Part 10

“Worth waiting a short while for, eh, my boy? Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt has advised us to wait. They are turning ordinary soldiers away. How would you like to defeat your own chances by being in such a childish hurry? If you really want to serve,” he looked sharply at his nephew, “you must wait.”

So David waited. He was not anxious to fight. His talk with Tom was a strange reason, a feeble one, for turning into a soldier. David knew dimly that his resolve had sprung contrariwise from a host of impulses and moods having no true connection with the War.

The public clamor overcrowded the camps. Manila Bay was won. There was small need of men. David in the pause began to create pictures of what battle meant. He did not like it. He was no coward. Simply, he thought death to so young and fortunate a man must be a pity. He was a little sorry for those he would leave behind, if he did die. Nor did he wish to insist on losing a leg or an eye. He would have to bear the brunt of that. And it seemed a matter of insisting. True, if he were killed, Lois might lose her flippant bloom. That was an inducement. But there was no hurry even about hurting Lois. He could afford to postpone her anguish for a brief while. He could in the meantime enjoy it actually, by telling her about it.

“Lois,” he came to say to her one evening, “I am going to enlist and go to Cuba.”

They were sitting in their customary room. Nothing had greatly changed. If David’s love for Lois had become an easier burden the reason was that he no longer drew so near to her. He did not sit so close and hold her hand and let the song of her hair atune his nerves. She whipped his blood less: and all of his love was the mere increased turmoil of his youth when her youth flowed upon it: the added leap of two dancing streams made one.

She also had learned the need of forbearance. But his aloofness spurred her. There was that one time when she placed her cheek against his, nestled her sharp shoulder in his breast.

“You don’t like your old cousin a bit any more, do you?”

David held himself very still and apart. Then, what bound him to himself broke loose. What he did was splintering from his willed reserve so fast that soon all of his reserve was flown from him in action. His arms held her. All her body measured its panting frailty against him. His mouth hurt her lips. The rest of her was molten and not hurt half enough.

Lois struggled. For five minutes, she played a painful game of coolness. Then, she was composed. David dared not to speak. Whatever it was that had happened must be nothing, since Lois denied it. Whatever it was must be for the last time.

So now David was childish to have forgotten. But it was hard always to remember against one’s senses. The year was so intricate a thing for David. Hoping again, he said:

“I am going to enlist, and go to Cuba.”

Lois beaming and clapping her hands: “David! How wonderful! You’re going to be a soldier? Oh, I am glad!”

She jumped up, she embraced him, she sprang quickly away before her lips on his cheek had left their taste.

“When are you going?”

This dancing, elate girl was not the prostrate figure he had imagined fondly for this scene. The need of service in the tropics shriveled in an icy blast. Lois accepted him as part of the parade they had applauded together through the open window? She was quite willing to have him offer his life--lose it perhaps--for her cold delectation. Well, she had gone too far.

“None of your business!” he stamped away. “Leave me alone, now. I’m reading....”

* * * * *

America fought Spain. Santiago fell. Porto Rico was prostrate. August brought Peace. David had stayed in New York.

His energies swirled back upon himself. Their bloom toward Lois was chilled: their bloom in War and adventure had been nipped. For the rest of the year, he was in silent and hidden turmoil.

Young love could not live with comfort upon Lois. Comfort--the comfort of hot pleasure or hot pain--was what it craved. David withdrew fast. He had high-sounding names for the faults he found in his cousin. She was heartless, selfish, cold. She bruised his tenderness and misprized his service. The truth was she offended his pride. She had shown that she could deny herself the delight of his kisses: that she could survive even the picture of his death. Looking upon Lois for himself, the Narcissus of David’s love found a shrunken ego. It was a mere question of time when he would accept this failure and look elsewhere.

But before he could redispose his forces for their new excursion David must gather them in.

He returned to himself as a traveler comes home. Like the traveler he found how the magic of change and of adventure worked not only upon the highway. Once more in the familiar place whence he had gone, he found it strange and full of undiscovered things.

He found that he was lonely: he found that he was afraid. He found that for these reasons he wished to leave the Deanes: that they made him lonely and that they made him fear. He had been sweetly at home in himself: sweetly one with what his mother had left him. Since his coming to New York, this place where his heart dwelt was empty. His heart had not even been abroad with him, it had been away. Without his heart, he had gone to work, worked hard; lived with the family of his uncle and been glad; come so to Lois and come to love her. A strange ghost of David.

The year ripened and softened into summer--the season of relaxation, the season of decision and creation. David grew aware of a rolling fullness outside him, and of an emptiness within.

