He sat abject on her couch, laid his hands on his feet with a gesture of
humility in which alone a Hindu could have seen the pride. His eyes
dwelt on his sister’s cast of a pretty boy--a boy with laughing hair and
a face that was a flower. Tom’s lips were still. It seemed his eyes that
spoke. He loved when he came to Cornelia’s place to cast off his coat
and flare his collar wide from his tense neck. The muscles in his throat
seemed over-stressed for the low tone and the small volume of his words.
“Clay is a happy medium,” he said. “That boy is nearly enough your boy
to make you nearly happy. Clay is a possible element for our wills to
work in. But human flesh, and human mind, Cornelia! They are weighted
with a past so deep and so remote we are helpless before it. I know.
Remember a joke I used to play on you? The uncut grass by the barn: how
I made you try to stand a stick on end whose tip was fastened to an
invisible string? And whenever you thought you had it balanced, I’d give
a little jerk and the thing toppled?”
She stood off from her figure. She came forward; her finger touched a
plane into shadow; she stepped away as if there had been some vital
shock in the swift contact.
“Well?...” she said, not letting either her words, or his, eat beneath
the surface of her mind.
Tom knew he could spread a bath of acid that might take its time in
eating downward, yet leave its mark.
“I think, Cornelia, I have the same love as yourself for making forms.
But there is something perverse and accurst in me: something that keeps
me from spending my appetite on some reasonably complaisant substance,
like clay or pigment or even words. Like you.... _I_ must of course
write my poems in human life. And, Cornelia, it doesn’t work.” He
paused. “I dined with your friend, David, last night.” Again a silence.
“I ended by running off to a trumped-up engagement because I simply
could not stand his bland stupidity any longer.”
He got up and took a cigarette and lighted it. It went out at once. “I
am a fool,” he said.
Slowly he began to tell the wall against which he pressed his cheek,
half plaintively, the misery of the man whose medium is action. Cornelia
destroyed her boy’s nose. She remodeled it. While he talked, crouched
with his cheek flat to the wall, she hummed an aria from
_Lohengrin_--desultorily, false-simply, with evident satisfaction to
herself.
“Is there no mellowness in America? Is there none of the sweetness of
ripe soil? David can be as vulgar as Ruth’s carpenter-lover. Sometimes I
wonder is the chief product of American activity to be sweat. Bah! We
sat there: and David lectured me. To the effect that truth and beauty
are antagonistic and we must side with truth. When I asked him what was
truth, he answered: ‘Morality is true,’ When I asked him, ‘Pray what
might Morality be?’ he said: ‘If you don’t know, you ought to be ashamed
of yourself! If you are going to be flippant, we’d better go back to our
last subject.’ And, Lord of Hosts! our last subject had been _Balzac_!”
Tom was gone. Gone so abruptly, the door stayed a-jar behind him.
Quickly Cornelia threw the damp cloth over her model and seated herself
on the couch; she held her head tight in her two hands. Her mind was
quick with the sharp-eating lines of her brother.
“They will never get along. Never. Never. They are so different: as
different as ...” She stopped: she said to herself that this was her
brother whom she loved, and how could she think unkind thoughts of her
brother? It must not be. In the stifled conflict, she was moved. She got
up, flung wide a window.
Night. It was cold. Gas-lamps blinked and strutted through the air.
Their lights were false: they brought out only darkness. The street lay
low and reeled and swung away on either side like the deck of a pitching
vessel. The vessel was the world. It crashed through a sea of love that
spumed upward to Cornelia’s eyes. Her heart’s heat condensed it; there
were tears. She had a sense of the bleak urgency of life: of its passage
and of its passengers. She had a sense of the element through which she
and those she loved and the vessel plunged: how it was a sweet element
and dim and how hard it was not to forget. Surely, all thought in her
cold day was a denial of the Sea through which life was a passing:
denial of all save the vessel: denial of the terror of its movement and
of its passionate immersion. She, also, forgot. She, also, was a coward
with the rest before such words as “religion,” or as “mystic.” The salty
tang of this Sea beyond her plunging little world was in her eyes and
her mouth: all her body wept silently....
The cadenced strokes of an elevated train knocked at her mind. The truth
faded.
Cornelia brushed back her hair from her brow. “You are a silly woman,”
she said aloud. “He doesn’t care for you really. You don’t really care
for him. He will go away, and marry. He lives after all in a different
world. Tom and I will console each other.”
