The self-bestowal of woman was a part, a great part, of the goodness of
God. Woman had no need save for children: no joy save in the bitterness
of serving. Anne was there like a sweet delirious dream in the fevered
night. She had lain beside him and mothered his distress; she had given
him of her strength to be strong in the morning. When she judged he had
had enough of her, very calmly, very like a mother weaning her child,
she had put him aside. All of it a sort of passionate nursing: the sort
that the passionate nights with their drain of fire demanded. Anne had
always been silent.
His heart’s way of woman remained. In a veiled moment, she came and
offered up her sweetness to the yearning of man. A mystery--a mystery
that now had come to him! In the flesh. In the lovely flesh of
Constance!
She received him in the same small room.
David was momently chilled by her precise difference from the image of
his three days’ thoughts. She came up to him and let her arms glide
softly over his and warmed him. He looked down at her. He saw how the
loose folds of her _cérise_ robe parted and fell from her uplifted
elbows: how, underneath, her bosom was held tight in a white band of
lace. He thought that he might take that lace away and truly see this
bosom, crush it with his mouth. He could scarcely see at all.
He checked himself. This was unworthy of him: unfair to her. He began to
talk. But she smiled and came close to him again: she stopped his words
with her body. Her eyes fixed on his with a plea that he need not talk.
He tried to tell of his love, of his devotion, of his thanks, and she
was stiff, impregnable to words. He kissed her, had her body in his
hands, and there she was pliant, singing with response. So, soon she lay
there under his eyes and he had forgotten to say the things his duty
ordered....
At last he made a mighty effort.
He sat beside her on the couch. She was cool and straight beside him.
She was like a beach that the tide had left and that the sun had
hardened. Golden-smooth. Her breasts lay firm, her thighs rounded and
fell like lovely scoopings of summer waves. She was there like a strand
of the earth, waiting for the tide to return upon her.
David managed to speak.
“Constance dear,” he began. She laid her hand on his and he clasped it.
She seemed suddenly afraid. “Constance, I feel that I have so much that
I want to tell you.... Constance, it is only this that I love you with
all my heart and soul: that always----” He stopped. There she was
stopping him again. She had withdrawn her hand.
“Don’t, David! Don’t!” Her hand on his mouth.
He felt ashamed, ashamed of their nakedness together.
“You mustn’t use that word _Love_ so lightly, David.”
He was all pale inside. He felt that his breast had suddenly caved in
and that his heart beat hurtfully against its broken walls.
“I do love you, Constance.”
“No you don’t. Don’t be silly, David.”
“Why? Don’t you love me?”
It was strange how little he protested. He felt this. Already he
believed her. But if he did, what was all this between them? What
infamy?
She seemed to read his consternation. She lifted herself and kissed his
eyes and his hot dry lips.
“You don’t love me. And I don’t love you. But we are very fond of each
other.”
He was deeply ashamed. He wanted to move away: to cover himself. He did
not know how. He did not dare in any way to move. He sat there, fixed in
contemplation of the havoc these few words had made of all the structure
of his thoughts: regarding the wreckage with dim eyes, but amazed most
that the wreckage did not move him more, leave him more empty: that
life--and this--should still be possible.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
“Constance!” It was a cry of help for his dreams.
“You are a darling. I shan’t risk losing you by not having you know me
and yourself as we really are.... Why, David dear? Aren’t you even fond
of me?” She had her arm about him. “Kiss me, then. There.” She was half
laughing. She was a bewilderment of delight upon him. She was half
laughing at him.
Like a mirage, split by a stroke of the sun, his picture of their love
faded away. He had not defended it. It was no more. Yet he was not
empty. He was less serious, less loaded than before. It had been a
mirage of paradise in a desert. It was gone. But the desert through
which to trudge to reach it was gone also. Here was green earth.
He held her differently already. She seemed no less happy. He was more
aware of herself, more intent on giving her pleasure. He thought less of
his own heart and its desires. He found his own joy, now, in bringing
joy to her. It was all marvelous strange, he knew vaguely in the back of
his head. He had abdicated loving her, she had declared that she did not
love him. Yet he was content, he was happy. He had been wrapt in the
solemnity of his emotions like a priest at prayer. Now, he was all out
of himself like a boy lost in his play. And yet he seemed stronger, more
contained, fuller of life. He knew sometime he should have to think all
this out....
