He was decreased to a more comfortable pitch by this let of energy: he
came to David; with both hands half-helped him from his seat.
They had been long in darkness: in darkness some strange light from each
had played upon them. Now at the mundane level of the gas-lamp, they
stood and needed to look into each other. Their eyes were venturesome,
but their darts of laughter proved them timid. They stirred: their
bodies and their minds: swerving away. As if they dangled loose from one
another and were close-fastened only by their eyes....
* * * * *
David walked yearnful through the City. It seemed sure to him that his
heart was empty. He cared for no one. He was a speck caught in a petty
whirl that gulfed him quite as whole as if an ocean had risen to immerse
him. Happenings of the day and of all other days lay in the back of his
head in a shadowed corner where he flung what he was too weary to
dispose of: the corner of a curiously cluttered room that had no dear
thing in it. So, walking the wild City, it was to David.
He stood in a great Square and heard New York. Low, brittleness of
wagons, liquid hoof-blow of horses sweet against the opaque call of
drivers, beat of the herds of men driven by iron streets. High, murmur
of lamps wreathing with air that dropped like weight of sadness from the
sky: weary air, sinking to the City streets of its own helplessness, in
love with the warm lamps that turned away from such anguish. The
buildings hummed their tune of mastership. But these were low: was low
the plaint of the air that was being breathed and defiled by the herds
of men. Under all was the City: above all was the City’s voice. David
stopped still and heard it. A sudden, solitary shriek, coming from afar,
dying, born anew.... The City hurried and did not hear itself.
David walked again. The cry was gone. He was deaf also: doubting,
forgetful.
He walked to the house of the Tibbetts, where he was due to dinner. A
warm hall: carpeted stairs leading up like a schemer’s invitation:
balustrades that flourished and bold flat pictures that grimaced against
walls with the effrontery of servants. The door closed. David stood on
the thick carpet and felt the harsh mahoganous gleam, the cushioned
unresilience of chairs, the obtuse blindness of leathered walls. He felt
this Fay and her mother, how they were hard and soft: the black sleek
fatness of Mr. Tibbetts moved against him, held out wide hands to take
him in. A forbidding brutal gloss, like the woodwork, sheathed a
softness, a _give_ of sentiment and thought no more alive in these
people than the red plush of the sofa....
All of it was suddenly obscene to David. He was in the mood he had found
once in a house of prostitution: he had entered with a fellow from the
Office in stern response to passion: he had fled as one flees in a
nightmare. The Madame within the harsh green satin of her kimono, which
was a mold for flaccid flesh: the hard faces of the women, the hard
pastiche of their gestures upon which the flabbiness of their souls and
the unexercised pulp of their minds came out, oozed out--David caught
himself. What nonsense with these good friends asking him questions!
What had that memory to do with this? He walked deliberately into the
mood of the Tibbetts: he forgot his nausea, as he had forgotten the
voice of the City.
But Tom he could not forget. His forgetting all else brought him
inevitably to Tom. He was warm and alive with Tom. He felt that in Tom’s
friendship more than in all else--more than in his work downtown or the
slow reading of good books--he was growing up. He glowed with Tom as one
might smile at the accomplishment before one’s eyes of a good prophecy.
All his life he had known that he was destined to become a man. An
ecstasy, this, of wonderment and terror which ran, in a kaleidoscope of
color, back to his childhood and to the time when his little arms had
clasped his mother’s knees. _Some day he would grow up and be a man._
Whenever he heard these words inside him, they came by his mother’s
voice. For she had brought them first like a fire to his life. She had
burned him with them as a reproof, or thrilled him with their glow of
destiny, or when her slow hands and her mouth upon him told of their
imminent loss, lighted him as a sacrifice with their mysterious meaning.
For in these words was a world beyond his mother. In them, coming from
her mouth and from her breast that he loved, David knew the ruthless
rhythm of his life away from childhood up to the passion of maturity:
away from his mother to a motherless cold land for his own mastership.
This destiny could be many things. It was a twinkling star he looked at
from his safe world and laughed against: it was a fairy-field near only
in his fancy, far from his being, dominioned by the will of his young
ignorance: it was a menace from which he fled to his mother and toward
which the vigor of his mother’s love yet drove him.
