uncomfortable, shifting, now he had gotten up. He followed his uncle to
the fourth and topmost floor of the empty echoing house. In each narrow
hall as they passed through, a gas-jet trembled in a red rugose globe.
“Here we are, my boy. Bathroom below.” Mr. Deane smiled. “I’ll have you
waked in the morning. Sleep tight.”
David heard him stamp heavily down to his easy-chair, his chaos of
papers, his whiskey. As he had turned, he seemed to wink at David. Was
he trying to be kind? A door slammed outer silence. The room was
alive....
The Vice-president of the Railroad had an estate three miles beyond the
limits of David’s town. The Vice-president had a somewhat remote sister
who used to visit David’s mother. Although Mrs. Markand always tried to
stop her and to change the subject--it shamed her--this lady would talk
of the glories of that estate and of the pride of its owner. So now this
room was talking of the Deanes. A remote room it was, thrust out in
limbo--an obviously spare room. But it was full and stridulous with
observations.
David sat on the broad bed. Two dormer windows were open, and the street
came in. A low ponderous murmur welling and declining. Fogged and blue.
With sudden periodic flashes of near commotion: a passing cab, a car
clanking. The pervasive sense of low hard pavement drenched with the
beat of life swung up to him in flat strokes.
The room had the same fogginess, the same color as this new world: the
same dull compression of incessant life. It, too, was a scabbard for
some lancing emotion. Doubtless his glimpse of the family photographs
had determined David’s mind more than he knew: the muffled finery of the
house.
David had the sense of a prison; or was it a church? There were hearts
here that beat against this place, and yet they were worshipful voices.
He had never thought of the arrogant consistence of walls and of an
aunt. He was not sure of his cousins.
Unknown to himself, with the naïve prescience of the wild caught thing,
David found the spirit of the house: its angular and mournful fixity,
its irrelevance of finery and comfort. He had been shocked to find that
he knew these sorts of furniture and ornaments: there had been sporadic
visits to stately country parlors. The City’s contribution seemed
mostly the house itself, perhaps its work upon what was in it.... A City
of somber houses sentineled like conquerors on sodden streets.
David settled back in the wide bed and drifted away; a cloud of
porcelain fans and gilt settees and majolica statuettes swept in his
mind with a mingling of soft girls, and beat on the frown of gray
walls....
It was night when he awoke. A numbness was over David. He thought: “Why
don’t all these things thrill me more?” He felt the plethoric breathing
of New York. Night had always meant to him the freedom of dreams, play
of stars. Here was a night that stirred with stifled pain. David jumped
out of the bed and went to the window.
An unbroken flank of houses rose from the mist of the street. They were
lightless and sleeping. They were not dreaming like most houses he had
known that went musing by night. They were heavy and hurt. It was as if
the day had struck them and blinded them; left them there in a coma.
David saw the quavering glow of the sky. The air came to his naked
throat with moist fingers that trembled. David crept away to bed....
“Your bath is ready, Sir.”
He heard this, he recalled the several knocks that had preceded. A sun
slanted into the dormer windows, lay bright there in the corner of his
room. But the shadows were everywhere--hostile hangers-on.
At table below he found his uncle, still coatless, moist, full also of
night’s shadows. His uncle looked worn and tired. A drawing weariness in
his own body, over his own face, told him the same shadows clung to
himself. City morning lacked the resilience of new birth. It must be the
usual thing: for Mr. Deane had answered his question with “Yes, I slept
fine,” and David looking back over the swift night could see in it no
cause for this new agedness that waked in his veins.
“A cool night,” said Mr. Deane. “You were lucky, lad, not to be
introduced to the city in one of our broilers.”
The swinging door widened, the maid brought David his breakfast. A
melon, eggs daintily propped in porcelain funnels: he must split them,
he guessed, with a sharp stroke of the knife without taking them out:
coffee that cut mental mists.... What curious impressions he was having!
He sat so long in this room, he noticed the shadows on his uncle’s face,
the shadows in his own blood: he had not seen the room. He felt now as
if he had thought the room was dark, and there was no use trying to see
in the dark. The door swung wide: it was as if himself had just come in.
