the lady he was assiduously courting--and exploiting? Marcia caught
herself so forming her question. She tried to change it: “How does he
know I won’t?... Well, I will.” She wondered if she would.
Imperceptibly, she had returned to the first form of her question. She
resented Tom. Her mother was working for him with far greater will than
any of the other “friends” had been able to inspire. It was dear already
that this young flasher from Ohio was going to have the dull but golden
Lomney for a partner. A bit dangerous, thought Marcia. What if next
year, her mother tired of him? What if he proved too false? Marcia
smiled. There seemed small doubt of that. There he would be, deep in
their Group, inextricable. Matters must not go so fast. Marcia must
delay them. She pictured the pair, lost in their confidences, and was
troubled how.
She came back to the note. What had heartened him to send it? Was Mr.
Rennard after all a rash importunate, one easily ruined? Marcia did not
doubt the true purpose of the note. He wanted her to tea. He could not
pay attention to her here. That was enough. Did he truly desire this
enough to risk his hold on her mother? A dangerous--compliment.
She went over the always chance occasions she had seen him. Never alone.
She had felt the pointedness of his glances toward her: caught him
talking to her mother with a strained interest in her own mood. She had
tested this by changing her mood and watching his rapid awareness. He
was a curious man: bright, lithe in all senses, unbelievably hard, yet
fraught with a glow that she was sure impact might turn to fire. She
wandered over his personality. She felt he was too clever and too
sensible to be sincere. Yet his standards seemed too directly those of
his intelligence and strength to lend reason to insincerity. She did not
know. She did know she would have tea with him: and say nothing to her
mother.
It was easily reasoned. “I’ll control him, myself. If he goes too far or
too fast, I’ll have the weapon of a word to Mamma. What a brazen, simple
country boy it is!...”
She went: she was right at least in this, that Tom had nothing to impart
to her “of interest” beyond that he liked her and of course couldn’t see
her _really_ at her mother’s. In all else, she was wrong. She could not
understand this sudden, cold-passionate man. In writing to Marcia
Duffield, he had not understood himself.
“Perhaps I’ll know better when I have talked to her across a table.”
She came with a spur of adventure. She was trapping her foe. While he
reveled in his success, letting his pleasure out, she would enmesh him.
Thereafter, should he ever move in a direction she did not like, Marcia
would soon show him in whose hands he was. Marcia was so astir with her
scheme that she thought herself cool and collected. She had a dogged
affection for her mother: a sort of animal loyalty in which was properly
admixed a very human loyalty to herself. Here, she was quite sure, there
was question only of her mother.
Tom, meantime, waited and went over in his mind the impressions in
confidence of which he had dared write his letter.
“A girl absolutely incapable of carrying an altruistic act to an end ...
and yet--a Christian! If she resolved to serve her mother by telling her
I was flirting with her daughter--and she is convinced that this would
serve her mother: she must be hostile instinctively to her mother’s
friend--she would have to be sure, first, she did not care for me. She
is coming to-day to find out. It all depends on to-day. If she does not
like me she will betray me with a sense of serving her mother. If she
does like me, she will take secret delight in making her mother a
fool.... Dear little fool herself! If she knew how much I love her black
straight hair and her white straight body, how little I care in contrast
for her mother’s interest in my future! If she knew--well, she must
know.”
He went forward, seeing her at the door--seeing the shrewd determination
in her face as she came forward to him.
“Miss Duffield,” he said, “you are not going to make the mistake so many
make of thinking what I do a deliberate thing. If you will examine my
note with care, you will find in it all the silly guile of sudden
inspiration. I am a creature of moods.” He looked at her as he had
wanted to, across the table. “So are you, Miss Duffield.”
“How do you know?”
“Why else did you come?”
She was not so foolish as to say: “There might be other reasons.” She
was not so willing as to admit his statement. She was silent. Tom began
to laugh: a clear, long laughter. When he was done, they both knew he
had laughed something away.
The rest was easy. Marcia was certain that Tom was the contrary of canny
and deliberate. He liked her: he had done a direct thing to see her. He
was unworldly as ever a man must be who understands a woman.
And she liked him. She liked the respectful way he spoke of her mother.
Somehow, it gave her a sense that he was trustworthy: although she had
no thought of why this quality should particularly interest her. She
liked the assumption in his words of her superior perspective.
