“Well, never you mind. We’ll pick you up. Won’t we, Fay? We’ll take care
of you.”
She seemed almost tender. Then her hard giggle.
“No one shall laugh at you either,” Fay declared.
“No one except us,” said Lois.
The thought came to David that he would have preferred her saying: “No
one except me.” But it was plain these two hunted together. David found
it hard to understand their likeness.
“Children! Children! Come now. We’re going.” The voice of Mrs. Tibbetts
strode through the house. Duer was the quickest to respond.
David and Lois were alone.
The brief packed hour had stirred the early world of David, had made it
glow again. Their spirits had been high together. Now, somehow, they sat
in gloom. They realized that in their lightness there had been combat.
Looking at each other, they felt the burden of those below advancing
heavily upon them.
“Why do you love Fay so much?”
“Because she’s a dear.” Lois was not on the defensive because of Fay.
She had more intelligence than her answer. She deemed the question
worthy of no better. She sought the solace of a different subject.
David kept silent, and looked at Lois and thought of Fay.
He saw Fay quite clearly. Fay was dark, regular of feature, beautiful
even. Her face was hard. It had none of the free loveliness of sixteen
years. It roused in David passion more nearly than affection, the need
to dominate rather than to help. David saw her straight mouth, her
veiled eyes, the squareness of her forehead: he tried to remember that
she had laughed and joked with Lois, was delightful snubbing her solemn
brother. Her lively brightness seemed strange to her immobile face.
“Besides, Lois is her chum, and look at Lois!” he argued with himself
and he looked. He knew that her tenderness was like an early yellow
violet. He set aside his first forbidding instinct about Fay. He forgot
it, altogether....
In contemplation of each other, these two were like two worlds, each
with its atmosphere and its teeming life and its fires, each with its
intense exclusive consciousness, thrust suddenly close out of the
silences of Space. They felt the indefeasible Past that summed their
difference: its involute progression of separate thought and deed
reaching from the mist of their beginnings. They were separate: Nothing
was between them. Yet they were being drawn together.
When Lois came down to breakfast, David was gone. There was just time to
kiss her father as he trudged back into the dining room, hatted and
overcoated, smoking hard at the day’s first cigar. Mr. Deane’s true
genius for system was at work even at half past eight. When he reached
his train at Fiftieth Street, his cigar was done. It was a smaller cigar
than he smoked later in the day.
“Well, good-by.” He stood in the doorway. Lois jumped from her chair and
threw her arms about his neck and kissed him. She loved her father. It
was somewhat a maternal love. She knew that he was rather the defensive
and serviceable member of the household.
One day, she visited her father at his offices downtown. She walked a
bit fastidiously through the murky sales-department on the ground floor
where the bright yellow oak and the beveled glass and the shadows under
long tables depressed her. She saw men moving about in shirt-sleeves:
grimy boys that ambled in and out of doors whose jaws seemed busier with
gum than their slack minds with business. They led her to a spiral iron
stair through whose slatted steps she could see the bowed heads below
of men at desks and women bent over papers. It had appeared to her first
that this was a hostile world, she was frightened to have come upon it.
On the narrow steps, she gave way to a girl--not much older than herself
in years--but very old as if she lived in a harder world than Lois, a
world that wore one more away, that sapped the flower of cheeks and the
laughter of eyes and parched the bloom of a girl’s hair. She noticed all
this, stepping aside so that the girl might pass. She moved, apologetic,
fearful, strangely ashamed. She saw the hard paper cylinders serving
this girl as sleeves. In the lifeless golden hair she saw that a pencil
was stuck. She felt guilt. But Lois had no power to plumb her impulse:
it went. She was in her father’s private office and a new pride swiftly
scurried away the mist of that strange encounter.
Here--she felt it at once--here her father was master! A new light by
which to see him.
At home her mother ruled him. Muriel flouted him when he obtruded upon
the most idle of her ways. He seemed glad, as of a privilege, to hold
Lois on his knees, after Sunday breakfast, and spoil her with promises
of trinkets, bribing for kisses and smiles. Also, at home he was weary,
a depleted man. He had little ways of confessing his weakness and
although Lois was not so analytic as to gauge them consciously, their
accumulation brought its impress to her mind. He lost his temper. He
bore treading on, was silent, then suddenly he lost his temper. He cried
aloud about his power, that his will was final: _he_ was the head of the
household: not Muriel, not Muriel--_he_. Lois felt the whisper against
these over-protestations.
