their ages and their minds. An eye unchecked by surfaces and the color
of habit, drawn to the womb of life, must have found Tom’s love for his
father in those days deeply atune with the love of his father’s wife who
was dead: must have seen the bereaved love of Curtin Rennard astir for
a new replenishment in all his children.
So deep a dream could not grow unchallenged in one as quick with reality
as Tom. He rebelled. His nature munitioned itself for rebellion.
There was Cornelia. She saved herself from her father by making into an
ideal her dim devotion to her mother. Tom took her as ally. Cornelia
imaged her saving devotion in maternal deeds, she imaged it in clay. Her
mother was sanctuary from the common danger. In Tom grew great love for
his protecting sister: above all tense self-abandonment to his father’s
greatest rival, the real world. Here lay freedom for Tom! His blood knew
that the hidden love must scorch and shrivel in the sun. He courted the
sun. He was in perpetual revolt against his father’s hold on his
emotions: against his father’s closeted ideals: against the source of
his father’s hold, his own deep identity with his mother.
Hence, Tom’s distrust of women, his devotion to Cornelia, the frenzied
scatter of his forces in objective life. During Tom’s boyhood, he was
almost a woman in his attitude toward women: in each of them he fought
his mother, fought her betrayal of him--as of herself--to his dominant
father. His love of Cornelia was at once a way-station for his
self-freeing will and a substitute for the parental yokes from which he
needed freedom.
Directly through her, indirectly against his father, Tom grew in love
with imagery, with color, with the Symbol--the artist in Tom grew. From
his passionate seeking of the outer world, there rose his power of
success in society and in law. For the world loves the lavish spender of
himself: it will run to the largess of his ruin as wolves to their meat.
Yet as Tom saw his practice swell, saw the doors behind which stood
butlers open to him, the silent music of his blood went on. All these
talents and emotions were reactions. Behind them stood the Image of a
man--hating art, hating social intercourse, hating life,--of a man
beckoning Tom back to an ecstatic, fabular peace. For that man’s hatreds
also were reactions ... behind them....
All that ancient lure was now resistance to the life Tom flung himself
upon, even as all this life was his resistance to that hidden lure. He
would consecrate his talent, he would build him his church, Success. But
his mind ran against it, weakened the rock on which he builded. Cornelia
was knowing. Here were depths beyond her vision. She saw chiefly the
young man so soaked in his Puritan upbringing that he was loath to face
the joys he had of his worldly undertakings: a very usual hypocrisy and
of no importance, but one she hated since she was full of it also.
“I don’t see,” she said, “why you should be ashamed of enjoying Mrs.
Duffield’s parties. Heaven knows we had lonely enough years, here,
first.”
“You go with artists--with intelligent people. You have too much
kindness to imagine how dull the rich and the successful are.”
“Nonsense! Their success speaks continual wise words. Their gold is
brilliant.”
So they swayed back and forth, these two. They were equals. They had
never become rivals--before David.
* * * * *
Laura Duffield invited her new friend to dine.
“Come early,” she said, “I want you to meet my son, before he goes to
his usual party.”
He entered the drawing-room: a young girl and a young man were there.
“Farge and Marcia, this is Mr. Rennard.”
Their polite greeting was sauced in an expectant languor and a very
harmless resentment. It was as if they were resigned to a bad habit of
their mother.
Marcia, looking at Tom’s trimly rhythmic body, thought: “It is lucky
Mamma is getting a divorce and must behave.”
Farge was too dull to syllogize but he twinged with a sort of envy and
almost pondered out: “_My_ friends are not freakish enough for Ma.”
Tom was seated and Mrs. Duffield was already in full talk.
He found it hard, listening to her, to take in these two. As she talked,
she insisted on holding his eyes. It was as if she talked for no greater
purpose. Marcia and Farge sat on a lounge just outside his range. They
were looking at him. Farge smoked a cigarette; he had offered none to
Tom. Marcia leaned far back, her legs were outstretched straight; she
threw one ankle over the other. Mrs. Duffield made good the deficiency
of her son. She never smoked, but she had full provisions for her
friends. Tom felt how from ankle to neck this girl was firm and spare
and full of a voluptuous relaxation. Only her eyes were taut, perhaps
from poising him. She did not listen to her mother’s words. She hummed a
tune very faintly: her upward foot marked time.
