toward Helen.
“Bless you!” her eyes said, “God bless you. And do as I want. And love
him as he deserves.”
How very certain it all seemed to Cornelia! There sat Helen Daindrie,
talking, smiling, frowning a little perhaps, and nothing had been said.
Nothing had happened. Yet Cornelia was sure that this girl would win
David’s love, and win him from Tom and save him.... Win him forever from
herself.
So let it be. There was no bitterness in her heart. No hurt, it seemed.
For all of her was the fullness of her hurt. Her hurt was about her,
surrounding her like air. Without it, she must have stifled.
She wanted to get up and take Helen’s hand and kiss it. She was her
David, looking at this woman. She wanted to kiss Helen’s eyes and tell
them what it was they would soon see. She forgot the Doctor. She no
longer saw him. So sure she was.
She sat there, full of her vision. “Nothing has happened. They need
never meet--unless you force it,” was a faint whisper she had no ears
for. She must go on in this greater ecstasy than she had ever known. She
must make her vision live. Who was she--Cornelia, or David? or was she
this sweet fresh girl with the loyal eyes? A great faint ease moved
through all her body, as if she were bleeding to death.
She had no words to say to Helen, nor to herself. She longed only to
touch her hair, kiss her eyes. David was to touch and to kiss them! Her
nerves, that had been taut and clear in the drunkenness of fasting,
slumbered now as if they had feasted. Her eyes were dim and saw no
further thing. She was indeed swathed warm and happy, like one bleeding
away and bathed in her own blood.
But nothing happened. She had no further sense of the room save that it
held her up: nor of the easy talk save that her knowledge of it let her
float slumberously, in the sea of her blood.
All her blood was outside her. It was no longer a beating surge within
the pent walls of her soul. She was emptied of desire and of pain.
She felt that something was to happen: there would come some proof to
her vision. She would look upon it sweetly as upon her death.
She awaited her death. She was smiling.
The bell rang. The door opened. David came in....
XIV
David had long intended to see Cornelia. Tom reminded him more than
once: reminded him perhaps a bit too often. There was a stubborn touch
in David. Something within him seemed to resist his going, and even he
knew moodily that the something was kin to Tom’s insistence. He had a
way of sallying forth on a Sunday afternoon, resolved to walk an hour
and then go to her place: and of forgetting. Until it was too late. He
would say: “Next time I will not forget.” At last the “next time” came
to be Thanksgiving.
He dined with the Deanes. He had no plans at all for after dinner. The
dinner would be big, he lazy. If his uncle offered him a cigar and Lois
was amiable, he might sit around all afternoon. He did not much care.
But his uncle had his erratic ways: in and out of business, one never
could tell about him. Doubtless the moody angles of Lois were due to her
father. Sometimes he would treat him as a man:
“Have a cigar, sir?” David accepted and liked this. Moreover the effect
of a cigar was always to make him heavy and sleepy: unfit either for
walking or a visit: in no heroic mood for visiting a friend toward whom
his sense of guilt made him uncomfortable.
Then again, his uncle would light his own cigar and forget him; perhaps
even say:
“Well, children, I am going to take a nap.... Run along.” He napped on
the dining-room sofa.
This happened on Thanksgiving.
Lois was somber. David knew that her engagement--it had never been more
than a casual trial--was broken. Once more she was in the open field.
And more cynical, more difficult than ever. She had been spiteful, it
seemed to David, on this Feast of Thanksgiving. For the first time in a
rare long stretch, he had almost preferred the flinty steadiness of her
sister. Lois had nothing to say to him, to do with him. When she spoke,
she managed an air of objective and disdainful interest that was worse
than indifference. As if she were thinking: “What can this specimen
possibly have to say?” After dinner, she struck out her hand and smiled
formally into his face:
“Good-by, David: I have a date and it’s late. Can I drop you somewhere?”
He spurned her offer. He found himself out of the house, it was still
snowing. He had a sentimental turn over the snow and his loneliness, his
being turned out lonely into the snow.
He began to trudge and to enjoy the walk. He had had no cigar. He was
clear-headed. The snow ceased, the air of the darkling City was soft
like the touch of silk. He trudged for several hours. Five blocks from
her house, the summons came to Cornelia.