Yellow woodwork in the pantry, an entering maid. He saw the heavy
panelings in oak and the resplendent chandelier in the air and the
straight-back, red-plush chairs and that the maid was like himself from
the country. She was a heavy solid girl moving in grace. Chestnut hair
about the sweet round eyes. Her smile was sweet, he did not feel like
smiling; she was the sort that smelt of warm milk; David thought to
himself what a shame she had lost two of her teeth.
He liked her standing close to him, serving him: her arm touched his
shoulder. He saw that the ceiling was painted: it sagged down in a
verdant circle of flowers: obese angels cavorted about very green
garlands.
“We’re friends,” his senses spoke, “we are both strangers.”
Mr. Deane rustled his papers: he dipped toast in his coffee, noisily
lapped it up, sucked his mustache. It was droll how his red tongue shot
out and caught the brown drip of his mustache. Mr. Deane was talking.
“We’ll go down together, my boy--for the first day.” He consulted his
watch. “It’s eight-twenty now. As a rule, I think Mr. McGill will want
you at the office at eight. It takes forty minutes from here to the
office. Fifteen minutes for breakfast.” He reckoned and rang the bell.
To the entering girl: “Anne, Mr. David’s regular breakfast time will be
ten past seven.”
His face had been long, looking away. It turned again toward David, and
broadened. He winked. Yes: he was trying to be kind.
“Does your watch keep good time?” he asked. Why should this question
seem to bring him relief? “See to that, my boy. The City is run on
_schedule_. On _schedule_. That’s why it’s a great City. That’s what
makes a great City out of a piece of country. Manhattan once had fields
in it. And a few hills. Oh, yes--Central Park was a squatter’s marsh.
Wait till you see it with its new asphalt roads! Some day there’ll be
asphalt roads all over the country.”
“It’ll be hard on the horses,” David felt he must inform his uncle.
“Hard on the horses? Maybe. Maybe it will. That’s the rule of
civilization. It is hard on us all. Hard on the workers and hard on the
bosses. It’s worth it. Progress must have her dividends. When Captains
of Industry die of overwork, should we spare horses? We’ll do without
them!”
Mr. Deane made a long strip of his napkin and ran it horizontally,
methodically over his mouth. “You see,” he went on, “you’ll have to
change your outlook on life, now that you are to become a part of the
great City--a part of the great Machine. You’ll be proud of it, soon
enough. The New Yorker is a man of service. He serves Business. He
serves Country. He don’t think of himself. Look at me. Your Aunt
Lauretta is away vacationing. I stay here and work. I don’t think of
myself. I’ve not taken three weeks off in twenty years’ time. I stick to
my guns. They can trust me in the City. They know I am faithful: I am
always on the spot. The easy jolly ways of the country don’t go far in
the Metropolis. We’re a beehive, we are. Work! Service! And the
ambition of each man is to die in harness. Of course, I mean the men who
_succeed_. That is the one way to earn real money in New York. To think
of absolutely nothing else: to give time to absolutely nothing else.
There’s the American Ideal of Service for you.” He paused and glowed
upon his nephew who sat, stiffly erect, trying to believe, in order that
he might like this talk.... “And, my boy, what’s the result? Don’t you
know?... America is the result!” He flourished his white hands. “The
great Democracy. The land of three and a half million square miles.
We’ve made it. The American Ideal made it. I’ve been out West. I’ve seen
our country. The Rockies that you could drop the Alps into--lose them.
The Grand Canyon that’s a mile from top to bottom. The geysers in
Yellowstone Park. The greatest, most populous, the _biggest_ country on
Earth! And we’ve made it. We’re making it, my boy. American Ideals.”
Mr. Deane stopped again. He reached for his climax. He found it. “I
presume,” he said, “I presume no sane man will deny that William
McKinley is the greatest statesman to-day in the world.”
He said this with a new impressive quiet. He had heard a speech of
Senator Black: he had shaken hands with him. He recalled his gesture.
David nodded. He felt he must do something. He felt a strange
discomfort. Why should he resent these patriotic words? why want to
doubt them? Should he not have found glory in believing? His mind
dropped back to Thomas Rennard and he knew that Rennard would have
contrived to scout these boasts. He found himself relieved. He wanted
Rennard as a companion in the guilt of his mood. He was quite sure it
was guilt to doubt a word of his uncle’s. No question of that.
He sat beside him in the car: his uncle was reading his third morning
paper. They spurted and clanked, they swayed down the great iron street.