She was relieved at her brother’s bitter mood. She was weary, as if she
had been on a great journey. She lay on her couch and closed her
eyes.... The air of her room was thick and was running in massive
current. She felt herself swept along. The tickings of the clock on the
mantel tore past her and caught in her dress like little strayings of
straw. The air surged over her head; she saw a house flung upon its
current and dipping across her window. Where she was it was quiet. Tom
came up to her; in his hand was a gleaming scalpel. “I am going to mold
David’s face,” he said. She said: “You can’t, Tom, because he is done: I
have done him already.” Cornelia looked at her model of a boy: it was
all wet: suddenly it sprang and David threw himself upon the ground, and
broke. Her father stood over her hurting her wrists. Her wrists hurt in
his fierce grasp: but she felt how her father had no hands and was
armless. He stood towering beyond her, high, and hard like a stick.
Cornelia knew that a string was attached to him, and that Tom held the
string: he was going to jerk it, and then her father was going to fall.
She was afraid: her father was going to fall on her and she would be
crushed. She saw that he was a child, she was full of pity. Her face
was upturned toward him. He was above her. She felt she was going to
kiss him.... Over her eyes, there was David, peering through turbulent
shadows into her, curious to see, since her eyes were open and she was
not asleep, why she had not heard him enter....
The mood held. She remained in that palpitant hinterland where all the
nerves and senses of herself met all the beings of her past. David
impinged sweetly upon this swerving world. She lay, scarce breathing,
looking at him with eyes that denied the rest of her.
The world where he could thrust in his head without violence receded. It
went. Again, her senses were enemies, strangers. That was a man to whom
she had not given herself. Her senses stormed her recovering mind. “Why
does he not take me in his arms?” they pleaded. She was on her feet,
shutting herself away.
“How you frightened me, David! I guess I fell asleep.” In her panting
words, she was gone from him. She could dare to say: “What a pleasant
surprise, your coming! I am so glad you came.” She gave him her right
hand: the left hand followed. He held them both: she drew them from him.
“I thought I would chance it. Have you had dinner?... What were you
dreaming about, Cornelia?”
She laughed, her low, stalwart laughter. “What would you imagine?”
“You looked so strange, so far away. As if you were in a spell. Even
now, you are not quite out of it.”
“I was in myself, I guess.”
“You won’t tell me what you dreamed?”
She looked at him.
Big, burly boy, with his blue muffler over his throat and his hands
hanging so limp beside him. He was so at ease, so friendly curious, so
cool. While she was white inside with the need of telling. It was
impossible. In the shadow, a pain viced Cornelia’s homely face--lent
accent to the wrinkles already upon her brow. It went, leaving its sharp
bite.
“How have you been, David?”
He might still ask her, force her to tell him.... David began to talk.
He rambled along the flowered paths of his own green life. He forgot
about her dream, he forgot about Cornelia. As her chance of
self-bestowal, of drawing him back with her to the self-land she had
left, faded before his dear indifference, Cornelia’s hands were fists,
her soul retracted with hurt.... He chatted.
She left him to put on her hat. She saw herself in the mirror: plain
Cornelia, Motherer! who had found her boy at the age when boys go forth.
Her mouth affirmed the bitter resolution that must make it hard: her
eyes fought against their tears--David was there--with a dry will that
must dull and dim them. The ineffable glow of confidence and of the
sense of being sweet faded still farther from her face, leaving it older
and less sweet.
So she returned to David: they went out to dine.
VII
There were times when the two young men sat in silence, looked at each
other: and Tom was depressed and beaten by the world: he needed comfort
of his friend. Then, out of the silence, David talked. A new way he had
of bending low in his chair with one leg curled beneath it, the other
straight out, while his arm rested on the forth-stretched knee and his
palm turned upward. He would talk low then, try to give to Tom a thing
he was not sure he had himself, and was not sure but that Tom had far
more than he. He believed he was recalling Tom merely to his own
possession.
“Think of what you have done in your life! You should think of that.”
“What have I done? What does it matter what I have done? What am I?”
“You conquered your life, you made a new one for yourself.”
“David, our deeds are not ourselves. We are what we are, not what we do.
Our deeds, if anything, are what we have thrust from us. If I have done
much, I am the emptier.”