He hated the Deanes that afternoon. It was an old track in his brain
that led him now from them to Cornelia, as his old revolts had led him
three years before. True, Mrs. Deane had said to him: “You can stay,
dear, if you want and entertain _me_.” True, the thought came that this
might have been more comfortable after all. He did not want to go home.
Tom had a way of wreathing their room in smoke and cynical smiles on
holidays. It was plain that the time had come to go as his feet now took
him....
At the tea, nothing visible had occurred. Cornelia was behind her
guests. Far away: pleasantly so, since if she held a rebuke for him it
was far away also. There had been a girl with a sweet voice. He did not
recall her face. He had come late, left early.
Now a note from Cornelia. She had scarcely seen him on Thanksgiving. She
wanted to see him. Would he come the following Sunday to tea?
He was there, she was not alone. This was rather strange, thought David.
Evidently she was not so anxious after all to see him really. He had
exaggerated her feeling. Doubtless she did not care enough to have a
rebuke for him. At least he could not detect it. It was a pleasant
afternoon. With Cornelia was a girl--“my dear friend,” she called
her--Miss Helen Daindrie. A very sweet girl, thought David. Rather
distant.
“You funny person!” she said to him. “Why didn’t you offer to take Miss
Daindrie home?”
“I thought I’d like to see you alone, for a minute.”
“Nonsense! You know you’d have preferred escorting her.”
“Well--is it right--at a casual tea--the first time you meet a person?”
“The first time! Why, David! You met Miss Daindrie on Thanksgiving.”
“Oh, did I?”
She was looking at him with a cloudy reserve on her eyes he could not
understand. Why should she be offended, if he did not remember Miss
Daindrie? Did Cornelia love her so much?
“Now, run along.” She almost put him out.
He thought her strangely cavalier and distant. He enjoyed her. For the
first time, in long, he did not find Cornelia cloying. There had been
none of the warm discomfort.
He was glad to come again. He was glad, now, in his supine state, when
he was lifted in any way from his comfortless closeness with Tom.
It was a little party. Cornelia entertained quite often. She had always
said, in the old days: “David, I do not invite you. What should you do
with all these stupid people?--stupid and self-important. When I see
you, David dear, I want _you_.”
Now, how different was Cornelia, how light and easy to get on with!
David began to question, should he really want to see her alone, could
he succeed? He came to just such a party of self-important people,
nondescripts of whom he had met none before, with their endless chatter
about remote, allusive topics, and wished to see none ever again. It was
almost like meeting an old friend to find Miss Daindrie there. He
reckoned that she and Cornelia must be fast friends. She was strange.
Each time he met her she seemed to him so different he could not be sure
he had met her before. He talked with her a great deal that evening.
Cornelia said: “There is only one person here you could possibly be
interested in. Don’t mind being selfish, dear. Devote yourself to _her_.
I’ll manage the others.”
He did. He scarcely spoke with Cornelia.
A pause of several ordinary weeks: a visit to the Magnum Institute.
“Would you like to see the great laboratories and the hospital?”
Cornelia wrote him. “Doctor Westerling said I might come, and bring a
friend.”
David escorted her. They went through a long, high room, cold and
metallic and full of corrodent odors. It was painful to David. He felt
that he was being cut by a very sharp steel blade, so that there was no
pain, and yet it was painful Miss Daindrie was there in a white apron
and a white stiff blouse. It seemed to David that the hard starched
linen must cut into her softness. His teeth were a bit on edge, and he
was afraid to look too close at the acids and the test-tubes full of
evil germs and the smears of blood. The Doctor explained a culture of
gelatine in which grew billions of organisms and over which Miss
Daindrie pored as over a cradle. This brought nausea to David. He knew
he was silly. “I would not want to be a doctor,” he whispered to
Cornelia. He saw that she too was in pain in this chill temple of
science.
What held him most was that Miss Daindrie had no eyes for him at all.
She followed the white-aproned Doctor in rapt submission. And Doctor
Westerling, David was sure, did not like him. He looked quizzically at
David’s wandering attention.
He said to him: “You are not interested, I guess, in medicine--except
when you have a stomach-ache?”
“No,” David answered seriously. “Isn’t that the one time when I should
be interested?”
For a moment Doctor Westerling appeared to like him. His eyes widened,
took David in as if with the help of a new light. He began nodding.
“Why! You are right.” He laughed. Miss Daindrie came up.
“What contribution _did_ you make, Mr. Markand, to medical science?”
