understand Cornelia released his worry into laughter.
“Oh,” said David, “it is just the same in my case with what Mr. Rennard
has said about you.” He looked at the little cast between the windows
and blushed: he folded his hands and looked at them.
Tom remained silent. There was no need of talking: and although he
talked much it was deeply true that Tom talked only when he had need of
talking. He was comfortable now. He lit a cigarette, and lay prone,
propped by his arms, on the window-seat; he let the conversation of the
two go over him and smoked.
“You know,” Cornelia said, “we are not New Yorkers either.”
David met her eyes. “Your brother told me about how you ran away.”
Cornelia was silent. What could she say to swell the room’s slow
freedom?
“My case”--David went on--“I am so different. I always lived with my
mother and then she died. And then my uncle took me--took me really in
charge. That is why I came. I have never done anything because I wanted
to, really--that I can remember. Except perhaps work in the bicycle
shop. Mother wanted me to stay longer at school. But--” he looked at his
hands again and stopped, then met Cornelia squarely with a smile, “the
truth is mother said to me: ‘Do as you please, son.’ And--and I was
bored by school. My best friend, Jay Leamy--he worked at Mr. Devitt’s
also.”
“You never told me that,” said Tom.
“He didn’t stay my best friend. I guess that’s why. I guess I was a
better friend than he.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Cornelia.
“Well--it was natural. He was ten years older than I. He got married. He
got a better job at the Arms factory just outside Town. We didn’t see
each other so much after that. He sort of lost interest.”
Cornelia laughed. “I think that’s a little hard!” She did not want this
word. She was sure “hard” was an ultimate wrong word for David Markand.
She was vague in her misgiving. “Probably, his wife and--he had
children? Well, they must have left him far less time.”
“It is not a question of time, is friendship?” David asked.
“Well, left him far less----” Why did Cornelia find this difficult?
“Less _emotion_ perhaps. I can understand that. With a wife and
children.”
“It would not have made any difference with me,” said David simply.
Tom was leaning over. “Perhaps you don’t know what it means to have a
wife and children.”
“I know what it ought to mean to have a friend.”
“Are you sure?” said Tom.
“After we had shared so many thoughts, don’t you see?”
“You must be capable of deep friendship,” Cornelia thought aloud.
Tom was somehow crossed by her remark. He lay back once more, brooding.
The talk was easy now between the other two. So easy that even silence
did not disquiet them. Tom seemed far away.
Out of a silence, David asked: “Is that sort of friendship rare?”
Cornelia, not knowing, did not answer.
“If it is rare,” said Tom, “there must be something wrong with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The good things in the world are common. Sunlight: moonlight.”
“Mother and I were that sort of friends,” said David.
“I hope Tom and I are also,” laughed Cornelia.
David looked at her close. She was a woman who made beautiful things.
That was her life. It seemed to David she was not so very different from
many women he had known who were nothing but mothers. She was not
pretty. It never occurred to David that she could be less than
beautiful. So he accepted her.
A vague questioning flew through his mind like a scarf of cloud: Were
things in the world that had different names so different after all?
Artists and mothers, friends and mothers, sunlight and mothers.... The
questioning faded.
It was good in this room.
Cornelia felt the trace of his mood on her flesh, found a warm pleasure
in talk with this earnest boy whose mind could touch truth without the
stiff proddings of the clever. It seemed to Cornelia that David was
steadfastly strong like a tree.
Tom jumped out of his smoky silence and brewed coffee. They threw
cushions on the floor. They laughed a bit at David’s awkwardness at
squatting. These shadows in the room were good. Tom came forward now.
The ease of his revery and of his listening had distilled some new
disquiet. He needed to get at David.
He would have said: “How little this boy knows himself! What passion
lies behind this dream of friendship! What will the world do when he
goes asking impossible treasures?” The thought gave him worry. He would
have said: “The City will not make him. Thanks for that. But break him,
break him, perhaps.” The fear made him urgent: David must be flexible
with his terrible strength. His spoken words were: “I am reminded of a
story----”
“There was a man.” Tom did not know what he was going to say. His head
swam. He was suddenly tired and full of power. He wanted, not sleep, but
dream---- “who loved his friend. This man loved his friend and a woman
came into his life whom he loved also. He asked for her in marriage, she
gave her promise. So he went to his friend and told him. And the friend
cried: ‘Do not wed her. Remain with me!’ And the man said: ‘I love this
woman but you are my friend. I remain with you.’ He dismissed the woman
whom he loved.
