confidence she had in Tom!
He followed Marcia. She went to the opposite corner of her room: near
her cheval glass. She stood there. Tom closed the door, let his weight
lean upon it, then seated himself in a broad arm-chair. Her whiteness
was taut: her black hair and eyes were hot. A tremble swift and faint
sang through her. She found she could not stop it. She moved and took up
an ivory brush, she strove to let her trembling flow from her two hands
to it. It was a very long time since Tom and she were alone.
“Marcia, please sit down.”
She complied at once: she flushed with anger that she had. Tom came and
leaned over her. He looked obliquely at her great black eyes and the
sharp perfection of her chin and the way of her white throat. He put his
open hands on her hair, he turned her face upward toward him. He placed
his dosed lips on her parted ones. His hands slipped down her face, her
neck, her body. He stood away. She said:
“Why do you do that, Tom?”
“That is how I feel.”
“Don’t lie, Tom.”
“I am not lying, Marcia.”
Her eyes blazed up. It was a burst of bravery and challenge. They
crumpled. She hid her head in her arms, she wept.
Tom put his hand firmly to the back of her head where the hair was
caught away from the neck.
“Listen, Marcia, I am not lying. Listen, please, Marcia.”
She was silent, if she was still weeping. She did not raise her head.
Tom leaned and kissed her neck. The faint scent of her hair in his eyes.
Marcia straightened sudden. He met the attack of her gesture.
“Now listen, do you hear?”
She stayed balanced, looking at him straight: her eyes filled with an
ironic hunger. So Tom wanted her. He began before she changed.
“You have never understood me, Marcia. I can’t blame you. I have never
understood myself. I am honest with you. I have always been. Perhaps it
was expecting too much, dear, that you should be able to stand that....
Marcia, I care for you now, as I did before, more than for any woman in
the world.”
She dropped her eyes and began to finger the embroidery of her chair.
“I go through strange tides, Marcia. I cannot help that. Most men have
hypocrisy to hide these ebbs. Most women have passiveness. I have
neither. So I suffer.... Marcia,” he went on, “I do not want to lose
you. But also I do not want to hurt you. Can’t I have you, without
hurting you, Marcia! It was because I had not answered that question,
that I forced myself away, forced myself cool.”
“What do you mean, Tom?”
He took a chair and brought it beside hers and seated himself. With a
great calm he heard himself say:
“Marcia--will you marry me?”
“I should love to, Tom.”
“We could manage. I might even gradually start to pay off your Mamma’s
debts. A little flat. Two weeks at the seashore. A cook....”
He spoke very seriously, with each item stroked the slender pearly hand
he had taken.
Marcia withdrew it. “Don’t be a silly, Tom.”
He jumped up. He drew her after him: he held her close, kissed her
throat.
“It is not impossible. I want you, Marcia.”
“You have had me.”
“I have never had you.” He thrust her away and walked to where she first
had faced him. “You know I have never had you, Marcia. How can
you--oh----!” He threw up his arms and stopped.
Marcia came closer. “Tom,” she said, “what do you really want of me?”
“Yourself....” He paused. “But without the sense that I am harming you.
Yourself, without restraint.”
“Why did you leave me, Tom?”
“I’ll tell you. Despise me, if you will. I’ll tell you. Because I had a
guilty conscience. Because I thought not alone of your future but of
your mother. Because I seemed unable to be either your lover or your
husband.”
She smiled.
“You’re not the sort of man one should marry.”
“Unfortunately I lack qualifications.” He put bitterness into his voice.
She was sure--and glad--she had hurt him. “But civilized standards have
nothing to do with love. I could love a woman, if only she were in a
civilized way disposed of, so that we could afford the luxury.”
Marcia laughed and placed her hand back in his.
“Why have you never put things this way before?”
“Never put things this way before?” He was amazed. He burst out
laughing. “Really, my dear, this is too ironic. I had given you up: I
had given you a free hand to marry. I was prepared to lose you
permanently rather than stand even temporarily in your way. But you did
not marry. What did that mean? I didn’t know. How could I? But what
should keep me from hoping? Any fool may do that. At least there was the
circumstantial evidence that you had not married. That is why I came
to-night, Marcia. I came to ask you to marry me. To plead with you. For
the first time I was prepared to sacrifice you for my own
desire--altogether. And now, when I am acting my most selfish self, for
the first time you see the sacrificial mood that I was in before!”
She placed her arms about him.
“Strange contradictory dear.... You shall have me, dearest. Wait and see
how soon. I think I never wanted you quite so much.”