David was sure the Doctor stopped liking him at once.
Their meetings were casual but they were not infrequent. Miss Daindrie,
he thought, must be a remarkable woman. For she was always affable to
him; and always knew what he had said last time. Yet, her mind must be
replete with significant affairs. How could he doubt through it all her
strict inaccessibility?
One day, she said to him: “Why don’t you come and see me some evening,
Mr. Markand?”--and laughed.
“Why do you laugh?”
“I almost feel you have vowed you would never ask of your own accord.”
She was full of assurance, and of a sweet timidity. It seemed to David
she was so high above him she could fulfill whatever whim she wanted and
lose not one jot of her stature. Such a whim, doubtless, was this.
“Oh, I should love to come.... I didn’t--I didn’t really----” he
stopped. “Do you really want me to come, Miss Daindrie?”
She saw that he was serious. “Why should I ask you?”
That was convincing. “I don’t see,” he said, “what you could possibly
find of interest in me.”
It was the beginning of the impulse he was always to have with her to
speak out his mind.
She answered him seriously too.
“I want to find out, perhaps,” she said.
They were in a box at a theater. It was a special matinee of a comedy by
Bernard Shaw: a strange new genius out of Ireland. Cornelia and Miss
Daindrie had arranged the party.
“Shaw deserves to be supported,” Cornelia explained; even Tom had been
willing to come.
She heard every word that passed between David and Miss Daindrie. Her
neighbor in the Box was a young man she had never met before. He found
her strangely distracted between the curtains. He said to her: “But
after all, Miss Rennard, what are we to think of this man Shaw?” She
answered, vigorously nodding: “Yes, indeed.” David was going to call?
What a stubborn child he had been! A good sign, deeply. She believed she
could see. Unknown to himself, he was struggling against Helen. He had
an assured, comradeful way with women--the way of a boy: it was gone. A
visit to a girl might mean nothing. After these resistances and the
silence behind their questionings as they looked at each other, he might
well ask why she wanted him to come. It was a bit disconcerting for the
young man beside Cornelia.
When she was back in her room, Cornelia threw herself on her couch and
cried. What a great Victory she had won!
David went about, filled with a new humility, a growing hatred of
himself.
Nearly two years it was since he had seen in a street-car a small girl,
and walked through a world suddenly shriveled. What after that? He too
had shrunken and grown like the world, so that once more the world
seemed right for him. Now another change. The world was gone altogether.
None of its tortured standards near him any more to measure him and call
what he was good. He stood naked in a sort of psychic space: he saw how
soft, how idle, how small was his soul. It came to David how he hated
himself, and how he was so full of this defeat upon him, that he could
love no person and could have kind thoughts nowhere. All his senses were
caught up in this tangle of himself. He felt he must grow far beyond the
lowness where he now stood, to look with free eyes again upon another.
Tom was there, however. Tom was a part of himself--a part, then, of that
he must detest. David called on Miss Daindrie. He went there and was
silent. It seemed a place, wide like clear air, where he could look on
himself. He had no sense of her.
He said to her: “Why do you ask me to come again? I am not amusing: I
have nothing to give you.”
And she: “Come next week.... What night, next week, can you come?”
He did not understand.
But he was at a pass where even this element of not understanding could
not much hold him. He was not interested in Miss Daindrie. He was rapt
in a hateful inner spectacle. What he needed was calm and clarity and
strength to look at himself. This he found, sitting in the room with
her, and her few words glowing steadfast over his eyes like candles. So
he came.
She invited him to dine.
When he entered the drawing-room he felt he was late and they were
waiting for him. Doctor Westerling was there. A slight small man with a
limp stepped forward from his chair and as David took his hand he liked
him. Mr. Judson Daindrie. Mrs. Daindrie had a cordial smile. It was all
strange to David--this warmth, this kindness. He could not understand
it. He felt a cloud over the face of Conrad Westerling and the Doctor’s
will dispersing it till it was gone. The struggle and stress of this he
thought he could better understand. Mrs. Daindrie was saying to him:
“Won’t you take Helen down, Mr. Markand?”
And there was Westerling offering the precedence through the door to a
Miss Sophie Laurence who seemed very heavy and stupid. All of these
pretty ways were disconcerting since they hid something, David felt, and
he knew not what.
