heavy rain had been. David saw how the sky changed. It was farther away
and solid, no longer shredding in mist.
Nature was near to him once more. The talk was near and spreading. He
began to understand the words that went endlessly on. It was like being
in the rain, face up, where he could see the separate drops strike him,
and the full sweep of the rain was lost.
He was afraid of these pouring men and women. He was afraid they would
ask him to join in their words. What would he say? He had no theme and
no passion. “I guess I am pretty stupid.” He was relieved, confessing
this to himself. He was soft and vague; he did not seem to mind. Almost
he seemed glad. Something made him know in these sharp stamps of life
the consequence of hardenings and exclusions.
What was it he had felt in the fields near his town when he lazed? He
had felt a great and moving Breath. He had felt himself astir upon a
Breath, as he saw a hair on his chest lift when he breathed. Life? It
had no center, no form, no way. It was a breathing rondure that fed him.
Below on the road and below the corn came a man. His head and shoulders
were slight, moving up.
The eyes of David were veiled. His thoughts were color. He felt no form
to his thoughts, no form to himself. He sat in a water of slow colors.
He sat as if he lay. He was quiet, enfolded. These waters that held him
were a tide. They were moveless and yet they were pointing. They seemed
to be going somewhere and to have come from somewhere and to be going
whence they had come. David said to himself:
“How funny! I’ve forgotten all about last night. That is funny!”
He thought of last night.... Brief strained words within the trees with
a strange sharp man. Angular words--and their canoes rippling smoothly
out, side by side. Undimensioned like a dream’s end, yet sharp, was
their emerging from the trees. The lake was suddenly solid, mounting
toward its end where the village burned a patch in the night--they
paddled together toward it.... A different world; an adventure. Yet he
knew that the colors which were his thoughts and in which he had lain
had not changed.
The man on the road was near. He saw the man of last night.
All new and the same: a man cutting upon him through that night, these
guests, these clouds. “Rain’s stopped. Time for a walk.”
* * * * *
A boy, nineteen and tall, with loose light hair and features warm
against the gray of the day--a young man, older by some years,
quick-gaited, short--followed the road that followed the shore of the
lake.
They were silent. David clutched a strand of grass and put it in his
mouth.
“My name is Rennard--Thomas Rennard,” he heard.
“Mine is David Markand.”
“I come from New York.... Are you going to New York?”
“Yes.” David wanted to say: “How did you know?”
“We hadn’t much to say--last night--to each other, did we?” Thomas
Rennard laughed. They looked at each other.
“Have you ever been to New York?”
“No.... I have an uncle there.”
“You’re going to work for him?”
How did he know these things? “Yes.”
“A bit of a loaf before you buckle down?”
“He has a big tobacco business,” said David. If he did not wonder, if he
took this walk as the natural pleasant stretching of his legs, he was at
ease.
“Suppose you don’t like it?”
David was silent.
“Suppose you don’t like it--will you quit?”
“Why--I guess so!” It had never occurred to David. Life was life. One
did not question if one liked it. The air where one was one breathed.
“Be sure of that!” Tom Rennard’s words came warm. “That is important.
Hold on to your right to _choose_. Hold on to your right _not_ to
choose.... I never really had that right.”
David was silent again. He walked with a man, he walked with a world he
had no sense of. But his legs went easy.
“I’m a lawyer,” said Tom Rennard.
“Didn’t you choose _that_?”
“No ... I thought I had. I dreamed of being a lawyer. I fooled myself.”
“What did you want to be?”
“I don’t know that either.”
He said “either.” Why did he say “either”? It was true. What did he
know? David spoke with an elation like a release.
“I don’t know, either. Really I don’t. You see--Uncle--Mr. Deane--he
came up when mother died. I remember what he said. ‘Want to come to the
big City and work for me?’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’ I think I answered
that. Yes--I did. I knew I’d said the wrong thing. My uncle sort of
smiled. ‘This is no work for you.’ I was at the shop. ‘Will you come?’
‘All right.’ ‘Better try,’ said uncle. ‘Your first years won’t bind
you--nor me.’ That was all.”
“Don’t let them bind you.”
“But it wasn’t like that, when you started to be a lawyer?”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” Tom Rennard smiled. “I wasn’t born in New
York, either.” What was there David felt again in the word “either”? “My
sister and I came East from Ohio.”