“Marcia!”
“Don’t let your feelings blind you to reason, Tom. _Our_ feelings. You
don’t want a wife. If I was rich--or you were--even then, would you want
a wife? You want _me_. I you. Without alloy, dear. I’ll marry King.”
She smiled brightly.
“Do you know why I put it off? Because I thought it might mean real
captivity. It must have, Tom--without you, there, to rescue me. Oh,” her
face darkened, “I could not stand the thought of him without the
antidote!” She was silent, brooding. Her eyes seemed full of the picture
of her life with the dull rich man. It stifled her, blinded.
“I could not have stood it, Tom. I can now! Without you, it must have
meant prison. Now, it means release--adventure. Yes!” She seemed to be
emphasizing her resolve--bringing it clear before her eyes to see it.
“You’ll see that I am game. I am almost happy.”
She sank down in her chair, and smiled at him; tears kept her from
seeing how he smiled a bit wistfully away.
She needed to be silent. If for no other reason, for the tears.
She wanted to ask him simply: “Do you _love_ me, Tom? For Tom, if you
did _love_ me....” She did not dare her question. She did not dare, even
in her silence, to conclude it. She was afraid of his answer. Both for
him and for her she was afraid. Both of his “yes” and his “no.” After
all, her mind faded and veered, she had better marry King. It would be
going on.
She was dry-eyed.
Tom took her hand and kissed it.
* * * * *
“What do I really mean by all these things I do?” When Tom was alone his
question came often, came without answer. When he was with David, it
hurt and these things he did were like ash in his mouth. But even the
hurt was better than the reverberating silence. So Tom fled solitude.
But what of David? What did he want of David? Was he glad of him or
bitterly, passionately sorry? Did he want him close or far away? His
acts and moods, were they designed to hold or to repel him?
Tom was at a pass where all these things were chaos. The clear facts of
living were straws in a heaving sea: straws he reached for. He went
brightly about his profession. It prospered. But it became more and more
a thing to hide from David. And all such things were more and more to be
hidden from himself. Marcia was engaged. He feared her marriage which he
had manoeuvered, vaguely, as the time of a demand he could not face.
Also he looked forward to her marriage: the senses of him: his blood
and his wits as well. Marcia’s marriage must be a function of both.
He tried, close to David, to blot out his conflicts. He tried to realize
that it was David himself who brought about the conflicts: and to pursue
the rational conclusion that it was David who must be blotted out. His
reasonings had the way of playing him into some dark dilemma. The forces
driving him toward the constant agitation of his wits seemed all too
clearly irrational and heart-sent. He could not isolate the verbs of his
reason. If he did, he found them without subject, object--dead waifs of
sound flecking a hollow mind. His reaching for the true drive within him
left him a streak in imponderable Space, as if he had grasped a Comet.
It was better to be confined to straws.
The schemings pertinent to Marcia, straws: the intricate work downtown,
straws also: the being with friends, the satisfaction of his senses,
straws again. The effect upon his mind--this passionate bestowal upon
work he could not respect, upon pleasure he could not enjoy--was a slow
desiccation. He was dry, cynical, erethic. He needed to rouse himself to
heights of activation: his work called for no less. And the impulse
rousing him was ever one he was cold to. A strain on his nerves. As in a
man making himself drunk with drink he forces himself to swallow.
Needfully, since this vast disharmony gained on his life and since each
part of it warred against the others, Tom came to bestow upon its
various factors the quality of respite and escape. He needed a makeshift
harmony in order to live. One instant of admitted anarchy in our minds
means madness: in our bodies death. Since discord was there, it must be
balanced with other discord. One group of his thoughts swelled, sagged
out of place: he propped it into a semblance of poise with another
hypertrophy. So discord propagates itself. Life went on.
David was there to cleanse him of the tastes of his worldly work,
restore his self-respect, give him a vantage point against the scheming
Tom of the day. His other friends--shallow, quick fellows ready to give
what he asked and forward-coming, helpless women like Laura
Duffield--were there to balance the reticence of David, ease his
diseased hunger, throw him momentarily free of the strange
dissatisfaction of his one satisfying friendship. The function of work
was to sustain him, flush his energies until such time as he knew how he
wanted to play. Marcia was compensation for that in him which could not
look to David. David was compensation for that in him which was ashamed
of Marcia. His hours with David and Cornelia were sleep in which he
lived as he dreamed, won strength to face the waking: his hours of work
were respite from the starved clamor of his dreams--a way of winning
time from their insistence.
