fumbled in bare feet along the tunneled hall. His flat palm felt her
door. It was locked. The end--sweet end of unreplenishment.
No word further: no glance toward the past to open it once more....
* * * * *
They were really there--the Deanes! A cool, bright night with stars
crushed above the crude wave of the city streets. They had traveled
through that night and those stars for this city. They were there in the
early morning.
They came in discussiveness and noise, as a luxurious gift comes wrapped
in crackling paper. Once unbundled, they were rather silent. David
sensed an unease and discomfort in their coming--a token of what
happened in souls of their kind when they were taken even for a day from
the rounds of their habits. David observed with what swift recuperation
they merged into the imprint of their house; how their house seemed to
sigh and settle with the recapture of its soul. Sudden, there was David,
completely strange, dizzily away: with the memory of his amour an
unbelievable, discreditable dream.
He watched Anne with the other servants that had come sink swiftly into
the cloud of servience: lose her charm and her sex: dwindle in an
instant to be an appendage of her mistresses, an inflection of the
wishes of these reigning women. By the shock of this a sort of osmosis
went on in David.
He found himself partly identified with Anne: had they not been one
together?--and, so, diminished, humbled. Another part of him flung her
off and merged with his cousins, his flesh and blood; become Anne’s
remote and indifferent master.
He stood there awkward while the process shredded and dazed him. Between
these warring halves of himself, he fell away from the sharp social
trial of the moment--the need of fronting these women. His aunt took
note of a vacancy about him.
“Well, David, it’s been a long time waiting to know you.” She added to
herself: “He’s stupid.”
Her second daughter, Lois, supplemented her aunt as one generation
should another: “I think he’s dear”; she looked at him keenly, “but
what’s bewildering him so?”
She came very close to him, and held out her hand. “I’m awfully glad to
know you, David.” He took her hand so patiently, that she held up her
lips, “We’re cousins,” she explained and she laughed.
With great seriousness, he kissed her and liked her.
Muriel, who was nineteen and three years older and wiser than Lois,
watched the little challenge of acquaintance, smiled sourly, busied
herself with her bags.
“Well,” she said, searching for her powder puff. “I suppose it has been
frightfully hot?”
Mr. Deane had been quarreling with the coachman about the fare: his own
carriage was not yet in service. He puffed into the room. David saw and
at length realized how changed he was, in the true setting of his wife
and daughters. He scarcely noticed David.
“Got everything?” he asked excitedly. “Nothing lost? My! it’s hot! That
robber robbed me. Lauretta--you have the keys? I must run along.
Where’s breakfast?” He mopped his brow, he paced; and David wondered
whether the executive task of shipping his family to New York--or some
obscure disturbance--was the thing too much for him.
David stood quietly apart. He unstrapped bags; untied boxes; stacked
rugs and tennis rackets into obtrusive corners. They let him work for
them, quite as they let Anne work. He found himself dwindling from them:
he wondered why he minded performing these casual tasks. He found he did
not care for this identity with Anne, although a part of him knew it
existed only in himself. He looked at her--not even in her. She was very
moist and humble and unattractive in her black skirt and her white apron
tucked high in her corsage. He could not separate her body from that
apron--chiefly from that attitude of serving. He wanted to say to
himself “Well--she served me!” He wanted to be high-handed, cynical,
indifferent. He managed to lose all sense of this toiling, nodding girl
as one with the sweet woman he had held in his arms and held with all
his body. There he was, scrutinizing Lois: her smart slimness; the
perfect abandon of her body not to him but to her own position. His
cousin wore a bright blue satin dress, simple and short and trim. Her
corsage was caught up in white lace:--the scheme was near enough to the
livery of Anne to make the difference crying. Her half-bare arms were
white. Strangely white. David guessed what pains she must have been to
so to keep them. She had taken off her hat; her golden hair fell
daintily--unmoist, immaculate--upon her forehead, and in crisp ringlets
down her neck. She had a tender smile that seemed to take one in and
laugh one out. Her features were smiling, soft and round, and were yet
tinged with an astute concern that contradicted their benevolence. The
white-slippered feet and the white-stockinged legs were an increased
offsetting flirt of humor to her serious brown eyes. The attentive
quality in Lois was her grace, her tender aloofness, her sixteen years
full of pride. David found himself quite willing to deny his amour with
a servant.