“And you went to college and studied to be a lawyer?”
“Not college. Law-school at night. Musty long rooms under dim gas jets.
Days I was several things. I sold pen-knives for a time. I was a waiter
in cheap restaurants. I worked in department stores. My sister earned
next to nothing, then. At times, we shared one room.”
David tramped on, limbs free. At his shoulder the lake and the farther
shore. The mist was lifted from the day. The mist was concentrate in
clouds. The day and the water were clear. He felt this man beside him,
sharp and strange, in the new lucid air.
His sharpness seemed right for the city. This man was a city man. David
did not think there could be dim things--dim lights--ever in New York.
Yet that picture he had of the law-school.
“--an ideal setting, don’t you think?” Tom said, “for learning the law?”
David walked with the picture of Mr. Devitt’s shop. He loved it.... A
long low dirty room behind the bike-store. He went in. It smelt of
leather and glue and oil, of rubber and sweat. That smell left him. A
gas jet burned in the piping that cut down crooked from the crumbled
plaster. The dim noise of the place seemed almost to stop his pores. He
looked at the gray refuse through the dirty window and did not like
where he was. He went to work. His hands worked. His mind took on a
leisurely gait with the room, took along with it the way of his hands.
He liked where he was. His mind and his hands were clear of the room,
moving with it. It was fun. When he tired, he stopped.... A city man. He
was going to the city. A city man had looked at him and known he was
going to the city!
“I wonder--will I ever be a New Yorker.”
Tom Rennard laughed. “Soon enough. Too soon.”
“I was born in Boston!”
Tom looked at him: “You are not like Boston,” he said. “--old Boston,
perhaps:--a Boston that was really a field compressed, a gathering place
of fields and of field-folks: a Boston I dream of--where Thoreau came.”
Still David was elate, not understanding. His legs and his arms were
very free. He felt, walking beside this clear quick man, a cloudiness
about himself. He had a distant sense of a David Markand: his legs
exhaled a smell of rubber and grease, his shoulders pushed along like a
slow hill rising to the horizon, his head moved faintly like a tree. If
this distant sense came nearer he would laugh. He felt he was not a city
man, even though he was born in Boston. He stopped. He stooped and
pulled a clump of dripping moss with his two hands. He threw it away. He
turned his muddy palms toward Tom.
“Look,” he said.
“Yes--I understand.”
David wiped his hands on his trouser seat. Tom laughed.
“I don’t understand,” said David. Then he blushed.
They walked in silence. David found that walking so in silence beside
this man he could think: his mind took form: he felt he could direct it.
He said to himself: “I must think ... about the city.... That is
important. I am going there soon. I don’t know what to think.... What do
I know?”
He said aloud: “What was it you said you understood?”
“How you feel--a little.”
“Why?”
“I also came to New York, a first time--once.”
“Tell me about it,” said David....
* * * * *
A faint trail lagged over root and moss through trees to a grove of
locusts--a wide clearing with splotches of gold on blue grass. A girl
stood before a tree-stump. It was round and quite smoothly cut. On it,
at the height of her waist, was a clay model--reddish rich clay--and the
crude hint coming out of a mother with a child.
The girl was plain and angular. She wore a drab brown smock. Her coarse
skirt was high above mannish boots. Her sleeves were rolled to the
elbows and the muscles of her thin arms were eager and tense. She
stopped and wiped the stray brown hair from her eyes, looking at her
work. A twig snapped: instinctively she fended her arm over the clay
figure: she turned. Tom Rennard was there.
He sat on a rock. “God, that’s lovely, Cornelia!”
She came beside her brother. They looked at her work.
“The rain won’t spare this one, any more than the others.”
“Even in that tree hole?”
“You know, Tom, the squirrels will play heck with it there.”
Tom smiled. “Why not bring it home and put it in the parlor, where the
Reverend Curtin Rennard can worship and adore it?”
This was a huge joke for they laughed: a serious matter for there were
tears in the eyes of the girl.
“What do you think he’d do, Cornelia, if he found this place?”
“He mustn’t, Tom.”
“What a brute he is!”
“Bless him,” said the girl.
“Don’t you think, sister,” Tom pondered, “don’t you think mother perhaps
was like that?”