So his life stumbled and shook ahead. It held together. But it was
textured of half-true, half-meeting elements. Its hazardous solution
caused a continual ferment. The sign of ferment was his growing pain in
a life stumbling, shaking ahead.
He walked down a Square with that lithe pacing stride of his. Half
clenched fists swung at his side. There was a fairly constant strain in
his eyes that lifted them in their sockets. With teeth tight set, he
hummed a tune. Energy was forever thus escaping from him. When he did
nothing, he fell at once into a state of preparedness for flight. He
wanted to get away: get out. He could not. Life gripped him and he loved
it. But much energy was born of this deep impulse to escape. He
scattered it about. Much he applied--and applied to perfect the
conditions of that very life from which his nerves rebelled. His
vitality in talk, his speed of impressions, his plasticity of posture in
the world grew from this energy. So that he shook along in a vicious
circle. Much of his power to throw life into his work came from the
secretions of his dissatisfaction with it: from the energy of his
dissatisfaction. But life is full of such mechanical paradox. All of
civilized life is such a one. Many a man succeeds in the conscious world
because of the failure hidden in his heart.
Tom stopped. He was before a crumbling brownstone house: a rusting iron
grille, a gate thrown out on useless hinges. A tiny plot of grass
flanked the narrow walk. The soil was rocky: sediment of the City--cans,
flakes of cloth, splint eyes of glass--choked the slim green. From the
low stoop the house flared up, soft in decay.
Tom turned his back on the house. He looked North on the Square. In his
eyes was a hunger for open places. His glance consumed the narrow
breadth of the Park with its dapper walks and its trees. It broke
impatient on the row of red-brick houses. It spent itself. Tom’s gaze
narrowed. He turned and went up the stairs. They were dirty and
dark--four flights. Odor of mildew and misspent lives seeped from brown
plaster.
He struck his fist on the door. Behind him was a hall painted the color
of stale chocolate. In the center of the fly-blown ceiling a sudden
cupola, picked out in glass--green, yellow, blue. Sky came through dim
and soiled.
A young stout fellow opened the door and gave a cry of pleasure: let Tom
in.
“Hello, Rennard! Flora. Florissima! Company’s complete.”
Tom pressed Lars Durthal’s hand. “Hello, Lars,” he passed him.
A long narrow table spread in the square small room. The heavy mantel
was ribald with knick-knacks of varicolored glass, purchased in useless
shapes at Coney Island and Asbury Park. Their gayety, adance in the
boxed mirrors of the yellow wood, seemed irrelevant above the table,
with its high unlabelled bottles of red wine, its mounds of Italian
bread, its platters of cervelat, tomatoes, sardelles. The table’s order
was disturbed by its broken wreath of guests.
Most of the diners lounged already in their chairs. Between laughter and
smoke they sent their eyes lazily toward the kitchen. They had begun
with their wine.
“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” a slender fellow spoke, upon whose long neck
poised a head remarkably round and small; within his face with its fat
sanguine cheeks the eyes and mouth and nose took up an inconspicuous
space.
“Good evening, Marquese.” Lagora was a nobleman: a dealer in marble
according to his one report, in Italian oils and spices according to his
other. A clever, shifty, cloudy fellow with hands like a girl’s.
Tom sat down with an air of temporariness beside him.
“Well, Dounia--comment ça va?” He leaned and placed a finger on the
cheek of the woman across the table. Dounia Smith put down her glass.
“I’ve no cigarettes.”
Tom placed a box in her expectant hand. They were enormous hands: gaunt,
naked, acquisitive, with a wrinkle about the finger-joints that was
sinister against the smooth calm of her wrists. Behind her hands, Dounia
Smith rose diminished. She was tall, handsomely cut: her hair swept
black and low over her temples: her eyes had a gray slant that offset
the thin lips, the sharp tilt of her chin. When she lighted her
cigarette she showed all of her teeth. They were white. But as the gaunt
huge hand came near her face, the rest of Dounia Smith went into
eclipse.
A man came up, neatly and drably dressed, with a red tie that flared
against the pale primness of his face.
“Glad you’re here, Rennard. Business particularly boring, to-day. Fun
particularly needed, to-night.”
This was Christian Hill--sedate, rebellious--a man of business who
craved intoxicants of life. All his sentences sounded like telegrams.
All his money, too sanely earned in a broker’s office, was at the
disposal of his search for madness. He looked on Tom as his ideal. He
would have sold his wife into slavery for a lust sufficiently great to
make him commit the folly.