She took his hand and led him to a glass in which he saw their faces
together. Hers was laughing quietly. His was neither serious nor
mirthful: full of a sweet surprise.
“Look at yourself,” she said.
He remembered once when he had been a boy at School and he had wrestled
long and hopelessly over a problem in mathematics. His teacher, of whom
he was very fond, came and leaned over him so that her waist touched his
shoulder. She made a quick calculation on his paper. The problem was
solved.
“There now. Wasn’t that easy? All that fret and trouble----”
He had felt a relieved gayety go through him: half the help, half the
nearness of the teacher. He was reminded now.
“Look at yourself,” she said. He looked. He saw his face like that of a
rather unknowing boy upon whom a good-hearted friend had played a
delicious joke. He was aware of the face of Constance: it was just
beneath and beside his own. And it was laughing under the passion of her
hair. He saw that he was laughing also....
He was glad this time to find Tom at home.
“My! My!” Tom bantered from his wonted corner. “You are getting gayer
all the time. What larks are you up to, anyway?”
“I have been to see--Miss Bardale.”
A steely glance went through David.
“Oh--she.” Tom spoke. And David knew that never, never could he speak of
such things to his nearest friend. But he could speak of some things.
David came up to him. “Listen, Tom. Am I ever going to grow up?”
“I hope not, Davie--altogether.”
David sat down beside him. Tom went on: “I rushed home after a business
date for dinner. Hoping to find you. I wanted to see you to-night.”
“Why?”
“For no literal reason, David.... Does one have to have a literal reason
for seeing one’s friends? Eh? Does one?”
Suddenly, David was uncomfortable. He had felt strong entering the room.
He had asked Tom if ever he was going to grow up because just then,
perhaps more than at any other time, he felt mature. Now this fine mood
faded. It was very strange. He could not adjust to Tom the discoveries
of life he made without him. Three evenings before he had come home
dancing with romance and Tom had cut his clouds. Now here he was,
realistic like a god taking his mortal holiday: and Tom spoke of having
missed him and of the love of friends. What was wrong here? Why could he
not get rid of the ridiculous idea that Tom was always spoiling his
pleasures?
“You don’t care for me very much,” there he was saying, “You don’t even
come home anxious to see me.”
“I did to-night, Tom.”
“Yes: after an evening with our fair Constance. I am restful, eh?”
David blushed. How unpleasant Tom could be! But he was sorry he had
blushed. For Tom looked sharp at him: his face seemed to be coming
forward as he looked. Then, he dropped back into his chair and took up
his book. With his eyes on it, he spoke casually:
“Since you are so friendly with Constance, perhaps you can tell me: has
she gotten rid of Stegending? Or is he still agonizing?”
David turned pale. “How should I know?” he muttered.
Tom smiled at once, knowing he had hurt him.
“It is always a mere matter of time till they want to marry her. Then,”
he chuckled, “it is--as the doctors say--a mere matter of hours.”
David felt the need of striking, as if it had been striking back.
Although he had no accurate sense that Tom had attacked him.
“You are funny, Tom. You say I never come back anxious to see you: and
you seem to find fault that I’ve been out amusing myself for a change.
As if you weren’t out ten times more than I.”
“I go out for business. If I had my way I’d stay home every blessed
night. And tell the hostesses to go to blazes.”
“Well, I like to go out for pleasure.”
“By all means, Davie. But don’t have too much. You may get tired of it.
Then what will you do?” He laughed. “Perhaps then you’d have more time
for your middle-aged friend.”
His mood was changed. The will to hurt was gone. It was as if in its
fulfillment he had been assuaged. Tom looked at David now with a warm
candor. And David, looking at Tom, realized that this was a great
joy--this talking with his friend: it was clear and deep and right: and
what had come before was already dim, had already lost its taste. Even
as he looked back for it, that seemed less real than this.
Something of the essence of these thoughts Tom found and was glad.
“Come, old man,” he said. “Light your pipe: let’s have a chat.”
