Part 12

“I may be considerate. But if I am hit, I hit back. I have not objected to your virtual quarantine of me, these past ten years. I have behaved and kept up front. I have shown in at your parties and paid your debts when they grew troublesome. The only time, my dear, ever to pay a debt. But if you insist on placarding my love-affairs, I’ll fight.”

“Very well. Go and do your worst. I shall of course get the dirty end of this. I have, all my life. But don’t expect I’ll make peace with you.”

“Laura, you are a fool.” Duffield stood up.

“I know I am. I am sort of glad, that you think I am a fool. It puts me miles out of reach of your kind of wisdom. I know I am a fool. You had your share in making me one. But even you shan’t succeed in making me a coward.”

Deems Duffield sighed and drew on his fawn-hued gloves and sent a little whistling note through his shut teeth. Coming up to his wife, he looked at her and slowly shook his head. He placed his hands on her thin shoulders: their eyes met.

“It’s a fight, then, my dear?” He said this pleasantly.

“I am sorry, Deems, you have made such a ruin of our lives.”

“I am sorry, also, Laura.”

He drew her quickly to him. He kissed her forehead and stepped back.

“Good-by. You are the best thing I have ever had, and I hate to see that I have lost you. But it’s not the best things we need most, my dear. It’s the ordinary things. Often in life, we have to get along without the best in order to have the common.”

She stood breathing deeply, white and strained from his words. In her mind was a racing kaleidoscope: how he first had kissed her, and taught her love; how fearful she had somehow been, and how he had fallen away. In her soul was a sense of guilt. She said nothing: he was gone.

She rang the bell.

“Delia,” she said to the entering maid, “I have changed my mind. If any one calls this afternoon, I am in.”

She threw herself on the chaise-longue and picked up her novel. _The Egoist_ of Meredith. Its crystalline obscurity distressed her. It seemed so far removed from life: so frigidly in diapason between the Sun and the North Pole. She threw the book away and scribbled a sentence on the edge of a newspaper that lay near her hand.

“All marriages that turn out monstrously begin as idylls. Indifference at the start is the one defense against horror at the end.”

“How I wish I could express myself!” she sighed. She tore off the edge of paper, crumpled it, thrust it in her corsage. Marcia was there.

“I met father in the street.” Marcia made no further greeting to her mother. “He seemed in fine fettle.”

Speaking she crossed to her own room. She shut the door. Her thought ran: “Papa hasn’t Mamma’s family but he makes up for it in liveliness.” She examined herself in the mirror and took off her hat. “I wonder whether it is a wise thing to confuse marriage and love. I wonder whether the woman must always get the worst of it, like Mamma. Perhaps not. Mamma is the so-called innocent one. Perhaps the rule is that the innocent one, of whatever sex, should get the worst of it. I’ll remember that.” She had dropped her suit on the floor and slipped into a blue _crêpe de chine_ gown that hung straight and square from her shoulders. Within it, her body moved like a still sure mechanism. “Oh, well,” she said, half aloud, throwing herself on her couch and taking a book, “the sins of the parents shall educate the children unto the third and fourth generation.”

She remembered her unopened letters on the table near the lamp beside her. She reached for an ivory paper-cutter and began to open them.

One of them, from an unknown hand:--

DEAR MISS DUFFIELD:

I have something of interest I wish to tell to you, and I must see you alone to do so. Will you have tea with me, say at the _Orange Tea-Pot_, next Wednesday at five? You will catch the reason and the caution implied in the rather unfrequented place. It is not bad, though.

I hope to see you, and am,

Yours most sincerely, THOMAS RENNARD.

Marcia read the remaining notes: placed them all back in their envelopes upon the table: took her book. She read for an hour. She called the maid, ordered a bath, undressed. She stood for a moment before her cheval glass, hesitant to throw her bath-robe over her nakedness. With a free delight she watched the bright strength of her body. Her hips were slight and firm: her breasts were two swift standing rondures: her abdomen drew tautly down into the straight and narrowly set legs. Marcia knew from statues she had seen that this faint triangle of strain, tracing and pointing downward at her thighs, was almost masculine. There was voluptuousness in this: and in the dear black hair falling about her body, making its whiteness burn. Marcia hated that flabbiness of mind and form which she called feminine. Coquettishly, as if to bar another’s pleasure, she threw a robe across her shoulders. She seemed to be outside desiring to be in. With the check to her nibbling sense, her mind went free, and she began to think of Thomas Rennard.