“Of course she was, Tom. What other model have I got? I can’t really
remember. Seeing I was three when you were born. Knowing father I bet
mother didn’t nurse you except in a locked closet. But how else do I
understand? And I do!”
“I can’t remember her at all.”
“I either. All one remembers home is father.”
Tom got up. “Prayer time, I reckon.”
They chose a close recess of little cedars, they hid the model and came
away.
The woods straggled down into elders and a last thick cordon of callow
poplars. Here was a field. It was untilled and ragged with brown
hillocks and hollows. They passed their cow, tossing her tail. The
breeze of the end of day glided under their feet, scattered through the
field, swung up above the margin of trees. Near the house was no tree.
An unpainted barn: a well with hood awry on a flag of shale....
Cornelia and Tom joined their brother and sisters filling the dim room
with their thoughts and their bodies. Up to the flecked, stained ceiling
their presence filled it. The room made them one. The empty chair that
faced them on which lay the Bible made them a body lacking a head. Their
shoulders were sharp against each other. Their eyes did not meet, save
in the empty chair. Fear was the mold of the room, making them one. Fear
also corroded them, shredded them apart, turned them into what each
was: Clarence and Ruth and Laura, Cornelia and Tom.
The Reverend Mr. Rennard was very late. His empty chair grew emptier.
The Bible faded. The room was losing its submissive creature. It was
bleak, it was larger and less alive. The ceiling went up and the vagrant
thoughts of them who waited went less to the ceiling, flew out of the
window. Outdoors came in. The chirp of a cricket, the minor-third of a
frog in the far marsh, the undulant sighing of trees losing the
sun--came into the room. The charm was gone. The empty chair was a
chair. The One was a group, jarred apart....
“Father’s not coming,” Clarence said. “When he comes he’s on time.”
“You tell the prayers,” said Ruth. She was the oldest.
“Nonsense,” said Cornelia. “We’ll call it off.”
Ruth smirked. She was glad her sister had committed herself.
Laura was silent: Laura who was the youngest and yet a terrible age had
eaten her. She was lanky and somehow starved. Her eyes drooped, her
large hands hung limp, her breasts sagged under a thick brown frock. She
was all dull, she was mournful and dry like the bald patches of earth in
the field. Laura was the one who was sorry. She did not wish to hear her
brother: she missed her father. She loved the bite of his words, the
frequent blow of his hand. The Hell he pictured was sweet to her since
he consigned it. Laura loved her father with the harsh lust of brown
soil for the water that does not come. She was dry and hot and sick with
this sterile love of her father.
Clarence got up. “I guess not,” he said. “I’m going.”
He was younger only than Ruth. He was twenty-four. He went each day in
the buggy to Dahlton where he attended the Presbyterian Seminary. He
was following the career of his father.
Cornelia and Tom were alone. They looked at each other. A single
instinct moved them. “Let’s go back,” she whispered. They clasped hands.
They heard the crashing of the underbrush, a deep sudden breathing. They
stood there silent. A tall man backed out from the clump of little
cedars. He turned and dashed the clay model against a rock. Cornelia
screamed.
Mr. Rennard looked at his two children. His fingers trembled. He kicked
the ruins of the statue back from his heels and came upon them.
“What’s that?... You scream?”
Cornelia was stark.
“Stand aside,” he ordered Tom. Tom moved as a muscle flicks to a nerve.
The man stood over his daughter. He was gray and erect. His hand lifted.
He struck her sharp on the cheek. Then he smiled. His hand lifted again.
“No you don’t,” she cried. “No, you don’t dare!”
“You wanton----”
“No, you don’t dare!”
The old man looked at his son and daughter, his face was ineffably sad.
It was sad with a sense of sacrilege and of a God proved impotent. It
was sad with a hunger that only a blow could appease.
“Go home!”
His command straightened Cornelia and her face stayed Tom.
“We are going to stay here.”
The father faced annihilation. He must disappear--disappear from living,
or he must find a channel for this surge of wrath. He found it since he
was strong. Never had he been beaten in his home. But he had been beaten
by life. The process was old with him. When life cast him out he
prayed. He avenged himself on the nations of men and women who refused
to be his. He sent them living into Hell. He avenged himself on the
pitiful bitter hurt--on the remoteness--of Beauty. He called it Sin.
Sweetly he escorted men and women and the burden of love into Hell with
his prayers.
