done this; for five years thought nothing about it, thought nothing
about the world. That was strange. He had loafed three weeks near an
idle lake and a world was born. Was earning one’s bread perhaps a trick
of the hand, like placing the spokes in a wheel? What had the droning
hours in the shop brought to him? Did he not go out into the breathing
fields and watch his mind stir to expand? Until there had been three
weeks of this and his mind had expanded. He liked work. Was it perhaps a
trifle like a drug that one gets used to, that eases one off from the
world? Here he was, juggling with steamship deliveries and tinkering
accounts. Brainier work than welding handle-bars? Life could not be
this. Perhaps this wise woman who earned her living did not know life
after all.
At least, she did not know him. She had bored him: she was boring him
now. David felt he knew her somewhat. He was not boring her....
“It has been such fun, Mr. Markand. After all, we can’t get along, can
we, without fresh points of view? They mean success in business. Not
plodding counts, you will find: always the fresh point of view....”
Her judgments were cleaner-cut than his. A rubber-stamp is dear. What
lay, in truth, behind the patter of her phrases: “France is corrupt but
clever.” “People vote according to picnics and catchwords.” “After all,
there is something _clean_, something _big_ which America stands for,
that no other country can rival”?
Lois also had her occupation. She received no salary for it: she was
apprenticed to it still. She would get her place in the world, if she
pursued it well. It too would mean money and ease and position. She too
was going through a trick that was far from the free winds of living.
Did not both these women belong to Deane and Company?
He loved Lois. He said to himself he loved her. This woman he did not
love. So he saw her clearly. Let him swing this clear-seeing back into
the dim place of his heart that hurt! It was impossible. He could not
diminish Lois after all. The result of his effort was to dispose him
more pleasantly toward Miss Lord. Here he was smiling at her with a new
attention that a less wise woman might have been wise enough to
mistrust....
He came away with a gnawing sense of doubt. He was heart-sick more
deeply than ever. Miss Lord and his cousin were creatures of a single
world. They performed different parts of a single service. Both of them
were supposed to uphold the prestige of this system that made money and
spent it: to submit to its standards of deed and thought, to further its
dominions. For this, Miss Lord had her wages, Lois her keep.
_He too!_ He too had been taken in for service! For service rendered he
too would receive the means of sustaining life. David had seen a
coat-of-arms heralding a strange device on the façade of a great
commercial building. It had puzzled him. He had forgotten it. Now he
recalled it and understood it. He marveled at its telling word. It had
said: “Spend me and defend me.”
A great fright was being born in David....
V
Tom Rennard and his sister stood under a house with a high straight
stoop like a dozen alongside it. They looked up. Behind them their
passing through Stuyvesant Square. The sky was very deep and warm on the
moldering housetops, beyond the cool clouds. These skimmed their shadows
across the Park’s shut green. They threw small puffs of gray on the
gleaming creepers of the Church. They dropped to the squat red
meeting-house of the Friends and lightened its brick with their dark.
They went westering over the bleak dense City.
“This is the number.”
They mounted the stoop.
Each had a hand on the iron rail that rusted under crumbling paint.
A piercing rumble lay in the Park. Jangle of horse-cars, stir and
laughter of children, the dry gasp of life hot over the Park from four
dense sides, as over a cool well. And the Square merging with these the
distances it caught on its church-steeple: hoot of river craft, gashes
of dull speed echoing into sharpness as an elevated train passed through
muffled houses. All of it funneled down the narrow eastward street that
fell from the Square to the River: rose above the shoulders of these
two: flattened back against the reticence of brownstone walls.
“Not a bad house,” said Tom. “Relic of Knickerbocker glory. Some less
brilliant Stuyvesant cousin may have lived in it once.” He pulled a
bell-handle: its call pierced and lingered in the old mansion’s depths.
The house stood unmoved like a ventriloquist.
He turned. The sun was aflame in the Eastern windows. He faced the Park.
Slow swarms of men and women crawling and scattering like bugs. These
drew away his thoughts from the house and Cornelia. She stood laughing
at the ornamented vestibule: its florid crimson plaster.
“Strange, isn’t it?” she said. “When they tried to add beauty to their
houses they made them hideous. Why is it?...”
