organs give the bacteria their chance--the pernicious ones. Or rather
what conditions develop the pernicious ones, for that is essentially
what our bodies have done. I am interested in nothing else.”
Helen felt there was no answer: Doctor Westerling was interested in no
answer. She kept silent.
“Well, we do need doctors,” contributed Mrs. Daindrie. “Fortunately, not
all doctors refuse to help the world, like you, Doctor Westerling.”
A faint sneer crept over the young man’s features. It covered a hurt.
David alone saw the hurt. Mr. Daindrie answered the sneer.
“Yes,” he said, “we must get on with the drugs, while you have yet to
prove we can get on without them.”
“Don’t you believe in any of our curative or preventive service?” asked
Helen Daindrie.
“Honestly, it is all nonsense.”
“All of it?” She was withdrawing. But Westerling had a truth and he must
pursue it first.
“I am sure modern practice has done more harm than good. Operations
clean up appendicitis. We know that. What we scarcely guess, is how many
nervous systems, kinetic systems, circulatory systems are wrecked by
successful operations.”
“I had always thought the American surgeons were great scientists.”
“They are great virtuosi,” declared Westerling.
“Yes, but----”
“----virtuosi should practice on pianos.”
He was very excited. He said no word of his own doubts. He said no word
of his vast sacrifice which his unproved convictions had forced upon
him. He could have become rich in the practice of medicine. No one knew
this better than Conrad Westerling. No one more than this Jew of
sensitive family and depleted means loved the luxury and the freedom of
money. All his life he would labor at an insignificant salary because of
the depth of his sense of service. A true poet of Science. But of all
this he said no word. He could not. To one person he needed to say all
this: the person he loved, to Helen. But until she said that she loved
him, he could not even to her. The strategy of showing his better self,
of gaining her allegiance to his cause in order to help win her, was
beyond him. Speaking stridently and harshly now, it was his need of
tenderness and his deep respect for the tenderness of Helen, that spoke.
The Daindries could not know this, could not quite conceal their
shrinking from him. It was not a question of right, it was a matter of
taste. A too passionate devotion to an ideal was an untoward display, it
was out of place: quite as would be a too naked display of devotion to a
woman. This stern stiff man was at work perhaps wiping away an entailed
incubus upon the life of man, but he lacked amenity. Their nerves told
them this. Their minds hinted that he had intellect and courage. But
like all proper people, what their nerves ordered came first.
David had liked his words. They excited him. He had understood them less
than Mr. Daindrie or than Helen. But he had visioned more. What came in
to him was precisely the personal anguish, the personal
immolation--though he could not configure them beneath his antagonizing
words. He saw also Helen’s shrinking from the violence of those words:
as if they laid hands on her, threatened to exclude all others and
possess her. It seemed that Helen did not want to be possessed by truth.
It must be something warmer, something smaller perhaps, that would
possess her. So David felt the true content of Westerling’s words. They
held a burden of great courage, a plea of love: these he was really
offering to her: these she would not accept.
David walked a few blocks to the car with Westerling. He held out his
hand.
“I like what you said at dinner, oh--so much, Doctor!”
He wanted to say far more.
“Do you?”
Westerling looked sourly, haughtily at him, as if David were trying to
hurt him. With a stiff body too erect he shook David’s hand--dropped it
with a gesture of completion.
“Good-night.”
So David could not go on.
But he went to Cornelia, to whom he knew he could speak.
“I don’t think,” he said, “I am going back ever again to see Miss
Daindrie.”
Cornelia’s heart stopped its beat. “_I am glad_--I am--no, I can’t be
glad.” Sense and will turmoiled against each other. David saw her
sitting quiet there, looking at him. It was quite natural, he thought,
that she could not understand. He had come to tell her. It came to him:
“She must think it funny that I should tell her this. What can it matter
to Cornelia?”
Cornelia, feeling he would go on and that for this he had come and that
himself would tell her what to do, began to go deeper into his coming.
He had sought her out: this was rare: for a rare incentive. He had
sought her out because he needed to talk about Helen. To no one else
could he talk. From no one else could he hope for the persuasion he
wanted: to send him back to her. Here was a problem that hurt him. She
could smoothe it. For this he had run to her. When she had done her
part, he would leave her and go back to Helen, he would live and play
once more....