Here was a party to which a not too well established youth had invited
Muriel. The youth was calling for her in a carriage himself had hired.
“You aren’t going in that carriage,” said Mr. Deane.
Muriel was struck silent. She retreated before the sudden quiet of his
authority. Slowly gathering herself, she matched him.
“And why not, please?” Her voice was compressed in her throat.
“Why not?” her father burst forth. “Because I don’t want you to. I don’t
allow any young whippersnapper who wants, to take my daughter in a hired
carriage. We have a carriage of our own, haven’t we? Isn’t it good
enough? Send your young man a message to countermand his rig and you may
go.”
Muriel stood there, swaying a bit, lowering on him.
“I’ll do no such thing. Make him think I’m a child who cant go out in
any carriage but my Papa’s? The whole thing is too silly----”
“Very well. Then stay at home.”
Muriel broke into tears.
“I won’t,” she cried. “I’ll go. I never heard of such a thing. It’s
stupid. What have you got all of a sudden against Alfred? Why should you
ask me to insult him so? If he prefers to order his own cab....”
She stood there and wept and moved not at all, save for the stamping of
her feet. Her father paced the room, far less contained.
“I have said what I meant.” Stopping short, he joined the issue. “And
you will obey. So long as you are in my house, I am to be obeyed, do you
hear? You ain’t married yet.”
He left the room. Muriel went to the dance in her father’s carriage. But
Lois knew how clearly, in the light of the ensuing days, the victory was
with her sister. Muriel kept aloof, frigid. She waged a perpetual
_guerilla_ on her father. Soon he began to bribe and to cajole for a
return to favor. He bought her an armlet she had several months ago
expressed the wish for. He had said it was too expensive. “Out of the
question.” He took her to theater with a strained gusto of good will
and to supper after. He spoke to her with a nervous smile that exclaimed
his suppliance. And Muriel accepted all, gave nothing. She wore his
armlet and in no way acknowledged the life and feeling of the harried
man who waited for thanks as for a reprieve. On his return each evening
to his house, she managed some little way to hold him frozen in
discomfort. On the occasion of another dance, he said:
“Muriel, my dear--I just wanted to know--are you using the carriage
to-night, or is your escort taking care of that? I just wanted to know,
you see--because if so, I might use Henry myself. There’s a conference
I----”
“I have made no other arrangements.”
“Oh, well, that is all right, my dear. I can get a cab. I--I just wanted
to know, you see....”
Having completely and ignominiously surrendered, he beamed at his
daughter. Muriel smiled back.
Here: Lois was ensconced in a deep armchair of bronzed leather. She was
examining her little feet that lay in a rich Turkish rug. A knock at the
door.
“Come in,” said her father without looking up.
A young man, the symbol of subservience, stepped in.
He placed a group of papers before Mr. Deane, who did not look at him.
He stepped back, threw up his head and waited.
Mr. Deane raced through the papers. He marked annotations. He grunted.
“You’ll have to see Mr. McGill about this”: the young man agilely
stepped forward to ascertain which paper it was, and agilely subsided.
“All right. Let Mr. Marton attend to the tax.”
He returned the papers to the young man, for the first time saw him.
“Here,” he smiled. “Why don’t you two greet each other?”
Duer Tibbetts moved jerkily forward and took his cousin’s hand. But the
bondage of the room’s authority was strong on him. He seemed weighed
down by this sense of special dispensation. Social talk was impossible
in the august presence. He was soon gone.
Another five minutes of chat, another knock. This time a girl appeared
with papers. The same subdued alertness, the same gingerly respect. Mr.
Deane pressed a button. A boy bobbed in.
“Take Miss Deane to her carriage.” The boy fell back as if to flatten
himself into the wall, while she passed him. Her father got up.
“Well, my dear. I am afraid I am too busy now”; in this splendid easy
manner he dismissed her....
This transfiguration of her father into a man of power was a sharp new
knowledge. But in the more persuasive color of her home, its lines grew
faint. It soon withdrew into the limbo of things remote, scarce real,
hence scarce remembered. It had little application to her world uptown.
In consequence, it had no effect.
Lois left school in time for lunch. It was to be her last year at
school. The lunches would go on.