He wanted to be himself. He felt all manner of hands upon him, save his own. Gentle hands: good hands. Not his.

The idea of solitude came and grew: it filled him. He did not know, he felt--what solitude would bring him. Had he not somehow known it, after all? He would go thinking of his mother. Was that not solitude? Perhaps to be alone would be to find her. To find her, he knew, would be to be alone no more. Dim inexorable forces these, which he could not resist the more fatefully since he could not understand.

David was an animal that sought the healing of stillness. Who shall say how close his longing was to the creeping away of the brute? Perhaps the therapy of silence is no other than this return of longing to the source of longing: to union with the limitless well of life in which lies our world like a fleck in a limitless cup. In the philosopher seeking the Word, in the dumb creature seeking rest from his hurt the lure is one: the way back sure since it is the retracing of steps to the Beginning.

The sage and the brute only can go the way of spiritual homing without the folly of explanations: they are naked and submissive before the primordial voice. David, like most humans, was somewhat between these two. He was full of reasons.

He could say: it is not good for me to see so much of Lois. He could say: it is not right to impose further on the Deanes. After all, go back a year and he had not seen them: they had not bothered--or been bothered--with him. Let him blaze his own trail.... If he wished to be free to live his own life, was that not natural also? He had his own key at the Deanes. But there was a certain unavoidable restraint. Suppose he had wanted some night to stay out till morning? This had never been. It might. He was approaching twenty-one! What would his aunt say? What would Muriel and Lois think? Manhood needs room. It was awkward to bring friends to the big house: he seldom did so. What if, some day, he should want to bring a girl--bring her somewheres? A thrilling reason, this! To have a place that was his, where he could be with a girl! The hospitable house of the Deanes was not hospitable to such conceptions. In the air of these daughters, even the thought of adventure seemed strained. The presence of Muriel and Lois fretted his nerves: spiced them: taunted them. But if their lives, their thoughts, the gay deckings of their bodies called forth sex, also they stifled it. David wondered if it would be always so, even when they were married. For a reason he could not name he decided he would not want to be a husband to Lois. There was a curious contradiction in these girls: something counterfeit; perhaps something thwarted. David once saw a great red flower--Muriel’s--in a vase on her table. Thinking of other things, he smelt it: his mind went rushing toward it, finding it odorless. He crushed it. He had never felt the least impulse to crush a fragrant flower. Muriel and Lois were roses, but they had no perfume. He thought, if he held such a lover, he should want to crumple her. It might mysteriously be a way of having satisfaction--of having a substitute for satisfaction. Living in the house with Muriel and Lois, he found they sharpened his senses, yet blunted his will: heightened his needs, yet dwarfed his power to get them. And David knew it was Muriel and Lois who filled this house of the Deanes. It was the house of Muriel and Lois: not the house of his uncle and aunt. Why should he keep on living with two exacerbating cousins?...

There were reasons aplenty. But this fading day was a day that drifted beyond the world of reasons. He was alone.

He had been tired, he had managed to leave the office early, to be alone. He sat there, gazing away at the hot park with eyes that were truly looking inward.

Something stirred in him. Not the movement of unrest: rather a deep vibration as when coals kindle: the quickening from inert heat to glow.

What was he? What was he doing? A fear in this that was somehow sweet. For it impelled him to a sweet direction. He was nothing: what he did, mattered not at all. What of it? He was going to die some day, and that was sure. He had a haven there: and also he had a haven in the past. Perhaps he should have died when his mother died? How he loved her now! With what new fragrance! Let him fear, and be cold. He had a way in his real life from these. Some day he would die and see his mother. This dwelling back, this yearning forward were one....

She had eyes too knowing ever to need to look. Eyes that felt him. He sat there holding the skein of yarn that her long soft hands unraveled: silently. Her arms moved in rhythm: and her body: and her mouth, that was smiling. He was caught up, they dwelt together in a song whose cadence her busy hands were marking. The yarn that went from his own hands to hers, it bound them: it was not yarn at all: it was red. Sweetly, unendingly the music went that enclosed them. Sweet, unending were the changes of its mood. The cord no longer flowed from him to her. Within it was life running from her heart to her dear hands: and thence to his and to his thirsting heart. His mother fed him, always his mother smiled and he could see the breathing of her breast. She smiled, her breast rose; her breast rose and touched him. The touch was naked: naked mother-flesh to his lips.

He was an open mouth, drinking the touch of her breast: drinking his mother. Swinging ... rocking ... swooning ... drinking his mother.