Anne needed to come up to him and ask him:
“Will you be going downtown to-day, Mr. David? Or will you be here to
lunch?”
“I’m going downtown,” he said sharply. He looked in her face and found
the soft intimate sense of her offensive: a too cloying sweetness for
his stomach. On the heels of his discovery a great remorse and disgust
at himself. It drove him toward a demonstration of bravado: he needed
almost to make clear to this searing presence of the Deanes that he owed
Anne much, was more like Anne than like them, and was aware of it. This
too was checked, left him dangling.
Lois caught him looking her through, and came over to where he worked at
a stubborn bag: she said: “Let me help you, David.”
“No need,” he said with a tone studiedly similar to the one he had
addressed to Anne. There was balm in that. It seemed, however, not to
disturb Lois: and Anne was out of the room.
His cousin helped to the extent of loosing one strap. She sat on the
gladstone and was suddenly languid, and forgot....
With Lois cornering his eye, David found he had the whole group in his
mind. Mr. Deane was still at paces on the floor, calling for breakfast.
David was amazed at his insignificance in this concise room. His wife
paid him no attention. Twice she brushed against him, crossing the room:
twice also she brushed against a bag. Her reactions were one. Muriel
went up to him and said: “Father, let me have about twenty dollars more,
will you?” Mr. Deane’s pacing slowed against this new ordinance. He
stopped, snapped the bills from his wallet and handed them to his
daughter. Muriel was at the moment looking over her shoulder, giving an
order to Anne. She did not stop. Her eyes did not go with her receiving
hand. Mr. Deane resumed his pacing. His wife said, half in the air: “In
a moment, Anthony, we shall be able to spare Anne.” Lois, musing in her
corner, suddenly flared forth: “Father, you are making me nervous with
your walking like a lion in his cage!” But at once her face went soft,
she forgot what she had said. Then her father had left the room,
following the bright discovery that Anne had left before him.
David felt it was time to be off for downtown. He went to his aunt.
“Good-by.”
“I hope, David, you don’t squander your money at those expensive lunch
places.”
David said he did not. He did not add he was afraid of them. He went to
Lois.
“Good-by.”
“Good-by,” she smiled. “Come back soon.”
He went to Muriel. She looked up surprised.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Good-by.”
And the revelation came to David. These four persons were not a group:
in no true sense were they a group. The families that he had known were
strictly groups.... Even his own, though in his father’s days the rhyme
of it was pain. Some single rhythm, some common color composed them.
Here were four persons. Their spirits had nothing to do one with
another. He was quite sure their spirits were not aware one of another.
They spent one man’s money: they obeyed one woman’s orders: they lived
at the behest of a sort of mutual complacency together, sharing the
pleasures that were in need of union for support. But they were not
united. David felt it, touching their fingers, as he said:
“Good-by.”
It gave him a strange, even a sick feeling: as if he had seen a man
devouring his own hands.
IV
It was voluptuous for Tom Rennard after the trees and the birds to give
himself once more into the bond of his profession. Through the free
woods he walked in manacled anarchy: through the City’s thralldom he
walked free. He plunged into work. He touched the tasks of the
approaching season, knew it would be his best, measured his dominion
above success and was glad like a bird perched on top of its cage. He
prepared a brief for a case months away from trial: he played with the
strategy of an appeal in a suit not yet argued. In the brash nights of
the refilling City he sat in hotel lobbies and let his mind cut clear
through the flaccid provincial crowds. He journeyed uptown to a baseball
game: drank in the rawness of the joy of others in a ball swiftly caught
and clouted: let his heart fill with the tang of the game’s intricate
and lissome grace against the sprawling pleasure of the mindless. Once
more New York, an atmosphere, lay, swirled, clouded and shone around
him. Then he shut his desk, an early afternoon, and went to see his
sister.
Her studio was unfashionable in location. It was the top floor of a
crumbling red-brick house in the moiled middle East Side of the city. It
was east of Murray Hill, west of Stuyvesant Square: the elevated trains
snorted their cinders not far from her flowered window. Cornelia began
to make money and her habitation blossomed. Persian shawls appeared in
appropriate corners: new rash adventures in color out of Paris gladdened
the white walls: slender vases came from exile in Chatham Square. Tom
called the place his refuge from the city.
