snatched his book.... “Unless, of course, you are more interested in
_The Banking System of the United States_.”
“Lord, no!” David laughed.
They sat together on the broad, cushioned couch whose gay blue and dull
gold were a telling contrast to the dull blue and bright gold of the
mother’s room below.
“What are you going to do when you become rich?” she asked him.
He looked at her. She asked him this as once before he had said to her:
“When are you going to get married?” She had answered: “I am not going
to get married, perhaps.” He had laughed her denial away.
So now: “I am not going to get rich, perhaps.” And there was she,
scoffing at him, holding back her head and saying: “Please, do be
serious, David!”
He was. He began to think aloud.
“Not everybody gets rich.”
This had no effect on her. As his silence marked his words as her
answer, she shook her head with a faint impatience.
“I know. But what’s that to do with us? You’re my cousin, aren’t you?
You’re our sort. You’re in Daddie’s business.”
“What sort don’t get rich, Lois?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She looked at him as if he were stupid. “You ought
to know, better than I. You see ’em all around you at Daddie’s
business.”
She also had been set to thinking. “How are they different from us?” she
asked. Then: “Father says they simply aren’t as clever. Most of them
drink too much: and have packs of children: and don’t bathe very often.
I guess it’s all these things.”
“It must be. But you can’t really see much difference. Of course, _you_.
You’re different. You’re a--why, you’d die, you couldn’t have been born,
anywhere else. But I work with five other chaps in the shipping office,
and they’re just like me.”
Lois laughed. “What nonsense. They’re not! You’re much nicer.” She was
giggling in foretaste of the wicked truth she was about to utter,
“you’re--I’m sure you’re _much_, much cleaner.”
She was like a pricking rose under his face, laughing there on the
couch. David resolved to be angry.
“That’s rotten of you, Lo. You’re no democrat.”
“Of course, I’m not. I’m a Republican.”
David, enjoying his indignation and unconsciously aware of the excuse it
gave him, reached for her wrists.
“Don’t!” he commanded.
“You are!”
He pulled her to him, and put his arms around her waist. He said: “Stop
making fun of people.” Then he kissed her.
Lois stopped laughing. She was very still. Her eyes glistened.
“Do you think, if you hadn’t been _nicer_, and _cleaner_ and everything,
I’d let you _kiss_ me?” She jumped up and away.
He liked her intimacy. It flattered him. He did not wish to tell her of
his work at Mr. Devitt’s, and how easily he might have stayed there long
and forever. And she liked his reticence, feeling its power. She liked
the veiled promise of pleasure and strength that he suffused from all of
his big being. It frightened her.
She was seated as far away from him as she could manage. Her bare elbows
were on her knees and her chin was cupped in her hands. The pressure
upward faintly distorted her soft mouth: one corner was open and two
teeth bit white and hard against the lip. Her throat tremored with her
amusement; the rose mesh of her waist fell forward in suggestion of the
warm swell of her girlish bosom. David believed that she was purring. He
saw her teeth biting their hardness into the blush of her lips: he saw
how smooth and round her arm was. He said:
“You let me kiss you because I’ve a right to.” He was aware of the
retreat in his words. “...because we’re cousins.”
She merely lifted her face a bit, as if he were stirring away. “All
right. We’re going to play now that we are _not_ cousins. We are just
you and me, do you hear? So you mayn’t kiss me anymore.”
Already he was forward. The game started. The goal was implicit with
them both. In a fortnight’s time, David had won his kiss. He was very
sure that Lois was very lovely: he was almost sure that she did not
return his kisses because he was unworthy....
* * * * *
David sat at his long table in the office, lost in a maze of figures
which gave a different answer each time he questioned them. He was
languidly certain the figures were laughing at him, held him in
contempt. About him yellow pine, hard human bustle. He looked up through
the mist of his discomfort; he saw above him a slender and sleek young
man with a smile on thick lips.
“My name is Duer Tibbetts. You’re Markand, aren’t you?”
David was not sure whether to keep his seat. He was twisted in
indecision.
“I am a cousin of your aunt, I work over there under Mr. Herding in the
Cashier’s Office. I have just come back from two weeks in Virginia. I
was told to look you up and make you feel at home.”
For the pause, he stood there a bit ill-at-ease himself.
“I’ll come round at noon, and we’ll go to lunch.” He was gone.