He stood at his manhood’s threshold, not daring to turn back. A deep and
cavernous beginning. A passage lost in shadows. Not seeing the passage,
he dared to enter. His mother’s going had been the bidding of her love
that he should leave her. But David was not alone. A part of him was
still the short and sturdy child that clasped his mother’s knees. All
this was changed, and all this was eternal. For now, again, David was
not alone. Tom who had shown him the coming of his manhood would
accompany him through it.... His friend and comrade: though David knew
it not, in a way marvelously true and false the legate of his mother.
VIII
David lived alone for a little more than a year. Already in that year’s
Spring the two friends decided to find a place together.
Their living room opened from a narrow hall. Along a darkness, sidling,
their two bedrooms, symbols of our forbidding attitude toward sleep as a
dull thing crowded between bright periods of bustle. They blinked, these
rooms, with their hopeless single eyes flat on the gray bricks of the
adjoining house: blinked like purblind old women against something too
close for focus. Here, sleep was imprisoned, that might heal men from
the poison of their days, but that men have turned into a merely deeper
and more occult brew of their days’ poisons.
The room where the sun came was the room they thought they lived in.
Their home, that: though they spent far less hours there than in the
blinking sleep rooms, and though, of course, the sun was usually there
when they were not--they who weighted each day into the City as miners
go down shafts. But it was good to know the sun was there even with them
away: they had hunted long for a southward room. The resilient Mrs.
Lario, with her bare arms giving to no touch and her smooth throat so
palpably immune from the gust of a man’s passion, above the tight
composure of whose eyes brooded her hair like a black tempest of
contradiction, came and cleaned. She turned the mattresses: she
sprinkled water for the dust of the crumbling floors. She made the rooms
gleam with a moist complacence like her own widowed virtue. But then,
beside Mrs. Lario, came the sun: dried the moisture of her mop, turned
all this artificed cleanness that smelt so of its triumph over dirt into
a health that glowed, self-sustainedly, without a hint of being mere
reform. The sun came and balanced Mrs. Lario; and made her possible. So
that when Tom and David were up, ruffled and wearied, through their
shafts at night, they felt that their home had been not cleaned alone
but redeemed also. And if there was a flavor of must in the tidied
bedrooms, the rococo sitting of the pillow-shams, the somewhat
chromo-patterned regularity of things left on their bureau, there was as
well good air, still a-thrill with the sun’s last coming. On Sundays,
they greeted the sun as one they knew, who knew their home better than
they: greeted him a bit like a familiar god with his long frank strides
shattering their windows.
David was making a success in his uncle’s business. He had at last
achieved a salary determined rather by his place in the office than his
relation with its head. Mr. Deane’s theory had unconsciously been one of
compensation. He balanced his knowledge of the boy’s advantage by
miserable pay. This enabled him quite honestly to say: “David gets no
more than any other beginner.” An easy way of feeling just. Now David
was beginning to lead the life of a young bachelor in the City. He had
outgrown his little Eastside room: he was after all a representative of
the Deanes. If he went to the theater, it was not right that he should
sit in the gallery like a clerk. If he went hunting for rooms with this
smart chap Rennard, he must not, by an admission of the low price he
could afford to pay, reflect on the House of Deane. Mr. Deane was a
little on his mettle with his nephew as most men with their sons. He was
approaching the time of vicarious satisfaction. He made David assistant
to the Credit Department, and gave him a good salary.
David knew the nepotic alloy in his good fortune. It did not trouble
him. He thought, somehow, he deserved it. He recalled vaguely an old
remark of Tom’s about another matter. “Men who get what they deserve
always do so, you will find, for inappropriate reasons.” David was
letting the sweet illogic of America come in on him. He was lost in
wonder at the perfect and complex weave of manifest occurrence which
armored the reality, latent and different, beneath. The weave was one of
grace, good will and beauty. It was in contradiction to the moving
nakedness he felt fatefully aswing below his life and the whole City. He
was after all in much a child: one who wanted the world to be good to
him: to whom the real was the most splendid of fairy-tales. He fitted
into this social structure so close akin to the land where hags turn
into princesses and pumpkins become coaches. He was that sort: the sort
who wanders blithely through an enchanted forest where great black
trunks of trees stand under a green sea of murmur like protective
stanchions and who picks up an acorn, finds it to be a golden apple,
eats it with neither indigestion nor surprise. The whirling petulance of
American life, its oneness with the tempo and technique of the dream,
was very near and very sweet to David.
