might clench his fists and his teeth, unseen. Cornelia placed her hand
on his shoulder. She was torn by his weeping.
He righted himself. His eyes were burned with tears. Cornelia sat beside
him. She took his hand. She placed his hand to her lips.
“Dear Tom!” She was trying to smile. Instead of the smile, came tears to
her also. She turned away her face, struggling, not understanding.
“I am not weeping for father,” said Tom. “I am weeping for ourselves....
So are you!”
Cornelia gave way. She also hid her face in order to give way. Tom,
stroking her hand, looked beyond them: from the sun of his hurt into the
dim world.
XIII
Cornelia loved to sit by her open window and look out.
She had the need of seeing the City clear: a cold pattern. Her own mind
was chaos and she saw no help to crystallize the swirling problems that
consumed her. Like one who in great heat wins comfort from vision of
cool waters, she thought of the City as a design, carefully plotted out.
It was not easy. Looking beyond her house, with the street swarming in
her eyes and the battlemented roofs surging above her head, she was dim
in revery. In the dimness, the City lost its geometric outlines. It
veered in and out of her grasp like a delirious dream: its streets were
parabolas, freighted with teeming particles of life which each had a
centrifugal direction. It all was a frangent swarm, knotted, heaving
upon itself, forever ashift. She saw it a monstrous replica of her own
mind: there was no relief.
She struggled with it. She said to herself: “What is so regular as the
streets of New York?” When she dispelled her inchoate vision, also there
was pain. For now she had the sense of streets cut livid through human
lives: each street was a sharp thrust and heaped about it mounds of
desiccated bones.
At last Cornelia shut the City out. She sat in her little rocking chair
with a candle glowing, and huddled upon herself as if her pains were a
swinging swarm about her. With hidden eyes she came to a dim world of
thought.
She had never needed to find the word for what she felt toward David.
Often, she needed to say to herself in self-assertion: I am a woman.
Her life brought doubt of that. Were women supposed, like her, to live
alone and work, and have no home, and have no one to care for? Her
instinct despaired often of the life she gave her body and her mind. In
protest, sometimes it would speak: am I a woman? But here was a harmony
so deep it required no voice outside itself: in what she felt toward
David. Long since it was an atmosphere: a wide world she fed in or
starved in: howsoever, lived and would died in. She did not say to
herself: I am in the world. She did not speak to herself of her own self
with David. Endlessly, now, she worried about him, asked herself how she
could help him. Still more frequently, she asked herself how she could
save him. And in her next question: Save him from what? she was already
deep in her tangled problem. She was like one who lived at the edge of a
dark forest: whithersoever she went, with a step there she was in it.
Its tangled shadows were always at her side.
Cornelia could understand, could also not understand. She had the sense
that David suffered: suffered with her brother. She had the instinct of
some struggle hidden between them, and of danger for them both. She knew
not what it was. So it was horrible: it was like the nocturnal stirring
of unknown life in her forest. She knew it was not merely the
worldliness of Tom, his efforts to make David worldly. She knew how
eased she must have been to believe it was no worse. But touching upon
this, the terror still prowled at large. She had no hold upon her
terror.
It was years now, growing on her like the loom of a Curse. It blackened
and dried her life. She lived with it. All of her being was a shrunken
point, veering blindly about in order to forfend some visitation so
obscure and vast that she was nothing before it. If it was fearful that
she knew nothing to bring her comfort, it was fearful as well that she
knew nothing to knit her fear. She was a little swirling point under a
sky that was black.
Sudden words came, like jagged movements in her mood. She said: “It is
not for me that I am miserable. I do not want him for myself. God knows
I have no hope of him for myself. It is not that.... God grant it be
true that under this all, it is not merely that I want him for
myself.... Oh, God grant it be only this! No other danger. I will face
that. How gladly then I will give him up!...”
She buried her head in her arms, she prayed: she knew not what to pray
for. She had the sense of an unholy loneliness, of praying to herself.
She sprang up, wide-eyed, looked at her long, transparent hands: she
said aloud: “Why am I alive?”
A thought came sweeping and cleansing: she was like a sea torn by swift
winds, now suddenly a sheet of rain came down and smoothed it, soothed
it. So a thought came glancing and offered peace.