“What is it, Davie?” she asked aloud. She was ready for her part.
“I am not--not good enough for her, Cornelia.”
Good enough to come to her when she could soothe him: not good enough
for Helen.... “How do you know that, David?”
“Because I know some one who is.... Conrad Westerling is good enough for
Helen. I admire him immensely. I know he loves her. I know it hurts him
when I am there. I have seen that. Why should I hurt him, Cornelia?”
“But what about Helen Daindrie?”
“Why shouldn’t she love him? He is strong, and courageous. He has
wonderful ideas. His whole life--I feel that--is nothing but his ideas.
She _should_ love him.”
“Is there room for Helen in one so full of ideas?”
“He loves her, so there must be.”
“She does not love him, so perhaps there isn’t.”
Cornelia looked at him blushing.
“She does not love him, David. What is it to you? Can you make her love
him, David, by staying away?”
David’s blush was crimson.
“I--I don’t mean that. N-no. I--I don’t know what I mean.”
He began pulling at his handkerchief with nervous fingers.
Cornelia steeled herself.... _Yes she could!_ She laughed at him.
“Why you funny person--you funny Quixotic David!” A pause. “Or are you
merely awfully conceited? Answer me, then: how will your staying away
help the lost cause of Doctor Westerling?”
David bit his lip, turned pale, looked at his twitching fingers.
“I am a fool, am I not, Cornelia?”
“You must go on, seeing Helen. Your staying away _now_ would be
offensive. What right have you to fight another man’s battle against
Helen? Don’t you see how presumptuous it all is? She knows best what she
wants, David darling, not only of Doctor Westerling, but of you also.”
“Westerling is a noble man who has worked and done things.”
“You will do things also. I won’t let you slight yourself. That’s
slighting your friends. If you are good enough for me--and for Helen
also?----” she found something near the playful smile she wanted, “must
you not be good for something?”
“Cornelia, I don’t understand her wanting ever to see me.”
He was very mute and very timid, looking at his hands.
“And who are you to judge? What do you know of Doctor Westerling and of
yourself? Live, David--spread out like a tree. Then we shall all know
what you are.”
David got up.
“There!” She came up to him close. She took his head in her two hands.
“Are you convinced?” He shook his head and her hands moved with it....
Since her plan had been found and she knew that it was working, there
was peace in Cornelia. Her way with David was the way of a mother. She
knew how this birth and this life had rended her: what it had cost her
in blood and anguish. So is the mother peaceful, knowing this, with her
unknowing child.
She took her toll of him, like a mother also. She held his cheeks with
her hands and she drew him down and kissed him.
“And you see, don’t you, why you can’t stop so suddenly from going to
see her? What would she think? The offense and the pain--yes, David, the
pain, if you stayed away?”
He went back to Helen Daindrie. He went again and again. Cornelia had
settled and given him what he desired. There was reason no longer for
seeing Cornelia.
Spending his quiet evenings with Helen, he did not see the Doctor. He
forgot him, he was ashamed, as Cornelia had cleverly made him, of the
conceited presumption that he could help his cause by staying away. He
came, therefore, feeling nothing but peace: wanting the right to feel
no other thing. For in peace, he came to himself. And what he sought
above all else was this. Coming to Helen and sitting there beside her,
it was easier, somehow.
But it was easier most of all to look at Tom, and know he hated him, and
know that they must part....
* * * * *
They had gone on living together. The silence about them, holding them
in, was stiff and frozen.
David went no longer to Flora’s. He wandered about the City, seeing
nothing, until his legs ached, and then he went to bed. He found that he
needed more sleep than he had needed in years. There was a constant
weighing soreness in his body. His head was heavy. His thoughts pushed
through some clotted substance in his mind with a swerving pain. Often
his eyes ached: often his food did not agree with him. Yet he was
hungry. He needed great sleep, great food. After sleep, he was heavy,
after food he was often sick with heartburn. He was like a pregnant
woman. He went about loaded and diminished. His thoughts delineated no
true objective world. What came with any sharpness into the mist of his
mind, he hated. Thus Tom. What soothed his dwelling in these mists he
courted. Thus Helen Daindrie.