“Of course, Mrs. Duffield would not understand our coming down here to
have tea together. Dear lady! Does not a tinge of deception have to go
into a sincere relation? Every mother must forget her daughter if she
would live. It is the duty not alone of her friends--of her daughter
also--to see she may. For her to know the truth of you and me would be,
not to know the truth from the standpoint of her and me, but an
irrelevant, damaging lie.”
He said these words, not pleadingly, not in argument, but as two
co-religionists perhaps might mention an unmooted point: or as two
students might discuss a lesson they had learned together.... Tom had,
not an enemy in the house of Duffield, but another ally: a subtle, an
amazing one. Far from having been delivered into Marcia’s hands, the
hastening events laid her at least equally in his.
They balanced the accounts....
* * * * *
Marcia was wine for Tom. Never before had he been so held by the body of
a woman. Never had he dreamed a woman could so swing with both reserves
and desires: so without effort, without stint.
She filled his room with miracle. She filled his life with the ease of
power. How did this come about: this wonder he had in touching her cold
skin, in meeting the hardness of her teeth, her soft lips? What was this
Marcia?
Madness.... Madness in sanity as wine in a cool cup. She came to his
warm room. She did not kiss him. She did not speak. She did not stir.
She was there.
She felt a flame rise near her. It would soon catch her clothes, burn
them up. Her it would temper, make mellow. She stood, looking at the
flame, this subtle man, who held back his hands and whose eyes were on
her. What should she do? Why did he not come forward? He burned
straight, there across the room, like a flame in a windless world.
Always his hands held back. Her clothes sagged to a dulling weight....
Marcia stood swaying with the need of burning. Would he not help? Then
she would help herself. Delicious fool that he was!
He was perfume and flame: each pore of her was big with him.
Tom watched the firm, still whiteness of her self emerge from the lie of
her clothes. No woman. She was a god. She was a pillar of purity and
strength. No lascivious rondures and flauntings of flesh, no softnesses.
A human form stripped to essential grace. An instrument of living, spare
and direct like a command, flaying like a rod, swift like his passion.
They loved.
They gave no thought to the Shadow--the long intricate life-way of which
the passion of woman and man is the mere flaming threshold. Both of them
knew this. Each drank, in the other, a secret satisfaction whose mystery
and timelessness thrilled them. They did not understand themselves or
each other. Their love’s dissidence from the plodding and gluttonous way
of husband and wife was a brew sharp, sweet, wild: they were drunk in it
together. No more they had in common than their intoxication.
Themselves, each other, the nature of their love--all was unknown and
secret. They scarce spoke of it. They drank and were glad, and were
never content....
Out of the silence of each, they came again. The subtle liquor worked
its miracle; they were one into a flame whose leaping walled about
them--disappeared as a song stops--leaving them their silences. These
carried them off, each to a far deliberate world. No memory, no reason:
absence of desire. Until such time as a rising murmur in their separate
silences swerved them, flung their silences once more together.
All this, merely the spill of Tom’s full life; prelude in hers. His work
prospered. Tom had the genius of diligence. He poured himself no more
into his affairs downtown than into some unremunerative affair at a
friend’s, where the price of applause was exhaustion. With Tom,
exhaustion was breathing space till the next passion. So he prospered in
work and in play. Laura Duffield was his devoted friend. Gilbert Lomney
was his partner. To both, as to Marcia, he was satisfying in the measure
that was wise.
* * * * *
Upon this heyday of his success, David now blundered as a dull boy
stumbles over another’s floor-full of tin soldiers.
There seemed no cease to the miracle of Marcia: to the delight of the
insatiety between them. Laura Duffield was divorced and more than ever
with her new gallant friend. In her family and in her world, he was a
secret champion, a strong prop. His relations had wreathed out. He was
welcome in many houses: he was a chord of many circles. His partner had
come to worship him with a canine fidelity. Lomney was so dully at home
in his desirable set that he no longer felt its desirability: he was
convinced that in introducing Tom he did the set a favor. Tom did not
disillusion him. He laughed about it with Cornelia, and made her partner
of his pleasures in order to keep her partner of his reserves. With her
to see on the morrow, Tom took to the gilded foyers, the gilded youth of
the City with a cool grace that lissomly assured his comfort and his
usage. Laura Duffield gave him a gesture of confidence; Marcia the glow
of triumph: his law affairs the agility to move forth and back with
telling unconcern. Cornelia gave him what he needed of a home. He was a
splendid product of the City. Now, David Markand, with his dear
clumsiness, to clog and clutter it all.
