the beauty of your life!” He held forth his wine glass.
Korn raised his to his eyes, nodded and sipped. Tom drained.
“Did you get that, Davie?” he said. “The contempt Korn showed in
answering my toast? I do not blame him. I’ve never earned his respect.
Think how he must despise _you_!”
Korn did not turn his head. Lunn grunted and smirked--in his plate.
Dounia and Phoebe came to David’s rescue.
From Dounia: “I am sure Mr. Markand is br-raver, much b-raver than you!”
From Phoebe: “Jack, deny that you despise Mr. Markand.”
Tom drove ahead. “But I’ll earn your respect yet, Jack Korn. I may be
earning it now....”
Christian Hill was nudging Miss Gross.
“He’s a wonder, is Rennard. You must get him. The other man, the one in
the black suit, Madeline, _he_--he is----” Hill whispered in the young
girl’s ear. Her fork clattered: her little eyes lost their dim cunning:
became bright and large.
“Really?” she gasped. She gazed at Korn and was speechless. Her hand
went to the old bead bag in her lap.
Talk like a comet drew to the head of Tom and Korn. They held it: they
swung it: it was a dazzle of gyre to the jerk of their directions. At
the farther end of the table, Signora Sanni came and went: sat
imperturbable. She was a woman of more than forty. Disillusion was sweet
in her firm, strong face. It was a preservative. It did not keep her
pretty, it kept her content. Her features had set. It was as if they had
thrown away their woman’s tricks of blandishment and surprise: as if
they had sold their power to impassion at the price of passion itself.
At her side were Lagora and Lettie Dew. These three alone were intact
from the ebullient pull of the other end of the table. Lagora was
incapable of an objective interest. He ate seriously, he spoke to
Signora Sanni, he nagged Lettie. The eyes of Miss Dew wandered from
their circuit between her plate and the ceiling, to David. For a moment,
their gaze softened; something swam in her eyes, something stirred like
a cloud’s rift in her mind. With a violent gust of smoke--for she smoked
incessantly--she blew it away.
“But I maintain,” Tom said, “that the law makes the game all the more
delicious. The more rules, the more brains to overturn them.”
Korn smiled and nodded: “Goethe put it--‘In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich
erst der Meister.’”
“What does that mean?” Tom was held up.
“Just about what you are saying,” replied Korn.
“Well, then, Goethe is right.” Every one laughed except David.
Tom raced: “I like obstacle races: I like hurdles. Society is made up
simply of men who run flat, like you, dear Korn, or go in for
steeple-chasing, like myself. Now, I have a friend--tell me, Korn, what
do you think of this for manipulation ...?”
It was amazing, thought David, how little Korn said for one who held
such sure attention.
“----with the girl married, he controls her life. Do you see? Of course
he must pay his minimum--let us say his taxes--for that. But say what
you want, love or no love, there’s always about the same ratio of
satisfaction in a love affair. Eh, Dounia?” he baited her. “Come,
Dounia, tell us for once. Down with the veils. Is there so much
difference whether you love the man or not? I am convinced that woman’s
pleasure is utterly subjective. Who gives it to her is of no
consequence--unless she lets herself be imposed on by Society’s
mandates, standards, sentimentalities. Won’t you enlighten us, Dounia?”
She looked at him with a defensive sharpness. How did he guess how
women felt? how utterly subjective passion was--at least in her? Phoebe
also stirred back in her chair. His arrows were scattering too near. How
could he tell--he was peering mischievously at her--that she strove
often to forget her man in order to be happy with him?
“You see, she won’t tell. These women who think that being dumb is being
secret. As I was saying, he controls the lady. And she controls her
husband. And since he is high in power in the world downtown, my friend
controls that also. No prettier, no more outlawed game could be
imagined. I maintain it is pretty enough, Korn, for your praise.”
Korn chuckled. Tom raced on.
David had the sense that in a circling way he was the goal of Tom. Tom
threw out flaring lines, struck here, flung there, with himself as
center of his operations.
He lost this sense. It was replaced by the poignant one that Tom ignored
him. If anything remained of the earlier impression, merely that the
avoidance was planned. Tom paid more heed to every one in the room! His
attention was flattering and was canny. He baited Dounia, but Dounia
could not bait him. Durthal and Lunn were subsidiary strings that
reënforced his theme: and the women. He wove his complex music with the
lives and thoughts of all those present. And when he noticed David, it
was to prod him--to hurt him.