His sleep also was strange. It was dreamless. When he closed his eyes he
dropped, almost at once, into a profound close pit whose blackness held
him moveless. When he woke, it was some force, far down where he had
been, that had spewed him up: his brow aching and his body churned with
a great dizzy distance.
He attended to work. There was always enough mental energy for that. In
fact his work was his savior. It took him out of himself: but not upon
some shattering objective world, shrunken and tortured and congested
like that by which he had once measured himself and found that he was
good. It took him out of himself into an easy world of conventions and
abstractions: where figures had the relief of ineluctable laws, where
there were fixed commodities like tobacco and freight-rates, where men
were sure machines of buying and selling, where values and credit could
be determined. A sweet, imagined, malleable world, the world of
Business, in which each day for a few hours, David took refuge. Another
such world he now rediscovered and frequented. He had greatly neglected
his violin. Always he had played without consistency, and now be did not
play at all. It must have been painful and intrusive to make music of
one’s own, so David let the dust gather on his instrument and the
strings break. It was different with the world of the music of others.
David began to go to concerts: chiefly orchestral concerts. He did not
care for the virtuosi, he detested Opera. The symphony of eighty
upraised voices, marvelously artificial, essenced and controlled, swung
him at once into a distant land. These worlds of the violins and horns
and ’celli were also concise and constrained. Their ecstasy was a
comfortable unit, as compared with the vast vagueness of a City street.
In a way far more grandiose, music was a release, like business, for
David.
With violent wrenching of his nerves, he forced himself to look at his
dear friend.... This after all was Tom whom he had loved, who had found
him at his advent into the life of the City and into life itself. This
was that friend who had opened his mind, loosed his tongue, made him not
too bitterly mourn his mother. This was Tom who, when he was ill, had
nursed him and he had been so sure had loved him, whom now with
straining nerves he tried to see, clear through a strange hot haze about
them.
Tom sat there reading. No: he was not reading. His head was bowed over
the book, but his eyes were away. He was very graceful, there in his
rocking chair, with a leg thrown over the other knee and the gentle line
of his sharp shoulders drooping down to his chin. Tom. His best friend!
David looked on him with a great love. What a clear clean face he had.
David knew that the thinning hair so faint above his high square brow
was soft like silk. That his eyes, if he saw them now, would be dim with
a moisture he could not let be tears. And the old gnarled hands: the
hands of one who struggled stintlessly and was master. What was there
wrong in Tom? Sitting across the room they had once chosen with such joy
together--“the Sun is there! Davie, think of that rare god, the Sun: he
will visit us each morning and stay all day”--was it not hard for him to
look on the years that intervened and that were somehow wrong? Why? Why
was not life the simple thing it had appeared? They had gone singing a
song together: it was not right that it should end in tears.
But now there was new strength in David; a new vantage point he seemed
mystically to have gained, where he could clamber up and look about him.
Often he had gone so far. Beating with regretful wings against a
perverse reality that prisoned him no less. No less. Now, it was less
indeed. If he came again to the conclusion at whose brink he had stood
so often, now he could follow it. No bar between him and what he decided
to do. If Tom was false and a false friend, he would step over the
brink!
Gracefully Tom sat there. And it was sure in David that if ever he had
loved, this was the loved one. There had been women whom he had
embraced, close of kin who had housed him. This was a mere comrade, a
mere fellow-man: his hand-clasp was strongest of all. But also there was
life. How little he knew of life! What a sweet hedged delirium was
music, what a close cabin his affairs downtown. Tom had taught him life.
Life of a sort Tom gave him now, as had his mother. What if he must be
born again, away, as once from her?
He had lived in a sweet dream. One walked along a road. At times, it was
garlanded in fields: at times it rose between jagged heights, or dropped
beside the spume and the roar of waters. A road, clear and straight,
and one could walk it. Here he had met Tom. They had joined hands. They
would walk the road together. The steady road. The fleeting dream
wherein he walked.... For here was no such road at all! How could one be
sure of a hand clasped at one’s side? Which were the fields and which
the mountains and which the torrents? In their delirious tangle, where
was the road?
Tom had poisoned him. Tom had lied to him. Tom led him into ugly places.