Marcia felt it first, felt it before he did.
She sat on his bed; she looked at him where he smoldered in a corner
smoking intemperate cigarettes. It was a mood, she thought; she said
nothing. She put on her clothes.
“Good-by.”
He tore apart his revery. “Good-by.”
But the edge of his love was dulling. Always now, he was likely to leave
her side and sit away from her and look away and smoke: while she lay
aching with blinded desire, watching him, pressing her breast with
angering hands till its pain stop the pain of her heart.
She sat up suddenly so he was forced to look. His eyes were upon her
whom they loved; yet they were distant, they were lost in a mist, they
did not see her. In her beauty she stood up to him, all her clear
straight agile body calling him close: he bit his lips and his eyes were
looking beyond her.
Then she said: “There’s some one else, is there not, Tom?”
He did not look at her eagerness. He shook his head.
“There’s another woman.”
He was angry. “It’s not so.” More force spilling away that her body
yearned for. This urged her on.
“There’s another woman!”
She needed his focussing upon her, even if it were but in wrath. She
stood over him now. She knew he loved her so, with the lines of her body
shrill and clarified in standing. Tom was white with anger. He grasped
her and broke her in anger. She laughed in love....
He loved her as never before, that afternoon. Because he loved her as
never again.
* * * * *
The year that David lived alone was the year of Tom’s struggle with him.
It was not a question of changing his life. It was a question of
capturing the subjective opposition, as it came forward in the nearness
of his new friend.
Tom knew a way. This inner inhibition stood objectified in David. Let
him capture David. David was his old love of giving instead of
constantly taking, of being calm and passive instead of constantly
pursuing. In him, Tom saw the restful cleanliness of despising this race
he was running hotly: the futility of spending one’s dreams upon a
contest that was never done and whose prize was death. He would not give
up his entry. He needed the mundane sense of power, the badge of
success: he was too sensual to forego the liquor of attention. But he
needed also to still the voice that kept saying: “Fool!” By the old
process of projection, he now saw these words in the eyes of David. If
he could have David, he could have silence.
He watched him with a growing steadfastness and a dwindling clarity. He
knew at last that he wanted to win him. He knew that the affection
between David and Cornelia stood most in his way.
All that year, he studied David. He came to understand his habits and
his moods. He inserted himself upon his groping friend with the
deliberate reserve of a chemist applying weighed ingredients to a
solution.
The measuring was no easy task. David was within himself. He was hidden.
It was plain he showed more of his mind and spirit to Cornelia than to
her brother. They spent evenings, late afternoons together. Walks on
Sundays became almost a custom. Tom was frequently along. There was no
slightest wish to bar him. But Cornelia encouraged those very traits in
David that must keep him intractable, secure to himself.
“And the world,--and the world?” Tom argued. “You are living in the
world. It touches you on every side, at every instant. You are wrong to
try to ignore or to despise it.”
Usually, Cornelia answered for her friend.
“We are the world, if we choose to have it so. What you mean by the
world is only the gross and the impure. Why alloy yourself with that?”
Tom laughed. He knew this was David working upon his sister. Her life
and her work were essentially conformist. She was no hermit, no rebel.
She had had her great revolt, she had settled. She was not so very
different from him. But Tom was too wise to say these things before
their friend. To humiliate Cornelia before David would have the effect
of estranging him. David would judge him and not understand. The idea
that he could influence Cornelia was beyond David’s belief.... All this
behind Tom’s laughing.
He kept silent, above all kept pleasant. He saw Cornelia’s motherhood
once more hunting and hungry. She was going to preserve David from a
hostile world, though it be with her own body. He watched her passion
and David’s dispassionate compliance. He worked his own will when they
were alone.
“Cornelia has a habit I can well enough understand of wishing to make my
friends into what she would have liked to be, herself.”
“Isn’t she what she would like to be herself?” asked David.
Tom smiled, and was serious. “To succeed, for most of us, means breaking
through an iron barrier. Even those of us who do so cannot escape a
little maiming.”
“You are so violent in your statements, Tom!” The idea of Cornelia
maimed was nonsense to him.
They went on talking of her new season’s work.