David had the sense, walking through the streets, of a young man
marvelously sure and hard and clever for his years. He gave forth the
slightest word as a pronouncement.
“The very hottest weather’s over,” he declared. “Greibeck’s is a great
café. You must go there often. I discovered it last year, one day I was
lunching with Mr. Farnam--H. L. Farnam of The Liberty Trust. Always go
downstairs. There are women upstairs. Downstairs is the place for
talking business.”
Duer Tibbetts thrust the long printed card under his nose and then told
him what to eat. He ordered as if he were in a great hurry. He drank
beer with his meat. “Don’t you want _anything_ to drink?” he asked as if
unwilling to believe in any organic deficiency in his new friend. He
called the waiter by his Christian name--but never looked at him.
“We must get to be friends,” he announced. “Don’t bother about the boys
in your office. They’re not our sort. Stick to work.... Stick to work
and stick to your uncle. He’s a prince--a prince,” he chanted with
emotion.
“I’ve been here three years. Since I was sixteen. No college nonsense
for me. I’m assistant cashier. You’ll find the old man is hard, but he
is just. Yes, he is that. But he has his silent little ways of pushing
you along.”
For the first time, he raised his eyes and David met them. He liked him
better. So this Duer Tibbetts was to be his friend? As soon as he began
again to talk with his eyes once more down, David examined him.
He seemed engrossed in his own words. He paid them out, as if they were
coin. He talked with a certain muscular emphasis of his lips, a periodic
pointing of his left forefinger. His forefinger always was detached from
the others. The rest of him remained immobile. A gold chain fell
straight from his lapel to his coat pocket. His hair was so blond that
near the temples and behind the ears it imperceptibly faded into the
color of his skin. His fingers were wider at the tips than at their
base. His voice was high pitched, coarse-grained, mostly a monotone....
David met his eyes and liked him again.
Tibbetts’ gaze clinched his firmly; almost too fixedly: as if his eyes
lacked the pain of encounter. They were lashless blue. Tibbetts had the
soft eyes of a boy, the shallow eyes of a man who has not ventured where
the boy’s eyes yearned.
David turned his own deep uncertain gaze on him: in the retreat of his
glance and the veil of warmth that suffused from the contact it was
altogether clear which was in truth the older of these two. But neither
David felt this, nor Duer Tibbetts, steadfast and staring. What came
from their encounter was David’s sense of respect and wonderment for
Duer Tibbetts, and Duer Tibbetts’ thrill of respect and wonderment for
himself. To this end he talked. A gentleman can boast only before an
equal. And Tibbetts was a gentleman, if for no other reason because he
felt the quality of David.
“A smart chap. You know: the sort who get on in the end,” he reported to
his father. The young protégé and the powerful attorney of Deane and
Company discussed the new arrival. They said many things. The paramount
detail that this was the nephew of Mr. Deane, they had no words for: but
this was what they were keenly thinking. The suppressed thought came out
in the rhythmic beat of Mr. Tibbetts’ thumb against the desk, in the
over-emphasis of his son when he said such common words as these: “I
like him. He is slow, but what is slowness? You never can tell what’s
underneath. The fact that he don’t know much now shows merely that he
has lived in a little town. Lots of good stuff has come from little
towns.”
Now, he talked lavishly and with diligence to impress David who sat
passive, trying to learn, telling himself that he was learning. He
talked of projects and profits, of Mr. Deane’s subtle aggressiveness and
of the Company’s prosperity. He spoke of the great law-suit which his
father had won for the firm from the Feddlesby people. He spoke of a
swinging figure that had gone from Deane and Company to help elect
McKinley.
“Measure it with our payroll, if you want to _feel_ how much it was to
give.” He did not divulge the payroll. He said, “We” when he meant David
and himself; “We” when he meant the Company; “We” when he meant America.
There was a deep philosophy in this confusion. But David was still far
from grappling with it, and Tibbetts did not dwell in the sphere of
definition and reflection.
“Yes, sir,” he pointed and flushed with his prophecy. “We’ll be in Cuba
in less than a year. Don’t you forget it. We’ve got to kick the
Spaniards out and go in ourselves. Then, we’ll earn enough from our
dormant Las Daciendas plantations to buy up every relic factory in Key
West. It’s a coup that’s certain.”