Tom’s new partner, Gilbert Lomney, who was a cousin of the President of
the Fidelity Bank, who was a nephew of the General Manager of a great
Railroad System, who was among the loyal stags of Mrs. Astor’s balls,
who was a fellow with no moral and no professional sense--he wondered
how he was going to get along with him. He brought in business well
enough. But Tom had misgivings. He thought about them now. Lomney’s most
brilliant feature was his glasses: his best achievement was his
neckties. His glasses had a way of catching the sun whenever there was
any sun around. His neckties were striped and of three colors. Without
his glasses, Lomney was dull. Without his neckties, he would be naked.
His eyes were flat. His complexion was habitually gray. About his mouth
were the heavy lines, the puffing pucker that denote a sluggish kinetic
system. One thing, to be sure: Lomney’s head was long--what Tom knew to
be a generous head. But he was not sure of the brows that seemed
dissociate from his eyes. Well: this was his partner. That day there had
been a rub in the office.
Lomney came in smiling in the morning.
“Rennard,” he said, “is there no way of getting out of this contract
cheaper than by paying the indemnity?”
“Why doesn’t Murchison pay it? Good God! it’s scarcely a mutual document
at that!”
“Well, if he has to, he’ll have less respect for us.”
Both of them knew that Murchison could afford to be fair: that Sampson
could not afford to be cheated. But, “It’s not a question of that,” said
Lomney, “It’s a question of how we are going to stand at 79 Broadway.”
“Let’s have all the facts--since the contract.” Tom easily devised a
plan. He had taken it to Lomney, who rejoiced.
“Come out to lunch, oh, Daniel!” He flourished a silver-headed cane.
“No, I’ve an engagement.”
“Very well. Ta-ta. I’ll not be back to-day.”
Tom sulked at his lonely lunch. He did not mind the trick he had played
for Lomney’s client. But the unctuous pleasure of his partner was an ill
thing to accept. It made him clear away his desk that afternoon with a
fresh disgust: and be improperly amiable to Ladd, their abject clerk:
and smile at Lomney’s fizzle of a brief to be argued in the morning.
“Let him lose the damn motion, I’ll win it back on appeal for him. More
glory, more money----” Standing on the stoop, Tom saw and added: “--More
satisfaction in having Lomney lose.”
He went on, while his body waited: “Why should I be doing these clever
things for the half benefit of Gilbert Lomney? Don’t I know? I have the
brains, but he has the pull and the people. Face it, man, it’s the
game.”
He knew he would have to. There was little use in being clever at the
Law save one could sell one’s cleverness. There was little use in
treasuring even in some mute corner of his soul the dream that ability,
unorganized, was profitable. It could only spoil his humor: perhaps his
chances. Some day, Lomney might find him lunching alone and think it
queer. This above all must be avoided. Lomney had his Class’s phobia for
queerness. He would not have trusted Solomon in an outlandish cut of
vest.
Coming this late afternoon to see his friend, Tom found the check on his
tangents of mood abominably hard. He must take Lomney to his bosom and
cherish him: as a man should another who was to multiply his power....
Waiting made them pensive, forgetful. The doors of the vestibule sucked
suddenly in. Cornelia and Tom gathered themselves with an alacrity
determined by their recovery from its opposite. A woman was there. Her
bare arms were folded: a gray apron spread across her body like a sooty
mist over a fertile field.
As they stepped in they left the day. They entered another time. In the
transition they were quick to both. It was September and hot. Beyond the
bricks and the pavements, Indian Summer made the world glad. Trees waved
in their new bright colors like flowers sprung up over night: earth was
a-dance with insects, was leaping drunk from sharp liquors: air trilled
with seeds for the next Spring. In New York heat was empty. Tom and
Cornelia thought this. David also.
He sat upstairs in his room, looking over the Square.
Tom and Cornelia were out of the day and into the hall. About them the
odor of endless passions, innumerable steps: the acerb sad odor of the
lodging house. More lasting and more real it was than the lives of the
creatures who came and who went. Here in this breath of the dark halls,
their one permanence.
David had but recently moved in. The room was still somewhat strange to
him: it was hard to rest in it, to rest asleep in it. Being with it
stirred his nerves. The need of repose sent him to sitting in the Park.
Also, he was still weary in the change from his vacation spent in the
mountains with the Deanes. The first days of return had been dense
ringing blows on the slumber of his nerves that were once more
glad--glad as never before--in the free welcome of the woods. This was
gone--gone echoing as David refitted to the City.
He was pensive, waiting for his friends to see his new room and take him
to dinner.