Footsteps in the hall. David lurched from his revery. Shreds of it clung to him spinning back to earth: he was still red and moist with it.

What did it matter if he was lonely? He would find loves. He was young and strong, his hands were not idle. The city embosomed him. His hands were not idle, seeking.

A knock at the door. There was comfort every way. Backward, forward: comfort of rest, comfort of adventure.

“Come in,” he said. He was surprised at the laughter in his voice.

Tom and Cornelia: a little hushed looking about, taking in his new walls and roof. He was on them, unbridled, pouring.

“Big enough to hold my bones as I sleep.... Don’t look so shocked. Are you going to disown me?”

His words poured fast. Slowly, behind his words, he seemed to face them.... He was leaving the world of his family, the cloying and sweet drag of it. Here was the coming. These friends: tissues of thought and passion that were not his! What was his measure, what did he look like here? Through the door had come with them the City. Chaos of steel and stone in which swung numberless worlds of flesh, lactaries of blood. Sudden he was in it! He heard its throb in his room, he felt its Hand, weave of a million separate forces, loom on him, fall on him, test him.... His voice in a maze of roars, his eyes in a maze of suns. Transfiguration. Silence out of the roaring worlds. His own voice unafraid.

They listened to him.

“Let’s enjoy ourselves to-night. Let’s eat on Broadway and go to a theater. My treat.... I insist! Look, I’m rich!” He took a silver dollar, he tossed it through the window. “I’m ready. Come.”

He was throbbing. He took Cornelia, and swung her waist and kissed her.

“Dear sweet Cornelia,” he laughed. “I swear I’ve not been drinking a drop.... It’s you!... It’s you made me drunk. Don’t you believe it? I swear it.”

She was glowing with pleasure. After all, David seemed part her boy. Let him carry on. And he, pacing about the room.

“I swear it. I swear it is Cornelia.... By my----” He stopped. He was sober.

David was sober. Looking with a new-discovered tenderness at Cornelia.

“Excuse me,” he blushed: he sank into a chair. Cornelia’s cool hand was on his brow.

“Nonsense, David. We’re all in the same mood for fun. Thank you for that. Let’s chat a moment, and then we’ll go.”

She wanted him to rest. He was perspiring. It was just the sort of sudden weather to catch cold in.

Tom lighted a cigarette. He saw Cornelia smoothing David’s hair. He saw David, unknowing, unseeing, smile into his sister’s face, relax to her sweetness. He did not like this. He looked hard at them, puffing his cigarette. Until his gaze made them self-conscious; made Cornelia take away her hand: made David look at him. This was what he wanted....

VI

Deeply the luminous complex stir that came to him as he stood straining in the hall and gave up his hat and gave up his coat to the silent butler, that came through barring tapestries of blue upon mist of laughter and words, of feminine silks and smoke, of tinkle of frail china, made Tom afraid. He parted the swerving draperies as one cuts a wave, plunging into a sea. At once he was bound with this new terse element.

Fragments of Ohio still clung to him. He would have reeled in this dazzlement had there been space. But the room’s brittle density upheld him, pushed him slowly in the sense of its scarce visible grain. Tom was submerged smiling.

Already a force worked in him, digesting this dense life, making it a function of his own, making its subtle fumes a stimulant for the force making it a function. Tom’s mind groped, as he walked lightly, for an old-time hurt.... He had been badly cut in the wrist by a fall through a rocky road. For a month his cut wrist was bound close. When the bandage was off and the air let in, his wrist had seemed to possess a power of flight out of all proportion with his other wrist, with the remainder of his body. This had made for dissonance. It was as if only by good attention he held the soaring wrist in place. So now, his suddenly liberated will, as compared to all his body. Tom relaxed on the balls of his feet and had the adroitness to look about him. His field, this. In his two prematurely aged hands could he not toss this world? He felt power, he felt grace. His eyes gleamed. He laughed. Words, polished and caparisoned, flew from his mouth as if the Design fitting them to him were absolute, were mystic. Tom’s body was taut now. His mind had gathered in this reeling quality. But his body held to his will, as an artist sways to his violin. Meantime, still, the brittle density along whose imperceptible grain Tom flowed. Ladies with subtle ways of calling attention to their bosoms by suppressing them: their arms came angularly forth from the compressed and mysterious domain like spouts of energy--like escapes of self. So their arms, so their voices. At arm’s end a tea-cup: at voice’s end a word. Neither important. Sip tea, sip words. But the attention was engrossed in a deeper quaffing. These spouting shreds of self could be joined, could create a circuit, could release a current from heart to heart, from loin to loin. Tom felt this. He felt the suffused emotion of this splintering welter. He saw in the words, in the arms of ladies, sparks of invitation, fuses corruscating back to mute stores of combustible sensation. All of the afternoon seemed a disguisement, a limitless deferring of the reality of all the wills there massed. Tom wondered by what constant guard the fuses never burned to their full length, the explosives never went off: how they kept sheathed from this glitter of temptation. He perceived that the flames were cold and lightless. He perceived that the fires shot off into air: were free of substance: were in some careful way remote from the pent inflammables in every breast. And Tom had suddenly the vision of fireworks, blazing in a night above a score of hands that flashed white and calm in the broken darkness. Men and women displaying fire only outside themselves. Perhaps at the most, some inner rim of char.