“Daughter,” he said, “you have committed sins that make me know the
helplessness of intercession.” He was gone....
Tom was down with his head in his two hands, crying. Cornelia bent over
him, smoothed his hair, kissed his wet face feverishly since she needed
to do something with her tingling body. Her nerves leaped with strain.
Deep down, something was alive.
“Tom,--Tom,” she whispered, “Don’t! I’m glad. Aren’t you glad?... It had
to be. It is good....”
The boy looked up: he saw in his sister’s face what he felt in his
heart--their life had died, their world had foundered.
“We’d better go,” said Cornelia. “You know what I mean. Life at
home--after this?” She shook her head, her eyes closed.
Tom sat on his rock. He knew it was his turn. He knew he sat there, a
child. He knew he must rise, a man. Never without Cornelia would he have
dared, could he have found strength or direction. But could he fail of
her challenge? Could he be a drag on her strength?
She stood, her eyes shut, over him, touching his hair. “I can’t imagine
it,” she said. Still he sat. His eyes were open. They saw the mangled
model of clay. He got up.
“We’ll go,” he said. “We’ll go East. We’ll go to New York! I’ll work.
I’ll find work. You’ll have a chance to study.”
The blue mist of night grew between them as they faced each other.
“Tom----” she faltered now. “Why not?” her faltering nerved him. “I can
do anything.... You, sister, you’ve got to be an artist--a great artist.
Wait and see.”
“Do you mean it, Tom?”
He was sober,--like a panting young creature after a race for life.
“I never meant anything before. We’re going.... We’re going to-night.”
They clung heart to heart like lovers....
Curtin Rennard returned to the house and sent them all--who were
there--to their rooms. Laura asked after the absent Cornelia and Tom. He
struck her. The household slept in a silence like black in which many
colors are lost.
Within this silence came Tom and Cornelia. Two candles burned in the
room of Ruth. She sat on her bed. Her brother and sister stood. She was
in her nightgown, a fat miserable woman of twenty-seven. Her body,
folding and breathing, seemed a part of the heavy matting, of the rugose
cover, of the thin sheet. She was stout and her voice was thin. She had
fat wide arms and her nose was sharp and thin. She twirled her misshapen
toes.
“Come along with us, Ruth,” said Cornelia.
“I can’t.”
“Do you like having to run over to Dahlton every time you want to see
Jack?”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t you want to get free?”
“I can’t.”
“--Hiding like a sneak in the woods to love: just because Jack’s a
carpenter.”
“I can’t.”
“You could marry Jack, if you left.”
Ruth was silent. She sat, transfixed a moment. A great tide of misery
swept her: she crumpled back in her bed. She wept.
“I can’t. I can’t,” she looked up. “It’s too late,” she ended.
Cornelia seemed to understand, though it was all blank ugliness to Tom.
“Last year, even--if I’d dared. If you had helped me then. Now----”
“Ruth!” Her sister went to her and held her.
“It’s all over now. He’s had about all he wanted....”
She wept. Cornelia was helpless. A great shame was in the room. It took
Cornelia and Tom and branded them. Their youth was a sin. Their courage
was a heartless boasting. Before this miserable sister who had lost her
hope their lives were suddenly sweet and simple. They felt shame.
Tom took Ruth’s hand. The woman sat up again and looked at her brother.
All the shame was with him, with Cornelia. Ruth sat in her nightgown,
her body naked before them; she was simple and undismayed. It seemed to
Tom in this hour Ruth was great.
She was quiet. She held Tom’s hand, she reached for Cornelia’s. She
kissed first one hand, then the other. She smiled.
“You--go,” she said. “I stay here, but you--go.”
Her tears were past. It was as if she had passed from herself. She said:
“I’ll bet you’ve no dollar to go with!”
This was Tom’s business, he felt. But in the candlelight and before this
so strangely noble wreckage of his sister he could say nothing. She
laughed silently. She pattered to a cupboard under the two glowing
candles. She dug beneath a bewilderment of clothes. She drew out a
wallet. She came back to her bed.
“There are two hundred and twelve dollars in here,--and I must get rid
of them. Yes: I stole them bit by bit from the house allowance. God! I’m
glad. But I can’t stand the thought of them being here any longer.”
Her words came more hard.