He sat with his elbows on the base of the open window and was glad when
the breeze touched his face. Also he was a little irritated when it
fingered upward and threw his hair in his eyes. He had to move his hand
to move his hair. Unwelcome. His mood was the immobile one in which the
Past alone may move. The wind was the stir of the outer world, the world
in which was his future and from whose moving he was momently apart.
It had been hard to leave the comfortable Deanes because they were so
good to him and made him welcome and made him feel that he was theirs.
It was a little easier to go, because of Lois. She held him suffering
near to her, with her lips turned away. But the real reason of his going
was a hidden spring that David could not name. He knew vaguely his going
had to do with this same comfort which made his going hard. One quality
held him, drove him. There was much to ponder in this, since, had he but
known it, there was much of David in this. He needed to move on.
He found reasons for his impulse, worthy reasons that his aunt and uncle
were the first to admire.
One morning in the mountains, sudden, he listened to his words: “Aunt
and Uncle,” he said, “don’t you think I will be training better for an
independent life if I learn to do without your dear hospitality?”
A ponderous sentence. It emptied David whose native tongue was rounded,
poetic, simple. He stood ponderous and awkward like it, above his uncle.
Mr. Deane was in white flannels and a blazer coat that was almost
unheard-of in America and had come blushing from London. It was red and
yellow and purple: striped it was and flaring in front so as to leave
way for the hospitable stomach. Mr. Deane sat curling his legs and
peacefully tasting his cigar. One difference in Mr. Deane on a vacation
was his less unnerved way with his cigars. In the City he chewed them,
in the country he smoked them. Mr. Deane was altogether a more
delightful and more generous person. His little blue eyes looked larger
as if they were more alive: his cheeks hung less heavy: his sparse hair
was less awry. In particular, his voice was different, what he said. It
came in less hectic bursts, less flurries of sudden release. His voice
was almost an easy monotone. He could speak more on a single subject
without wandering or strutting away. He could find more subjects on
which to speak. In the City any family discussion left him somehow
outside, though he himself had started it. His eyes stared away, he
retired, he became abstracted. Soon he was forgotten. He sat there at
the table, chewing his cigar, glassily looking inward. His brow furrowed
moistly, his cheek-jowls had pleats like an old dog’s.... But this Mr.
Deane was alert and full of jests. Each afternoon, he trudged forth with
Lois and David, grunting along a tree-swooned road to a distant woody
place where he might ply them with candies and tea. He appeared in the
morning, a racket in hand:
“Well, young man, are you ready to be beaten?”
And since David was a beginner at tennis, his uncle whipped him. He
twisted his body into intricate designs, he served a high slow ball,
surged forward with racket _en couche_ like a spear or _en garde_ like a
shield. He laughed when Lois laughed from her bench, was happy in his
6-4 victory over David--far more happy, it seemed to David, than any
business success had made him in the City.
The brief time her father was with her in the country, Lois escaped her
friends. The pair played and chatted together: occasionally, she read
him a story from one of the magazines or faced him over a card-table.
And these activities, in which David joined on his own brief sojourn
from work, went on without the interest, almost without the notice of
Muriel and Mrs. Deane.
Summer to them meant merely a transfer from the City of the business and
paraphernalia of City life. “A change of air” was what they said, and
what they actually meant. They were sure to go where the greatest number
of their friends went also. Such activities and such relations as the
summer brought of itself they disqualified before the more serious
continuance of City social life. Of course Lois could not be spared: but
she was far less tolerant with the free toss of the greenland and the
glint of a lake to formulate her appetite for somewhat else. There
seemed less excuse for her dapper friends and the conventions of
pleasure, under the stars and out in the open breezes. Lois could not
know that these enhanced her feeling for herself: that it was against
this feeling the world so painfully grated.
The indifference of Muriel and Mrs. Deane was a delicious pretext for
defiance. Not the least charm for Mr. Deane’s spirited revival was this
half-sheepish, half-crude flaunting of revolt into the proper faces of
his wife and daughter. It was as if he said: “I have my own way of
taking a vacation. You think it foolish. Doubtless it is. But it _is_ a
vacation.”
Now, in this climax of ease and pleasure, something spiteful had to
commence to stir in David, to spoil it all. Something that came with a
new burst of feeling for Lois, with a new glow of comfort in this family
that was so glad to have him.