“Are you not always living and being anew?”
“I am engulfed in a vicious world whose viciousness I know. I am false,
David. I play dirty games, dirty tricks. I do my share of the betraying
of the world, before I get my share of the thirty pieces of gold. You do
not know. I have open eyes. I betray, loving loyalty: I do dark work,
loving the sun.”
Tom was up from his chair. “Look at this flat!” He parted the curtains
of pale lavender that subdued the room to a quiet steadfast chromatic
scale. It was afternoon of Sunday. Swift and passionate the sun came in.
It made the curtains tremorous with fire: it cast a radiance upon the
cream-dun walls. It sang through the room, with light feet tripping the
soft rug, with tawny fingers touching the books and the vases.... Tom
and David sat within miracle.
Tom’s voice was dark in the sunlight.
“This rare thing,” he said, “who can purchase the sun in the city? Not
your saint, not your artist and lover! Only creatures like me who serve
darkness. The Law that I serve lives in shadowy dusty places. Its
priests are men too crafty and bent to be honest thieves. So I have the
sun. And, David, I love the sun. I hate what I must do to earn it. I am
a man who can keep his love only with gold that he gains by his love’s
prostitution.”
The last splendor of day. The sun’s arms turned upward, suppliant in
death. The vast Star sank beneath crumble of buildings. Tom and David
shivered at the eternal surcease.
“I feel that the sun some day of its own accord will go from me because
of what I do against it.... Go at midday, as it has gone just now.”
New shadows rose, they were silent like lips that have just spoken. The
glow was gone from the room: it throbbed still in their minds. A flower
faded.
David said: “I wish, Tom, I could help you.”
Tom did not smile.
“I feel you are unjust to yourself. Perhaps unjust to the world also. It
can’t be as evil as you paint it. As for you, I know how far you are
from what you say of yourself. You deserve the sun, Tom.”
Tom did not move.
“Just think! Over there, in the East--those black belching houses where
you say they slaughter cattle and brew hops--the sun will rise
to-morrow. Before you awake.”
“Where do you get your idea of the world?” ... A sharp question. It left
David blunt.
“I can’t explain. It’s not reasoned out. My idea of the world I guess is
chiefly what I feel.”
“And what do you feel?... Your own past of feelings, that is what you
feel. Your mother, your easy village life alone with your mother.
Nine-tenths of it.”
“Well: isn’t that life as well as this?”
“It’s dream!”
“I do not see the difference very clearly.... My mother was: and my love
for her. They are more real to me than the hardness of the city.
Perhaps, Tom, it is the hardness of men which is dream.”
“If your love and your life with your mother are reality, lean on them
now.”
“I live with them, Tom.”
Tom walked up and down.
“I leave you in your dream, David. I want to. But some shock of the
outer world will come and wake you. You are walking in your sleep. I
want gentle hands to bring you to yourself, at a safe moment, at a safe
place. Lest you fall, David.”
David was up also. They faced each other: the tall gentle unkempt boy
and the sharp sure measure of Tom: the boy with bright slow eyes,
against the weary quickness of the other.
“I may be more right than you.” David’s voice was low. It had a full
cadence of shaded notes. “I don’t think what we reason out is always
sure. I can’t explain. I believe that just the same.” About his low
voice the room darkened. What was light and certain of the room was the
spirit of the friends grappling within shadows.
David was speaking. “When I think, Tom, that there are millions,
hundreds of millions of men and women: each of them has feelings deep
like mine, feelings of doubt and happiness and sorrow. It seems very
wonderful to me that the world should be so rich.... I used to wonder
about God. It didn’t seem to me likely that there could be one Mind who
knew all about the billions of people that there have ever been, be
interested in them, know what was good for them, love them. But I don’t
feel like that any more. This huge sea of feelings, made up of so many
billion seas--well, that is true, and that is quite as wonderful as the
idea of God.”
“Do you think they all feel as you do?”
“Of course they do. I know that really I am no more than the rest. I
know how huge my own feelings seem to me.”
“But most of them are luckless, David, stupid victims.”
David looked wondering: “They strike me as wonderful,” he said. “Every
thing! People aren’t stupid at all. Perhaps rulers and philosophers are
stupid. I don’t know. I don’t know how they work. I know that no stupid
man could make a chair or plow a field. And a woman, Tom, who can give
birth to a child that will grow up is not a stupid woman. Think, there
are billions of women who have done that! All these things seem
marvelous to me. Language! Think! The little mute creature who comes
into the world, and in a few years he can talk. Is that stupid, Tom?”