David was swung in the wonders of this clanging cable that tossed them
headlong, while the wheels groaned to be free of their rails, that
dropped them rocking and sighing to a halt. What he saw was himself
surrounded by mournful men--clottings of men under straps--and all
devoured by the news they sucked from their papers, all immersed by the
same strange shadows--angular shadows--he felt in his own veins. Beyond
the maze of men ran out the mazes of traffic. Capering strides of horses
with yearnful nostrils; interminable houses, motley, jagged, restless,
broken off into squares and corners like herded wild things before the
assault of other wild things more volatile than they. So it seemed to
David: these buildings grouped in panic were of one stuff and soul with
the scurrying, arrogant throngs that pressed about them and clambered
through them.
In its startled rhythm David’s mind wandered aimlessly. He forgot about
the car: when it moved with any respite it loped like a weary and
whipped horse. The broken rhythm made openings for his mind: patches of
his past came through the interstices of moving, came torn and poignant.
He saw himself in his easy greasy clothes at work at home: he felt the
shoulders of plain men beside his shoulders: eyes of brothers looked
into his eyes and his hands, black with oil, clasped other hands that
were warm. His hands and theirs were near each other--far, equally far
from himself now moving through a city. He saw not patches of his past
but of himself, as if he had been looking through this clot of men at a
man beyond them. He had a vision, harried by the car’s toss, of a young
man alive with many others. They marched along a hooded way into a
shadowy house. Their loose clothes, the grease of their hands, the smile
of their eyes was going to be cleansed away. He saw his hands clasping,
so far from his hands now, hands of men who were brothers and who were
losing hold of a warmth held in the clasp of hands.... His drifting mind
touched a book he had loved: _The Tale of Two Cities_. He saw a tumbril
with its sodden burden moving through the Terror of Paris. He saw the
death-claimed gaze of men moving through crowded streets. He heard the
groan of wheels. Seeing these far things, when his uncle jerked his
sleeve--“Here we are”--he was not far away....
“That’s the East River yonder.”
David’s mood changed.... They walked down a narrow street whose name was
a legend. David was walking on Wall Street. Glass casements fronting
heavy buildings, huge masonry pillared by slender stone--the grace and
loom, the hypocrisy of Power. Spawn of the buildings: men with naked
singing nerves like wires in storm, and women with dead eyes, women with
soft breasts against a hard tiding world. Furious streets. A street wide
and delirious with men shouting and waving their straw-hats like
banners. Streets narrow and somber that curled like smoke across his
feet. Streets eaten with secret moods. Streets cluttered and twisting
with pent power. Streets pulsant like hose. Streets slumberous like
pythons. Streets writhing and locked.
A wide gash of sky. The sun was a stranger. The blue was a burn.
They went toward the River. Black houses were lost among masts of ships.
Black herded houses crawled towards the wharves. Men were nervous like
rats feeding on grain.
David walked on Wall Street. Walked toward his uncle’s office that was
to swallow him up. Walked down to where it waited him, a block from Wall
Street. Life was sea-yearning. Shops sold sails and compasses and
binnacles. In the smart of the salt a scent and a sense of spices.
Coffee and wines were at home here in the grime of the North, had
brought with them the linger of their homes. Tobacco. Musty housings for
jagged yellow leaves. A brooding, reeking, murmurous street.
David fell down the funnel of a world. The waters touched him that
touched far lands. Pregnant waters. He had been like a virgin whose lips
trembled with fear. He was like a virgin whose lips tremble with desire.
He stepped into a doorway, behind his uncle....
* * * * *
The Deanes returned from the mountains in a body. Mr. Deane, despite his
virtues, was taking a vacation. A few days after David’s mustering into
service, he had gone to join his wife and daughters. David was alone in
the barren house, with Anne to cook his breakfasts and make his bed.
David was alone with Anne in the house. But in the house was the spirit
of its owners and more really David was alone with that.
He moved uneasy through the City, he lay uneasy in this house that was
his only home. He tried to win a certain temporary comfort. He was
helpless against the press of the Deanes, thwarting his rest as he sat
eating his food; against the press of the City as he worked at his desk
downtown, earning his food. It was beyond his reason. The days were
fire. The nights were fume of heated stone and brick. And, within the
stone and brick, restless spirits marring his own. The City gasped out
the heat of the day by night. David was seared between alternate fires.