“Now, thereafter, all was sorrow in the home of the man and his friend.
One night as the man slept an angel came to him. The angel said: ‘Thou
who art so loyal to thy friend, name a wish and it is granted.’ The
man, half-unknown to himself, cried out: ‘Make a miracle! Make one my
friend and my lover. Then I may be loyal and yet be happy.’ The angel
smiled. ‘So it is already.’ The angel disappeared.”
Tom paused. A sudden discomfort came upon his face. He pushed back to
his tale as to haven: “...at once the man awoke. He found himself in
his bed. He remembered the angel’s visitation. He believed it. He ran to
the sleeping chamber of his friend, expecting to behold a miracle. It
was his friend, his unchanged friend who slept there. The man cursed and
smote his breast. Then a great light came to him. He understood. He
returned, both loyal and happy.”
David sat there.
This Cornelia understood. Tom was on one of his moody jaunts and away.
She had sat there watching as a girl on a fence might watch a horseman
gallop past in dust and hoof-thud. She recoiled as he swung in too near.
Tom laughed. “Come! You need some more coffee,” to David. “You are half
asleep. I can’t get along without coffee. Can you? The world is so much
a dream, one’s sense of fitness makes one go to sleep beholding it. I
find I can do endless work, with endless cups of coffee. I wonder who
invented coffee. A shame, isn’t it, that the true benefactors of the
human race are nameless. The Gods tied Prometheus to a rock and set a
vulture on him, for giving us fire. The other saviors of life they have
made nameless.”
He skipped nimbly from parable to fun: from apostrophe to laughter.
David found himself loving the mere exercise of following his new
friend. It was like a cross-country run with an agile pathman. Over
brook and rock he tried to leap with him. No time to look and to
consider. The way was nothing, the leaping everything.
The story was forgotten. It was shivered away in the pelt of Tom’s
succeeding words.
Cornelia was silent. She was pensive. She had stopped listening to Tom.
When he went galloping like this, he was running away from something
deep in himself. She knew. He would take this thing within him he needed
to escape and toss it far and rush after it. Let him rush.
There was David laughing. Tom no longer needed to smoke cigarettes.
David was glowing near his finger-tips.
Coffee was gone. Night had come up from the street like incense of
incantation. It curled its way into the room, it subdued the flame of
the room to a warm ash.
Tom lighted a lamp. No one spoke. A golden ray filtered about the table.
It left them in shadows. David got up to leave.
“I was so happy to be here,” he said.
Cornelia clasped his hand deeply in her own. It was warm. She found it
hard to speak. “Boy!” her heart sang to him. She managed to say: “You
must come soon again.” ... “And again and again.” Her heart had the last
word.
Tom took David down through the dark halls where gas-jets shivered like
emprisoned birds. He was not happy with this last silence of Cornelia.
It was as if she had said: “Why do you bring a guest here and then
insult him and not let him even know that this is what you have done?”
His eyes were hot, the hand that took David’s was cold.
“Good-by,” he said, “I hope we are going to be--friends?”
“Oh, yes!” exclaimed David....
David walked under swaying houses. They were aburst with broken flame.
He walked among scattered men and women driven with unbelieving will and
eyes unseeing toward these fires--toward fires that meant love to them
and warmth. It was the evening before work: the breach in the dull
circle of toil. Hearts were released. Blood surged in vain encouragement
through the habit-hardened lives of the workers. Men and women were
floods of longing torrenting the streets.... David walked under the
spread wings of his own sweet mood. Life was full. Full of the play of
voices and of bodies: full of adventure. Life was the mystery of
finding....
* * * * *
No one else was at home, that evening. Anne brought early tea to Lois
and to David.
“It is _our_ house to-night,” Lois was playful.
A strange exhilaration still sang and worked in him. He looked at the
girl who had shared those sweltering nights: he looked at Lois
flattering his new ease. It all seemed right to David. It was right that
Anne had been there to take. He smiled on her masterfully. The girl was
fearful lest the young Miss understand. But we can bring to our minds
through intuition only such thoughts our minds have words for. The
remote amour was an unthought-of, an impossible thing to Lois. Anne’s
own senses, feeling this as they groped forward, again came to rest.