Then, still another sense. David began to feel himself separate from
this noisy element he was immersed in. He put forth spiritual fingers to
explore it. He drew his shredded findings in; he began to explore
himself.
He felt a hazardous balance, swung safe from fall by an impalpable
thread, between himself and this room: himself and Tom. Even the
gaslights, naked and stiff and hot, were elements of Tom. He was on the
other side and was alone. But there was a joy in the experience of
separation. He was apart, impregnable. He could poise somewhat the
laughter, the surge, the flection about him; arrive at himself.... Was
he impregnable after all? Why, then, hurt?
... Wine soaked soft these men and women--these prisons of sense. Sense
swirled unhindered upward, danced with spiraling cohesion beneath the
gasjets....
The door pushed open again. A man, dull shouldered, with heavy head and
tread and unlit eyes, came in and nodded and sat down at the end of the
table beside Korn. With the door wide for a moment a strange world stood
in the hall beside the room: a world, cool and hidden.
He was also an accustomed guest. He came with heavy breath as if each
breath lifted a weight of flesh against some obstruction in his gullet.
He nodded dully, with a brighter gaze alone for Tom.
“Too bad you weren’t here earlier,” said Tom. “The law needed your
defense.”
“So?” he was dully aware. His eyes peered out, like a big dog’s,
disturbed at feed.
“I think Officer Murphy might do well to ar-r-rest you all,” said
Dounia.
“Oh, you wouldn’t have him do that,” cried Hill, with a slightly
trembling voice. “It is such fun breaking all the Commandments.”
“So long as glasses are not broken,” said Tom.
“How is work, Murphy,” asked Korn with a serious full face whose irony
was far beyond the detective’s wit.
“Oh, slow ... _glp_. Ain’t much ... _glp_ ... doin’.” Murphy looked up
and down the table, interested at last, lacking something. “Say, Flora,”
his gross voice thrust out. “A little of the red?”
The gathering paused momentarily about the intrusion: swirled about it.
He was a gap in its midst, a load on its vital spirit. His fleshly
dullness must be smeared over with raillery and laughter. The crowd
began to digest him. Murphy disappeared.
His heft, now dissolved, was an added strength in the room’s swelter.
Tom rode the wave of broken personalities and whipped it and steered it.
Lagora forgot his duties toward Lettie and tried to make love to Flora.
He flattered her. He owed her money. He thought it might be well not to
have to pay for his dinners. Signora Sanni flicked off his words like
flies. She was learning the unlikelihood of being paid. And Lettie Dew,
released, allowed herself to gaze full and long at David who was back in
the storm taking its breast, distinguishing no thing. Phoebe was moist
and breathing hard. She was safe, however, beside Korn. Her sense of
safety crowned with smugness her bibulous affection.
“I believe truly,” she said to David, “we should be going.” She had said
this over and over. It gave her the excuse she somehow wanted for
finishing each succeeding glass of wine. She spoke measuredly. She was
passionately anxious to have David know she was more the lady than
Dounia Smith or Flora.
Lettie leaned over and smiled at David. Very suddenly. David smiled
back. Lettie scowled. David was hurt. As soon as he looked away, her
eyes were once more on him.
Miss Gross, cool, unliquored, chuckled and took the varying scene; she
wondered why Mr. Rennard evaded her diagnosis. She knew that later, Hill
would try to kiss her. He would take her home in a cab for no other
purpose. She was debating whether she wanted to be kissed by him, or no.
It might be fun. He was a married man! There he was pendulous, at her
side. He looked down more daring at her light-lashed corsage. How far
dared he be mad--was Madeline worth madness? The price----: He was
dismayed to find himself sobering under his question: deciding against
it.
“Damn it!” He jumped to his feet and brandished his glass. “Let’s
be--let’s be----” his voice died down: “----free souls, to-night.”
He found his seat limply. It was his tragedy to be sane. This Madeline
Gross--pretty though she was--was not yet the creature for whom he
expectantly and religiously waited: not yet the love for whom he was to
abandon his wife and child, with whom he was to be lost in the sacrament
of irreparable Folly. Not yet. Perhaps never! He was sober. He put a
bottle to his lips and emptied it. It gave him a stomach-ache. He began
to recall that Madeline lived far uptown, and that a cab would cost a
considerable lot of money.