There was then a true immersement of David in this world. And in this
fact a danger. Nothing is so rebellious as reality. No man who does not
first move with the world can change it. If the deep mute sense of life
in David pushed ever upward in revolt, that revolt would be the mere
fused head of all his being: of the world’s: it would find its
articulated deed. He would go farther, infinitely, in rebellion, than
the rebellious Tom whose mental area of understanding kept him in a sort
of passionate inertness. The emotions of Tom Rennard were conservative:
the part of him that loved loved what was still and plumbed--and
_there_; the manifest world he found rather than its latency of change.
Only his mind ventured ahead into potential realms. His mind was much
like a courier at work in advance to fit and to pare down conditions for
the advent of his master.
So Tom felt a hazard in his friend. He wished to live in the world that
he found. He wished to live with the friend that he had found. It was
needful, therefore, that his friend should live there also: that he
should change just in so far as to fit Tom’s world, yet not so greatly
change as to be no longer David. Tom realized that the world’s
acceptance he desired in David, and its possession he feared, were very
close to one another. He looked at his friend, and wondered....
David lay back in his rocker, with his legs out straight and the mist of
his pipe rising above his upturned head. He was comfortable: above his
waist his body huddled in a condition of collapse that made the rigid
straightness of his legs and of his arms falling down by his side a
comical diversion. Tom looked at him from his rush seat chair, direct
and simple. He sat at ease, straight. He picked a paper from the floor,
but below his waist his posture was unaltered. His head moved on his
neck like a hinge: his torso moved on his hips like a hinge. There was
David reaching for a match: his legs shifting, his chin dropping upon
his chest.
David’s arms went out, and he yawned. His body was rigid. It seemed to
press out the energy of words: “Oh--_O!_ I am sleepy.”
Tom laughed. He had come in far later--from a dance. He had been up an
hour earlier. “Why don’t you lie down, then?”
David’s eyes seemed to exercise command over his sluggish state. They
thought the idea a good one. The big body lifted heavily from the chair,
went wide and down to the floor. David lay on his back. Tom looked at
him. He could have raised his foot and placed it on David’s stomach. One
hand, palm upward, slumbered directly beside Tom’s chair. Tom could
have stepped on it. The temptation ran humorously through him.
“Why you should be sleepy, my dear man! I’ll bet you slept ten hours.”
“Well,” after a pause, “it’s Sunday.”
Tom laughed again. “You’re still a lazy country lout.”
David snorted and smiled. He rolled his generous round head away from
Tom and closed his eyes. Since his eyes alone had borne the quality of
resistance that was his space in the world, David lay prone and
altogether passive: he was a little like a flame that has been
extinguished.
Tom began to contemplate his friend. David breathed deep and low.
Looking and pondering, Tom came to breathe in unison. His shorter,
tighter body made this anomalous. They breathed together. But David was
sleeping. Tom’s breath brought him discomfort. A tithe of it he
discharged by stirring his foot to within an inch of David’s hand. It
stayed there. He was forward in his seat. His gaze went forward fixed on
some vague moving object that swung in a pure parabola away. All of him
followed.
They had been together a month. There was David’s face fallen away on
its side. Tom could see the slight strained tendons of his neck. His
sleepy hair was a mood apart from the floor it touched like a mist
thrown from the alert earth in the morning. His pipe had slipped and
cast its ashes. Tom wondered if he was closer to his friend after a
month, and how far closer he could grow. This the question he followed.
As if in search of it, he leaned agilely forward, immersed, and picked
up the pipe next to David’s hand. He was again erect in his chair. He
held the pipe before him. Not seeing it. He was very awake thinking.
Suddenly he looked at his hands, amazed. They were empty. The pipe was
in his mouth. On his face came an expression of motion, as if he wanted
to get away. He thrust the pipe back of him, on the tabaret. Again,
rest came to his features. They no longer strained in the symbol of the
need to move. He was in contemplation. His lips parted and pursed at a
faster tempo than his breathing. His eyes hardened. He took a long
draught of air as if his sluggish breathing had half stifled him. Once
more he breathed at his wonted measure.