“I do not have to live,” it said. And that in her which alone she did
not question, which alone needed no words since her whole life was its
Word, gave answer.
“No: what of him? With David in trouble, I must at least be here.”
Once more she was a sea churned by the winds of her dilemma.
But at least she had the faith that it was good for David that she
should live. No faith this. Rather the matrix of her life--the hollow of
the world in which lay her sea, however restless it beat....
* * * * *
Through the City walked Tom. He and his thoughts were a nimble line
parting the City. Through the warm weather and the thick crowds of men
and women he cut. Past the great loads of stone, he made his way. He was
in Cornelia’s room; it was as if his path had left a wake--half fire,
half blood--where his thoughts simmered and soaked into the living City.
“Cornelia,” he said to her, “what is there wrong with us?”
She looked at him. She loved him. She was glad always to be with him.
Why did he not come back to her? In that way alone could she save him.
If he stayed where he was----
“Let us cheer up, Tom dear. We’re depressed. I wouldn’t have thought
that father’s death could depress us so.”
“You know better than that!”
“Is there anything more wrong with us, Tom, than with the world?”
Tom smiled wanly.
“How like a woman that is. However deep we rot, if the world rots as
deep, no matter? You women accept the world.... Cornelia, that thought
which to you brings consolation, would make me desperate.”
She said: “Perhaps we have not found ourselves, yet, Tom.”
And he: “Father’s death has suddenly set me to thinking where we are:
and you to feeling.”
“I am not thinking of father. Ruth’s letter made me think far more of
Ruth. Poor wasted Ruth. And Laura--bitter, sick Laura. I think of them.”
“Are they the only victims, Sister?”
Cornelia was pale. She drew back in her chair as if Tom threatened to
strike her. Tom leaned toward her and with a quiet voice went on:
“Cornelia,” he said, “Father is dead. The father we revolted from and
left. Tell me, Sister, how have we improved upon him?”
There was a silence. There was calm, very deliberate in Tom. He was
smoking a cigarette. He took the red-tipped toy and held it before his
eyes and looked at it; he blew on it with his half-parted lips. His
lips were very hard against his teeth. The burning tip of the cigarette
flared for an instant under the draught, burned more ash.
“Is not that the question which haunts us, Cornelia?”
She had no word for him. She felt he was unjust and cruel. She was
helpless under his mood. Always in the past, she had been able--the
sister, the mother in Cornelia--to veer him from himself and from
herself when his mood went shattering. She had been wise and poiseful.
Now she lay quivering with him, underneath his words.
“We don’t talk very often, do we, of father and the past? I wonder why
we avoided them. Were they not the scene of our great Victory? Where is
our pride, Cornelia?” He was deliberate and slow: his irony stiff like a
rod.
“Just think,” he said, “what we left: what we overcame! Father! He is
dead now. His remains--all of them, including Ruth and Laura--lie
rotting on the Farm. We should be able to make some sort of estimate of
what he was....”
She wanted to stop him. She wanted to know. Tom was right. Let them make
some estimate of what they were.
“... a man whose blood had turned to poison.... Do you remember how he
used to beat his daughters? The thing to remember in that is that he
loved it. He had one successful daughter: Laura: she loved it also. And
the world we lived in, Cornelia. Few children are brought up in so real
a world. We alone had no illusions about America. We knew that in
America, quite as elsewhere, only the few were to be saved. The rest
were damned. We knew that the deeds of the masses were damned deeds
here, quite as in Europe. Yes:--were there illusions about what he told
us of the Revolutionary Fathers? or the Pioneers? We were wise children.
And the reason was simply that Father taught us to see the truth. Have
you ever thought of that? He taught us better than he knew, himself. For
Father saw through the real world: he saw what a cold and lustful
monster it all is. But he had his way of refuge. He had his God who had
predestined him to heaven. Blessed Father! He had his revenge, for there
was always the same God damning the irritating mob to hell. For his
sake, Sister.... Do you see what I mean? Father gave us his knowledge
for weighing facts, which means that he gave us his disillusions about
Earth. But we did not stop there. We turned that same power against his
own fairy-tales. God went, heaven went, hell went also. All that
remained was the Earth that he had taken from us....”
Tom was silent. He smoked measuredly. He went on:
“Father was a happy man: he had a place to go to, from this desecrated
world. Father was a strong man: he had his God. Where is our God,
Cornelia?”