She got up. She jerked her shoulders, as if the gown that clung to them
were an obtrusion. Perhaps the obtrusion was elsewhere in the room. “It
must be late, Farge?”
The boy gave a limp hand: Marcia nodded sharply. Tom felt that Farge had
not wanted to shake hands, and that Marcia would not have minded. He
noticed that this girl was built very like a boy: and that Farge with
his pudgy rondured body and pink cheeks was rather like a girl. Alone
with Mrs. Duffield he found that he had been attracted by her daughter.
He was not sorry. This charm upon him made it easier to be charming. He
told an anecdote of that day in court: he had been in court seventeen
days before, but instinct made him say “to-day.” Talking, it came to him
how far more naïve and fresh this oldening, troubled mother was than
her young daughter. Tom did not understand this. He felt it would not
have been safe to tell white lies to Marcia. He wondered why the strange
weariness and slackness of the girl came to him as pleasure.
“Why, Mrs. Duffield, is the younger generation prematurely old?”
She laughed with her liquid laughter. She did not guess beneath his
question.
“Why? Do you mean yourself? You are not prematurely old. Oh, I am sure
not. You are mature. You have been forced so early to play a man’s part
in the world.”
“That can’t be it. I see it most in young folk that do not work at all.”
“Well, not working at all is the part of the very old.”
“I am still not satisfied. I almost think that the shrewd parents of
Competitive America have learned to palm off their own weariness on
their children. Just like them it would be: a trick of the trade.”
“It is nothing but sophistication, dear Mr. Rennard. We old folks have
the naïveté of savages. Our children are civilized. That is all.” She
examined him. “Does this weariness repel you?”
Tom watched sharply without heightening the look of his eyes. She had no
idea whence had come his thoughts.
“No,” he ventured. “That is proof, I suppose, that I am touched myself?
It attracts me rather. Of course, not weariness alone.”
Mrs. Duffield was weary: endlessly weary. Often she flung herself to bed
with a horror of the needs of her toilet. Often she awoke in the morning
with the demands of getting up a mountain in her path. She took Tom’s
words to herself. She would not have to grimace her weariness away. It
would be pleasure to be with him.
Soon they were friends. When he came in to her, she thrust out an arm
in greeting, and did not budge from her lounge.
“Make yourself nice and at home; or I’ll have to get up and do it for
you. I’m so comfy!”
Her weariness went before her admission of it with him. He stood over
her; she was aware that his eyes could see within the negligent folds of
her flimsy housegown. What did it matter? They were friends. Once she
said:
“Make believe this is an evening dress. Then the décolleté won’t shock
you.”
“Then also, it won’t interest me,” said Tom.
She needed to know everything about him: that she might help him.
“I’ve made up my mind on that!”
She told him of herself more and more: more and more easily. She told
herself that she could not otherwise gain his confidence: and she needed
that really to help him, really to be “friends.” In truth she craved his
help, she was glad to purchase it with whatever aid her place and her
connections might afford.
“It is hard to speak of such things,” she said, half sitting up on her
lounge, with a bare arm falling straight toward the floor. At once it
was easy. The ease of her lying there before him and the glow of his
eyes taking her in were a lubricant to her words. She could never have
spoken so at first in a tailor-made suit. She would have laughed with
the freedom of sincere denial at a friend who ventured to link the
exhibition of her soul with the exhibition of her body.
* * * * *
It was through Laura Duffield that Tom came to his real establishment in
practice. Gilbert Lomney was her cousin. For him, Laura was a brilliant
woman who somehow had managed also to be good. He had great admiration
for her, not a little fear. It was by her strategy that “Lomney and
Rennard” was brought about.
The City had welcomed its own stuff in Tom and Cornelia. The City had
come from the same sort of place. At the beginning, Tom felt this not at
all. He was frightened by the City. He did not understand when its
heights bent down and touched him. Each suppliant before New York goes
through the same amaze as the unfriendly Town proves lewdly hospitable.
Few dare to admit her wantonness since the avowal would take from the
measure of their prowess. In the early bewilderment of being taken-in,
of finding a naked mistress in place of a shrouded goddess, the critical
faculties are struck to sleep.