Seated at the wide round table with Muriel and her mother, she
instinctively inquired into her own future freedom: and in this mood
studied them. She studied their dress; she studied their activities. She
absorbed their judgments and their pleasures.
She was sixteen. A spirit of gayety and candor danced in her heart. But
she had no knowledge to build a mansion for it: to train and cherish it:
to give it weapons wherewith to confront the world. It was dancing, this
unblemished spirit, dancing itself to death. For it was daughter of the
sun, and it breathed no fresh air: it had been born careless and frail
and all about it walls of convention: it was starved and forced to feed
upon itself.
“I promised to go and have tea with poor Mrs. Dent.”
“Since when,” asked Muriel, “is Mrs. Dent ‘poor’?”
“Don’t you remember she has just lost her husband?”
“Oh, yes.” Muriel remembers.
Her mother goes on. “Do you think, dear, you can drop me there on your
way to the Selby’s?”
“I don’t really see how I’ll have time, Mamma. I must take a rest after
lunch. I promised to call for Aline King.”
“Can’t Aline get there without you?”
“I promised her, Mamma.”
Mrs. Deane will take the street-car. She does not like to squander money
on cabs.
“You haven’t forgotten that you are going shopping with me, to-morrow
morning. You promised me.”
“I saw just the loveliest hat, just to-day, Mamma, at Bertrande’s. I am
having it sent home to you. I’m sure it will suit you. Then, we needn’t
go shopping. I must write to Clarice sometime. I thought I’d sleep late
to-morrow and write before lunch. She is getting a divorce, you know.”
Lois knew already the inwardness of marriage. There was much talk of
this at the luncheon table. She had the right contempt for the girls who
married unmoneyed men for love: for the men who risked their
future--their finances--in alliance with unmoneyed girls: and for the
novels she read where love was extolled and the sentimental match
defended. These books were--well--for reading. Novels and stories were
indulgences like red and emerald peppermints after dessert. They lied.
And Lois knew already the inwardness of friendship. Muriel and her
mother had friends. They kissed them and flattered them and entertained
them. At the luncheon table they discussed them. No one but was a tissue
of deceptions, of selfishness, of deceit. Their morals were largely
obstacles they were forever dodging. They flirted--with fops or fools.
They angled--for goldfish. They were miserable at home. One was none too
anxious to have children. One was none too faithful to her husband. All
of them were none too good at all.
Immediately after lunch, Florence was to call for Muriel and take her
for a walk. Florence was violently trying to win the King boy whose
father had nearly a million. But it was hopeless because Mabel--mutual
friend--had told Muriel all about it and _she_ was secretly engaged to
Clifford King. Oh, Aline wouldn’t know! Clifford was bored by Aline.
Muriel and Mabel had had a good laugh over Florence--poor child--such
antics.
“She really loves him, you know.” Muriel smiles complacently. This is an
interesting if somewhat superfluous detail in her wish to wed him. Mrs.
Deane nods, mildly concerned.
Later: “Hello, Florence dearest. I was so afraid you’d be late....”
Indeed, Lois knew already the inwardness of life. Life was, in the
patriarchal term, a “business proposition.” Out of the arcana of the
past her intellect could summon the picture of a free land peopled by
striving men and women. This land was America. Its freedom meant the
opportunity of all “to get along”: to become rich. Men achieved this in
business, women in marriage. The sublime distinction of America was that
no castes interfered with business, and no classes with marriage....
Sharply there emerged from this hallowed field one man and one woman.
The man was her father. He had grown rich by being quick and clever. The
woman was her mother. She had grown rich by being sensible, by seizing
her chance. Romance in their lives was a hidden function, if it existed
at all. It was bound up with the mysteries of birth and sex. These
things took care of themselves.
The important thing for Lois, since she was a woman, lay in the need of
being sensible. Lois knew what this meant. She knew as well the
proportional insignificance of her own girlish impulses. Lois loved to
play, loved to be loyal to a friend, would have loved to love a man. But
these were part of her childhood, and childhood was a special state. Its
needs were indulgences one must outgrow. Childhood was of the same dim
category as art and stories. It wasn’t true. It was “make-believe.” It
lied. Muriel had already cast it aside like her short dresses. Lois was
aware she was carrying it a bit too far and too long. She was sixteen
and in ankle skirts and her braids were already gathered on her head.