She waited on them with a sweet dignity. It was so plain she was a
woman. A woman was a creature whose life was nourished by herself. A
creature free of the world. David felt this, as they sat munching at
table. It was the quiet serving girl who made him think of woman. With
her blood she nurtured. In her womb, at her breast, with her hands,
forever her own mute spirit giving men food. Woman was the true master
of life: the sourceless god.
David looked at Lois. A faint chill went through him. It seemed to him
that Lois was not quite woman. She was less herself, than this waiting
servant. He felt her need of sustenance, her lack in this of godhood.
Anne helped her to cake. There she was cutting the cake,
simply--sublimely? Lois was above the table like a flower. He thought of
the strength of Anne’s abandon: of the wise strength of her withdrawal.
Wisdom and strength--for him! Cornelia came also. She, too, was more
woman. Already there was lodged the seed of dissolution in his heart
for Lois, before the climax of his caring.
Upstairs, he went far toward it. Lois’ arm was about him, the air of her
body stabbed his blood: he forgot his comparisons. He was quite sure he
loved Lois. They sat so close together, and often she placed her cheek
against his lips. He saw the fine tautness of her body hiding beneath
the flimsy frock it wore. He desired her body. He desired to break its
tautness.
“Is it wrong, Lois dear, to love one’s cousin? Because I love you very
much.”
“It is extremely proper.”
A fire had been fanned in him that afternoon: fanned by Cornelia. It
burned for Lois.
He viced her shoulders in his hands and looked at her, as one stiffens
before a leap. His hands slipped upward to her head. The thrill of her
skin and her flesh flowed through his hands like blood. He held her
face. He wanted to tell her how he loved her. His own face came nearer,
it was like a death and a birth: a frenzy of change.
She thrust her head downward, his mouth sank in the mesh of her hair
behind her ear.
He was panting. “Why don’t you let me kiss you--as I _must_?”
Lois withdrew her body. Her mood was not changed.
“Don’t be silly, David. I can’t let you kiss me, that way.”
He was silent. He did not gainsay her. He wanted to hide his face.
Something started up in his breast and beat against his breathing, hurt
him.
Not the denial of the kiss. It was the sudden pierce of her
insensitiveness. She had not cared to understand how he cared for her.
And when he had longed for her mouth, her mood had not changed!
If only it had! If only she had been moved--though it was in denial.
He had at times believed he saw her little body stir with passion when
he was near her. But so faintly, so containedly. Never a doubt of her
control. Something she tasted in exquisite moderation and enjoyed. In
her denial she was cool. It was as if her hunger for a closer kiss were
a question answered in her catechism: one she knew all about: one she
had learned the answer of by rote.
There she was smiling, chatting. She had already forgotten. He looked
away and heard the mutterings of his pain that she could be smiling,
chatting.
* * * * *
With dull head David went to his work.
He loved Lois and rebelled against his love. She gave him no ground on
which to hate her. Always his love was watching, watching for a pause in
which to whisper: “See? You do her injustice. She is not hard and
flippant. She is young and unknowing. She does not feel a deeper love.
How much sun can a bud hold in its tight petals?”
She was not different. She sought him out. She allowed him no escape.
One day, she said:
“Why don’t you kiss me any more?”
David took her hand and kissed that, tenderly, hopelessly. Lois laughed.
She thought he was teasing her. She fell in with his little game.
Work was already a tune David knew by heart. Fortunately, since his head
was dull. The year approached its scintillant climax. And David’s head
was dull and his heart was heavy.
One bitter cold day he stepped out for his lunch.
When he could he lunched alone. It was a problem of avoiding Duer
Tibbetts whom he emphatically did not like, but who went on blandly
liking David. It surprised David how little his own attitude and his
inner mood affected his relations with that blossoming gentleman of
affairs. It was almost as if, in the reality of their business and
family connections, so slight a thing as personal taste must fade away,
did not count. He had often lunched with other boys in the office--the
sort who Duer said were not “their sort.” He liked them, until he began
in this very approach to have discomfort in their friendship. Since the
bursting of his wound with Lois he sought to be alone. He was equally
surprised by the sensitive response of these others. They felt his
aloofness in the office: they honored it. They were different indeed
from Duer.