He sprang up. His eyes flashed. Deep anger was with his hands above his
head. He sank down once more, and dropped his cigarette.
“We have no gods,” he said. “We have lost the old one. We have won no
new ones.”
He smiled with the same hard half-parted lips. “I am not sure that we
were so very wise. All the searing and desecrating vision that Father
gave us of this reality was mere preparation for his Faith. He and his
kind helped desecrate the world in order to enjoy their heaven. Without
his heaven, is this reality he gave us altogether truth? Where are we
with it? What is an abortion in relation with a life that is fully born?
We rebelled; we left him and his blows and his hell and his God. We took
with us the corroding poison of his blood. Were we not fools, Cornelia?”
“But, Tom, what else could we have done?”
“Nothing, of course.”
“Then, perhaps----”
“Be brave and honest, for once! A little more like father. His souls in
hell could also not have done otherwise....”
“Tom! I won’t believe....”
He cut her short. “Very well, then: what _will_ you believe?”
She was silenced. His smile was over her, a hateful bitter triumph.
“That is it, precisely. Don’t you see? What _will_ we believe,
Cornelia?”
He came and lifted her out of her chair. They sat down on the couch. His
hand was very gentle on hers. He kissed her.
“We are neither the old nor the new, Sister. I sometimes think we are
nothing. We are not happy. We are not strong. We have no gods at all.”
“We are unhappy, Tom.”
He looked at her fiercely.
“Are we that?” he asked her. “Have we the strength to be unhappy? To
remain unhappy? Oh, how I wish I could believe that!”
He was grasping both her wrists. He dropped them.
“No,” he said. “It’s a lie. We are nothing. We are not even martyrs. I
with my Law--my successful rotten Law. You with your paltry,
remunerative Art! We are on the way. Something is on the way, through
us, perhaps, through the wilderness of life. We are they who shall fall
by the wayside.”
He looked over his shoulder, out of the window. The night was a blue
haze, deep and far. It was streaked with the murmur of men, with the
glow of a million lights. A tremor ran through him like the pulse of
blood, and came about them, seated in the room.
“Let us face that, Cornelia....”
“But Tom:--in what you said--that is faith of a sort. You spoke of a
wilderness to go through. Of a way. It must lead somewhere. There must
be something else?”
“For us?”
“Perhaps not for us.”
“I should like,” Tom pondered, “to have some Church in which to perform
a service for my father.”
She looked at him close. His head was down. She took his face in her
hands and touched his shut eyes with her lips.
“Dear Tom! Don’t I help?”
There was a great hope in her. If she could find him again: hold him
again! Tom, her first child....
He was searching her with eyes her lips had opened.
Her thoughts ran on. Dimly she felt the peril in her thoughts, running
along.... No, Tom was not her child. Tom, no longer. He was like her. It
was true. Only, he would not accept. She knew the wilderness of life
stretched mountainously far beyond where her feet could bring her. She
knew the truth for her in what Tom had said. She had hoped, not for
herself, but for him. She had hoped falsely. They were one--they were
one. For there was another who was so infinitely more, that they were
nothing.
And so her mind ran on, while Tom’s eyes searched her. David was not
maimed like them. In his eyes was the promise of a new God. And Tom was
waging war against that promise. Talk as he would, understand as his
mind made him, Tom waged war against that faith in David which he
lacked. Strove to snatch it from him: steal it and wear it dead, rather
than let David go on alone, with his eyes living.
She had said to him: “Do I not help?”
With an uncanny closeness, Tom sought in herself the answer.
Cornelia turned her eyes away. She could not look at her brother. It
was her brother whom she loved. Yet, turning away her eyes, she felt
that she was leaving him by a wild wayside, to parch and perish. She
felt that even so let it be. All of her must be girded beyond him.
He also had said no word. He went to the window and stood there looking
out. She knew that both of them had understood....
* * * * *
Twelve years before they had set out on a great enterprise together.
They had come up from a common childhood which was a common suffering.
They had reached Being together. Everything they had was a thing they
had shared. The sere soil of the world was a single path they had
traveled. Their hands had been joined. Now, facing each other over the
communion of their years, they were prepared for war.