“I did it for us--Jack and me. I was going to bring it as a surprise the
day we ran off. I never told him.”
There was a pause: a song in it.
“Please!” she thrust the wallet into Cornelia’s hand. A pitiful blend in
her voice of beseechment and command.
She got up. She kissed her sister’s mouth and eyes. She faltered
downward until her head touched Cornelia’s skirt and the hand clasping
the wallet. So, half kneeling, she stayed long.
A sudden resolution lifted her. She took Tom in her arms. Always Tom had
despised her. He had known her, hypocritical and false, the meticulous
slave of her father’s household. Why was she great and noble only now
when hope had left her? Why, thinking these things, could Tom not abide
the hot fold of her embrace?
“Good-by,” she said. “Hurry.”
She urged them to the door. All three of them wept....
* * * * *
This life, which Tom’s words had given, was now David’s. They walked.
They sat on a rock fairly dry. David paddled Tom in his canoe. David was
alone at _The Villa_. This life which Tom’s mood had given, was now
David’s....
“All the time,” Tom had said, “I was dreaming to be a lawyer. Sister was
dreaming to be a sculptress.”
“Is she?”
“Yes.... Both of us what we dreamed to be. Neither of us what we dreamed
to be.”
* * * * *
The week went. The last day came. They decided to go to New York
together. They packed each his bag and sent it ahead to the station.
They were free-footed under the last free morning.
The field was a gash of brilliance across the wooded forehead of day.
The trees were very tall: their feet dwelt in dawn, their heads touched
the noon. August--and David’s mother dead since May. The field was a
gash of light in David’s mind....
He loved his mother. But his love remained at the depth where it began:
one with his needs when he was an infant and she nursed him, a child
bruised against the world and she consoled him. She was gone: but the
glow of her motherhood still warmed through his life. Like his love, his
loss was mute. He did not know how deeply he loved, he did not know how
deeply he had lost his mother.
He wound up his affairs--or rather he watched while the benign agency of
his uncle wound them up for him. He pocketed a fabulous mass of bills.
Almost in the spirit of a wanderer after Beauty he came away.
The spirit of one who believes in the presence of Peace like the running
on of the wind, like the running on of a river, like the spreading of
flowers upon the fields of the world.
He had come to this lake, gemmed in green purpling hills. His calm came
with him. He listened to neighbors’ talk, he wondered pleasantly before
the world. All of it was a thing outside. He saw himself at work in a
repair shop, at table with the gentle woman whose breath was a well of
feeling. He lived in a dream that was real and was not yet over.
Sudden this man! Walking beside him now, upon the gash of the world, his
new experience was a hand that touched him--brushed back the hair from
his sleepy eyes--pressed fever to his brow--grasped his throat so it was
hard to breathe--struck him!
David found he walked in a hurting wonder: the woods were part of this
wonder: the man beside him was part of a whirling wonder. He was like a
slumberous water that the wind struck sudden from all sides. The waves
of his feelings were up and down. His deep self--his past--rose through
the lashed fissures of his mood. He knew that his old life was dead and
how he loved it: that his new life was being born and how he feared it!
At the day’s close the night: at that day’s close the City!
The day was gleaming glad but David walked in storm.
The vision of his mother ... he raced home against the thunder he could
see above them. Great drops of rain were already on the pavement; the
day was night. He burst into the kitchen where his mother worked. “My!
it is going to storm.” He saw that somehow it was still light in the
kitchen. It was different from outdoors. There about his mother was a
bright calm spot of day in the body of storm.
She said: “Well, David, you got home in time. What are you worrying
for?”
David looked at his companion. Tom Rennard was clad in strangeness.
David looked at Tom Rennard and the room where his mother worked
receded: he could burst in on it no more, hear her say:
“Well, David, you got home in time. What are you worrying for?”
It was all moving away and his arms were helpless. There was Tom looking
at his watch. Tom looked at him, who somehow was breathless beside him.
“Well, we got here in time. Fifteen minutes ahead. What are you worrying
for?”
A shudder through David. The world was magic--black magic. He went
beyond the station to a little hedge where a tree stood alone. He sat
there alone. His heart made a beating music through his head. He held
his head in his hands, there were tears in his mouth.
“Mother, mother,” he murmured. “I miss you, mother.”
The train crashed into the station: he had to return.