* * * * *
In a way so gradual and smooth he had no heed, life was going well with
David. He was relaxed before all its elements that met him. His mind,
instead of sallying out to measure and contest each meeting with reality
and to reduce it in vassalage of his own subjective world, receded now
within itself and what it found disguised, remolded into consonance with
the world meeting him.
His easy acquiescence in Constance Bardale’s sense of their relation
brought him reward which his new mood could value. The delusion of love
was rent away. Remained the reality of passion to be accepted or denied.
He was in no mood for denial. Tacitly he let slip all he had dreamed of
woman, all he had dreamed of love. He had no thought of a next-coming
step with Constance. He was not open to surprise or worry. He was calm,
contained. He was the very lover she desired.
And proud of his success. Proud of his conquest of one whom a naif part
of him still found miraculous and remote. At her parties now he fell
back into a silence and reserve of a different meaning. He knew himself
the secret master. The homage of her guests to Constance was homage to
him. Men feeling for her with tense nerves, warm eyes; women seeking her
secret in her words and gestures, envying her power, glad to share in
its largess and pick up the aroused senses of the men that she sent
retreating from her--was incense to David. He could afford to recline
away from the conversation: he could dare outstay the last of the guests
and hold her one moment in his arms, drink in one draught the wine of
the evening’s excitement upon her lips before he left her also.
He did not see her too often. She saw to that. She had a tact and a
control that were artistry. And a consciousness of this that made her
jealous of her standards, steeled her against lowering them, filled her
with a firm discipline of pleasure. She designed the mingling of their
lives with restraint and omission, with emphasis and grace of color.
David breathed the well-being that must rise from any poise of forces.
He had the comfort of the part in an harmonious whole.
Now this well-being wreathed forth into the other, the deeper phases of
his world.
He moved toward a different attitude in his work downtown. Here the
violent yet canny preachments of Tom helped also.
“The weak man,” Tom said, “stays in business and yet despises it. So
that the one End of business--success--escapes him. Of course I am not
now talking of the mediocre fool who respects business--as he is told
to--and ekes out his pittance blacking the other fellow’s boots. You are
beyond that, Davie. But there is another sort of fool--a more
intelligent sort: the man who ‘sees through’ business, despises it and
therefore muffs it. He is unreasonable also. If he can’t stand business,
let him clear out! If he decides to stay in he is a fool not to win. One
must of course despise business. One must know that it is the scramble
of rather lowly-evolved and very greedy persons. One should be conscious
of the gullibility and venality of bankers, of the wastefulness of
manufacturers, of the opaqueness of middlemen. It should be clear to you
that the elements that lift up the Rockefellers and the Morgans and the
Hills are chiefly the singlemindedness of the stupid, the unimaginative
and the dishonest. But what sort of a fool is it, David, who being aware
of these inferior forces permits himself to be worsted by them? That
seems to me an altogether illogical conclusion. It seems to me that
just this knowledge should make the knower come out on top. In other
words, the man who has brains enough to despise business should be the
successful business man: not himself but the mediocrities should become
the victims of his disgust. Therefore, David, through the very clarity
of your vision into the nature of affairs, you must master them. God,
man! would you be anywhere save _on top_ of such a muck-heap?”
Tom had not failed to help make David’s vision clear. As he said:
“Law is pandar to all of business’s ugly lusts. I ought to know the
system’s filthiness if any one.”
David took these tirades with a grain of salt. He was convinced of the
Quixotic extravagance in Tom’s idealism. Yet, the essence of his
teaching must be right. David believed he knew this, now. Business was
indeed a scramble in life’s gutters for food: the unfortunate way men
had of getting their bread. But what was one to do? There was the bread
in the muddy gutter. Plenty of it, plenty to go round. Tom had assured
him that the economists who said “No” were slaves of the scramblers. Let
him just read Kropotkin. Production was in a state of wasteful anarchy.
But men had somehow preferred to ship their fair food from the fields
where it grew, and drop it in the filth of a million scurrying feet, in
the gutters that were rutted and befouled by years of greedy commotion.
Here they preferred to fight for it like pigs nosing to a trough: to
expend their energies and debase their spirits for its hoarding and for
the depriving of others. It must all have been in some way deeply
needful, else why should this idiotic condition have arisen, why should
the simpler way not have been found, by which all men might have what
they needed to eat--expend the rest of their forces in higher works?