How was he able to be sure she would not take his presuming letter to the lady he was assiduously courting--and exploiting? Marcia caught herself so forming her question. She tried to change it: “How does he know I won’t?... Well, I will.” She wondered if she would. Imperceptibly, she had returned to the first form of her question. She resented Tom. Her mother was working for him with far greater will than any of the other “friends” had been able to inspire. It was dear already that this young flasher from Ohio was going to have the dull but golden Lomney for a partner. A bit dangerous, thought Marcia. What if next year, her mother tired of him? What if he proved too false? Marcia smiled. There seemed small doubt of that. There he would be, deep in their Group, inextricable. Matters must not go so fast. Marcia must delay them. She pictured the pair, lost in their confidences, and was troubled how.

She came back to the note. What had heartened him to send it? Was Mr. Rennard after all a rash importunate, one easily ruined? Marcia did not doubt the true purpose of the note. He wanted her to tea. He could not pay attention to her here. That was enough. Did he truly desire this enough to risk his hold on her mother? A dangerous--compliment.

She went over the always chance occasions she had seen him. Never alone. She had felt the pointedness of his glances toward her: caught him talking to her mother with a strained interest in her own mood. She had tested this by changing her mood and watching his rapid awareness. He was a curious man: bright, lithe in all senses, unbelievably hard, yet fraught with a glow that she was sure impact might turn to fire. She wandered over his personality. She felt he was too clever and too sensible to be sincere. Yet his standards seemed too directly those of his intelligence and strength to lend reason to insincerity. She did not know. She did know she would have tea with him: and say nothing to her mother.

It was easily reasoned. “I’ll control him, myself. If he goes too far or too fast, I’ll have the weapon of a word to Mamma. What a brazen, simple country boy it is!...”

She went: she was right at least in this, that Tom had nothing to impart to her “of interest” beyond that he liked her and of course couldn’t see her _really_ at her mother’s. In all else, she was wrong. She could not understand this sudden, cold-passionate man. In writing to Marcia Duffield, he had not understood himself.

“Perhaps I’ll know better when I have talked to her across a table.”

She came with a spur of adventure. She was trapping her foe. While he reveled in his success, letting his pleasure out, she would enmesh him. Thereafter, should he ever move in a direction she did not like, Marcia would soon show him in whose hands he was. Marcia was so astir with her scheme that she thought herself cool and collected. She had a dogged affection for her mother: a sort of animal loyalty in which was properly admixed a very human loyalty to herself. Here, she was quite sure, there was question only of her mother.

Tom, meantime, waited and went over in his mind the impressions in confidence of which he had dared write his letter.

“A girl absolutely incapable of carrying an altruistic act to an end ... and yet--a Christian! If she resolved to serve her mother by telling her I was flirting with her daughter--and she is convinced that this would serve her mother: she must be hostile instinctively to her mother’s friend--she would have to be sure, first, she did not care for me. She is coming to-day to find out. It all depends on to-day. If she does not like me she will betray me with a sense of serving her mother. If she does like me, she will take secret delight in making her mother a fool.... Dear little fool herself! If she knew how much I love her black straight hair and her white straight body, how little I care in contrast for her mother’s interest in my future! If she knew--well, she must know.”

He went forward, seeing her at the door--seeing the shrewd determination in her face as she came forward to him.

“Miss Duffield,” he said, “you are not going to make the mistake so many make of thinking what I do a deliberate thing. If you will examine my note with care, you will find in it all the silly guile of sudden inspiration. I am a creature of moods.” He looked at her as he had wanted to, across the table. “So are you, Miss Duffield.”

“How do you know?”

“Why else did you come?”

She was not so foolish as to say: “There might be other reasons.” She was not so willing as to admit his statement. She was silent. Tom began to laugh: a clear, long laughter. When he was done, they both knew he had laughed something away.

The rest was easy. Marcia was certain that Tom was the contrary of canny and deliberate. He liked her: he had done a direct thing to see her. He was unworldly as ever a man must be who understands a woman.

And she liked him. She liked the respectful way he spoke of her mother. Somehow, it gave her a sense that he was trustworthy: although she had no thought of why this quality should particularly interest her. She liked the assumption in his words of her superior perspective.

“Of course, Mrs. Duffield would not understand our coming down here to have tea together. Dear lady! Does not a tinge of deception have to go into a sincere relation? Every mother must forget her daughter if she would live. It is the duty not alone of her friends--of her daughter also--to see she may. For her to know the truth of you and me would be, not to know the truth from the standpoint of her and me, but an irrelevant, damaging lie.”