He became part of the round table. Feeling himself a part and feeling
Mrs. Daindrie at his left smile and be warm to him, David was eager to
move himself away, just so he could truly see that he was part of this
bright round table.
Miss Daindrie smiled at him, as at an accomplice.
“These are my family,” she seemed to tell him.
He was at ease. He was unafraid of silence. So was Miss Daindrie. He
said to himself: “I am sitting here quietly silent, just like Miss
Daindrie.”
“Well, Mr. Markand? I understand you are musical. You play the piano?”
asked Mrs. Daindrie. Quite abruptly she put her inapposite questions.
“_Do_ have some more of the fish!”
“I imagine you feel quite like a New Yorker.”
She left him alone. All of them left him alone. He was of them all.
They tightened into a unit--they became a family--they discussed some
family event or listened with a sort of mystic understanding to
unleavened words from Miss Laurence whom they seemed fond of, as one is
fond of one’s own foibles. In these gusts of attention away from him,
David was comfortable. It seemed to him that Doctor Westerling was not.
There was a fragility about Mr. Daindrie. The skin was translucent and
tight under the upstanding wave of his gray hair: the blue eyes were far
in from the white tufts of his brow. His hands were very small. Even
sitting there and taking the plate from the maid and thanking her, and
listening with respect to the prattle of Miss Laurence, David felt that
he was a little man who limped. Intelligent. Why did he have the sense
of conflict between his intelligence and his gentility; the sense of his
head bowing?
In another way Mrs. Daindrie was slight. She had a freckled smile and
the puffs of her brown hair blew out the laughter of eyes. She was
satisfied, it seemed to David, with the perpetual courtliness of her
husband. Against their mood he felt Doctor Westerling veering stiffly.
He wondered if this was why he felt this grain of resistance in them all
against the doctor.
“Why, then, do they have him to dinner?”
“But why do they have me?”
He was a stranger, more so than Conrad Westerling. Yet, he was taking
the soft patter of Miss Laurence less to heart. Could this possibly be
of importance?
The door had opened.
“Come in, Hope.” Her mother spied her. “You may say good-night.”
A little girl stepped carefully through shadows that lay from the door
to the bright table under its hood of electric lights. She dashed
swiftly to her father and jumped into his lap. She hid her face.
“I said you might come in, Hope, to _say_ good-night.”
Hope faced about and smiled with a mischievous triumph. She had had at
least this moment from her mother’s precept. Her father placed her
firmly on her feet.
“This is my youngest,” Mrs. Daindrie explained to David. “I believe you
have never seen her. Hope dear, don’t you want to say good evening to
Mr. Markand?”
“Why am I so little surprised?” said David to himself. What was there
growingly strange in this quiet night? “Does she remember me?” He felt
the hollowness of nervous strain, as the little girl of the car came up
to him, held out her hand.
“I know you already,” she announced quite clear and high.
“Oh, do you?” said Mrs. Daindrie.
“I know you also,” David spoke to Hope.
Their words caused no great interest. Doubtless, on one of the occasions
when he had been there before they had met. In the lack of concern the
two felt protection.
She took his hand, he looked into her eyes.
They were not quite so dimpled.
She tossed her head and withdrew her hand and left him.
David watched her giving the same hand to Doctor Westerling, watched her
embrace her sister with a burst of fondness, watched her recoil from the
clumsy hug of Miss Laurence. He tried to believe that what she had given
to him was secret and different.
She was gone.
He felt at home in this strange house. He felt intimate deeply with this
little girl, whom he had watched for a moment out of their wide lives in
a public car. He accepted her in this house as he accepted physical laws
of life. Miss Daindrie had ears where they should be and they heard what
they should hear when he spoke words to her. So this warm home had the
little girl whom he loved, had his comfort. He did not fathom how now
his love for Hope was a quieter thing. He accepted--didn’t we?--miracle.
So he thought. He had looked on the girl of the car with less intimacy
after all. Intimacy was the denier of quiet? Words were the denier of
knowing? Was he comfortable, intimate, what was he here in this relevant
night? She led out of the room where he sat embraced with Miss Daindrie.
Did she lead forth--him? Whither? Who was she after all?
Doctor Westerling had an uncomfortable smile or an abstract frown when
he was quiet. Mrs. Daindrie remarked this. She found she could better
leave David to himself. He did not mind. Wherever the talk was, and for
whom, he listened pleasantly. She must pay attention to Doctor
Westerling the more since she realized that her daughter did not seem to
care if he was at ease or no. A strange unwonted character in Helen.