The night was mellow and soft. It grew smeared with the sweat of wear:
hard with broken clusters of decay. It was over....
* * * * *
Tom and David walked homeward in silence.
David knew one thing, and it hurt: Tom had been showing off to the man
called Korn. He had one question. At last he asked it:
“Who is Mr. Korn?”
Something quailed in Tom. He took his answer, flung it brutally against
his quailing.
“Korn?” He was looking ahead, far ahead. “Korn--why, Korn is a
pickpocket.”
There were no more words. They went down the hall of their home: each
entered his room.
Tom closed the door.... It was very white and very quiet and clean. He
sat on his bed. Resting his chin in his hands, he went on looking ahead,
looking far ahead. Seeing nothing. The alarm-clock was obtrusive with
its tick-tack-tick. The window was open from the top. A faint breeze
made the white mesh curtains stir. Tom felt a soiled self sitting on
the bed, felt soiled feet on the tidied floor. Tom felt a desecration.
He was up. He was almost like a somnambulist. He was in David’s room.
They were looking at each other.
“I have done nothing. You fool, acting as if you were guilty!” he said
to himself.
“Yes, Tom?” David did not understand the stillness.
Tom was in conflict. “Are you sure--are you sure you are not guilty?”
Words cried to be spoken. He had none.
“Don’t be shocked, Davie,” he spoke at last. “One must meet all
sorts----”
“I am not shocked. But it is strange. He seemed so intelligent a man.”
Tom pounced, with passion of relief.
“He is intelligent, Davie! That is life. You don’t know how life is
lived in New York. There are no sharp distinctions, Davie, between
criminals and honest men....” He stopped. That sounded wrong. He plunged
in, to make it right. “--- What I mean is, the ways allowed by the law
and the other ways--there are conventions, Davie. Now-adays, to get
along, a young man must break in, must break in somehow. Strictly
speaking, that is never quite a righteous----” He stopped again. David
looked with gentle eyes: was Tom pleading, was Tom pleading for Korn or
for another? Tom’s rage came sudden, a birth of weakness....
“Look here,” he attacked him, “what a prig you sometimes seem, man! What
do you know about life? You who have always gone a greased path, sliding
into fortune! Do you think all men have uncles to do the cheating and
the robbing for them?”
David’s fists closed. He held himself.... By God, was Tom right?
Tom felt his victory. He was enraged still more. He struck again. “If we
all had the fat lap of your aunt to coddle us, or the pure lips of your
cousin to teach us love for nothing! Perhaps you think that any man who
hasn’t some one else to lay the dirt for him had better stay under? A
lot you know about life.”
“But Tom----”
“Look about you. I don’t apologize for Korn. He is what he is. He is the
typical social being. Nakedly. The rest of us think we are the pretty
names we are called by.”
He stopped. David was silent. A great fear ran through Tom.
“When you learn, David, to be a man, to give a little understanding--you
may deserve the friend you have.”
Still David looked at him, looked beyond him, searched for a reason. Tom
went out. It was as if the air that enveloped David sucked him backward.
Once more Tom was in his room. Its clear white calm was unbearable to
him. He would be less harried in the dark. He shut off the gas. He flung
himself upon his bed. He could not bear the darkness. He could not bear
the light. Doubtless, next door, David was quietly taking off his
clothes. Slow, slightly puzzled--unbearable David! Oh, he could murder!
He jumped up. Something dim, something gray, something dirty and simple
and soft: this was his need. He rushed down to the street....
* * * * *
Reaction.... Tom was contrite. He watched David sharply, aloofly even,
then did some good thing for him. Some intimate thing none but a loving
eye could have devised: and with a quiet tact. So there was David more
bewildered than before. But not David alone. He understood no less than
Tom. The storm of their relationship seemed moving toward no issue.
David was sick--a little sick.
“You shan’t go downtown, to-day, do you hear!” commanded Tom. “This is
a busy day for me, but if you don’t give me your word you’ll stay home,
I’ll stay home myself to make you.”
He went out and telephoned to David’s office. He came back with a
doctor. Tonsillitis.
Tom nursed him. Mrs. Lario found there was really little she could do.
David had an assortment of dainties to sip. “This won’t hurt your
throat.” He had books. He had a splendid array of cushions architected
for his back to prop him for reading.
Mrs. Deane came and found her nephew lying happy in the large front
room.