There was no doubt of that. His aunt’s note of a year ago had invited
him to the house “until you find a comfortable and proper place for
yourself in the City.” By Spring he knew that they had put aside all
thoughts of his leaving, and that his uncle had no doubts of his being
able to “do” downtown.
The Spanish war burst, half frolic, half business, upon the country. In
February the battleship “Maine” went down in Havana harbor. In March,
the Inquiry Commission backed the voices of papers and politicians
shrilling for war, by its dubious decision that an outside mine had done
the damage. Congress turned its trick of political revolution. President
McKinley was swept from the saddle. His reservations were set at naught:
his reluctances were negated to weakness. In April came the call for
volunteers.
The crisis caught David in a tender mood. Stirrings of doubt concerning
business and politics had died. This energy was being poured as fuel
into the flame of Lois. As his energy bubbled up, there it went. There
grew indifference for other things--for all things. Something in the
casual technique of Lois kept the flame from spreading: sealed it in a
tight place where it danced by itself, rather merrily than tragically:
smartingly rather than to a sear. David went on with his affairs.
His weekly salary had been raised five dollars. He left off going to
food-pens for luncheon. The spirit of earning more made him careless
about spending. He came to find Miss Lord less noxious and took to
asking her to an occasional meal. He went to theater, read novels, liked
his Aunt Lauretta. He tried to keep clear of Lois: but after all the
pleasure of her company was far more real than the pain. He saw the
Rennards frequently: but their apart opinions stayed apart, they did not
merge with him. His emotions and his nerves were a blind swirl within a
rigid life.
Now, the call for volunteers. He was young and strong. Was it not his
move to answer? He did not want to go. He was comfortable in his new
indifference. Doubtless, the Cubans were not comfortable. But they were
very far away.
He brought his problem to Tom. He did not know what he wanted of his
question.
“Lord, man! Don’t be a fool.”
David had never seen his friend so moved, so angry, so tenderly savage.
Tom jumped from his seat and paced the room. His hands were fists.
“David,” he stopped before him and spoke with a hot restraint, “I am
ashamed of you. Why the Devil should _you_ want to go to War?”
David was sprawling in a wide Morris chair. He curled up a little under
this onslaught like a furry caterpillar.
“Who is to go, if unmarried fellows like myself are not?”
“Who is to go?” Tom blazed at him. “Who is to go? I’ll tell you. Loafers
who have nothing better to do. Men who are so miserable in their jobs
they’d die for a chance to get away. Men who are so miserable in their
homes they’ll die if they can’t get away. Unmarried, healthy men? The
very last, I tell you. Let the sick of heart and the sick of life go
first. They’ll find the Cuban fever far more like a pleasant change.”
“This is no time to be flippant.”
“I am not flippant.”
“Then you’re--you’re wrong. This is an unselfish war if ever there was
one----” Tom’s smile choked him. “Well, darn it: we’re in it. We’ve got
to see it through, however you may look at it.”
David was sensitive enough to feel the deep concern which Tom’s
cynicisms covered. This was why he stopped his words of protestation.
Strange unease came to him with the feeling. Tom wanted him to stay, to
live. Why should he stir against his friend because of that? Tom
stormed, making his friendship clearer, showing his affection warmer;
David grew colder, less convinced, almost spitefully set against him.
He stood up. “Well,” as if to make an end of an unbearable thing, “I
think I am going to enlist.”
A cloud went over Tom Rennard’s face. It was gray, feverish. His hands
fell out as if a current had crumpled them and gone.
“It is up to you,” he said. David left....
How unfair, how like a woman he had been! Why? Why did this brilliant
warm-hearted comrade lead him into moods that were womanish and unfair?
He had left Tom as if Tom had insulted him. Could he have left
otherwise, if Tom had said: “By all means go. You’re not worth saving.”
It was strange. It brooded in David for several inactive days.
Tom sat long, fingering his hurt, with a cold smile wavering away. His
mind reached back to the first afternoon of the three at Cornelia’s
studio: to the parable he had thrown off and that had had no sequel. Was
this hostility of David’s perhaps its sequel?
He stopped smiling.
“God send, at any rate, he doesn’t go!”
And Tom did not believe in God. He believed in himself. The very
following day he saw Mr. Deane in the latter’s office.
Mr. Deane beamed on him. “I have heard a great deal of you, Mr.
Rennard--from my nephew. What can I do for you?”