She deemed herself brave and a trifle foolish to be so frolicsome at
sixteen. She was unswervingly confident of knowing how to change at the
needed moment. Meanwhile, she felt herself slightly inferior in the
things that held her and in the moods she loved. The rule of life was to
harden the present into a mold for the future. Yet Lois could not resist
pouring herself still into immediate and short-lived moments: giving
herself to emotions that must have no future. The gay spirit still
danced fast. Inexorably, from without, the things she learned bore
inward, seeped downward, stifled the things she had merely always felt.
Her acquired consciousness was a slow acid mist that would eat away the
stir and laughter of her birth. The gay spirit danced fast, though it
was dancing to death.
All this was Lois. All this was drawing, with her and in her, near to
David. With David the stalwart muteness of the years that inclosed him
with his mother: the sting and the song of his father: the drowsy stir
of the Town not yet awakened, not yet awakened to its death in the crash
of the industrial Age.
Two little teeming worlds, spying each other, craving each other across
the Nothing....
* * * * *
David and Thomas Rennard had agreed on an evening by letter. They were
going to dine together, and then to theater. Tom waited in the lights of
a Broadway chop-house.
He would not know the man he met: this he knew. He stood quite still and
gauged the crowds. The heavy strokes of their passing fell against his
measured life. They separated him as he stood there from the thoughts
and fruits of his growing. Tom stood graceful and free as few men do.
His weight was equal on both feet: his arms were unpropped: his back
curved subtly in rhythm with his head. Only in the faint peer of his
eyes was there defect. Tom was nearsighted. He did not admit this. He
wore no glasses, despite the advice of doctors. His best friends had no
inkling that when he recognized them, distant, on the street, it was not
by sight of their features but by knowledge of the accents of their
walk.
The crowds flayed him with dull black strokes and Tom was separate from
his first months in the City. He twined this with thoughts of David. It
was different of course. David must have found a ready welcome in the
house of his uncle. Tom knew of Anthony Deane: his name was that of a
big-hearted, well-liked merchant. Tom had come with no reception, no one
to remake and to keep him. He thought of a stone fallen in a
wind-shattered sea, how it sank with no slightest added tremor of wave
and no sign from the swinging heavens. He knew what the City had done
upon him. The terracing steel had rivetted his eyes and writhed him. The
clamor of this world had soon enticed him from the call of his old
thoughts. Old dreams were outrun by the faëry of the City.
He stood naked there, and emptied among millions. Cornelia was distant
with her cold hand in his. But he was more alive than he had been. He
knew this, because his nudity was not stark. It was encased in a great
trembling. It was cold with a great hunger for warmth. A fire of will
stirred in him: darted from him out and became vision among the
millions. He had seen. He saw that these millions also were naked and
forlorn from themselves. No one was at home in the City: no one was
himself in the City! Tom had found himself smiling, known himself
strong. He was naked no longer. _He was clothed in the knowledge of the
nakedness of others_.... At once he had looked at his hands and found
money. He prospered. But Tom knew that this light from within himself
which played about among the darkness of men and brought him the
strength of knowledge could not go forth from him and stay in him as
well. When it was away, outside, doing his work Success, he was unlit
himself.
Would he find David still shivering in his new nakedness? Tom remembered
the distinction between them.
“No,” he said aloud: “he’ll be thinking there’s darkness and confusion
all about, in the blinding blare of his own light. And blaming it all on
himself.”
He winced, suddenly finding it cold. The dark pupils of his eyes
distended, the mouth drew downward over the lower lip, the skin was taut
on his cheek-bones. Then a recovering spark in his eyes illumed their
warm particles of bistre, the defiant smile of his mouth pointed upward.
The lamps of the restaurant façade fell over Tom and bathed him. He had
the sudden pain of feeling himself a black spot in warm blaze. He moved
aside to shadow. He stepped out, and grasped David’s hand.
A coachman stood at the corner beside his horse. Idly he flapped his
arms--a habit caught from the cold winters--against the musty broadcloth
of his coat. He saw the two young men in the light. Their profiles were
sharp. An eager alert young man and a drowsy one, passive before him. A
clear laugh and a muffled laugh that followed always. The coachman
turned to his horse: “Well, young feller, have some oats?” He prodded
his soft nose. The other two were gone.