“Hello,” she said. “I am glad you came. I’m lazy this afternoon.” Tom
folded his coat away in the little bedroom. It had the air of a cell.
The white walls were bare, the white iron bed was narrow; a small pack
of books stood in the corner of the floor.
“You take it easy,” he said, already at the task, “and I’ll prepare you
some Turkish coffee. Have you any of that orange essence left?”
He was adept and he needed to ask no further questions.
They settled and sipped and talked. Cornelia was on the couch. Tom
squatted on the floor. Both of them had lighted cigarettes.
“Well, what adventure?” she asked.
She looked more than the three years older that she was. She wore an
unembroidered smock--a dull, muslin drab. Her feet were sandaled. Her
hair was drawn tight back over her head, where it could not interfere
with work. Her eyes were soft in the harsh angles of her face.
“I was on a vacation, Cornelia. You know that means that I took care
nothing should happen to me.”
She laughed. “That efficient you’re not, dear boy.”
“Well, there was no semblance of adventure. I tramped and drank a lot of
glorious milk and slept nine hours a night.”
“And----?”
“And swam and paddled.” Tom wagged his head with the catalogue.
“You met somebody interesting?”
He stopped. “How do you know?”
“You always do, don’t you? Who was it? The girl, at last?”
“No--not the girl. And you’re wrong. Really, I had a deliciously dull
time.”
She did not press the matter.
“Daydon says I ought to move now I’ve won that prize. He says no one
will visit a studio so near Third Avenue.”
“Are you going to?”
“I am not.”
“I am glad, Cornelia. Just because you have begun to have money is no
reason for spending it all on rents.”
“That’s just what most New Yorkers do, is it not?”
They both laughed, and were silent.
“What you said has a lot of truth in it,” Tom spoke at last. And his
sister knew he had pounced on her observation as a text. He was
comfortable now. He had been just a bit uneasy, questioned about his
trip. There was the sign of a release from nervousness in the
brightening of his eyes and the slower puff of his cigarette--the way he
curled up his legs, limbered his arms and began to talk. Cornelia
watched him with a vague amusement and a subtle reservation. She would
let him have his speech; then she would pin him back to his trip and the
thing in it which made him nervous. In this mood she listened.
“Really,” he said, “the true inwardness of New York’s rising sky-line
has been the passion of New Yorkers for high rents. Have you ever
thought of that? What a handy substitute for other, remoter standards
they have found in the price of housing? Of course the gullible talk of
the fact that New York is a crowded island. They forget the miles of
dilapidated and discarded masonry within hail of their stylish towers.
Some day the historian will understand. He will say this: ‘Money was so
deep their worship that they mis-prized all treasures of life which did
not blatantly announce it. They left their walls empty of beauty, their
larders empty of health, their houses empty of grace, in order to pay
high rents to the lords of land. These fabulous sums were the pride and
the decoration of their lives. The height of New York rentals and the
high buildings that were their symbols became the chief expression of
Metropolitan Art!’”
He laughed. Cornelia kept silent.
“The historian will finish in this tone: ‘Surely these were a foolish
people, ripe for destruction.’”
“Give me another cigarette, Tom.” She was resolved not to help him
along. Tom came to silence. He felt her mood.
“Well, what is it?” he asked.
“You had better look out, brother mine. You could easily get to be a
typical New Yorker. I hate talk.”
“What I said wasn’t true?”
“Yes. But it was talk.”
“Oh, boo! Don’t be so serious.”
“Weren’t you?”
“Of course not. I was speaking the truth. Even, I was prophesying. To be
serious at such a game is to risk being a fool.”
“Most of your talk, Tom, is a side-stepping of something in you you want
to hide. I have noticed that.”
Cornelia was half up on her couch, facing him straight. Now, she was
ready to pin him. “It’s a bad convenience, dear,” she went on, “putting
up all these brittle outer observations when some one threatens to get
under your skin. You do it so well.”
She smiled; Tom straightened his legs and met her gaze. He knew her
direction. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said.
“Why? Just because you don’t?”
This was a true shot. He acknowledged it.
“Very well,” he spoke dryly. “There was a boy--a mere boy--up there.
From New England. For some curious reason he upset me. I don’t like to
talk about him. I do want to see him again. It’s all rather odd because
he was really quite dull. We had damn little to say.”