He said these words, not pleadingly, not in argument, but as two co-religionists perhaps might mention an unmooted point: or as two students might discuss a lesson they had learned together.... Tom had, not an enemy in the house of Duffield, but another ally: a subtle, an amazing one. Far from having been delivered into Marcia’s hands, the hastening events laid her at least equally in his.

They balanced the accounts....

* * * * *

Marcia was wine for Tom. Never before had he been so held by the body of a woman. Never had he dreamed a woman could so swing with both reserves and desires: so without effort, without stint.

She filled his room with miracle. She filled his life with the ease of power. How did this come about: this wonder he had in touching her cold skin, in meeting the hardness of her teeth, her soft lips? What was this Marcia?

Madness.... Madness in sanity as wine in a cool cup. She came to his warm room. She did not kiss him. She did not speak. She did not stir. She was there.

She felt a flame rise near her. It would soon catch her clothes, burn them up. Her it would temper, make mellow. She stood, looking at the flame, this subtle man, who held back his hands and whose eyes were on her. What should she do? Why did he not come forward? He burned straight, there across the room, like a flame in a windless world. Always his hands held back. Her clothes sagged to a dulling weight.... Marcia stood swaying with the need of burning. Would he not help? Then she would help herself. Delicious fool that he was!

He was perfume and flame: each pore of her was big with him.

Tom watched the firm, still whiteness of her self emerge from the lie of her clothes. No woman. She was a god. She was a pillar of purity and strength. No lascivious rondures and flauntings of flesh, no softnesses. A human form stripped to essential grace. An instrument of living, spare and direct like a command, flaying like a rod, swift like his passion.

They loved.

They gave no thought to the Shadow--the long intricate life-way of which the passion of woman and man is the mere flaming threshold. Both of them knew this. Each drank, in the other, a secret satisfaction whose mystery and timelessness thrilled them. They did not understand themselves or each other. Their love’s dissidence from the plodding and gluttonous way of husband and wife was a brew sharp, sweet, wild: they were drunk in it together. No more they had in common than their intoxication. Themselves, each other, the nature of their love--all was unknown and secret. They scarce spoke of it. They drank and were glad, and were never content....

Out of the silence of each, they came again. The subtle liquor worked its miracle; they were one into a flame whose leaping walled about them--disappeared as a song stops--leaving them their silences. These carried them off, each to a far deliberate world. No memory, no reason: absence of desire. Until such time as a rising murmur in their separate silences swerved them, flung their silences once more together.

All this, merely the spill of Tom’s full life; prelude in hers. His work prospered. Tom had the genius of diligence. He poured himself no more into his affairs downtown than into some unremunerative affair at a friend’s, where the price of applause was exhaustion. With Tom, exhaustion was breathing space till the next passion. So he prospered in work and in play. Laura Duffield was his devoted friend. Gilbert Lomney was his partner. To both, as to Marcia, he was satisfying in the measure that was wise.

* * * * *

Upon this heyday of his success, David now blundered as a dull boy stumbles over another’s floor-full of tin soldiers.

There seemed no cease to the miracle of Marcia: to the delight of the insatiety between them. Laura Duffield was divorced and more than ever with her new gallant friend. In her family and in her world, he was a secret champion, a strong prop. His relations had wreathed out. He was welcome in many houses: he was a chord of many circles. His partner had come to worship him with a canine fidelity. Lomney was so dully at home in his desirable set that he no longer felt its desirability: he was convinced that in introducing Tom he did the set a favor. Tom did not disillusion him. He laughed about it with Cornelia, and made her partner of his pleasures in order to keep her partner of his reserves. With her to see on the morrow, Tom took to the gilded foyers, the gilded youth of the City with a cool grace that lissomly assured his comfort and his usage. Laura Duffield gave him a gesture of confidence; Marcia the glow of triumph: his law affairs the agility to move forth and back with telling unconcern. Cornelia gave him what he needed of a home. He was a splendid product of the City. Now, David Markand, with his dear clumsiness, to clog and clutter it all.

Marcia felt it first, felt it before he did.

She sat on his bed; she looked at him where he smoldered in a corner smoking intemperate cigarettes. It was a mood, she thought; she said nothing. She put on her clothes.

“Good-by.”

He tore apart his revery. “Good-by.”

But the edge of his love was dulling. Always now, he was likely to leave her side and sit away from her and look away and smoke: while she lay aching with blinded desire, watching him, pressing her breast with angering hands till its pain stop the pain of her heart.