There must be a reason for her willed indifference, at bottom flattering
to the Doctor--he was there invited. Anything from Helen not properly
pleasant was flattering. Mrs. Daindrie had respect for those who had the
respect of her daughter.
She plied him with questions. She could not hold his interest. The words
each of them called forth died out like a too short fuse. Mr. Daindrie
looked about the table. He saw that Westerling was being bored by the
questions of his wife. He took umbrage neither for her nor against him.
He was a quiet man, accepting the world’s clashes.
“I suppose you are only waiting, Doctor,” he said, “to take up your
practice as a specialist?”
“I never intend to practice,” Westerling replied. There was an emphatic
note in his voice that brought silence over the table.
Helen looked at him, proudly. She knew the integrity of his mind. She
knew her father’s would meet it and be pleased. Always she was saying to
herself and to certain of her friends: “I have great respect for Doctor
Westerling’s mind.”
“Oh?” questioned Mr. Daindrie.
“You see, sir,” Westerling went on, smiling with a new satisfaction that
showed how exclusively his satisfaction dwelt in knowledge, in
discussion, in release from the naked domain of emotion, “you see, when
I graduated from Medical School eight years ago, and from the hospitals
here and abroad, a strange revelation had come to me. I had lost faith
absolutely in the practice of medicine.”
Mr. Daindrie was a good listener; a stern one. He bowed his head
judicially. Westerling talked exclusively to him. But loudly. So that
his consciousness of other ears must have gone to the volume of his
voice. Perhaps, it occurred to David, he was trying within this little
cozy table to address the world.
“It was a problem to face, let me assure you. Like one who graduates
into the Priesthood, perhaps, and finds he no longer believes in the
Divinity of Christ. Harder, much harder, I suppose--since in medicine
the régime of study is terrific.”
He said these words coldly. He seemed to avoid a tone which might bring
sympathy, conviction. He had no eye for the faint shadow over Mrs.
Daindrie’s face, at his allusion to Christ.
“But how do you mean, you lost faith?” asked Mr. Daindrie.
“I had believed myself devoted to a science. I found that the present
practice of medicine--the practice of medicine as it must be to-day in
_lack_ of science--is an empiric fraternal order.”
Mrs. Daindrie gasped.
“I am convinced that most of the therapeutic practices which occupy so
overwhelming a part of the work of the doctor must go. No; I don’t know
to be replaced by what. But the principle of introducing specific drugs
into the system to right specific maladies, right wrongs--I know it is
false. Some day most of our medical practice will be regarded as
medieval, quite as we look on the humors and the cuppings of the
Sixteenth Century leeches.”
“But there is nothing known to take the place of these medicines?”
“Nothing established.”
“Then, until such time, must we not use what we have?”
“Doubtless we must, sir,” Westerling spoke with a certain condescension.
“But I cannot devote my life to the application of guess work and patch
work which, I am convinced, is altogether based on erroneous premises.”
“As sweeping as that ...?” Superlatives, absolutes, all tendencies
toward violence brought out in Mr. Daindrie the deprecatory smile.
“Yes. The sole sound future of Medicine must rest on the discovery of
principles beneath effects which we call physical and mental life;
principles the pursuit of which will make the introduction of alien
curative elements into our bodies simply absurd. I am referring not only
to medicines but to vaccines, anti-toxins--surgical makeshifts. The true
curative elements of life must be inherent in us. Somehow we have lost
them. I am convinced the reason is that we have lost certain unconscious
principles of behavior in which they are implicit. I am convinced that
drugs are superstition.”
“But bacilli--the trouble makers!” pleaded Mr. Daindrie.
“Harmless to the properly ordered organism. Immune to anything so
isolated as the effect of drugs. We are subject to germ diseases, I am
sure, because we are not masters of our independence of them. I am sure
that some day it will seem as absurd to introduce drugs into our systems
in order to kill bugs, as it would be now to say prayers in order to
drive out devils.”
“But the devils don’t exist!”
“I’m not so sure of that. The instruments don’t exist--as they do for
bacilli--for seeing devils.”
Mr. Daindrie was dazed by what seemed the man’s veering from pure
science to superstition.
“You’re a bacteriologist!” exclaimed Miss Daindrie, sensing her father’s
state.