All this puzzled David. He was not sure whether the “We” who must kick
Spain out of the West Indies was the payroll of Deane and Company: or
whether the “We” that was to grow subsequently rich in Las Daciendas was
the citizenry of America. It was all a bewilderment of lines.
The weeks of his residence in New York he had been sedulously reading
the papers that came daily to his uncle’s house. He knew that America’s
interest in Cuba was a humane one grudgingly forced on her. Her wrath at
Spain and her forming resolution to have Spain “out from her back yard”
were due to her Christian worry for starving natives. The impulse of
brotherhood was quite clear in the papers. Yet the effect upon Business
seemed equally clear in the mind of Duer Tibbetts. Brought together in
David’s mind, these two clarities precipitated fog.
He went away, respecting the more this young man who saw the light while
he walked in darkness.
Relief of Cuban sufferers and relief of ravaged tobacco plantations:
America’s crusade for love and a great Company’s contribution to the
coffers of the Republican Party: the free lists of business and the
advantage of being a nephew--it was too much for David’s untrained mind.
For David needed to “conform.” And David needed to admire.
It was a Sunday afternoon. The room where David sat, the room of his
talks with Lois, lay in the languor of a refracted sun. It faced north.
David could see the full rays beat in the flaming brick and the warm
brown-stone of across the street, be absorbed. Here was a low
vibrancy--strayed residues of sunlight that had lost their
incandescence. The room had its compensation. Lois’ gay hand was over
it. The couch had a dappled welcome in its cushions: “outrageous” her
mother called them. A strip of Japanese brocade laughed on the wall: and
Lois’ desk, with its bright brass knobs and its jolly fluted legs,
hinted the tempo of the occasional letters and the desultory homework of
its owner.
David had emerged from Sunday dinner. Rather feebly he wrestled with a
Sunday paper. He was alone with it and it was winning. The article was
discursive and plethoric. It dealt with Tammany Hall and the imminent
Municipal Election. The City had just become the Greater City. Manhattan
had swallowed Brooklyn and Staten Island. Once more it served as the
shining symbol of the age: for it had gone through a merger, and it was
superlative in size. Now, Tammany was attempting to recapture the
swollen booty. It was, according to the writer, hopeless. “Richard
Croker is back from Ireland and his horse races. But he will find only a
ruin and a name where stood the corrupt organization that netted him his
millions.” Later: “Mayor Strong is beloved of the rank and file of the
people. Under him, under such of his competent servants as Street
Commissioner Colonel Waring, the people have learned the blessings of a
Reform Administration. They will never go back to Tammany. They have had
high wages and clean streets, better conditions in their tenements, less
disease and a low death-rate. They have understood. Tammany means misery
and vice: Tammany means the seduction of their daughters into the
gutters of sin: Tammany means all that crime and corruption mean. Leave
it to the people of the Greater City to choose a successor or an undoer
of our Reform Administration.”
This was all clear. But the general terms of the article bewildered
David. Why, in the face of the obvious conclusion, this note of frenzied
worry, of desperate pleading? The people surely could be left to choose
between happiness and squalor, between life and death. And why these
paid announcements of the Tammany candidates--these arguments in their
favor alongside indictments which made it probable to David that Tammany
would poll no single vote? The article was full of contradictions of the
sort that had twisted this last month of his life into a question-mark.
Mr. Croker, breathlessly returned from England, found his Tammany a ruin
and a dream: yet “efforts will be made to elect the Citizen’s Union
ticket such as have never been attempted in the century-old fight
against Tammany, the City’s incubus.” The people had enjoyed three years
of almost paradisal amelioration; yet “it must not be believed that
Tammany’s old tricks of getting the people--appealing to their hearts
and stomachs--have been forgotten.” Mayor Strong was the idol of the
poor; yet “the old cry of corporate control and a ‘rich men’s ticket’
has been raised.” The puzzles spread out into the past. The article
concluded with a brief historic sketch of this Tammany-monster that in
ways so foul brooded upon the people. “The study of Tammany makes it
clear,” one sentence went, “that it can never be reformed. The Tiger can
not change his stripes. Tammany means and has ever meant a single, evil
thing.” Yet, to David’s dumb amazement!--several of the old crusaders
who had ousted Tweed and killed Tammany in the “sixties” were a year
later officers in Tammany Hall! Here was a great Reform Governor and
Presidential nominee--in Tammany Hall; and the present presiding
financial genius of the City’s projected Subway system. While there, in
a corner of that very page, heading a committee of social knights who
had pledged body and bank to hold Tammany at bay was the man--yes, the
very same name of the man--who had been Tweed’s lawyer, who had
_defended_ Tweed when he was caught rifling the City.