The heat of business dulled his will, depleted his body, aroused his
nerves. A new equation. At the hour of closing, he was tired and yet
only partly tired. The discrepancy gave accent to his fatigue. The
rounded, gentle weariness that he had often known, which took him whole
in encompassing arms and lowered him to sleep, was not this. The City
worked on him with an uneven spite. There he was, with the low sun hot
in the west above the lurid Hudson: limp and moist and spirit-dead, but
with senses leaping and a hunger ranging his veins.
In this state, David took his supper--trying to stifle the heat with
iced tea and iced coffee. In this state he tried to sleep.
He lay naked in bed. The sheets clung to his flesh. His skin prickled
with irritation.
So far as work emptied him work was good. A new experience was a new
vessel--what David needed to pour of himself. But the season was dull.
Mr. McGill was gone, and already his first task, to sort and enter bills
of lading, was a tedious habit. It seemed not work to David but the kind
of punishment that was occasionally meted out in school: like copying
the commandment one hundred times: “I must not talk during hours.” There
was nothing more or else to do, until the Manager’s return.
The office was a haphazard, a languorous, loose beast functioning dully
through the inertia of its past and the prod of its future. Clusters of
girls formed like flies on a kitchen table. They chatted and laughed and
wiped the clotted powder from their cheeks. They took long hours for
lunch, buying cakes and cream-puffs and olives from the store and eating
in the office. The boys hovered about like greedy dogs, barking and
sniffing and showing a tendency to rear on their hind legs. The girls,
loving the sense of their desire, kept them unsated. Most of the
occupants of the inner offices were absent. On the other floors, above,
below, the rumble of the packers and the crash of boxes made a dusty
murmur. David had seen these infernos of industry, caught the acerb
flavor of wet tobacco and sweat and heat, observed men moving in the
mist of their hands and women serried at filthy tables, with haggard
arms that were forever plying and hot eyes that were still. He preferred
his purgatory. He hated the hour of lunch when he must step down into
the flaming stream of the canyon and be part of it, hunting his food. He
was glad when the hour of closing came like a silent charm, stilled the
drone of the work. No clock was needed to announce this hour. It went
over the cluttered room like an invisible hand: its tenuous sweet
fingers touched every one and everything. The girls at the writing
machines clicked more slowly, their eyes wandered more and more, their
hands brushed back their hair with a new hope.... A last spurt puckered
their brows and their lips: then the power died. The boys at the tall
ledger tables twisted legs about their chairs and stopped sharpening
pencils. They whistled sudden snatches of a tune. Wide ranges of
conversation sprang up. Talk wreathed forth until girls in the new
silence of their machines addressed each other clear across the room:
the men in the ledger alcoves laughed at jokes given forth from the
front windows....
Sudden, like the last spin of a top, a tremor ran through the office,
work toppled dead on its side.
Girls were in hats: cigarettes sprouted on the lips of the boys.
Overhead in the sudden noise of stillness, the new mood of the machines.
Life was out of the window. In groups of two and three the girls were
sucked away to it: the boys followed, with noses forward and dragging
limbs.
The streets were cauldrons that had overflowed. The sluices of pent life
emptied upon them. Work had banked these fires: routine had stifled them
to smoke. Now, the coals were strewn low and long. A draft of release
whipped down the channeling gutters. There was flame. The houses brooded
like disused ovens, storing their heat and their rust.
The vision of this was a searing stripe on David’s mind as he lay within
the night: was a dark band as he awoke upon the morning. He was naked in
bed. His strong arms were thrown up like an infant’s. His open palms
pillowed his neck. As he breathed, the muscles in his abdomen rolled
gently. He was a powerful boy, with white skin and a wave of golden
hair upon his body. He had pulled his bed directly beneath a dormer
window. The sun bronzed his head. The clear soft strength of his face
came out in this sleepy light. David dozed and prodded his senses into
getting up. He was strong and refreshed in the morning. He thought of
work as a contest and knew he would win. The Hell of labor was upstairs
where the men sweated in open shirts rolling cigars, and he had seen the
women fold back their waists till the tawny dust grimed the skin of
their breasts. He was in this world’s Purgatory. In the quiet offices
beyond, the inner ones bound by invisible threads of gold to the ease of
high houses in the winter and the distant smile of the mountains, was
Paradise and was the goal. David thought that he had given up the free
fields of his home and that now, already he was set on winning them
back. This, it seemed to him, was droll. He wondered why he had thrown
the fields away, when so evidently the promise of the City was to be
able to revisit them. He wondered why _he_ had done so. He thought of
Anne, who perhaps was forgetting the scent of the clover. He recalled
that if he hurried with his bath, he would have more time at
breakfast--more time to be with Anne. His long legs were out of the bed.