He saw the goal of the grain-ward course he had been flowing. There was the hostess.

Her vibrancy was freer. She had space about her. In her true light at last, a certain glow that was warm, since this energy was not, as in the others, so instantly splintered off by the packed impingement. She was insulated but Tom could touch her. Her glow came forth: he found a glow of his own. He liked this Mrs. Laura Duffield.

He had the sense of her subduedness as of a charm weighty enough to sink in this pandemonium of flicker. He bowed to pick it up.

“I have fought my way through to you, Mrs. Duffield. Congratulate me.”

She held back her head; he saw the fading of her golden hair, the age of her throat, the indomitable blue of her eyes.

“This must be Mr. Rennard!”

She threw back her head still further, as if to send her laughter upward, and, boyishly, thrust out her hand. Taking it, Tom added to his vision the full ripe crowding of her breast--no longer firm to stand up alone--and the delicacy of her wrist.

She shunted him off almost at once: introducing him here and there, squandering the charm of her attention as one tosses showers of coin out of reach. He had no more of her.

But as Tom, having reached this goal of his progression, was now silted aimlessly away in wide, flat spurts of movement, he observed the crowd thrust together, into a unit, into a reason. It was so he carried it with him back into the hall, into the street. The crowd’s form turned crass as he seemed to understand the will that had brought it into being.... It was her house: she had created this turmoil. Why? Why, each Wednesday afternoon,--to make no mention of doubtless other times,--did this glowing woman need to congregate such spill of life, pack it into her rooms, feed it, coax it to place its stamp upon her? What joy could there be in what must largely stultify her individual world? Tom pondered. Was this greedy crowd somehow a vessel in which Mrs. Duffield poured herself? That it might carry her off? leave in the stir of her curtains, in the perfumed mist on her bibelots, a substitute for her own marks which should have quickened these? And if so, why?

Tom’s casual yet forever determined mind associated these impressions widely until he knew that such habits were a deep part of the City’s nature. He groped with his light.

“If I understand her, I hold her:--and all she holds. I’ll go again. I’ll see that this promiscuous call makes for a more intimate occasion.”

The occasion came. But already Tom had learned to like the gatherings he was pleased to call promiscuous. Their fumes curled into his nerves, made them willing for more. A hint of his new appetite in his condemnation to Cornelia.

“Business, my dear Sis: Business. And of the lowest degree of horridness.”

“I can see where it must help your connections.”

“Let us hope so! Lord!” Tom paced up and down before Cornelia’s latest cast. “If I don’t get something out of these parties I shall have bartered my soul for nothing.... Satan will have cheated me.”

“He never does,” answered Cornelia.

Tom looked up as if stung.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing extraordinary, Tom. I am convinced that folks who strike a bargain with the Devil do so, not for specific gain, but because they like his company.”

Tom glowed at her with a cold smile of admiration.

“Splendid!... What does it mean?”

Cornelia’s sharp shoulders shrugged.

“I suppose I like Mrs. Duffield’s parties?”

“I am sure of it,” she snapped. Then, quietly, like a mother to her son, “So stop protesting, like a dear man. Yes?”

It was true. Tom knew it, however, as well as his wise sister. She understood with a great clarity only a part of Tom. She did not know how, in these protestations, he pleaded against himself, not with her. There was a depth in Tom more cold to these mundane blandishments than the surface was warm to them. Tom’s conflict was deeper than the desire to conceal from himself and from his sister this worldliness which guided him about. It was a conflict rooted in his nature. There was a part of Tom that despised his conduct, hated his success, rose forever like a gaunt, uninvited guest to spoil his banquet. A ghost in Tom that was very much alive....