“There were a number of unfortunate little changes she had to submit to
in her exhibit. I was heart-broken. But thank the Lord, Cornelia is
sensible. Else, she might be a good artist but she’d be broke.”
“Why won’t they let people alone, when they have beautiful things to
say?”
“Oh, they will, quick enough! Strictly alone. They’ll not pester them
with orders. You mustn’t take Cornelia’s art too seriously, David. It is
chiefly her art of living. If you think her very pretty statues great,
you’ll be taking to heart every word she tells you....”
All subtly merged with his love for her and his loyalty and knowledge of
the years when he had slaved for her and given her her chance. David
could not bring himself to the consciousness of an objection. He said to
himself:
“Tom is simply honest beyond any honesty I have ever imagined.” He was
right. Tom was. He was not disloyal to his sister. He said no word of
untruth. He was as kind and as loving as he had ever been. As ten years
before, he would have sacrificed much for her welfare. But she was
playing a game against him: and he answered.
David came to believe the hot-and-cold of talk with Tom and Cornelia
Rennard an atmosphere implied in friendship with such clever,
exceptional folk. He began to feel that Tom’s candor was to be prized,
even if it was not always easy to interpret: and that Cornelia’s warm
encouragement was to be discounted, since it meant escape from the
ungenerous reality Tom told him he must soon or late confront. Because
of, and in spite of her sweet charm, Cornelia somehow must be
discounted.
He was sure he cared no less for her. He was a man: he was understanding
a woman’s natively circumscribed philosophy, her natural taste for a
reserved and personal world. Cornelia stood already, artist though she
was and rebel at least in one gesture of her life--for Family. Tom was
the world of affairs and of adventure. Oh, yes: David began to see all
that. So of course he could understand the little flares of strain
between the two. When Cornelia’s attitude implied a rebuke of her
brother’s ways, he must listen sweetly to her words--as true to herself
and her world--and not too seriously apply them.
Pure Tom all this. But only Cornelia knew it.
“What on earth are you trying to do with him?” she asked her brother.
“My dear Cornelia, how you talk!”
“Listen!”
There were similarities enough between them. She also could drive full
force toward a single point: whip her intensity till it became almost a
deterrent to the average dull person. But Tom could meet her at any
pitch. He had one talent which she lacked and he knew this and would
ruthlessly exploit it. He had a ready sense of the ridiculous: a light
riding mood with which to damper her flame.
Cornelia swung upon him and thrust out her hand; her eyes blazed:
“Listen!”
Tom, on the couch, curled his legs under him; he straightened like a
schoolboy before his teacher, and threw a mock-serious frown across his
face. Cornelia’s onslaught could not resist. It turned into
argument--argument gradually stiffer, less alive against his mocking.
“David is not fit, Tom, he never could be, for your sort of life.” He
was still. “What he needs, it seems to me, is a training that will
permit him to develop what is deepest and truest in him: his sense of
reserve, his great purity of heart. The finest thing about David is his
nature’s implicit criticism of the life about him.” Tom still listened.
“If he is flung into a sophisticated life, his own incorrigible
innocence will merely thwart whatever he does: while that life goes on
thwarting his nature. He will be nothing, arrive nowhere.” She stopped.
“You women have a genius for simplifying reality!” Tom threw this out in
order to gain time. He knew it would goad Cornelia into eloquence. Any
disparaging generalization on her sex did always.
“Indeed! Well, you men have a genius for complicating reality till it’s
as false and absurd as a wired and painted and lace-draped lily. A fine
botch you’ve made of your reality. Every step of the world is so
cluttered with barbed-wire rules and pitfall standards that only an
acrobat can keep his feet. Why don’t you answer me? David is no man to
go to the top, tricking and beating every one else down, is he?”
“No.”
“He is a simple, gentle boy. That’s what he must remain.” Tom smiled:
Cornelia answered his smile. “Fortunately, he has an excellent place at
his uncle’s. There is design in that. At least, there is luck. It means
something. It means the pure and the brave in Davie may have a chance to
grow in peace. We need that. We’ve enough of you acrobats.”
Now Tom was ready. “David’s lovely sense of right will be as useful,
unless it comes in touch with the real world, as a violet under a
hedge.”
“A violet growing under a hedge is sweeter than a violet crushed in the
road.”
Tom knew he had talked nonsense. He always did when he would not face
the sincere part of him that wished to speak. There was no time to lose.
He must tell the truth.