The years of the preparing of success in Tom were like the growth of
love in their delirious simplicity, the sort of wild progression that
one finds best revealed in mathematics. A true tumescence. Tom found
some one who liked his humor and his freedom. He introduced him to a
strategic hostess. There was opened a breach in the trenched City. There
was more than one of these amiable friends. Each multiplied opportunity
at a geometric rate. Tom was soon in a position to choose, and from
choice comes judgment. He was soon surfeited with chances, and from
surfeit comes disillusion.
To be alone in the City requires a technique that only the child born in
the City or the genius may possess. On all sides of Tom were people
ready to be amused, ready to use him, ready to use him up. No bright
young man without the taint of an uncomfortable message need go to waste
in New York. Each clever little thing he does or says will echo, until,
if he does not take care, he may be deafened by its rebounding clamor.
He may drop like a pebble, he may sink straight to the oblivious bottom
of the lake: but not before myriad wreathings forth have made him the
hour’s center of a rippling world. If he step forward, he will step on
some one’s heels, and that some one’s friends will, for this chance
beneficence, cherish and advertise him. If he step back, the same thing
will occur. If he stand still, he will obstruct the one behind him who
is moving forward, and this too will net him a sincere appreciation. He
must be a genius or a willful man to escape acceptance by the City.
Tom Rennard was neither. He found that the man in whose law-offices he
learned far better than in law-school appreciated him and, when he was
admitted to the Bar, sent him work. He found, arguing a trivial motion,
that he was eyed with interest by nonchalant attorneys as he stepped
back to the counsel-table. He found that his brain could be sold if at
first he were willing to sell it cheap. Lawyers too busy drumming
business thought they were exploiting Tom when they employed him to be
of counsel in some tort case and let him do the work. Several dull
fellows with gratuitous patronage stuck to him regularly until they
found themselves with fees in their pockets and with their sinecures
entailed. Tom had a way of making a Judge smile that the men of the Bar
respected as they would not, in a lifetime, respect Justice. He was
quick to see that the able counsel acts, before the Bench, not as a
lawyer but as a man: that the tricks of erudition and the flourishes of
oratory gleaned from law-school had best be packed away. His average
Judge was a shrewd politician who, above all, must not be made to feel
his juridic ignorance. What he required from counsel was a mirror in
which he might see his power reflected: and his power consisted not at
all in judicial learning--display of that was an embarrassment--but in a
canny sense of men and use of means. Tom talked to the Bench, man to
man, asking-man to man-who-hath, with a candor most attorneys needed
twenty years to strip to. His attitude brought reward. Judges leaned
comfortably back and talked things over with him. When he reappeared
before them, he was remembered.
“But do you think, Mr. Rennard, that this point is pertinent?”
“Yes, your Honor, I do. And I am sure if you will just recall to mind
the case of Larson versus Mann--the question is one that has long
interested me and I looked it up----”
Who was this Mr. Rennard? this young and unknown Mr. Rennard who had a
way of warming the air of a court-room to his own purposes? The question
was asked: the questioners answered it. They gave him respect before he
had clients: they gave him the beginnings of repute at a time when he
had nothing else. Hating and fearing each other, they wanted Rennard on
their side.
Tom’s advance in the social world was synchronous. The ladies who give
teas are the sort who care for unattached young men. They are unhappily
married, or at least unsatisfyingly so: if they have children they wish
to get free of loving them too much. Grown sons can be admired safely in
a surrogate: grown daughters can be restrained from mastery in a fierce
competition. The smart young man may be a weapon and a drug for the
woman nearing forty with social honors to defend. He serves to protect
her from life and to supply her with it. The relation has its hazards.
It must run the course of the golden mean. The man must not really love,
not really win his lady. For her sake, as for his. If she gives herself
consciously to him, she will begin at once to bully him like a son or to
use him up like a husband. He will become both son and husband instead
of the escape from them. She will simply repeat her family failures
concentratedly upon him. He will no longer provide a cure for her life.
He will stand on the brink of disaster or dismissal.
Through no prescience and no conscious cunning; rather by the balance of
his nature, Tom was made for such a rôle. And Laura Duffield needed
him.