This was the rule. David must scramble along.
“The one danger,” said Tom, “is not to understand. The one degradation
is to exalt this pother, to make a noble thing out of the job of earning
one’s living. The cult of Business. You see it everywhere. Men must
worship: it is easier to worship low than high.”
All this was sound enough, thought David.
On his way down Wall Street, to and from his office, he saw a spectacle
strangely near the gutter metaphor of Tom. David remembered how this
sight had at first aroused him: how quickly it had become an unnoticed
feature of that downtown world so that, if he had missed it, in rain or
in snow, he should have known that a great dislocation had come upon the
Temple.
It was the sight of the curb-brokers. There they stood crowding the
broad street with their bodies, clamoring the air with their cries and
their scurried gestures. David went close to watch them: for they were a
thick knot on the street, they were like a swarm of bugs overrunning a
lump of refuse in a road. To distinguish more than the blotch of their
thronging and the low drone of their noise from which sharp voices
pierced, one had to bring near one’s face. David saw, now, that they
were mostly young men, rather shabbily dressed since they must be
prepared for every weather and for any scrimmage, with sharp faces--very
red or very pale--in constant motion. Their eyes darted, their mouths
worked, they dashed notes in little books, thrust forth hands above the
gesticulating mass and spun away to other knots of the buffet with hats
over ears and upturned collars. They looked up at the high windows.
There, perched half outwards in rows were other men, behind ranks of
telephones that they perpetually shrilled in, and thrust from them. They
leaned out, with contorted fingers signaled to their colleagues below.
Hands jutted from the crowd, fingers twirled answering signals. They
used the language of the deaf and dumb. If David had not heard the
incessant burr of their voices above the shuffle of their feet, he might
have taken them for deaf-mutes. A same something strained and
unquickened about the muscles of their throats and jaws which he had
noticed in deaf-mutes. He understood that only by signs and battle-calls
could they in the street and the men perched in the windows carry on
their communications. He admired their adroitness. The disturbance rose
and fell: had its hours of thick frenzy and its streaks of
deliquescence. But it was unending.
David had learned that the curb-brokers dealt in securities not listed
in the new Exchange that stood like a Temple beyond the turmoil of the
street. No other difference. So he knew these solemn walls were
hypocrites. Within them, older men, better clad, better-paunched,
buffeted and bid and bounced: at times--he was told--floored each other,
blackened eyes, broke noses. All one: the naked and the canopied gutter:
the scrimmage under sky and the scrimmage under marble. Buildings tiered
and teemed, and in each cranny a fight. With polite tricks, men plotted
and plundered, swung the whole of their vast might of concentrated work
into the anarchy of Distribution. To the end of deflecting from its even
channels the sap of Toil to their own bellies. Scrambling masters and
myriad slaves who had not even the grace of scrambling for themselves.
David saw how he was in a Jungle. A high and splendid Jungle whose call
to the hunt the minds of men had made complex and beautiful, but had by
no jot lessened. On the high seas and in far countries they wrangled
with fire and steel: in the curbs of the City they wrangled with their
bodies: elsewhere they wrangled with sinuous thrusts of their brains,
deceit of their mouths. But everywhere they were at a single, sterile
Game. David had been willing to accept Tom’s symbol for it all: that
black swarm of men, blotching the canyoned street--the brokers at the
Curb. He knew it for what it was.
Now, David was beginning to see by a new light, to find different
colors. Immersed in the struggle himself, he found that it had its
appeal like any contest: its occasions for fun and romance, its release
of the generous and the brave from the welter of uglier instincts. The
strange thing about Tom was that he kept the attitude of the outsider.
Perhaps therein lay his strength, the element of caution and command
above the Battle. But if David knew from his boyhood what a terrible
thing it was to watch two men beat each other in the street, he knew as
well what a thrilling thing it was if he were one of the beaters--beyond
pain and reason altogether, given up to the ecstasy of _beating_. So
now, however arbitrary the rules, wasteful the blows and trivial the
ends, there was a pleasure in this clinch of wits, a catching curve to
this conflict. The glamor might come, as Tom insisted, from the
prodigious expense of will and energy in those who struggled together.