Three houses stood far separate in the City. The house of the Deanes
where the old world of David dissolved into a frantic chaos: the house
of the Company in whose gathered fires his new world formed from the
running welter: the house on whose top floor lived Thomas Rennard. These
houses threw a vivid stirring like the glow of lamps. The spheres of
their activity converged. As they burned and moved, a myriad other
burnings rose and met them, intermingled and transfused them. A single
light, drenching the City. It fell like an eye upon these two talking:
it fell with the same singleness upon each spot where men and women
were, where men and women loved. From each spot came a glow, from the
myriad glows rose back again the transfusing fire, deeper than
consciousness, more real than the separate lives which fueled it, as the
glow of coal is deeper and more real than the black coal itself. But
through the brightness was a vibrancy: and where David and Tom sat, had
they been wise enough to follow its receding lines, their vision must
have reached back to the three houses. From other spots the grain of the
light traced back to other sources. From these sources forth again to
farther ones.... To a white cottage in the Eastern village, to the
leaning plains of Ohio. Thence again away to beneath the hearts of two
dead women stirring there, quiet--still--once more outward--perhaps to
find each other behind the sun. Close, there: and here at the chop-house
table seeking to be close.
* * * * *
David and Tom, together, were not on Broadway but at Cornelia’s studio.
The studio had swung to place under their feet; Broadway lurched on, the
footing of others.
Cornelia had not mentioned again her wish to meet Tom’s new friend. It
was not necessary. The relation between them was too intimate for that.
Tom knew when she was thinking of this: Cornelia knew when Tom had
understood her.
“Well, how was the dinner, brother?”
“Are you busy next Sunday afternoon?”
“No.”
“I told Markand you were anxious to meet him. He is in a state of
perturbation I hope won’t interfere with his royal job of clerking.”
“Oh, I am glad. But--how was the dinner?”
“You are the first artist he will have met. I have told him about us.
Cornelia, you must wear something brighter than that Russian thing. Will
you? The sandals will do. Stockings under them, however. A little more
air in the meshes of your hair. Yes? Why not that green silk blouse with
the orange smocking. I want him to see you’re an artist in some outward
visible sign.”
“And the work----?” Cornelia looked at her clays.
“I am afraid he is not quite up to these.”
“Oh, nonsense, Tom!” His sister turned on her couch, her favorite seat.
She tucked a foot beneath her and laughed. “To hear you talk, one would
think the boy was dull--or that my art was inscrutably profound.”
“He’s not dull. I was amazed last night....”
“At last, the dinner!”
“I was amazed at the bright muddle he’s in. I tell you, he’s inquiring
and inquiring. It’s glorious! He told me the Spanish-Cuban question was
not a mere matter of relief for the _reconcentrados_! ‘There’s something
else beside Principle,’ he announced.”
“Whereupon, I am sure, you added: ‘The same’s true of the Monroe
Doctrine.’”
“If I had, it would have shocked him. I did not. His new searching eye
has not yet reached that sacrosanct past. I was in no mood to startle
him, Cornelia. I felt different. I like David Markand. I respect him.
What if he has the usual illusions? In his soul, they are no longer the
smug knock-kneed lies I hate. They become true: at least, beautiful. My
facts seem shoddy and ugly--and lying, in the warm glow of his faith.”
They were silent both. Tom did not often speak so tenderly.
“Wait and see,” he concluded.
“I see already,” said his sister.
So David came.
He was to leave at once after the Sunday dinner: push his way through
the depleted Sabbath City: he was to ring the bell on the brass-plate
marked _Rennard_, come up three dusty stairs and find them waiting
through the door that made two worlds of the black hall and the bright
room.
“I am so glad to see you!” Cornelia had him at once in hand. He looked
very tall beside her sharp slightness. She took his hat and his coat.
“Do sit down.” David was anxious to look everywhere about him, to touch
all these mysteries with the warmth of his eyes so that they might be
cold and strange no longer. He did not quite dare. He kept looking near
Cornelia: then, with still greater ease, toward Tom. In this his
sensitivity was clear. A glance was an intimate gesture, a visit, to
David. He could not comfortably look at what he did not already
comfortably know.
“Tom has told me not half enough about you. Just enough,” she smiled,
“to make me know it was not half enough.”