Meantime had come the climax of her troubles, Mrs. Duffield was getting
a divorce. It was being borne in on her that her husband was nearly
bankrupt and that her alimony would be in ironic contrast to the demands
of her position. Her way of living was no small part of her “morality.”
It was menaced.
Deems Duffield was a broker. For fifteen years he had made a debauch of
his life and won from it a rare measure of content. When at last Mrs.
Duffield decided on divorce, his fortune--his last fortune--had gone the
way of his self-respect. It was plain that there would be difficulty in
keeping Farge at College. Fortunately, Marcia had no educational
conceits. She was at ease with a few lovely gowns: she was informed with
a spirit of shrewd economy that amazed her improvident mother. Duffield
seldom saw his children: which Marcia considered rather silly. “Why not?
He’s delightful company.” She had the wit to enjoy him, perhaps
potentially the depravity not to be concerned with his. But Farge was
dully loyal and not on speaking terms with his prodigal father.
Duffield’s ruinous irresponsibility had broken his son’s spirit. In the
example of his father’s evil charm, Farge lost that brusque approach to
the demands of life which mark off certain men from the hordes of the
mediocre. His cynicism was inept, his anger impotent: his confidence was
gone. Adversely, her father’s nature went toward the making of Marcia.
It taught her to swim nimbly between rocks, love danger, understand the
world. Her cynicism became a deadly intuition of the channels of
success: her anger was a sheath preventing the incisions of sentiment
and pity: her break with childish faith marked the emergence of a design
based on that faith’s falsity. It seemed to her a trait far too
emotional in her mother to be angry at the man who had ruined them all.
“Leave him be! You know he’s amusing to talk to. Never worry, Mamma.
Soon as I’m tired of this I’ll get married and fix you for life.”
There was no slightest doubt in Mrs. Duffield of Marcia’s capacity to
keep her promise.
From her confidence in part came the inspiration to bear up, to borrow
dangerous sums of money. For years the Duffields had been spending twice
what came in: he on his Broadway favorites, she on her social equipage.
But even after Duffield’s strike against paying for his wife’s affairs,
even after the first skirmishes of the divorce with their cold proof
that the clever broker would be able to escape with a scant alimony, her
social functions remained brilliant, her head remained high. Laura
Duffield was playing the rôle her faith, her one faith, sanctified. She
needed the confessional of youth for the strength to do so.
One last time, her husband called on her. A smooth, stout, suave man:
smartly groomed, full of sweet words, twinkling of eye.
“Laura,” he said, “it will be bad business for us both if you insist on
this divorce. And the worst goes to you. I can weigh in to a mighty
small income, of which half, dear, will be yours. Most of my winnings
are of a sort, my dear, that it would make Justice blush to have to rule
on. So, considerate gentleman that I am, I must hide from the Judge what
might prove embarrassing. Hand in hand, you and I can bear up and have
no fear. For all that is mine is thine. But, dear, if you insist on this
legal separation you must be satisfied with what will turn out to be
your legal separation from my money. You would faint, beloved, if I told
you what you may expect.”
Mrs. Duffield saw the very grim reality in his threat: knew as alone the
social officer knows what misery of deceit and sordidness the want of
funds must bring to the fulfillment of the one life she could live. She
answered:
“I can’t stand any longer the thought that you are my husband. I must be
free of that. I am unclean and I am taking a bath.”
Duffield smiled.
“The bath, my dear, you took some years ago. Why repeat it in public?”
She winced.
“I have no wish to resume relations with you, Laura. All I object to is
this exhibition.”
“Unfortunately, it has to be. I relish it no more than you. I deserve it
less. Our marriage was public. My cleaning my hands of you must be
public also. If you were so considerate and scrupulous as you pretended,
you could save us much by not defending the suit.”
“I may be considerate. But if I am hit, I hit back. I have not objected
to your virtual quarantine of me, these past ten years. I have behaved
and kept up front. I have shown in at your parties and paid your debts
when they grew troublesome. The only time, my dear, ever to pay a debt.
But if you insist on placarding my love-affairs, I’ll fight.”
“Very well. Go and do your worst. I shall of course get the dirty end of
this. I have, all my life. But don’t expect I’ll make peace with you.”