David sat struggling with all this as well as the spirit of Sunday
dinner permitted him to do so. In his town, he had heard disparagements
of Tammany. He had always confounded it with the National Democratic
Party. He remembered how they had heckled Jo Cleary, the machinist in
the shop who was a Democrat.
“Well, what if Tammany _is_ Democratic? Do you think your bunch of
silk-stocking Republicans is any better? They’re both of ’em crooks.
Here’s the difference. If you are broke, you kin get ten dollars
through the front door of Tammany: and you kin get a boot through the
back door of the other Party.”
David recalled that there had been silence after this reply. He was in
no mood for thinking it all out. He knew only that Jo Cleary had
straight sharp eyes and that he had always trusted him, found reason, in
more immediate matters, to believe him. Cleary was full of strangeness.
He wanted Ireland to be independent: he got drunk with telling
regularity, each Saturday night. When he was drunk, he was jolly. He
would sing pathetic minor songs of suffering with laughter in his voice
and wild flourishing arms.
“D’ye see?” he’d shout, “This is how we keeps ’em down. ‘Down, down,
with the pigs, ha, ha!’”
When he was sober, Cleary was morose and a good workman. David knew
enough to feel the pathos in his drunken jollity. It was a thing, unlike
all these about him, he instinctively understood. It was a thing, among
others, that made him mark Cleary’s sober words and give them credence.
So David stirred against the Sunday paper. He was glad, when Lois stood
there in the door to take him away from the vice of thinking.
“There’s some people downstairs, David, just dying to meet you. Will you
come?”
While he looked up at her, she was still. She felt the flattery of his
warm eyes. She was slender and sweet, with her bent body leaning against
the jamb. She seemed to David a glowing creature, a product so desirable
that the world which brought her forth must be perfect also. And Lois
saw him, clouding in his chair, trying to rouse himself to the business
below: she liked the brash vividness of his clumsy body, the naïve
confession in his face of all that spoke in his heart. She half realized
that this freshness did not grow in the sheltered rooms of the City: she
regretted it.
David followed her downstairs.
He felt as he stepped in that they were looking at him and that they
must have stopped abrupt from talking of him. It was as if one voice had
spoken and were now cut off. Yet David had heard no word.
He was being introduced. He saw that his business friend, Duer Tibbetts,
was in the group. He gathered that these were his parents and his
sister. They and the Deanes were all knit together. He was outside. He
had the sense of an aperture, laboriously open, slowly sucking him in.
He felt himself resisting.
There were words; he answered enough he presumed. Mr. Tibbetts told him
that his uncle was already hopeful of his success; Mrs. Tibbetts invited
him to dinner. The young girl was beside Lois. They were faintly apart:
a mere quarter-note out of harmony. This introduced a tremor into the
heavy rhythm of the room. David liked it. Instinctively, he moved toward
the two girls. In the dissonance of their atmosphere he found himself:
the group receded into its individual components.
He observed in Mr. Tibbetts an air of aloofness, of studied
condescension that was half nature and half inspired by David. Duer
imitated him, he saw now that Duer always imitated his father: he was a
depleted pattern of Mr. Tibbetts. Mrs. Tibbetts talked most easily. “I
am Cousin Laura,” she announced with a confidence that showed how fully
her habit was command, “and this is Cousin John.” She was a very thin
lady with a bobbing adam’s-apple. She was clad in glimmering blue satin
and her feet were slippered not so slenderly as to conceal their
astounding inharmonious width. David saw the height of her cheekbones
and the scooped boniness between her nose and her mouth. She was a type
familiar to him in New England.
In all the families he had yet come to know, the women were spokesmen.
The men burst on occasion from brooding silence into cantankerous
volubility. David was not surprised when Mr. Tibbetts began a speech.
It was different, however. It came from between thin lips. It left the
broad complacent countenance unmoved. It had none of the weight and
breadth and clarity of this man’s wide open collar and of his wide white
vest. It seemed very little to come forth from so voluminous a
frock-coat. Mr. Tibbetts talked; David could not altogether keep his
eyes from the cylindrical cuffs and the crinkly patent-leather shoes.