In a flash Cornelia’s mood changed. Her perceptions had controlled
her--the acute and angular and severe in her. Now she was seated toward
him on the couch; it was as if dominion had passed over to her eyes that
were large on her brother. She spoke tenderly:
“It’s not a girl yet, is it, Tom?”
“You know it never is. Girls can’t disturb me. I can master women. I am
cool and sure before them. But so I was with this--this fellow. Yet it
seems, as I look back--quite irrationally, mind you--it seems as if we
had had a contest and he had won.” He paused.
“You probably _talked_ to him--flaming revolutionary talk.”
Tom shrugged.
“And he was shocked.”
“Precisely,” Tom burst in. “He was the shocked one--the dominated one,
the silenced. Then, why this foolish desire to see him again and throw
him on his back?”
“It has been troubling you?”
“I have imaginary conversations with him. I walk up and down Broadway
with him, and say: ‘See! what a Gehenna this country’s greatest city
is?’ I take him to theaters and gloat and declare ‘Trash, eh? They call
it art in New York.’ Even at my office. I show him through my papers.
‘All chicanery,’ I announce. ‘That’s what you want to enter, is it?’ I
shame myself before him.”
“Think it over, Tom,” Cornelia followed his silence. “You should be able
to find out the thing that is troubling you.”
Tom sat a bit diminished on the floor. Sedulously he flicked the ash
from his cigarette, each vestige of the ash; his fingers close to the
hot, red tip. He looked up:
“This chap has something I lack and want: a sort of pure sincerity.
He’ll go far--and be miserable as the devil.”
“Look out! Aren’t you the one who is afraid of misery?”
“True. I want him to give me the saving treasure. I want to give him
the saving moderation. Then we could both be saved.”
Cornelia laughed. “What _are_ you talking about now?”
But Tom was very sober. “He is all wings. He has no eyes. He’ll dash
himself against the sun. I am all eyes. I see everything. But where are
my wings? I’ll freeze to death from far away, seeing the sun.”
He got up. He paced the room.
“Oh, this is nonsense. You are right. I liked him because he was a
naïve, country lad. I was afraid I had hurt his innocence----”
“You are dying to kill it.”
Tom stopped and faced his sister. “That’s not quite fair, Cornelia. Not
kill it. Steal some of it, perhaps.”
He was talked out of his mood. He was light-hearted and full of interest
for a thousand things. It was a trifle after all.
So they played through the afternoon, they went arm in arm to dinner,
they spent an hour in a terrace with liqueurs before them. They talked
of her work and her triumphs and the quaint jealousies of artists. All
this because it was his greatest pride. And several times Tom broke out
in admiration of New York: in praise of her vast largesses. He was
confident and proud. Cornelia smiled again--her angular, critical
self....
Before her door he kissed her good-night.
“We’ve made a pretty good start, from Dahlton, Ohio, haven’t we, sister?
Pretty good, pretty fair.”
She changed once more to the tender part of her nature: she ignored his
mood.
“Good-night. And Tom--that country boy--bring him up some late
afternoon?” Her eyes alone smiled. Tom startled, imperceptibly.
“Surely,” he hurried to say. “Surely ... if I see him.”
Nature cellared its profusion. The sap of life was sucked to the roots
of things. As the year died, the house of the Deanes came to life.
Chests gave forth finery and color. Curtains were up, barring the
archaic sun: dun colors were away from the florid chairs. The
safe-vaults let go their silver plate and their gold, and from the
hot-houses came flowers. Streets were chill, skies were mournful; in the
narrow endless purlieus of the disinherited, of the nine-tenths, began
the hunger for coal.... But it was summer in the City.
The position of David was straddling, but not too insecure. He was part
of the Deane household. How goodly a part devolved on his own
discretion. If he made himself liked, there was no comfortable share he
might not win. He was part of the Deane Company--the Deane machine of
subsistence. A small and trivial part with a distinction. This he did
not feel until his fellow-menials later had ceased feeling it for him.
In his low place there was always the seed of future sharing. He was the
Boss’s nephew. In the low places of the others, there was always the
seed of permanence. These were the Boss’s victims. The Boss would keep
them victims if he could. He would have all the pretty terms of a
century of special pleading to hallow his act. But surely the world was
a smiling place for David Markand.