He walked toward the cluttered food-pen where the waitresses sweated
visibly at the arm-pits. Here lunch cost him only twenty cents. The
place was at least clean, and the food good. The eggs for instance, and
the butter--details that meant much for David. He sat huddled at a long
porcelain board. From whirling waitresses in white the dishes fell with
clamorous approximation near his place. In the rear was an endless
catatonic beat of crockery and voices. The whole place roared like the
shatter of a mighty loom that wove the calls of women into the brittle
shower of china, the glint of knives into the shuffle of feet. David sat
and took his food and held his big arms tight to his body. The fresh air
as he left gave him the cumulated picture.
This day he heard a clear voice at his side speak his name in the cold
street.
He turned: there was Miss Lord.
Caroline Lord held a higher place in Deane and Company than any other
woman. These were days before the spread of advertising agents. Miss
Lord was in charge of the correspondence department. She had a little
office of her own, and a male assistant and a stenographer. She was
known as a remarkable woman.
“How do you do, Mr. Markand?” She had evidently overtaken David and now
they were walking together.
He saw her casually in and out of the long packed room where David
fumbled figures and papers. She was a remote business detail of this
still strange world. One day, Tibbetts dragged him into her little
office and introduced him. He remembered the way she sat on her desk and
chatted cannily and bit at a pencil. The smile of her white teeth was
beyond the reach of David’s comfort. He was glad to get away.
Here she was being affable again.
“I presume you were going to lunch, Mr. Markand?”
He noticed that she kept step with him. She was a big and capable woman.
“Y--yes,” he admitted.
“Do you like your work? Perhaps you are tired at night. Am I right? Oh,
never worry about that. When you get used--more used to it, it will take
less out of you.”
They had passed his eating place. What should he do? He began cursing
himself. It was so wide in him that he did not want to invite her to
lunch. In her, that this was precisely what she expected. He was a reed
before her silent pressure. There she was talking, as if they had an
hour to be together.
“We were up on the Palisades last Sunday. You must really have some of
your friends take you----” David fumbled in his pocket. His fare
downtown that morning had broken his last dollar. He had a way of not
keeping much of his money with him. It seemed a risky thing to do in a
wild City. His pocket held ninety-five cents! Lunch for two at a decent
restaurant was a catastrophe that simply could not be! She was trudging
along: subtly pushing him toward Broadway. The lunch-places of the rich
were near.
“Doubtless you have a lunch engagement ...?”
“No. But....” He stopped, she stopped. He blushed and she smiled.
“No? Well then, we might have a bite together.”
Why could he never lie? How he despised himself!
“I--I can’t, Miss Lord. I have only ninety-five cents.”
He felt naked before her. A lady should blush and go away when one stood
naked before her. There was Miss Lord laughing: swinging her weight back
joyously on one heel the better to observe him.
“Oh, isn’t it always a joke when we find ourselves short? I understand
so well. Won’t you be _my_ guest, Mr. Markand?”
She tilted her head back. David noticed how small her bonnet was above
the mass of her hair. “You know,” she went on, “it was really my
invitation after all.”
“Oh--I--no--I.” Her light mood was an added weight.
She was quick to understand and to redispose her forces. “Then you must
permit me to lend you five dollars. There now. I’ll be offended if you
don’t.” She dug in her bag and held out a bill. “Why should you
discriminate against a fellow?”
David paused long enough to try to see with what he thought her generous
eyes the foolish panic he was in. He gathered himself. They both
laughed. He took the bill.
“It is good of you,” he said.
“And of you,” she answered.
She was silent and meek while the waiter took the order. He was gone.
She began.
She talked methodically. She chose her specific subject and cribbed him
in it. It was plain that Caroline Lord detested vagueness and abhorred
disorder. No wide fields to roam and to be lost in. Miss Lord was
managing this lunch. Before long she bored him.
In the emptiness of this, he could retreat a bit and see her.
She was a handsome woman. Her age was beyond David’s knowing. He would
have called her new, rather than young. She was well-kept.
“I saw a play last night I am sure would have interested you. _The Blue
Daisy_. Have you seen it?”