II
The pulse of moving left them numb. The pensiveness of rapid flight
through the world came near them, could not transfix their numbness. Men
and women in a railroad car--serried, determined; pointed the train,
flung it against the city. David sat next the window. He saw the world
fly past as if afraid and offended. The green comfort of meadows was too
sweet for the sharp earnestness of the travelers. They had no will for
the shadow of trees and the cool ambiance of little rivers. Their mood
was a straight hard hot track of steel along which they flung: their
mood cut through smile of fields, slumber of towns. Their minds hurled
the train....
Tom and David sat together swathed in the pensiveness of travel. David
was restrained and somehow broken. Tom made efforts to read. Mostly he
held the book in his lap and looked before him. He spoke to David but
David was impossible to speak to. Tom understood.
His own coming to New York, eight years before, was there. It was an
ecstasy, an angry birth. Manhattan girdled in flame, Manhattan a woman,
terrible, virgin, and he aware of his own love and of his impotence
before her. Moving in the train with Tom, this time beside the mystery
of David, as that first time beside the mystery of his fate, was the
seed of Tom’s fate--his past. Moving in Tom along the iron rails....
The train and the rails and that world were gone: were become a cloud of
sense lifting him elsewhere. He dreamed of New York, of Ohio ... locust
grove, slender, reticent, athrill with the restraint of some secret ...
he dreamed of them as if they were not, he only was ... he a dream.
Night cast down curtains. Tom looked at David again, and seemed to enter
and know him. David was moving forward to the City as to a death he must
pass through. The City was a cloud for them both ... though a different
cloud ... whose blackness wreathed far over their afternoon. But David
was distant from Thomas Rennard. David felt he might know this man and
the City at a single moment: know them at once and together.
Sharp long shadows crouched across the aisle of the car. Heads and
shoulders of men and women loomed from a common gloom that expressed
their oneness. Men and women were single-mooded, single-loined, they
were a swaying, night-bound creature.
Four men--more nearly boys save one who was old--got up and reached to
the racks above the windows. They took violins and mandolins from cases.
They tuned them. The old one who was leader struck a chord. A chorus of
voices--male and wistfully female--quavered about the car.
Only the four who stood were visible. Song rose from underneath them,
tremulous and pervasive, rose from the gloom of the car. It was a song
of folk, a song of yearning. Passion shot it through and passion ribbed
it, it was a song of tender sorrow. The voices of women rose in it like
waving of lonely trees in a wide bare field--rose and swayed, wept and
subsided. The voices of men rose higher, mastering, comforting the low
wail of women.
The melody throbbed higher. Sharp flashings of desire were now the
women’s voices: the men were weary and disconsolate, dying down. The
song was over.
A new silence lay in the car. The car ran on, subdued in it and
sweetened.
The leader lifted his violin. He was a man of gray hair and tremorous
shoulders. His back was to David. The three boys rose again. Two of them
very dark with hot tender eyes and glowing hair. The third was light,
all his skin and hair was golden. David knew they were foreigners.
There was laughter in the song. Sunlight aglisten on tears. Laughter of
longing beyond hope, laughter of proud submission. The women’s voices
welled like a sudden sea. Their liquid accents spoke of the softness of
hands and the roundness of breasts, of the defiant promise of loyal
children. Laughter of love and blood. They sat half lost in the
gloom--wistful maidens, battered women--breeders of the defiance of
loyal children. Their eyes glowed as they sang, their lips were round
and wet with their song. The music rippled and foamed and raced. The men
joined in--hard, staccato lancings of laughter--the music of men who had
such mothers. The car was caught and was quick in their ecstasy. The car
laughed on, raced on, under a song of low fields and mounting conquering
laughter.
David was lifted up. His veins were eager with melody, his eyes were
dim. Never had he heard such music.
“Who are they?”
“Little Russians, I think. Ukrainians. Landless folk whose song is their
land.”
Tom also was moved. Differently. He listened to the music--thinking of
the silent passengers about this little group of immigrants--the
voiceless Anglo-Saxons, himself.
“If I had songs like that ... if I could sing such songs!” David wanted
to say. He said nothing. His own violin seemed a mute thing.
They were singing. An almost silent song, a song without words, a song
so wide and deep alone the cries of women and men could compass it.
