Part 13

David came to believe the hot-and-cold of talk with Tom and Cornelia Rennard an atmosphere implied in friendship with such clever, exceptional folk. He began to feel that Tom’s candor was to be prized, even if it was not always easy to interpret: and that Cornelia’s warm encouragement was to be discounted, since it meant escape from the ungenerous reality Tom told him he must soon or late confront. Because of, and in spite of her sweet charm, Cornelia somehow must be discounted.

He was sure he cared no less for her. He was a man: he was understanding a woman’s natively circumscribed philosophy, her natural taste for a reserved and personal world. Cornelia stood already, artist though she was and rebel at least in one gesture of her life--for Family. Tom was the world of affairs and of adventure. Oh, yes: David began to see all that. So of course he could understand the little flares of strain between the two. When Cornelia’s attitude implied a rebuke of her brother’s ways, he must listen sweetly to her words--as true to herself and her world--and not too seriously apply them.

Pure Tom all this. But only Cornelia knew it.

“What on earth are you trying to do with him?” she asked her brother.

“My dear Cornelia, how you talk!”

“Listen!”

There were similarities enough between them. She also could drive full force toward a single point: whip her intensity till it became almost a deterrent to the average dull person. But Tom could meet her at any pitch. He had one talent which she lacked and he knew this and would ruthlessly exploit it. He had a ready sense of the ridiculous: a light riding mood with which to damper her flame.

Cornelia swung upon him and thrust out her hand; her eyes blazed: “Listen!”

Tom, on the couch, curled his legs under him; he straightened like a schoolboy before his teacher, and threw a mock-serious frown across his face. Cornelia’s onslaught could not resist. It turned into argument--argument gradually stiffer, less alive against his mocking.

“David is not fit, Tom, he never could be, for your sort of life.” He was still. “What he needs, it seems to me, is a training that will permit him to develop what is deepest and truest in him: his sense of reserve, his great purity of heart. The finest thing about David is his nature’s implicit criticism of the life about him.” Tom still listened. “If he is flung into a sophisticated life, his own incorrigible innocence will merely thwart whatever he does: while that life goes on thwarting his nature. He will be nothing, arrive nowhere.” She stopped.

“You women have a genius for simplifying reality!” Tom threw this out in order to gain time. He knew it would goad Cornelia into eloquence. Any disparaging generalization on her sex did always.

“Indeed! Well, you men have a genius for complicating reality till it’s as false and absurd as a wired and painted and lace-draped lily. A fine botch you’ve made of your reality. Every step of the world is so cluttered with barbed-wire rules and pitfall standards that only an acrobat can keep his feet. Why don’t you answer me? David is no man to go to the top, tricking and beating every one else down, is he?”

“No.”

“He is a simple, gentle boy. That’s what he must remain.” Tom smiled: Cornelia answered his smile. “Fortunately, he has an excellent place at his uncle’s. There is design in that. At least, there is luck. It means something. It means the pure and the brave in Davie may have a chance to grow in peace. We need that. We’ve enough of you acrobats.”

Now Tom was ready. “David’s lovely sense of right will be as useful, unless it comes in touch with the real world, as a violet under a hedge.”

“A violet growing under a hedge is sweeter than a violet crushed in the road.”

Tom knew he had talked nonsense. He always did when he would not face the sincere part of him that wished to speak. There was no time to lose. He must tell the truth.

“I am not trying to corrupt him:--I like him, Cornelia: I want him where I can be with him. So long as he stays in his ivory-tower of dreams I cannot have as much of him as I want. But, Sister! I am no prince of darkness. If I have plunged into chaos it is because that is where the money is. I am lonely there as a good angel would be in hell. I won’t be with David. I tell you, one can be lonely and untouched even at a Reception, one can be guileless even in a courtroom. I am. These things pass over me like sticks and stones--smarting my skin. I do not want to change David. I want him near me. I want him to change _me_. Your mistake is the horror you have for surroundings that you know nothing about. A usual result of ignorance, my dearest. David will be as unchanged, certainly, as I.”

“Why do you want to drag him into your noisy world?”

“I can’t have a friend, by long distance.”

“There’s something more in it than that.”

Tom looked, not to deny but to learn. His face was open, sincerely in search.

“I don’t understand,” she went on. “If you really wanted him to change you, were willing at all to be like him, you’d meet him half way. I have seen how you ply him with your cynicisms, heckle him with your invitations to ‘begin to live.’”