Tom had a laughter that did not mean joy and tears that bespoke sorrow
of a sort he could not give his heart to. A merry world. A horrible
world! He needed to blot it out. It was so packed a frenzy of maze and
quicksand, that, if he did not draw himself away, he must become a part
of its frenzy--a mere whirling molecule in its tortuous falsehood.
Let Tom go his own way! Let him be!
David found what he was doing. There was his place of vantage to which
he could swing, and there was he, clambering up to it. He was leaving
Tom behind.
They had a talk.
Tom looked silently and long at David. He was very sweet and like the
Tom David would never have left, in his silence. Then he said:
“David, I hope that whatever you do, you will not marry a good and
beautiful woman.”
He seemed very tired to David. The old fire was there, but it was
moveless under a cloud that would not break.
David had no thought of marrying any one. No plan was farther from his
consciousness. He smiled rather confidently, therefore. He was
interested.
“Why?”
“Because, if you marry that sort, it will be almost impossible for you
to break away.”
“Why, Tom, if one married should one want to break away?”
“Marriage has this, dreadful about it, David. It is life for a woman to
be married, death for a man.”
“How is that possible? If it is good for one---- What a discord you make
of the world!”
Tom laughed. The fire parted the cloud.
“What is the world but just such unending discord? Look at the world. Is
it a sweet harmonious place? The one harmony it knows is an infinite
texture of just such deathless conflicts, of just such tragic sacrifice
of individual lives to its cruel rhythms.”
David was silent. Tom, the barer of life, was once more before him. He
felt that Tom might well be true in his words. He had not altogether
left the road of his Dream.
Tom went on. He had been silent and distant. He had made, for a long
time, no advances to David. He had left him alone. Now in the silence of
David, he saw his old art upon him, caught the flare of that past when
he had taught and given and David had received. He had no power against
this haunting past which he loved. He went forward to recapture it.
Blindly he went like an insect toward a fire.
“David,” he spoke with an incomprehensible passion that shriveled his
face, “David, I would rather see you married to a whore--than to a woman
who is beautiful and strong.”
Already he was afraid, burned perhaps. He swerved away. “...Though it
broke your heart, it would be less dangerous. You would escape. Comfort
and happiness alone, you will be helpless against.”
He stopped. He looked at David. He saw how different this was which had
happened after his words, from what had always happened. David was calm.
He was away. Tom had lost him....
* * * * *
David went on with his visits to Helen Daindrie.
He found he was telling her all the little things that filled his days
and nights--the little nothings.
“I don’t know where I walked,” he said. “It was very noisy, I know. But
it all seemed so quiet. There was a silence in the men and women.... It
seemed as if there was a silence in them, and they were scurrying about
so fast to get away from it.... But the silence clung.”
“You spend very little time at home.”
“Yes,” he said, shaking his head.
“Don’t you care to read?”
“I don’t seem to, now.”
“Why, David?”
“I do not want to be at home. When I am home, I go to bed. Even if it is
only nine o’clock.”
And then there was a pause.
“You do not seem,” she said, “to be very fond of the company of your
friend.”
He shook his head again, looked away. It was not needful, long. Again,
he saw her.
He was very easeful and relaxed. He made no effort to talk or to
conceal, when he was with her. She was a sweet impersonal presence. It
was good of her to let him come so often. He had no sense within his
vision of himself in the world, of her who was a woman beside him.
One time, after a great quiet, she said:
“Why, since these things are so, do you not live alone?”
Her words were part of the quiet. They did not break it. They were very
calm and very quiet indeed. So they entered into David.
He had not answered her. Often he sat so, still, and when he spoke it
was upon some other theme. She never spoke these words again....
It was Spring....
David got up very early from his bed, he went into their large room, it
slumbered restlessly there, he looked out of the window.
A great mist was before his eyes. A great mist lay in the street. He
could not see the street and the opposite houses. It was a great white
mist, warm and rolling away: the mist of morning. He looked toward the
east. There, dim in the white, were the trees of the little Square.
Above them he saw the Sun, a gleam, swathed in the vapors.
He went back to bed and to sleep.
When he awoke, he was rested. He was very warm under his sheet; he had
perspired. Under his flesh he was cool and rested as he had not been in
a long time.