But glamor it was.... Was all glory on earth the glory merely of him who
could see glory?
David moved to his new poise in the world on wings within him like the
wings of a seed. He was part of that Spring, he would bud with it: he
too sought sustenance for his green shoots, his frail flowers. His
affair with Constance shed mellowness like a sun: his relation with Tom
inspired at once a taste for mastery and the need of seeking it
elsewhere since to Tom he was subject. In the particular detail of
finding his life downtown an exciting game, there was his new Chief, the
credit man, Mr. Christopher Barlow.
A little gray-haired man with blue eyes sparkling: a silent man who
seemed unconcerned with giving him the most perfunctory explanations of
the work he expected him to do.
“How the devil can I give satisfaction if Mr. Barlow declines to show me
how?” said David to himself: and looked at Mr. Barlow: and found he was
not near so ill-at-ease as the occasion called for.
Mr. Barlow did not ignore him. His eyes dwelt on David, reticent,
timidly, as if he feared to intrude even with his eyes. But it was no
professional attention. The embargo was strict on business. David had
his desk. What should he do with it? He pondered--pondered long since
there was nothing swift in David at all. He resolved to take matters
into his own hands.
“I am here,” he decided, “I have to do something here. I’ll look
about....”
He began to eye, finally to study files, to go through ponderous credit
lists, to decipher, by the process of comparison, the marks he found
against the names of customers. He read the classified papers on Mr.
Barlow’s desk: those on the Wicker trays, before the stenographer filed
them. Mr. Barlow saw him prowling. David was quite sure the sharp, kind
face lighted up and the eyes twinkled. Mr. Barlow blew a sluggish ring
of smoke from his cigar into the air, thrust through it with his pencil
and exclaimed: “I got you!” to the ring. Cryptically enough. Yet it was
such behavior that limited David’s discomfort. Mr. Barlow seemed quite
manifestly pleased. He would go on prowling.
This continued for several weeks.
His uncle burst into their office with rustle of spread papers flying
about him like sails. He made for Mr. Barlow’s desk without noticing
David.
“Oh, Mr. Barlow: I wonder can you help me in this matter of Dehn and
Penny. You know, they have sued for that fall shipment. Yes, of course:
the shipper is responsible. But it’s a complex case. Whereabouts do we
stand as to the next ten years, should we decide to compromise?”
Mr. Barlow made a coördinated reach for papers that were carefully set
away in different drawers; at the same time he rang for his secretary.
As he took a pad and began annotating: “File C-9, Dehn and Penny, Miss
Loman,” he said and was at work. Mr. Deane was doubtless aware of the
dispatch of his Mr. Barlow. He did not seat himself. He stood there,
patiently waiting. He hummed a tune and beat time to it with the tip of
pencil on Mr. Barlow’s desk. With a cloudy gaze he took in the cluttered
room and David in the corner: then suddenly was lost in contemplation of
the ceiling.
“Here you are, Mr. Deane.” His uncle was startled as if from a revery.
It was an effort to take his gaze from the fly-specked ceiling down to
the pad of paper with its squad of figures.
“Hm--yes--Hm,” said Mr. Deane as he studied the array.
Mr. Barlow gave him sufficient time to study the report. Then, “There
are two human elements besides,” he said, “Faraday is an erratic
salesman. He may possibly lose us the account.” Mr. Deane nodded
thoughtfully. “And on the credit page,” continued Mr. Barlow, “their new
treasurer, Clumberg, is a man of intelligent imagination. His investment
in Dehn and Penny means confidence, and his presence there means
improvement. He is the sort of man who may be guided toward us by this
very matter.”
Mr. Barlow was silent. Mr. Deane stood a moment rigid in speculation.
Then he relaxed. He had found his decision.
“Very good. Very good. Thank you, Mr. Barlow. It is a good risk.” He
turned to go.
He paused at the door. His face was relieved of his stern cloud. In the
wreathing of his mood, his eyes wreathed also and took in David: this
time, not as a part of the office’s equipment, but as a young man in
whom he had an interest.
“By the way, Mr. Barlow,” he had David in his eye, “how goes our young
rascal? Is he behaving himself?”
“He is making progress.”
Mr. Deane chuckled a bit with his big stomach and disappeared.