“My boy,” said Mr. Deane, “you are on probation. If you prove your
worth, as you may well imagine, I will be glad. American enterprise is
the home of the free, the contest of character and brains. The true man
wins the prize. And of course, I don’t forget who you are: that you are
the only child of my dear sister. Nor must you, my boy. I have no sons
of my own.”
Uptown he was still somewhat the stranger. But he was the friend of Lois
and he grew confident. They liked each other. Different dispensations
from far separate sources had thrust them close. Now both of them stood
together at the gate of the brilliant world Muriel went to evening after
evening. They saw Muriel return, full of tokens of its splendor: full of
weariness and hidden joy, full of pride and hidden knowledge. David
meant to enter the gates with Lois. In the waiting it was natural that
they talk, hold hands.
She would have said that she found him interesting. There was her own
life, which in her mind lacked quality. It was an empty atmosphere
occasionally pierced by suns and falling stars. The light of these was
her sustenance and was rare. So Lois starved.
She would have said that he was easy to talk to.
In the conventional sense he understood nothing: in the sense in which
life was a ruled open page for Muriel and her mother. But in the outlaw
sense where these two were blind, he understood miraculously well. She
could skip the roted things of the world in talk with him, dwell on the
stirring and uncharted. They met in a sort of reticence about the
obvious. Not deliberately, but because he could not otherwise have
understood. Two persons speaking different tongues could live on
elemental planes. They could convey and satisfy the sense of hunger,
they could fight, they could make love. The difficulty might come when
they attempted to dine together, to quarrel civilly, or to get married.
Here, a common set of words was needed.
So between these two. Social engagements, family traditions, judgments
of the technique and manner of existence she could not broach with him.
She did not need to. Her school, her friends, her family webbed her in
such subjects. The wider ranges that Muriel would have cut through as
vague became their meeting place. They talked about life and beauty and
the future. She was sixteen and David twenty. In these vast fields they
were one fledgling age.
They were often alone together. The room on the third floor that faced
the street was the living-room of the sisters. And Muriel was usually
out: and the parents stayed in their own quarters below.
Dinner’s end was release. David sat there uncomfortable and Lois sat
there indifferent. Mr. Deane had few words. He was weary at night. What
energy he had poured into the business of eating. Mrs. Deane was voluble
enough, but she needed no attentive ears and she had none. She talked:
her husband ate: her daughters spoke low together: David made his
shoulders narrow and occasionally straightened with a shock when his
aunt’s eyes turned on him. The last sip of coffee meant the last moment
at the table for the girls, whether their mother was in the middle of a
sentence or their father was asking them a question. In this case, the
question could be curtly answered in the process of exit.
“Come, David,” from Lois, “you’re finished, aren’t you?”
If at first David was reluctant to leave so suddenly, he learned that
nothing different was expected of him. Mr. Deane lighted a cigar. Often
he was left alone to smoke it. He sat, his body folded and heavy in his
chair, his eyes folded and heavy behind smoke. Anne came and went,
clearing the table. He was unperturbed. His soft mouth wreathed and
pouted: occasionally he smacked his lips. He was the picture of
attainment. In his empty gaze, in the lack-reflex slumber of his
muscles, in the dim movements of the heavy smoke, there was a gross
Buddhistic character. It was clear that attainment in his American faith
tended not toward heaven, but toward a sort of flatulent Nirvana.
Meantime, Mrs. Deane was upstairs, under a lamp, reading a novel; and
when her husband did not eventually shake himself, with a slow and
sleepy evolution, to his club, he was in bed before she closed her book.
Often members of the plenteous family of Mrs. Deane came to dine. But
the atmosphere of the table was ample enough to embrace them. There was
the same dull air, charged with the vocal passion of Mrs. Deane and the
sharp reserves of her two daughters. Only one sister--a Miss
Dikes--could match the commanding Lauretta. They were profoundly
sisters: when she was at table, the currents of air were shifted rather
than changed. Always, Lois and David were willingly excused after
dinner. And Muriel managed often to be out when her relatives were
there. Her mother scolded and occasionally wept at this disloyalty in
her child. But the child was already stronger than the mother. Muriel
seldom quarreled back. She sneered and her eyes flashed: when she spoke,
it told.
Upstairs David reached for a book.
“You have your homework to do, I s’pose?”
Lois smiled and nodded. “Oh, yes.... But I’m not going to do it.”
“You’ll not get your certificate if you don’t watch out.”