These seemed the proper focus of attention, as in other cases the
speaker’s eyes.
Mr. Tibbetts was saying that it was a great joy to have a new young
member of the family. He said this several times. He seemed to be
talking down to David: to be choosing emphatic, monosyllabic words: to
be repeating his welcome for each bright button on his waistcoat. David
knew that Mr. Tibbetts could have spoken better. He recalled now that
this was his uncle’s lawyer, was a great lawyer, had his portrait
occasionally in the papers.
“Duer tells me you are already friends. I am glad. He will help you
downtown. You must help each other. I’ll tell you how. Have a race. See
who can do the best work. Who can work hardest. That’s not a bad idea,
eh? You two--having a race--spurring each other on to new efforts.
Racing each other to the goal of hard and successful work. Do you
understand what I mean? All life is a race. Ever thought of that? All
life is a race. You two men must help each other in the spirit of
friendly Competition....”
It was plain that Mr. Tibbetts loved this conception of his. He caressed
it. He rubbed it up and down. He could not let it go. David, standing
there, counted the buttons on his waistcoat.
Mrs. Deane spoke: “Why don’t you young people run along upstairs?”
Automatically, Lois, Miss Tibbetts and the two boys rose from their
chairs. It was as if they were being thrust away by a sated creature.
David could feel the swift rushing of the current of attention from him.
The single eye was turned away: the single word knew him not. He was
nothing.
He saw these men and women, sure, satisfied; he felt a certain cruelty
in their assurance and in their satisfaction. He was closer to the
girls. Muriel had not budged from her seat. In Duer was a certain
mingling of movement and of motive. Duer was changing his status. Muriel
had changed already. She had qualified and been absorbed. She was one of
the possessors, one with this generation which had achieved. Duer was on
the way. David saw something like a royal whim in the intensity of the
brief interest of these elders. They had looked at him as possible food,
as a possible new adhesion to their body. They had not remotely thought
of him as a separate human being with heart and mind and soul of his
own. In a way poignant, however vague, David felt this, felt further the
meaning of their swift disposal after the appeasement of interest. Here,
at last, he discerned a Group. He knew that in its elemental
consciousness he must be either a good thing for its increase, or a bad
thing altogether....
Upstairs another sudden shift in mood and stress.
Duer all at once was middle-aged and weightily silent. He looked on the
two girls with a forebearing reticence. He had left a part of himself--a
longing part--downstairs. A part of the group downstairs--the complacent
part--he was trying sturdily to carry on.
Lois and his sister were hard to impress. Their bright indifference
outshone his drab and manufactured ease. A certain sublime comfort lay
beneath Duer’s manifest disapproval of their gayety. It said: “Time is
with me. Wait until you are women, as I am a man. My way wins.”
Lois placed Miss Tibbetts before him with a ceremonial air.
“Fay is my _very best_ friend. So you two must be friends, too: for my
sake.... Kiss!”
He obeyed joyously. He liked the spirit of this. He felt its
unregeneracy. Already, though he knew it not, he was arrayed against the
informing tide of this life about him. And when he was near a girl whom
he liked, much of David’s inhibitions melted away.
Duer made his advance. He needed an ally against the flippancy of these
girls, these girls about whom he would have said: “They know nothing
about life: they know nothing about Business.”
“Well, how go things?” he swaggered, throwing up his head with a
nonchalance that was belied by the keen worry of his eyes. “Satisfied
with McGill?”
David retreated. “Sure,” he avoided an answer.
Duer knew that in such gatherings as now downstairs men must talk
politics and business while the mentally segregated ladies discussed
servants and dress. Duer had the passion of conforming. Life to him was
an exclusive club to which he yearned to belong. Service was a means
toward being voted in. He had all the fervor of a mediæval page grasping
for spurs. But David was miserable in this intruding sense of fitness.
He liked the anarchy of Lois more. He was curious about this girl whom
Lois loved. He had nothing to say to Duer.
So the four joined a circle from which Duer spiritually retired. David
did not know how to skate. Lois and Fay already lived the delight of
teaching him. The Rink would be open soon. They argued the kind of
skates he should buy.
“And if you fall,” said Lois forbiddingly.