The bitterest of all was this: that it seemed natural. It was as if
their common anguish, the hopes born of their hated home and the fruits
they had wrung courageously from their adventure, pointed inevitably to
this end. For the most natural of all was this: that the end also should
be bitter.
The death of their father had brought Tom for the moment closer to
Cornelia. He was coming again to see her. There had been months without
a sign of him. She knew that when this mood wore out there would be
months again. If she had questions of Tom, there was no time to lose.
It was bitter hard to bring herself to speak of David. She did not
flinch:
“How does your friendship stand with him?” she asked him.
“It is stormy. It will always, I guess, be stormy. But it will always
be.”
They were at war, but they were generous to each other. Their war was a
hidden and a sacred thing: it was not more nor less than the
confronting of themselves upon the path they had helped hew, had helped
each other walk. It was a hidden thing, but they had no desire to
conceal it. They were open to each other insofar as each could be. They
were the brother and sister who had waged life and war together.
“Do you think it is helping David--this ‘friendship’ that will always
be?”
“I have not your acute moral sense, Cornelia. How should I know?”
She bit her lips.
“Why,” he asked with his ironic smile, “why don’t you ask if it is
helping me!”
“You have made it plain to me, Tom, that you do not need my help. Out of
self-protection I had to withdraw thinking too much of that.”
He nodded as if he understood and agreed. This hurt Cornelia. Even the
words of contradiction would have been hostage to something precious.
“David is growing masterful. That much I can say for our friendship. I
told you how he turned Lunn and Durthal out of our place, one evening.
What I did not tell you was this: the following day David was contrite.
He wanted to apologize for the splendid thing he had done. I would not
let him.”
“Why?”
“What he did was himself. It is himself I care for. I will not let him
be a renegade to his own instincts.”
She laughed at him. It was an effort, turning her bitterness to
laughter.
“In the contradiction, you simply had a higher sort of triumph. Don’t
you think I understand? You labor to beat him down and break him. When
you see signs of your work you turn about. When you get him beaten and
broken at last, doubtless you will have no more use for him.”
“Doubtless, Cornelia.”
“Tom! Leave David alone!”
His cutting calm had parted her restraint. All of her fear threatened to
burst out. She was close to Tom, beseeching. In a moment, her hands
would be suppliant.
He let her plead.
“Do that for me, Tom. Leave him! Insult him! Turn him away!”
“I often try to. It’s no use. I can sustain no mood long enough for
that.”
She was blinded by his words into a sense of hope.
“Oh, a little longer! Send him to me. He never comes to me, now. He will
if you send him. I’ll help you, Tom.”
She stopped. She saw the folly of her outburst. Was there not war
between them? He was there with his irony.
“What have you, really, against our friendship? There is something
unreasonable in this. What is it? Of course, I shall send him to you. I
promise that.”
Never had she seen him so contained before her. He was winning. A
flourish and a dare in his promise to send him. She pressed her lips
with hands that had been almost suppliant before her brother. She would
accept his ironic bounty: turn it against him. Many a battle was lost
through excess of confidence. She could not answer his questions.
“You talk, positively, Sister, as if I were ruining the lad,--instead of
slowly bringing him up.”
“Bringing him up to what?”
“Well, to what? I ask you?”
“Tom, I cannot explain. There is something here I cannot explain. I want
David to be free of you. That is all.”
“So you can have him?--is that all?”
“You know that’s a lie!”
She was breathing hard with her hurt.
He examined her. “Yes: that is a lie. That would be a reasonable reason.
Too reasonable for you. I could respect that: even coöperate with it. If
there were any chance of success,” For an instant, he had tricked her
into stirring toward him. She winced. “You can’t expect me to crucify
myself and David for your vague philanthropic folly.”
“No, Tom--I cannot.”
Then: “Tom, are you altogether frank with me? Do you really think my
haunting fears are due to a selfish cause?”
“No, Cornelia.”
“Do you think, Tom--answer me on your honor--do you think they are
really vague and foolish?”
Waiting for his word, as he stood silent, she found that she wanted him
so to think them.
His answer came: “No. They are not foolish. And only we are vague about
them.”
“Tom!"...
She must look out. She was so weak before him. She was ever so near to
dangerous pleading. She straightened herself back.
“----but since _we_ are so vague, Cornelia? Necessarily so. I call the
whole discussion nonsense.”