He returned to the large room and looked once more out of the window.
The Sun was a naked flame jeweling the sky. The trees of the little Park
were shrill with green and the moisture sang on them like tinkling
glass.
Tom came in. David said to him:
“Tom, I think I want to go away and live alone.”
Tom was haggard in the sunlight. His eyes were hot and rimmed in
shadows.
He nodded. “Of course, Davie,” he said. “Go now, if you want to. I shall
be glad to keep the place.”
The two friends looked at each other. David wanted to take Tom’s hand:
he wanted to cry. Tom stood there, stiff, graceless for once, and did
not help him....
Thus easy it had come like leaves on the tree in Spring; like Sun out of
the mists of dawn. David thought very little about it.
He went on going to see Helen. He took his trunk and his books and his
violin and moved them into an ample furnished room on the West Side. He
was to have a bathroom of his own. He would be comfortably fitted out.
On the last day, he held out his hand. He said:
“My trunk will be called for to-day, Tom. I have taken a room.” He gave
Tom the address which he had written on a piece of paper.
Tom took it between his thumb and finger. “Thank you, David.” He had not
looked at it.
Mrs. Lario came in, behind a large tray that held their breakfast.
Quickly she set the table. She laid a newspaper, longitudinally folded,
beside each plate. She left. Tom and David sat down to their last
breakfast.
Usually, they read their papers. It helped to stem the arid draught of
their silence. Now, they placed their papers unread away. Tom looked at
David. He made no effort to speak. His temple was pulsing. David was
trying to eat. He looked at his food. He leaned back in his chair, and
also his thoughts seemed to incline away. He said to himself: “I must be
natural. What am I doing?” He found that he could not eat his breakfast.
He had a swallow of water, a spoonful of oatmeal. He could taste what he
had eaten. It seemed to be still in his mouth. He raised his head and
looked at Tom.
For an instant they saw each other.
A terror came upon David, a great pain. He could not bear this. Was this
not his friend whom he was leaving? For whatever reason, to whatever
end, this was Tom, and he loved him, and he was cutting an artery that
throbbed with blood. He could not linger. He felt himself being swept
toward a sort of precipice. He was afraid. It was as if he held in his
hands some precious life, and he and it were being entranced toward the
brink. Every vein in his head beat hard against his going: cried for his
moving.
He got up. He was trembling. Tom smiled no longer. There was a passion
in his eyes, as if this getting up of David were some fatal execution he
had awaited and steeled himself to meet. His face was bloodless.
“Good-by, Tom,” David put out his hand.
Tom took it. He held it limply. Then he pressed it hard.
“Good-by, Boy,” he said....
Helen Daindrie had a friend, “my young friend” she called her with just
a touch of condescension, a girl who had studied the violin abroad with
the greatest masters and who was once more in New York. She was to make
her official bow in the Fall. Helen Daindrie asked a few of her friends
to come and hear her.
“I have invited Cornelia,” she said to David. “Will you call for her and
bring her?”
David had not seen Cornelia more than twice in the past three months. He
had not seen her once of his own initiative. When she asked him to come,
he obeyed. He always would. Despite himself, he had the feeling for her
that a young man might have for a maiden aunt: he was deeply, even
ideally fond of her, but she seemed to live in another world, there was
no way of contact nor of expression for his fondness.
Since he was living alone, he had not seen her at all.
She greeted him, when he came, as usual, cordially, with no hint of the
empty months without him. Her eyes no longer searched him with hot,
comfortless inquiries. It was as if she had done everything she could to
be acceptable to David. She was quite ready.
“Just a minute, while I throw on my cloak. It’s very warm, isn’t it? It
isn’t going to rain?”
“I don’t think so. It’s a glorious night.”
“A glorious night? Do you think we have time to walk a little?”
He watched her finally settling her hair before the mirror. She was
“dressed-up” in a slim white gown. She was ugly. Her head outweighed her
body: it gave her a gaunt and naked look in her white dress. The yellow
skin of her face broke the paltry shimmer of her gown into green and
gray.
“I’m afraid,” said David, “we might be late if we walked.”
“Very well.” She came up to him and smiled. “Come.” She opened the door.
“Well, Davie, tell me how have you been?”