He looked down at David, for the first time naturally: as if David were
this expected object at his feet, and not some threshold beyond them....
They had been after all a mere month together. Why was he counting time
with David, when elsewise he was glad to take his days in gross, and the
thought of the years like steps of a painful stairway to be mounted
toward the flat respite of death? In this lingering with David and his
hurry elsewhere, there was a discord, a whirling that made him dizzy.
One part of him moved faster than the rest. He turned and turned around.
Tom’s eyes were seeking again. He must hold on to something to stop this
spinning. His jaw dropped an instant, before he had caught himself up.
There were his hands once more athwart his chest: in them David’s pipe.
Tom jumped from his chair. Carefully, however: David was sound asleep.
It was a day of clouds low-scudding over the City.
The City crouched hostile and sharp, as if it felt the universe its foe.
The City of men. With its roofs like an upstanding fur, it lay there, a
cattish monster. The wind boomed afar, plunged near, whistled and shook
the windows and was off screaming with fright at its courage. The City
was tense and cold under its houses. A lighter shadow cut down from the
retreated pall of the skies. The sun was up there somewhere. The shadow
mushroomed forth, losing its lightness, swelling with relief into the
wider darkness: disappeared. The City breathed again. Another shaft of
light, of greater vibrance, lanced it, made it quiver, faded once more.
These alternations were a rhythm, like breath, on the City. And in the
room, where Tom stood looking out and David slumbered, these
rhythms were compressed and sharpened. The swathes of lighter
shadows--strugglings of the sun--brought unrest. The City was easier in
the greater gloom. Was the sun what it feared? The gloom was a cloak,
hiding the foe. When it parted a sword flashed. When it parted, the City
trembled.
Tom felt the acerb coldness of this maze of stone and brick. A
testaceous monster crouched beside the hidden Hudson. It lost its unity:
it broke into parts. The City became a swim of brittle points, a sea and
a foam of iron. Tom wondered how the soft breasts of the dwellers had
conceived their City that was more hard and hostile than the whipped
heavens. He saw them under the mountains of their handicraft like
shell-less creatures huddled in a mountain of waves.
He was back from this fury to his chair. There slept his friend. He was
aware of David gently asleep and of the surge of the City and of the
skies a humor of hostile motion. He was aware of all this suddenly at
once. The contrast was like swift heat on the smooth surface of his
consciousness. It cracked. In the fissures light to see by....
The deposits of his last summer. He had gone away, for his two weeks,
alone. This was his custom, and the one who might have led him to
disregard it was unwilling. David had earned the respect of Mr. Deane by
declining to take a vacation. He might have gone, as the year before, to
spend it in the mountains with his uncle’s family. He had no stomach to.
He was very far from Lois. He believed she was engaged, though he had
purposely avoided the confidence she almost forced him to ask.
“You don’t seem to want to know anything about me, David.”
“What is there to know?”
“There might be many things. Why don’t you ask? Then you may find out.”
“What could there happen to you?”
“Oh, indeed, sir! So nothing could happen to me to interest _you_!”
David thought she was inviting him to bare his breast for her
knife-thrust. He was long past the desire of sensation from Lois at the
expense of pain. He looked dull. And Lois stamped her feet. “Then I
shan’t tell you. Now!”
Tom had suggested a plan. But he was half-hearted about it. He did not
want to go to the old place with his friend. He did not want to go with
him elsewhere. He went off alone. He selected the seashore. There seemed
nothing strange in this. He thought it was the turn of the sea. Here too
he did not altogether understand. He was afraid to tempt the old place
with David. Surely he would not enter it alone.
He went through a little huddled city, sweating and plethoric with
high-colored houses and swift dilapidations: a city with the face of a
slovenly fishwife, peeled by the summer sun and cut by the winter winds.
Beyond it the beach: a great golden girdle beneath the quiet bosom of
the sea. The ocean breathed gently there. It rose and fell passionless
and sweet, touching the word of men with virginal disdain. The sun
smiled aslant, as if half turned away out of compassion for the
feebleness of men. But despite its clemency, the human swarm was like a
pullulant emanation in a rich yeasty substance. Women and children and
men shifted like black maggots in the luxuriance of summer.