It was hard to pierce to Anne. Both he and she were embarrassed with
their desire to speak freely. They were shy. One morning she said to
him:
“Mr. David, if you would want to, why don’t you come back and I’ll cook
you your dinner.”
He thanked her and refused.
“You’ve worked enough, I think.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
She had not pressed her offer. He had commanded his pleasure. So it must
be her pleasure. She was that sort of woman.
“What do you do in the evenings?” he asked her.
“Oh, not much. I’m always to bed early. It’s too hot for dancing, ain’t
it?” She hurried through her answer.
David suddenly knew that when his sickened will and stinging senses came
to the house at night, she was there also! While he lay awake in his
bed, a wall was between his nakedness and hers. It was both painful and
sweet to think of this.
The black heat rolled with enforcement through the City. Life was wet
fire. A murmur of anguish was the breath of the night. He lay wide-eyed,
dreaming. The air was a prison. His senses yearned toward the quiet of
death as release from this breath of the world--from these fumes of a
dead sun. He was under surprise when it knocked at the door.
“Mr. David, I’ve brought you a cool drink. May I come in?”
He did not move. He did not reach for his sheet. Anne came through the
blackness and gave him a glass. He gulped wet coolth.
“Thank you--Anne.”
She took the glass. She bent down, her hair was a wonder over his eyes.
A wonder, since her hair was hot and still it was good. He felt her
moist lips on his chest.... There was the constant spirit of the house,
the forbidding intrusion of knowing that he was a guest and she a
servant, that this was evil.... Anne was gone.
No word at breakfast.... That night David found he was awaiting her and
she came. His sheet was over him. He took the glass she offered and
placed it on the chair; his arm drew her down till she sat beside him on
the bed. He felt her body burning under her cool gown: all the world was
distant, so that the house was distant too, and for once the Deanes were
in the mountains.
“No, Mr. David....”
He laughed. He was scornful: the Deanes were in the mountains.
A hot black sea was the world, rolling away. His bed rolled upon it;
only his bed was above the sea. It was haven. It was haven for him and
his woman. He drew her down, and his mouth sought her lips, her neck.
His mouth felt the wide loveliness of her body. It was distant still,
there was a gown between them. The gown was wide as a world. Her body
was growing great, until it was another sea that would cool him. It was
a sea of fire, but the fire was white and would cool him. It was needful
so.
She struggled.... Sudden she came of her own broken and sick will. Their
wills were healing each other. She was willfuller now than he. She held
his head in her arms, her flesh was all about him. Her gown was gone.
He found that she was lying beside him, crumpled: holding herself away.
He found she was a little bruised woman with bruised little breasts and
hair tangled, knotted in heat. He found he was moving away from her.
He found that the night was coming back. It was scornful and triumphant.
It waved onward, and upon its bitter burning waves came the Deanes who
were no longer in the mountains. There they were in the room. A vast
febrile room. Filled with the City and its desolate shadows, filled with
the Deanes. Huddling diminished in a corner a guest and a servant.
He spoke to her: “Anne.”
She answered: “Yes, Mr. David,” so he knew she knew this also.
At breakfast the sweet silence of restraint. A Puritan’s vow in the
withdrawn eyes of each other.
But the heat did not stop: nor the wearing away of will and the
rebellion of nerves. Anne came again. It had nothing to do with the
wide remainder of their lives. It was somnambular. She was the soul of
the heat--the gladness of it. So they got to be happy together and not
to mind very much. They got to laughing and to forgetting. There were
never many words. Breakfast was the break from a dream.
David deciphered her silence.
“I am wiser than you believe. I am wiser than you,” it said. “I am
thankful for you. You need not worry. Oh, I am very thankful.”