“I want to introduce you,” he beckoned toward a girl that had sat yonder
beside him. “Madeline--this is Mr. Rennard--Miss Gross.”
She came sidling. She was richly clad, very blond, very powdered.
Beneath the simper of blue eyes, the hot curl of placid lips and the
ringlets of blond hair teasing her tiny ear, Tom saw that she was
Jewish.
He took her tiny hand, gloved in fawn-colored kid.
“It is nice to have you here, Miss Gross. I hope our rough manners won’t
shock you.”
She propelled herself a little nearer.
“Oh, please do, Mr. Rennard!”
“You want to be shocked, Miss Gross?”
Hill intervened. “But you can’t, Rennard. You don’t know my little
Madeline.”
The little Madeline simpered and tapped her escort’s mouth with the back
of her gloved hand.
“How do you know, Christian? Just because _you_ couldn’t.” Bending her
body back, she threw her head back also. She gazed at Tom through the
lashes of her half-shut eyes.
Durthal came up.
“Your place is there, old man. Between Lunn and me.”
“Good evening, Flora. Say, you have room for Markand? I made him promise
he’d be here.”
A thick-set woman, with face incredibly composed and large bare arms
crossed over the gray width of her dress, nodded to Tom and to the
others.
“Good evening, Flora.” “Hello, Flora,” the greetings came. Flora did
not budge from her place in the kitchen door. Hill dragged Miss Gross
through the scatter of chairs.
“Oh, Signora Sanni,” he said, “I want to introduce my friend.”
Flora Sanni wiped her right hand slowly, methodically on her apron.
“Buena sera, Signorina.” She took the gloved hand, dropped it, turned
about. Her eyes were steel. She had taken longer to wipe her hands on
her apron.
Tom moved in Durthal’s power toward the nearer end of the table.
A young girl shut the door.
“Here you are,” muttered Lagora.
She nodded timidly to her neighbors--maliciously to Dounia Smith, a
defensive malice--and sat down beside the Marquese. He drew close his
chair. The two began muttering together. Lagora leaned forward. The girl
bent back from the thrust of his mood and his body. She was a frail
creature--a tissue of harried nerves with great black teeming eyes. Her
hand tapped on the plate. She lit a cigarette, inhaled a great gust,
emptied Lagora’s wine glass and then blew out the smoke. Her body was
draped in a short tight smock of blue hung from her shoulders. Her tiny
breasts stood up in it quite clear. Lagora’s brows worked up and down.
Her big eyes sharpened and cut him. He looked at her twitching
shoulders.
“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” she cried as she passed him. She threw up a
diminutive hand. Her breasts bobbed.
“How are you, Lettie?” Tom, taking her hand, had the sense of Lagora
smiling with snakish eyes. He passed on.
A lumbering boy got up, nodding and saying no word.
“Well, Darby?” Tom sat down. “I’ve not seen you in a week.”
“A long time,” synchronously growled the other. Tom heard him and
laughed.
“And the painting?”
Tom and Darby Lunn were lost together in talk. From the table’s farther
end Durthal saw them together. The laugh of Dounia Smith, the shrill
sneer of Lettie tossing her heels, the mutter of Lagora were a wave,
gathering, crumpling upon the calm of Signora Sanni. Durthal extricated
himself from Hill and Miss Gross. He headed through the disserried
chairs. Stretched arms reached for wine and tastes of antipasto. The
evening splintered and swirled. Food would draw it together.
Durthal stood over Tom.
“Here, old man. Change over. You sit between us.”
Finding his seat, he also had the sense of haven beneath the spray and
scatter of the room.
Of the three, Tom was the only one whose voice carried beyond them:
laughing. Dounia Smith eyed him with a tilt of her head. A finger, like
a talon, flecked her cigarette. Her brows were thin and straight like
the stroke of a sharp pencil on hard paper.
Flora Sanni stood above the table, with a vast white bowl of
_minestrone_. The crowd coalesced.
The table narrowed. The chandelier, relic of fluted brass and drooping
crystal, took on the tawdry tone of office and gave its light,
self-consciously, heatedly, like an old servant, too laden with memory
and years to want to work for so crass a gathering. The carved clock
ticked: a clatter of plates drew down bent necks, beading foreheads.
Sharp streakings of sound ribboned the table: swathed it: covered it
with a warm liquidity. Then the whipped undertone of selves seeped up
again, lapped over the inorganic sound, deluged it, drowned it in
angular surge of assertions.
The door gave a knock that was heard at last....