David was near Tom’s desk. His hand lay on a flat, blank piece of paper,
and an inch rule of thin, varnished wood. He picked them up.
“Look at these, Tom. Don’t you think they’re fairy-tales?”
Tom was smiling. But he was warm. “Compared to what some men have
thought and done, all men are stupid. The first man who made paper had
intelligence, yes. But the dull million imitators?”
“I don’t know how to make paper. It is all a mystery to me.”
“You could buy a book for a dollar, and read a few hours and know all
about it. Is that achievement, to you?”
David was silent.
“Men are a race of monkeys. All of them, David. A few among them now and
then who have the genius to create. Freaks. The apes harry them to
death, then they follow them. They are no less apes because they steal
and follow. Take from the annals of man the deposits of the lonely
exceptions and they’d go groveling and dumb, as they did five hundred
thousand years ago. Do not admire men, David. Admire the wondrous
diseased and solitary freak who at times is born among them, who rises
above them: who has given to the monkey-clan all the stolen toys they
clutter their lives with. Paper seems a miracle to you. That is sheer
ignorance: sentimentalism, if you will, which is the same. Look what the
monkeys do with this paper: how they degrade and defile what the
creators of paper destined for the recording of holy words. You can give
a monkey a jewel, but he’ll hide it in his refuse, or he’ll decorate
some obscene portion of his body with it. Is that not just what has
taken place with the jewels of intelligence and genius? The plow is a
miracle. But the average plowman is a slave who has debased both plow
and soil. What has he done with the sacrament of the harvest? He has let
his soil that should be to him as the woman he loves be stolen from him:
he works it for hire: he sells its fecundity to ugly masters. The lot of
women is a lovely thing. But how do women conceive? What do they do with
their children? You marvel at language. What do you think of what men
say? No, David: yours is an old sentimental fault. Through the ages
great lonely spirits have worked for good: they found the uses of fire,
they invented the wheel and the sail, the arrow and the lever. The
swarms from whom they differed as gods from maggots took their generous
gifts and turned them against life. Much of the march of civilization is
the abject record of just this bitter process. The dull creature who
drives your cab--how is he related to the hero that tamed the shaggy
stallions of the Stone Age? or to the poet that dreamed The Wheel? Would
the priest whose ecstasy brought forth fire be the friend of the janitor
downstairs who tends my furnace--or of the filthy fool that cooks my
dinner? What relationship beyond that joining the parts of a colossal
joke binds the prophet who first pressed papyrus and the degenerate
editor who buys his paper by the ton, dirties it with his lies and sells
it to the herd for three cents each morning? Or binds a Shakespeare with
the geese that have been quacking about him ever since he died? You have
no right to admire the debased relics of greatness--their parodies. To
do so is to do precisely the opposite of what you think: to flout the
spirit that alone deserves your wonder. Look what the world of men has
done. They have so perverted the gifts of the great that no free man can
longer partake of them. Their vileness has a monopoly in the fruits of
genius.”
“I can’t feel that.”
Tom was bitterly happy. He rushed on. “Well, tell me then: could your
ideal artisan work in a factory? He worked with his soul and his hands,
the artisan you might admire. It was his love that spoke as he worked;
as he sat lost in the magic of his tools, his hands touched the wood
with a caress from which came beauty. Machines and trade-union rules
would make short shrift of him! There is no place in labor for the man
who wants to love while he works. Or your farmer--your true breeder of
the earth--can he plow a hired field and then truckle with parasite
middlemen to sell and adulterate his fruits? What must his attitude be
to the loafer who ‘owned’ his soil and to the loafer who ‘handled’ his
products? And the poet-priest that loved his paper and placed the
mystery of his love on it--where would you have him write his love
to-day, in the Dailies or the Magazines? Where would you have him sing
and act his love, in vaudeville or the ‘legit’?”
“I am not up to reasoning with you, Tom. Not yet. But I shall be.”
“Am I wrong?”
“I am certain you are wrong. I feel these things--love and
brotherhood--the many people somehow creating and creating. I am stupid,
perhaps?”
“You are not stupid, David.”
“Then they aren’t stupid either! Any of them. They are just like me.