Voices rose and rolled, faintly, wavering. The song was flame: it
smoldered in the car: it glowed there, a little flame in a black cold
hearth.
The song leaped up. Darts of burning, flashes of spark: a man’s voice
crackled against the women. The song was a blaze. It roared; it danced
and consumed.
David and Tom saw the rapt eyes of women--stronger suddenly than the
gloom. Saw the sway of the men, singing and playing together.
The song died down. It was ember, crimson coal. It was ash....
* * * * *
Night was there. The lamps burned fitfully overhead. Without was a dark
rushing of buildings. Night and the City was there. The singing was
over.
David’s heart was full of the blood of songs: they were singing still in
his heart. He looked out of the window.
Black. A dim rushing of buildings--a rushing of swarming streets gutted
with yellow lights. Life out there was burning against black--was being
swept into black.
In the window David saw himself reflected, saw past himself to Tom and
the vague faces of the car. His own face was pale, there in the frame of
the window. His own face lay half blotted out in the swinging of streets
as under water. Tom’s face was pale and clear. David looked out of the
window seeing the City: and saw imprinted there the faces of David and
his new friend--white, ghostly, real. His heart beat with agony of
portent.
Another silence. Silence of preparation.
The car prepared to die--to be shattered into two-score lives, into a
thousand passions. The steel-straight mood racing to the City was done.
In its place a flutter of moods, a scatter as of birds under low skies.
Above the lamplight, under the swaying ceiling, shreds of song hovered,
torn remnants of voices.
The train shrieked and shivered, it plunged into a tunnel.
Smoke swept away David’s vision. The City was gone from the window and
the reflection in it of himself. Teeming pouring blackness without.
David turned and looked in the car. It was hot and hard to breathe. Thin
threads of smoke seeped in from the windows. They writhed about, they
trailed upwards to the ceiling. Smoke was where songs had lingered....
III
“...Of course, my dear nephew, you must stay with us until you
have found a comfortable and suitable home for yourself in the
city....”
So had David’s aunt, Lauretta Deane, written to him and made him somehow
doubt the amiability of the lady, despite the fact of her welcome. He
had never met the family of his uncle. He felt a significance in this.
His mother used at times to talk of Aunt Lauretta as of a fortunately
distant fact.
“Your father and Uncle Anthony never did seem to get along,” she said.
That perhaps disposed for her of Anthony’s wife.
Mr. Deane answered the bell.... David stepped into a naked hall, hanging
in camphored drapery. The varnished floor swept away in parabolic
shadows; the bannisters of the stair were a red lacquered flourish, a
sort of scrolled battalion along red, lacquered steps. There was his
uncle, rather hot, coatless, diminished.
“Well--glad to see you, my boy.... Have a good journey?”
David was looking for more glory. It struck him that the house was
bigger, brighter than this man. The traditional Uncle Anthony seemed to
require the setting of his visits to the little town. He mumbled
amenably.
“Your aunt and your cousins are in the mountains.... I’m alone, as you
see. Come in.”
He went before David up the stairs. They sounded hollow and yet they
were bright.
“The parlor’s closed up for the summer. Step in here. Have a drink of
something cool?”
“Just vichy, thank you.” His uncle moved toward the decanter beside the
paper-littered chair where he had evidently sat.
David stood still, holding his cool glass and aware, though he looked
beyond, of vagrant feathery bubbles in the water. Mr. Deane leaned over
the decanter.
In the center of David’s mind was the scurry of papers--Sunday
papers--on the floor, on the table, on the chairs. Chairs protruded
flamboyant scrollery from under the drab gray of their summer dress,
like little old coquettes. Massive pictures heaved on the walls, and
these were covered also and betrayed glimpses of finery of gilded
frames. The family photographs were bare. David found himself sharply
looking at a stentorian lady and two pretty girls with down-turned
mouths. He drew his body toward his questioning uncle.
Mr. Deane found questions hard. Three times he asked if David had
enjoyed his vacation: three times if he was ready for work. Then, with a
sudden sympathy, it came to him that such solicitude was perhaps
wearying.
“Better sit down,” he said. Gently. At last, “Well--I guess you’re
tired. You can go to bed if you wish to. All ready for you, my boy, you
see.”
There was a certain pride in his remark. David caught this. He did not
understand. He was in a mood where what he did not understand he could
not like.