“Laura, you are a fool.” Duffield stood up.
“I know I am. I am sort of glad, that you think I am a fool. It puts me
miles out of reach of your kind of wisdom. I know I am a fool. You had
your share in making me one. But even you shan’t succeed in making me a
coward.”
Deems Duffield sighed and drew on his fawn-hued gloves and sent a little
whistling note through his shut teeth. Coming up to his wife, he looked
at her and slowly shook his head. He placed his hands on her thin
shoulders: their eyes met.
“It’s a fight, then, my dear?” He said this pleasantly.
“I am sorry, Deems, you have made such a ruin of our lives.”
“I am sorry, also, Laura.”
He drew her quickly to him. He kissed her forehead and stepped back.
“Good-by. You are the best thing I have ever had, and I hate to see that
I have lost you. But it’s not the best things we need most, my dear.
It’s the ordinary things. Often in life, we have to get along without
the best in order to have the common.”
She stood breathing deeply, white and strained from his words. In her
mind was a racing kaleidoscope: how he first had kissed her, and taught
her love; how fearful she had somehow been, and how he had fallen away.
In her soul was a sense of guilt. She said nothing: he was gone.
She rang the bell.
“Delia,” she said to the entering maid, “I have changed my mind. If any
one calls this afternoon, I am in.”
She threw herself on the chaise-longue and picked up her novel. _The
Egoist_ of Meredith. Its crystalline obscurity distressed her. It seemed
so far removed from life: so frigidly in diapason between the Sun and
the North Pole. She threw the book away and scribbled a sentence on the
edge of a newspaper that lay near her hand.
“All marriages that turn out monstrously begin as idylls. Indifference
at the start is the one defense against horror at the end.”
“How I wish I could express myself!” she sighed. She tore off the edge
of paper, crumpled it, thrust it in her corsage. Marcia was there.
“I met father in the street.” Marcia made no further greeting to her
mother. “He seemed in fine fettle.”
Speaking she crossed to her own room. She shut the door. Her thought
ran: “Papa hasn’t Mamma’s family but he makes up for it in liveliness.”
She examined herself in the mirror and took off her hat. “I wonder
whether it is a wise thing to confuse marriage and love. I wonder
whether the woman must always get the worst of it, like Mamma. Perhaps
not. Mamma is the so-called innocent one. Perhaps the rule is that the
innocent one, of whatever sex, should get the worst of it. I’ll remember
that.” She had dropped her suit on the floor and slipped into a blue
_crêpe de chine_ gown that hung straight and square from her shoulders.
Within it, her body moved like a still sure mechanism. “Oh, well,” she
said, half aloud, throwing herself on her couch and taking a book, “the
sins of the parents shall educate the children unto the third and fourth
generation.”
She remembered her unopened letters on the table near the lamp beside
her. She reached for an ivory paper-cutter and began to open them.
One of them, from an unknown hand:--
DEAR MISS DUFFIELD:
I have something of interest I wish to tell to you, and I must see
you alone to do so. Will you have tea with me, say at the _Orange
Tea-Pot_, next Wednesday at five? You will catch the reason and the
caution implied in the rather unfrequented place. It is not bad,
though.
I hope to see you, and am,
Yours most sincerely,
THOMAS RENNARD.
Marcia read the remaining notes: placed them all back in their envelopes
upon the table: took her book. She read for an hour. She called the
maid, ordered a bath, undressed. She stood for a moment before her
cheval glass, hesitant to throw her bath-robe over her nakedness. With a
free delight she watched the bright strength of her body. Her hips were
slight and firm: her breasts were two swift standing rondures: her
abdomen drew tautly down into the straight and narrowly set legs.
Marcia knew from statues she had seen that this faint triangle of
strain, tracing and pointing downward at her thighs, was almost
masculine. There was voluptuousness in this: and in the dear black hair
falling about her body, making its whiteness burn. Marcia hated that
flabbiness of mind and form which she called feminine. Coquettishly, as
if to bar another’s pleasure, she threw a robe across her shoulders. She
seemed to be outside desiring to be in. With the check to her nibbling
sense, her mind went free, and she began to think of Thomas Rennard.