They are not so very different from poets and inventors. I feel that.
You say I am not stupid.”
Tom took David’s hands. “I am the stupid one. That is why I need reason.
Dear, confident boy. Please convince me!”
He looked hard, almost fiercely into David’s eyes: dimly glowing they
were, or rather their sentiment than themselves, in the shadow.... Tom’s
hands hardened over David’s.... David grew aware of a faint unease that
was sharp against the sweetness of his mood. Something imperceptible
drew back in him: blanched. Tom felt the withdrawal: he dropped David’s
hands--suddenly: almost he flung them from him. He stepped back and sat
on the couch. His hands held his head so that they did not tremble. His
voice came vibrant from the darkness.
“Do not listen to me, David. Though I out-talk you a thousand times, it
is you who are right. I am of an old travel-weary race that has lost its
gods and that has found no others. I feel you young and fresh beside me,
though in our years there is no great difference. Your childhood was not
full of false beliefs. You are strong now to go in search of your own
dear Mystery. I have cast off false gods. But their hands were about my
heart: and my heart went with them. They are indeed discarded and dead.
But my heart is dead along.”
David came through the room: it seemed a cavern as he made these paltry
steps to Tom. He sat beside him. Still, he was ill-at-ease. He felt so
suddenly strong, and stronger than his friend. While Tom talked, it had
been hard for him to master the despairing sweep of impotence over his
body as his mind. Now again, coming of his strength beside his friend,
he felt a chord draw him, held outside himself; so that his coming was
weakness. This could not be. Surely, it was good to sit beside his
friend and comfort him, to be glad of the mystic glow that touched from
their two bodies and made him feel Tom’s breathing, made him feel the
palpitance of Tom’s thought like a butterfly in his close-cupped hands.
Tom said: “Sitting beside me, you are sitting beside nothing.”
David was still.
“At the heart of me, David, there is an empty place. What you call my
success has been a violence wrenched from me. David, have you ever
walked along a country-road, taken a flower in your hand that grew
beside it--pulled, hoping as you walked on to unearth it by its roots:
and have you ever found in your hand a pitiful crumpled heap of petals
and pollen, with the nude stalk still fast behind you in the ground?”
“I wish I could reason out how wrong you are. I suppose for you I would
have to make a very clear argument. My feeling does not help you.”
“Are you sure?”
“If I am downcast, argument to prove I am all right is not the thing I
want. I am different from you.”
“Perhaps not in all things different, dear David.”
“I know you are wrong! I have watched you. We are friends, now, for so
long a time. I could have told you this, almost when we met--when I
paddled you about and you let your wrists play in the water and
sprinkled me. You have a funny habit, Tom, of hurting yourself. Lord
knows why you should like to! You are not satisfied with the world
because you are so much better. It is no sin, Tom, to live in the world
where we were born. It is splendid that you have such dreams of a far
better one. Your life proves how true and real you have been--perhaps
more so to Cornelia than to yourself. I am sure you would be the same
for me.”
“I could do anything for you.”
“I have nothing with which to cure you of your black doubts except a
stupid faith that does not touch you.”
“Davie, it is the best in you. Give me the best in you. I want nothing
better in all the world....”
Silence inclosed them, again.
David struggled with what he deemed his impotence. He was not very
bright, he feared. Perhaps he failed to feel the stupidity of men
because himself was stupid. Tom would not tell him that. A wave of the
need of giving welled about him. He was warm and relaxed within this
element whose indeterminate grain moved him toward Tom.... He relaxed.
The same easeless stir, moving to stiffen him back, poison this
sweetness, to make him one again with his threatened solitude. David
struggled for the quickening of himself in self-bestowal. Tom sat in
darkness, bitter, hard, his will a clenched fist over his body. With a
strain so true that the muscles in his neck stood out, he strove to turn
away from his loved friend.
But his hand went forth: his knotted hand that seemed beaten by the
weathers of life went forth as on a journey hazardous even to its
wisdom. It tremored close to the hand of David ... the warmth of the
young hand made it cold.
A sharp shrill voice that sounded a shriek in the darkness.
“Let’s have a light,” Tom jumped up.
In the yellow of the gas, David sat blinking. Tom was all movement. He
flung off his shoes, put on another pair. He changed his necktie. He
hung away his house coat. He stood dressed for the street.