She sat up suddenly so he was forced to look. His eyes were upon her whom they loved; yet they were distant, they were lost in a mist, they did not see her. In her beauty she stood up to him, all her clear straight agile body calling him close: he bit his lips and his eyes were looking beyond her.

Then she said: “There’s some one else, is there not, Tom?”

He did not look at her eagerness. He shook his head.

“There’s another woman.”

He was angry. “It’s not so.” More force spilling away that her body yearned for. This urged her on.

“There’s another woman!”

She needed his focussing upon her, even if it were but in wrath. She stood over him now. She knew he loved her so, with the lines of her body shrill and clarified in standing. Tom was white with anger. He grasped her and broke her in anger. She laughed in love....

He loved her as never before, that afternoon. Because he loved her as never again.

* * * * *

The year that David lived alone was the year of Tom’s struggle with him. It was not a question of changing his life. It was a question of capturing the subjective opposition, as it came forward in the nearness of his new friend.

Tom knew a way. This inner inhibition stood objectified in David. Let him capture David. David was his old love of giving instead of constantly taking, of being calm and passive instead of constantly pursuing. In him, Tom saw the restful cleanliness of despising this race he was running hotly: the futility of spending one’s dreams upon a contest that was never done and whose prize was death. He would not give up his entry. He needed the mundane sense of power, the badge of success: he was too sensual to forego the liquor of attention. But he needed also to still the voice that kept saying: “Fool!” By the old process of projection, he now saw these words in the eyes of David. If he could have David, he could have silence.

He watched him with a growing steadfastness and a dwindling clarity. He knew at last that he wanted to win him. He knew that the affection between David and Cornelia stood most in his way.

All that year, he studied David. He came to understand his habits and his moods. He inserted himself upon his groping friend with the deliberate reserve of a chemist applying weighed ingredients to a solution.

The measuring was no easy task. David was within himself. He was hidden. It was plain he showed more of his mind and spirit to Cornelia than to her brother. They spent evenings, late afternoons together. Walks on Sundays became almost a custom. Tom was frequently along. There was no slightest wish to bar him. But Cornelia encouraged those very traits in David that must keep him intractable, secure to himself.

“And the world,--and the world?” Tom argued. “You are living in the world. It touches you on every side, at every instant. You are wrong to try to ignore or to despise it.”

Usually, Cornelia answered for her friend.

“We are the world, if we choose to have it so. What you mean by the world is only the gross and the impure. Why alloy yourself with that?”

Tom laughed. He knew this was David working upon his sister. Her life and her work were essentially conformist. She was no hermit, no rebel. She had had her great revolt, she had settled. She was not so very different from him. But Tom was too wise to say these things before their friend. To humiliate Cornelia before David would have the effect of estranging him. David would judge him and not understand. The idea that he could influence Cornelia was beyond David’s belief.... All this behind Tom’s laughing.

He kept silent, above all kept pleasant. He saw Cornelia’s motherhood once more hunting and hungry. She was going to preserve David from a hostile world, though it be with her own body. He watched her passion and David’s dispassionate compliance. He worked his own will when they were alone.

“Cornelia has a habit I can well enough understand of wishing to make my friends into what she would have liked to be, herself.”

“Isn’t she what she would like to be herself?” asked David.

Tom smiled, and was serious. “To succeed, for most of us, means breaking through an iron barrier. Even those of us who do so cannot escape a little maiming.”

“You are so violent in your statements, Tom!” The idea of Cornelia maimed was nonsense to him.

They went on talking of her new season’s work.

“There were a number of unfortunate little changes she had to submit to in her exhibit. I was heart-broken. But thank the Lord, Cornelia is sensible. Else, she might be a good artist but she’d be broke.”

“Why won’t they let people alone, when they have beautiful things to say?”

“Oh, they will, quick enough! Strictly alone. They’ll not pester them with orders. You mustn’t take Cornelia’s art too seriously, David. It is chiefly her art of living. If you think her very pretty statues great, you’ll be taking to heart every word she tells you....”

All subtly merged with his love for her and his loyalty and knowledge of the years when he had slaved for her and given her her chance. David could not bring himself to the consciousness of an objection. He said to himself:

“Tom is simply honest beyond any honesty I have ever imagined.” He was right. Tom was. He was not disloyal to his sister. He said no word of untruth. He was as kind and as loving as he had ever been. As ten years before, he would have sacrificed much for her welfare. But she was playing a game against him: and he answered.