“More sun,” Tom explained. “It was no job moving the bed.”
“It is wonderful, child, how Mr. Rennard nurses you. I would no more
dream of interfering.... You do not appear to be very busy downtown, Mr.
Rennard.”
Tom laughed. “Oh, no, Mrs. Deane. Nothing to do at all. But do not give
me away.”
David understood.
“Supposing work does go to hell? It won’t. But supposing it did? Pooh!”
David could not forget such things.
Nor, in their light, could he forget Tom’s accusation that _he_ was
selfish: that _he_ had no idea of service. This one rift there was in
the harmony of Tom’s helping: a certain flavor of rebuke as he served, a
certain stress and reminder. “Here is how _I_ serve my friend.” Yet
David could not be sure. The rebuke he felt in Tom’s ministrations for
his own lazy selfishness might altogether lie in his own guilty
conscience. What did he ever do for Tom? So far as he could see, what
did he ever do for any one at all? His life was a sliding down greased
paths. Fortune or no fortune, what hold had he on the way? Lying there
on his cushioned couch, he found himself wishing Tom had not come back
so soon from work in order to see how he was. And wishing this, he felt
his guilt the more....
In flashes, like blaze in an empty sky, the emptiness of David came to
him and filled him and gave him great hurt. Whither indeed was he going,
and where was he? If Tom was querulous, irritable, weak, if Tom scoffed
at his relatives, refused to be serious about his friends and would hear
no word of his loves, what was David to complain? His relations were
nothing to Tom: he knew too well what earthy ones they were. Had David
respect for his own brief amours? Was there one of his relationships
with man or woman that was noble, that lifted him up? Was there one, who
worked for him and served him, as Tom did? Tom was faulty. Yes. But
David was a monster in that he seemed to partake neither of the virtue
nor of the sin of man. He was a trimmer. He was clamped down in some
chill Limbo. Knowledge came to him, even now, of his idle and empty
ways, like lightning in a lazy summer night: flashing and gone,
muttering afar, doing no work upon him.
He was a spiritually sprawling creature. He had no coördination. If his
heart was touched, how did his mind respond? If his mind, where was the
response in deed? It seemed to David that what he did wore away the
energy of his mind, dullened his heart: and what he felt and thought
became impediments to those acts which his living called for. He was a
loose-bound bundle of life, rolling down a chute....
In the fall, Constance Bardale telephoned to him.
“I am back. When can you come to see me?”
It was always hard for David to meet a sudden situation on the wire. He
needed a face and a warm smile to talk to. He was afraid he had been
dull in greeting Constance. For so long a time he had not thought of her
at all!
“Then, I’ll expect you Saturday to tea.”
She had not suggested an evening. The choice of the formal hour meant
nothing to David.
“I must make her know--somehow I must make her know I can’t go on.”
David said this to himself, going to see her. He did not recall that he
had failed to write since the apparition of the little girl in the car.
The poignancy of that vision was faded. But it had left its mark. In its
loveliness it had blighted certain ugly things in his heart:
disappeared. The condition whence sprang the ugly things was still in
David. He was not cured. He was merely bitterly aware that he was not
well.
Constance Bardale appeared different. Her new Paris gown was strange and
stiff and be did not like it. She was far away within it. Even her voice
had the apartness of alien adventures.
She took his hand swiftly and manoeuvered him into a chair.
“It is good to find you so flourishing. What _do_ you get out of New
York air to make you flower so! I thought of you particularly in a
little Normandy town where we stopped with friends. A Napoleonic
Baron--very plebeian that, for France. There was a gardener--of the
château--who had the one true aristocracy. A big brusk fellow. How he
adored his flowers and his vegetables! He reminded me of the way you are
sometimes.”
David thought how hard it was going to be to break the news of his
resolve to Constance. It dawned on him now that it might be unnecessary.
Of a sudden, “She has decided for me!” he announced, amazed, to himself.
He looked at her. Once more she meant discovery. For months, now, she
had been far from his senses, but his mind had thought her close. Now
his mind knew her far away, and his senses clamored.
They were at a point far anterior to their first warm meeting. No hint
of intimacy: no hint that it had ever been: no credible sign that it
could ever be. She talked fluently, her words and gestures took on for
David the nature of a sinuous veil, a blank blue of smiling nugatories
behind which the woman he had known retreated.