“I am not trying to corrupt him:--I like him, Cornelia: I want him where
I can be with him. So long as he stays in his ivory-tower of dreams I
cannot have as much of him as I want. But, Sister! I am no prince of
darkness. If I have plunged into chaos it is because that is where the
money is. I am lonely there as a good angel would be in hell. I won’t be
with David. I tell you, one can be lonely and untouched even at a
Reception, one can be guileless even in a courtroom. I am. These things
pass over me like sticks and stones--smarting my skin. I do not want to
change David. I want him near me. I want him to change _me_. Your
mistake is the horror you have for surroundings that you know nothing
about. A usual result of ignorance, my dearest. David will be as
unchanged, certainly, as I.”
“Why do you want to drag him into your noisy world?”
“I can’t have a friend, by long distance.”
“There’s something more in it than that.”
Tom looked, not to deny but to learn. His face was open, sincerely in
search.
“I don’t understand,” she went on. “If you really wanted him to change
you, were willing at all to be like him, you’d meet him half way. I have
seen how you ply him with your cynicisms, heckle him with your
invitations to ‘begin to live.’”
“If I met him half way I’d come back with half a practice.”
“Nonsense! You could live your professional life without him. Social
demands don’t go into one’s intimate hours. There is something else. You
really want to take David about with you--into the thick of the
scrimmage. Every word you say to him is a sort of preparation for his
entrance. Why?”
Tom was silent. He loved his sister’s trenchancy too well not to admit
her points. His doubts brewed energy. He got up and paced the floor to
slough it off. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he repeated. He stopped.
“Cornelia, I may be queer.... I guess I am a man of action. What else is
there to _do_ with him?”
She looked at her brother soberly. She knew he had touched a deep chord.
He went on: “My muscles seem to be very near my nerves. My muscles must
move, as soon as my nerves feel. Do you understand? If I am glad, I
dance. If I am hurt, even now, I am liable to cry. You know that. Don’t
you remember, Cornelia, at the Farm, when I had made a particularly
perfect mud-pie, how I brought it into the house and placed it intact on
your table--even though it meant a mess and a licking? It was mine: I
had to bring it in to you. Well: David can teach me dreams and truth:
but I’ve made a mud-pie of the world. He must share it....”
* * * * *
He had his days of offensive against Cornelia.
“You want to make a child of him. You want to keep him a child.
Motherer!”
“He is a child.”
“Aren’t you glad?”
“Well, if I am? Mayn’t one be happy with something that one finds?”
“What of David? He can’t have you for a mother all his life. Some day he
will be compelled to sally out.”
“Sally out where? He can have me always as much as he has me now. We
don’t need to outgrow our friends? Really, Tom, you have a vision of the
world that compares with Don Quixote’s. Giants and windmills.”
“Very good, dear incorrigible Motherer.” He came close and his arms
enlaced her waist: their cheeks touched. “You shall always have your two
boys to make behave and keep at your breast. So long as you live.”
Cornelia swayed with him, smiling. “But between feed-times, you shall
let them play in the streets.” She struggled away.
“You’re horrid--you’re cruel!” There were tears as she pushed him off.
* * * * *
Or his days of strategy....
“I am doing my best,” he said, “to undermine you with him. There’ll not
be a shred of you left in his heart, dear Sis, when I’ve done picking
you to pieces.” Which was precisely what he was about, and whose telling
disarmed Cornelia altogether. Surely, if he were in truth betraying
her, he would not be telling her about it. So she reckoned. While David
argued that Tom’s often disquieting reflections on Cornelia must in some
deep way be related with the real love he knew he bore her. With this
true, there could not be betrayal.
The two young men were together more and more. They sat in Tom’s warm
room; their words were of high things. They knew that these were things
that were not. Tom knew these things would never be: David that they
must. They met in the present of life as two might take hands down an
echoing corridor: close, though the one thought at the passage-end was
life; the other death.
From these talks came the sense of his emptiness to Tom as he began to
feed. He knew it only in the yearn he carried with him more and more for
somewhat he lacked, in that nausea for the present which was dooming his
love for Marcia Duffield, and making of his professional affairs a
clear, cold, removed design that he learned to trace with the tips of
his calm fingers. The mood helped him with Cornelia.
He went to her morose, and said kind things--angry things that in their
conveyance of his troubled spirit stressed his apartness from David.