The sea rose from the night as a jewel glows and burns beyond itself.
The sun swung into the sky and made of it a luminous flood that poured
gold on the beach, splintered mazes of sapphire, emerald, bronze on the
breasting waters. Yet of itself the sky was no color and no thing. The
sun fevered and sank away, leaving the sky a-tremble with its passion.
The sky lingered, lost in the haze of the sun’s mystery, given to the
rapture of remembrance that is night.
Within this stillness the broken hurry of people. Men and women were a
low spawn flecking and feeding on the universal fragrance. Tom walked
among them and tried to amuse himself. Never had human life been so
distasteful to him, so anomalous.
He rose early to escape it. A line of boarding houses and hotels lay
along the sand. A motley strewing. High barracks with false Colonial
fronts and rococo pillars scarfing their dismal heights. Smug cottages
burdened with great names: _Sea-Crest_, _Manning Arms_, _The Breakers_.
Sprawling, winging frames with turrets that twirled and were picked out
in colored glass.... On the beach, when Tom set out, a sparse sprinkling
of children. Mothers gossiped low in the background and a few bathers,
loosed from the conventional bonds by the tart spell of the water,
screamed, laughed, gesticulated, bounded. Tom left them behind. The sea
combed back and the dwellings of men were lost. All about, flatness. The
grass ran silver away across salt meadows that were ruddy in sun.
The sea was broken here. It lapped idle, and was green and halted by the
blue purl of the river that came out to be lost in the sea’s freedom.
The bay was quieter than the scudding grass that marged it. There was a
rocking stillness everywhere against which the earnest and sharp sally
of the pipers in the sea-weed was a dissonant shred. Here Tom threw
himself down and took the pungent air into his eyes and mouth and let it
moisten the strain of his body. He was immersed in the sweet summer.
A mood grew on him. He learned of a mistake that he had made. Upon the
contrast and the stillness of this place came something from without and
filled it and made its song. He found that he was longing for the
comradeship of David.
Sitting idle and full of the sap of the summer, he found that the part
of him which warmed him was straining outward, toward a vague thing
indeed--since he wanted no specific thing of David--but with a pull that
had no vagueness. He found himself unable to partake of the gentle world
he was in. He found himself tangenting from it, making of his wish a rod
to vault him back into the burning City. He sat musing, half asleep,
without sense of time. He dug with his fingers in the sand. He watched a
bug voyage from spot to spot with a rapt floating interest. He tried to
enjoy a cigarette, with a sense telling him that the air had a sweeter
perfume, could he but swing himself to know it. Unease was on him. He
consulted his watch and its denotation of the hours was like news from a
far country. Impulse to move was balked by lack of desire to go. He
stayed, balanced, bored, strangely exhausted with these hours of
indolence, glad of the excuse of hunger to make him move.
The beach was bedlam. He went through the throngs, as if he were wading
a morass.
Only the buffet of the waves when he swam beyond the breakers gave him a
resistance where he could dwell with a certain comfort. But he could not
bathe all day. He went in to dinner. A sort of immersement in a black
pot where food was. Clatter of dishes, hot stickiness of human motion,
flies stuck on paper. It was hard to part the tasteless substance of his
neighbors from the sodden stuff he prodded down his throat.
He escaped to the sea. While the populace digested, he could be alone
with it. It beat in monotone upon his world: it flayed it. The sea lay
there cruelly content, droning its repetitious chant. Until the endless
song mounted, terraced, burst in his ears like a vast shout of conquest.
Tom felt an invasion. His small body was being swept by a terrene
monster. The sea’s laborious approach against his nerves was no relief
from the crepitous _guerilla_ of the women, children, men, beating their
individual sticks and stones upon him. Tom went back to the deserted bay
where the sea was less the sea. And, gazing at the watery world, he
wondered by what spell the ocean had even been a balm to him: by what
strength he had dared love it.
He said aloud to himself in the silence: “Well, leave here. I give you
permission. Go somewhere else. If this bores you.” He had no answer. He
did not wish to go somewheres else. He wished to go back.