Apart from her now as he had never been, he wanted the warmth of her
nearness. His resolution to break off was a dim thing. He could not
understand it. He sat there and had forgotten it. This helped not at
all. Her way with him was beyond the mutability of a resolve. It seemed
a natural condition.
It was as if she had looked on him never closer before. She was a lady
with all the aloofness of her sex: not one to let him fling off her
clothes, let him lie beside her. The hope was monstrous of what once,
without hope, had been fact. It was over....
In his chagrin he could not find the comfort even of supposing that she
had sensed his decision and simply gone before him. He could not lave
his hurt in the thought that his long silence, with her in Europe, was
perhaps an introduction she had understood to her own course. He was
like a child: so aware of his own grievance, and of the sanctity of his
mood, he had no knowledge of hers. Like a child he came away, routed,
fascinated, fingering over and nursing his several hurts.
But, looking back, what humiliated David most was not these bruises to
his pride--was rather the dispatch with which he had recovered from
them. Neither the revelation of the little girl had held him, nor the
shaming lesson at the hands of Constance: neither inspiration nor
defeat. He had a slow pervading sense of his unchastened nature....
He dined with Caroline Lord. No rare occurrence; but this time Constance
was no more, and for the first time Miss Lord said:
“Let’s try to amuse _ourselves_ for a change. What do you say? Don’t you
think it’s a confession of no resources to be always going to the
theaters? You have never been to my apartment. Come and see _me_,
to-night.”
They walked up a residential avenue east of Central Park, where the cars
swerved swift and remote between sedate, slow houses. They climbed a
high brownstone stoop. They passed through a corridor echoing faintly
with their steps.
She lighted a table lamp. Color spread out from the emerald-silk shade
above a tidy stack of magazines, showed the room close and impeccably
neat. Each chair was in its place. The broad couch with its upstanding
cushions was smoothed of wrinkles. Gray curtains stood discreetly before
tall windows.
It was a cool room, methodically pitched. David found himself not
terrified by its neatness. Miss Lord seemed to be glad when he sank down
on the couch and rumpled it. He let his head lean against a
steel-engraving on the wall. They both laughed. A new Miss Lord.
She was letting David talk. She was silent, so the “moral tone” was
silent. Her body spoke and after all it was a lovely body.
David chatted. He was out of himself. His words came frictionless. His
words slowed down. He was aware of the stimulus that had taken him out
of himself, that had made him chatter.... Caroline. Lord. He saw her.
Hands rested in her lap: white strong hands in a wide strong lap. A body
luxuriantly full: it was strong. A wave of light from the lamp touched
her hair, made it a glow in the room.... She had without words a
maternal comeliness: she looked down, while he spoke, at her hands with
a girlish reserve.... David got up and kissed her.
She flushed and did not respond. He kissed her several times.
He was up to leave, she stood close under him. She was warm. A certain
discomfort kneaded her firm body, cloying it. She took his hand, looked
down at it, she looked up to his face, not quite meeting his eyes. She
squeezed his hand and pressed it against her waist. She said:
“You can’t really care for me, David?”
So David knew he did not really care. But she had one charm: the joy
there was in bringing a timid flush upon so strong a body.
He came frequently. He delighted to kiss her. Caroline Lord loved to be
kissed.
She had not planned this. She had in a deep way planned nothing in her
life. But she had the gift, as each new fact dawned on the rim of her
world, to be convinced that she had ordered it. Since David was
there,--the nephew of Mr. Deane--and since her senses loved his kissing
her, she planned a marriage.
The unfortunate circumstance was this: by the time she had hatched her
plans and cleared the way in her mind, she had already tasted the
delight of being kissed by David. And this was unfortunate because she
felt as part of her campaign toward marriage the need of circumspection
in such advances as kisses.
David noticed no change at first. Miss Lord feared to go too fast. She
had a sickening sense that she might lose all in her effort to gain all.
She found herself shamefully willing to temporize, and to enjoy the
evils of the day.
But as he held her in his arms, her little shifts began.
She said to him: “David, you do care for me?”
“David, if I felt that you could misunderstand why I let you kiss me,
oh, David,--it would kill me.”
“David, what is going to become of us? I feel that we must be doing
wrong.”
David began to feel how she was indeed asking him a question. She was
expecting something of him. He must give her an answer.
He said to himself: “She wants me to propose to her. Oh, I am sorry!”
His passion was gone.