He was flippant over her tragedy: over her life. He was clear-eyed
admitting it, and then he was flippant! He stood next to her with his
light grace and she hated him. For he was the brother whom she loved.
He went and did not for a long time come back. He stayed away too long.
But he wrote her a note:
_Dearest Sister_:
In accordance with my promise, I have urged David to go and see
you. I scolded him for a thoughtless friend. He is thoughtless,
you know. I have found that out, many a time, to my unhappiness.
These books I am sending you I have just read this year and liked.
I am sure you will like them also.
Lots of love, dearest Sister, and good fortune.
TOM.
How sure he was of David! How sure he was of her. She saw that he loved
her in the same deep confident way of the younger brother whom she had
nursed and led. The eternal way. She had unending hurt of this. For how
could she deny the call of his love through his little note? And how
could she answer it? She was torn. She knew there was now a reason for
Tom’s staying away. She wondered if Tom knew how he tore her. But if he
had written her coldly, cruelly, would it have been less cruel?...
* * * * *
Cornelia found herself nursing in her arms a life that she must make to
thrive against all hazards: the little life of a great resolve. She
looked at it, and gave herself up to it. Dimly she knew that if she held
it close enough, and warm, and endless against her breast, it would gain
in strength.
David must be saved!
From now on, she went about with it. While she worked or played--seldom
this was--and went through the grimacings of a social creature; while
she slept--there it was ever upon her breast: that David must be saved!
He had not come to see her.
She said to herself: it is no matter. To have seen him would have been
joy, or rather ecstasy so packed she could for many days have had her
joy of it. It was no matter. For she had no plan. What would she say to
him, or do, when he came? Let him stay away until she was more ready. It
was bitter to know he had not come, and she expecting him. It was no
matter.
Her sleep was a strange thing. No real dreams--streakings of thought and
dream ran through her night like falling flames. So that her night was
neither sleep nor waking. It was an endless trembling between two
worlds, it was a part of Chaos. She lay there and her body was a
restless weight holding her down. She was like a little boat tossed at
anchor by a broken sea. Her body and her consciousness: these were the
anchor. They kept her from running wild with the waves. And the waves
kept her from being quiet at her anchor. She was torn. She was a
continuous play of hindered movement.
When the day came, she lay there wearied as if she had been swept by a
great fury.
Her nights were streaked by these running ribbons of dream: and always
they were the same insofar as always they were really nothing. They were
David. Her problems in David. Her plans and her helplessness to solve
them. Never, even in her sleep, did she sink to some quiet haven of
dream with David: have him there to talk to gently, to be with gladly.
Something surging within her took this great Wish and cut it up into
bloody fragments and strewed her night with them. All of David was never
there: nor all of a single moment with her holding his head on her
breast. David’s laughter or David’s troubled frown or David’s voice: or
merely David’s name--David, David, David--falling down her night like
drippings of blood. And she, lost in this welter of struggle between
wish and the real, unable to take sides.
There was no rest in such nights. She lay in her narrow bed, cast up in
her cell-like room as upon some rocky shore. And looking back upon her
sleep, she had a sense of a delirious underworld, yellow of hue with
veins of livid red wriggling athwart it, and of herself who followed the
veins. It was a shattered and scattered self that had been thrown
through the night, thrown, somehow intact, upon the shore of the
morning.
Like a bruised woman, she was out of her bed. She placed the coffee on
the gas-burner, and took a bath. Cornelia had no pleasure of her body.
Unclothing herself, she did not care to look at her lean nakedness. It
was as if she had feared to find great bruises upon it. She laid her
gaunt hands on her breast and shivered, for it was cold and the water
was none too hot which she had heated. She noticed how small were her
breasts and that they had begun to droop. She remembered that once they
had been beautiful and that she had been tempted to use them for a
model; she had not dared, since then people would look on them. And
after all, they were girl breasts, not those of a mother. Now they were
neither. They were beginning to shrink and narrow and droop. They were
becoming the breasts of a woman who had not lived. Yet, looking at them
now, Cornelia felt no sorrow or regret. She took this fading as she took
the world--the world outside her. She was outside herself. She did not
care if her breasts were no longer beautiful. Who, indeed, had ever seen
them? What good had she had of their beauty?