David had followed upstairs a pair who were held to slowness by the
constant claim of the woman that she was too weary to go another step.
“Come along, Phoebe!” The man had a high straight back. He wore a soft
collar that bared his neck. David observed that it was wiry and clean.
The hairs were clipped high from it. David had time to observe. Whenever
the pair came to a rest, he rested behind them. Something impeded his
passing. Timidity in part. The disclosing thereby that he had overheard
them, that they were moving too slowly. His own scarce unconscious
resistance to mounting those stairs at all. He hated the place. But he
had no reason to give to Tom. And Tom took offense at his not wishing to
come.
“Why, dear man. Don’t you like Flora? I think Flora is splendid. Such
poise! Or is the place too noisy for you. David? Davie, you must get
accustomed to dirt!”
A vehemence in Tom that silenced David. Doubtless this was life, and
life no thing to shrink from.
“But I do like Flora!” He could not add that he felt that Flora did not
like him: did not seem to like any one who came there: nor the feeling
that if she had known him different and uncomfortable, perhaps she would
have liked him.
“Well, then!” said Tom.
The stout lady was sighing. “Why we ever come here, Jack! These stairs!”
“You know it is lots of fun, Phoebe. Go along now. You like it as well
as I.” He spoke immaculate English, and urged her with a slap on her
rump.
“Well, the people----”
“----the food?” he chuckled. “The mysterious bottom of Signora Sanni’s
pot. One more hoist, old lady. Th--th--ere! Where else, pray, can one
meet such a delightful assortment of bulls?”
“Don’t call them bulls, Jack Korn! Call them detectives.”
“Here we are, dear.”
David and they entered together.
“Korn, I _am_ glad to see you!” Tom reached over the table and greeted
him. “How’s business?” He had nodded to David and Korn’s woman with a
perfunctory politeness.
“Meet my dear friend, Mr. Korn,” he laughed. “Same profession as
myself.” The three sat opposite Durthal and Tom and Lunn. Mrs. Phoebe
Raymond was on one side of David. On the other sat Dounia Smith. All of
them laughed, except David.
He looked at Korn. A big, athletic fellow, clad in somber serge. He had
black hair and a significant nose.... Why had all of them laughed?
“I have never seen you here before, Mr. Markand,” said Phoebe Raymond.
“I--I come quite often.”
“Well, I don’t,” she looked full at him. “One gets so little time.” Her
round face was pretty. But it was fat: its petite features were lost in
flesh. Her bosom obtruded like a robin’s breast. David seemed to see,
investing the round comeliness of her mouth and nose, layers of sloth
and greed. A scaly dimness was already over the blue eyes. “I like small
gatherings more, don’t you?” she confided. “One could get to _know_ a
person then.” David had the sense that if he drank enough of the wine
Mrs. Raymond would seem very pretty indeed.
He began to eat. Words pattered and burst about him. The food had an
exotic charm. The air was full of heated eyes and bodies. Glances and
edged remarks trembled like flung spears in the flesh of the women.
David kept still and went on eating.
Phoebe Raymond tried to engage him in talk.
“My husband and I were in Maine at the time. Do you know New England,
Mr. Markand?”
“Of course he knows it! Can’t you see it written all over him, Phoebe?”
It was Tom drawing her away. “How dare you talk to my friend about your
husband! Have you no sense of decency?”
The immediate half of the table was his. He played it like an
instrument. His eyes were too bright and too hard, thought David. He had
little to say to him. To Durthal and to Lunn, to the women on David’s
side, to Hill even and Lagora, he had more to say than to David. Most of
all to Korn. But he looked often at his friend--sharp glances while his
attention swathed from right to left. David was enmeshed in his running
comment: all Tom said seemed to run through him and knit him.
“It is hard not to be moral,” he said. “One is pushed so into good
behavior.”
Jack Korn sat back smiling. He was a strong man. He was very quiet.
“What do you think of good behavior, Korn?” Tom asked him.
“It is as good a game as another.” He paused. “Surer.”
“But why should we want to be sure? Since we are already sure of death?
Look at Dounia, there. She has never done a risky thing in her life. Run
over her investments. Burton, Klein, La Soule--all good gold bonds. You
ought to be ashamed of yourself, my dear. You remind me of Markand’s
uptown relations.”
“And what are you crowing about?” Dounia retorted. “You’re as safe as an
eel.”
“I have at least the good manners to be ashamed of it,” Tom laughed. “To
hide it and even lie about it. I am gaining strength.”