“Mr. Deane,” Tom leaned forward in his chair. “You can’t do anything
material for me. I hope you will forgive what may seem the impertinence
of this visit.... You know what interest I have in David. I am eager to
know how he is getting on: what you think of his prospects. I have long
wanted a few words with you on this subject.”
Mr. Deane looked at the young lawyer quizzically, then in assurance.
“This won’t get back to my nephew?” Tom waved his hand in deprecation.
“You see, Mr. Rennard, I am afraid of conceit. Conceit spoils more
careers than drink. My long experience has taught me that bright young
men are what you might call perishable goods. I encourage them only _so_
much. But in your confidence I am glad to tell you that I have great
hopes of David Markand.”
Tom nodded seriously and held his silence. He knew this type of
gentleman. Mr. Deane would presently go on. As he wandered further into
the happy ways of his own conceits, he would be easier to manage.
“David has a good mind. He can work. He can apply himself. At first he
was a little bewildered. He had a strange habit of asking my office
manager a lot of foolish questions. I was afraid his mind was too much
the wandering sort. But that’s over. That was mere strangeness here. I
knew that. I could afford to smile at my manager’s worry. You see, Mr.
Rennard, this is a personal organization. It’s a family. I know how my
men are, and the women also. They don’t get into trouble in _this_
business. We satisfy them: our kind hands are forever on them: no
inducement to discontent or worry. And it pays. It’s a way of keeping
your machinery in good repair. Why, just the other day, one of our
warehouse truckmen....”
He forgot Tom. He prattled on. Tom saw he would have to stem him back at
some convenient crossing. The War was broached.
“I think David has some idea of volunteering.”
He said this casually, and peered sharp at Mr. Deane: saw the shock on
his face, and was relieved.
“Has he?” Mr. Deane’s flow of words belonged to a distant mood.
“Yes. You know David’s generous instincts.” Mr. Deane sat abruptly
straight: he grasped a pencil, tapped the desk with it. “When he reads
the general language of the Call he thinks it means him. I shouldn’t be
a bit surprised if he tells you some fine morning that his business
career is ended.... Well--and yet you know, Mr. Deane, there’s
absolutely no such hurry.”
“Hurry!” the older man exploded. Straightway, he held himself down and
was still.
Tom went on: “If the War lasts, why, then, of course....”
“Of course, if the War lasts. But it won’t.”
“America can’t squeeze all herself into Cuba. Our own affairs....”
“Precisely.”
A silence. Mr. Deane was thinking.
Tom jumped up. “Well, sir,” he thrust out his hand, “I hope I am
pardoned for taking your time in this outrageous way. It naturally meant
a great deal to me to have the mature judgment of some one like yourself
on a boy whom I consider my friend. I am glad to find that you confirm
my confidence in David’s real business ability. I needed your
corroboration. To tell you the truth, Mr. Deane, David’s impetuosity
worries me at times: that quality of giving without thought--without
proportion. I was a bit afraid. You have reassured me. Thank you very
much.” He was gone.
That afternoon, Mr. Deane devised a plan. Deane and Company must render
its quota of service to the national cause. Deane and Company was a
single unit in the zeal of its officers and employes to enlist. Some
restraint must be placed upon such vast enthusiasm. The country could
admit to its armies only the merest fraction of those champing with the
eagerness to serve. Meantime, the land must not be dislocated. Business
must go on. Another course, even if due to an heroic response, would
virtually be to lend comfort to the Enemy. Wherefore, in order to save
its employees the embarrassment of individual choice, Deane and Company
suggested that enlistments be confined to unmarried men between the ages
of twenty-one and thirty. To such, their positions would be found open
on their return from service. David was twenty.
This suggestion was printed and posted. David sought out his uncle.
“Uncle, I want to enlist.”
It was his office; Mr. Deane was contained and strong with all the
prestige and strategy of place. He did not want his nephew to enlist.
This was to be a hot and nasty war. America had no need of his
particular kin beyond his own chosen service for him in the House of
Deane.
“Of course, my boy, of course. I don’t dissuade you. Although you have
seen the ruling of the directors--it leaves you out. Your flying in the
face of that regulation might well cause a stampede in the office. But
never mind,” Mr. Deane hastened to add. He was not sure enough of that
stampede. “Never mind, I am thinking it over. I want you to promise me
you will do nothing until I have made certain inquiries regarding
service. I will let you know.”