He said, No.
“Do you go to the theater much?”
He said, No, again.
Miss Lord followed her plan. She had a catalogue of non-essential
subjects: art, politics, life:--the sort to be served at amicable
luncheons. She had already done books.
“Why--it’s the story of two brothers. Let me see, what is their name?
_Daysplaings--Gass-tong_ and _Rah-ool Daysplaings_. There’s the eldest
who has a beautiful estate in Normandy. The young one is sort of a poet,
a dreamer, you know--wanders about, mostly with his brother’s wife
while----”
David knew he was going to hear the entire story. She was a handsome
woman.
There were no curves in her face. Her chin was square and her mouth was
straight. The poise of her forehead was straight and the look of her
eyes was square.
“Well, you can imagine what happened then. But it didn’t. The idea was
there. That is bad enough. The husband was quite right, I think....”
Miss Lord was a pattern of symmetry: a study in balance and rule.
Her body was not angular. She sat very straight in her chair. “Then, the
curtain falls.” She was tall, and sitting she topped David. “The way it
was acted had a good deal to do....” She came forward a little. Her
hands were half shut and flanked her head. Her arms were two columns
propping some splendid official building.
“Of course,” she was saying, “that sort of thing seems to be common in
France. They’re a decadent race, you know. Clever, though!”
Yes: her body was indeed not angular like her face. Her arms were ample.
David could see the suggestion of flesh bursting the plain white
sleeves. Her bosom was voluptuously full. Were these not feminine
curves, these suave rounded masses? He felt the solidity of Miss Lord
more somehow than her sex. Sex is an aura, not a form. Women understand
this best. But a certain lack puzzled David. It was strange for him to
sit so close to this lovely woman and not feel her lovely: to see her
flawless and be unwarmed.
“‘Oh,’ the Irishman pointed, ‘she’s an Irish bull.’”
He should have laughed at this joke. He was full of the pain of Lois.
Suddenly, he was thinking of Lois.
“And what do you say,” it was the first question she had asked him in
many minutes, “to Tammany’s victory! After three years of splendid
reconstruction?”
It was part of Miss Lord’s program to discuss politics. Miss Lord was no
“crank on women’s rights,” as she put it. That was too serious a view of
the thing. Above all, or under all, she wanted you to know that she was
a woman: she wanted you to treat her as a woman. But a strong, wise
woman. One who could, unblushing, talk of adultery in a French play or
of the degradation of a Tammany campaign.
“Why,” David answered, “I don’t know. I can’t understand. If all these
things were true about Tammany Hall.... There must be something else
behind it all: some _reason_ why Van Wyck was elected.”
Miss Lord smiled. This was his opinion: a fledging’s she could take with
indulgence. She wanted no more of it. Now she could deliver her own. She
started.
David was thinking of Lois. Little lovely Lois. Why must his mind fill
so compellingly with Lois, when he lunched with Miss Lord?
“The thing is, you see, the people do not think. Catchwords and Sunday
picnics win them over. Really, popular government----”
This woman. That girl. Could two creatures be more different? Why then
the idea of a comparison. Did they have something, did they lack
something in common?
“... so far at least a failure.”
Their ideas _were_ one. Here was Miss Lord trying to conceal the
impression that she earned her living: trying with might and main to be
like Lois. An older, more settled, equally virginal Lois?
He half-closed his eyes. It did not matter. Such subtle things as eyes
half-closed were beyond Miss Lord. Beyond Lois? He heard her voice. “The
City had to pay ten cents a-piece for coat-hooks! A-piece! When you can
buy them _anywhere_ retail for a nickel.” He heard her voice. It was so
unlike her stalwart strapping body that he had not noticed it until now
when his half-shut eyes saw less. Miss Lord’s voice was high, was
girlish! It too had that ring which, though David knew no such rule,
goes with an emotionally empty life. Wise, cool Miss Lord. Did she have
really more of the wine of feeling than pampered Lois? Was she more
alive, after all?
She was earning her living. While Lois lolled at teas, and waited for
her début. Earning one’s bread--David knew what that meant, in the
world. It meant the heights and the depths. It meant nobility. The man
who earned his bread was a man: the man who did not was less than a
woman.... Did it really mean these things?