“If I met him half way I’d come back with half a practice.”

“Nonsense! You could live your professional life without him. Social demands don’t go into one’s intimate hours. There is something else. You really want to take David about with you--into the thick of the scrimmage. Every word you say to him is a sort of preparation for his entrance. Why?”

Tom was silent. He loved his sister’s trenchancy too well not to admit her points. His doubts brewed energy. He got up and paced the floor to slough it off. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he repeated. He stopped.

“Cornelia, I may be queer.... I guess I am a man of action. What else is there to _do_ with him?”

She looked at her brother soberly. She knew he had touched a deep chord.

He went on: “My muscles seem to be very near my nerves. My muscles must move, as soon as my nerves feel. Do you understand? If I am glad, I dance. If I am hurt, even now, I am liable to cry. You know that. Don’t you remember, Cornelia, at the Farm, when I had made a particularly perfect mud-pie, how I brought it into the house and placed it intact on your table--even though it meant a mess and a licking? It was mine: I had to bring it in to you. Well: David can teach me dreams and truth: but I’ve made a mud-pie of the world. He must share it....”

* * * * *

He had his days of offensive against Cornelia.

“You want to make a child of him. You want to keep him a child. Motherer!”

“He is a child.”

“Aren’t you glad?”

“Well, if I am? Mayn’t one be happy with something that one finds?”

“What of David? He can’t have you for a mother all his life. Some day he will be compelled to sally out.”

“Sally out where? He can have me always as much as he has me now. We don’t need to outgrow our friends? Really, Tom, you have a vision of the world that compares with Don Quixote’s. Giants and windmills.”

“Very good, dear incorrigible Motherer.” He came close and his arms enlaced her waist: their cheeks touched. “You shall always have your two boys to make behave and keep at your breast. So long as you live.” Cornelia swayed with him, smiling. “But between feed-times, you shall let them play in the streets.” She struggled away.

“You’re horrid--you’re cruel!” There were tears as she pushed him off.

* * * * *

Or his days of strategy....

“I am doing my best,” he said, “to undermine you with him. There’ll not be a shred of you left in his heart, dear Sis, when I’ve done picking you to pieces.” Which was precisely what he was about, and whose telling disarmed Cornelia altogether. Surely, if he were in truth betraying her, he would not be telling her about it. So she reckoned. While David argued that Tom’s often disquieting reflections on Cornelia must in some deep way be related with the real love he knew he bore her. With this true, there could not be betrayal.

The two young men were together more and more. They sat in Tom’s warm room; their words were of high things. They knew that these were things that were not. Tom knew these things would never be: David that they must. They met in the present of life as two might take hands down an echoing corridor: close, though the one thought at the passage-end was life; the other death.

From these talks came the sense of his emptiness to Tom as he began to feed. He knew it only in the yearn he carried with him more and more for somewhat he lacked, in that nausea for the present which was dooming his love for Marcia Duffield, and making of his professional affairs a clear, cold, removed design that he learned to trace with the tips of his calm fingers. The mood helped him with Cornelia.

He went to her morose, and said kind things--angry things that in their conveyance of his troubled spirit stressed his apartness from David.

“I have been at it again, Cornelia.”

He sat abject on her couch, laid his hands on his feet with a gesture of humility in which alone a Hindu could have seen the pride. His eyes dwelt on his sister’s cast of a pretty boy--a boy with laughing hair and a face that was a flower. Tom’s lips were still. It seemed his eyes that spoke. He loved when he came to Cornelia’s place to cast off his coat and flare his collar wide from his tense neck. The muscles in his throat seemed over-stressed for the low tone and the small volume of his words.

“Clay is a happy medium,” he said. “That boy is nearly enough your boy to make you nearly happy. Clay is a possible element for our wills to work in. But human flesh, and human mind, Cornelia! They are weighted with a past so deep and so remote we are helpless before it. I know. Remember a joke I used to play on you? The uncut grass by the barn: how I made you try to stand a stick on end whose tip was fastened to an invisible string? And whenever you thought you had it balanced, I’d give a little jerk and the thing toppled?”

She stood off from her figure. She came forward; her finger touched a plane into shadow; she stepped away as if there had been some vital shock in the swift contact.

“Well?...” she said, not letting either her words, or his, eat beneath the surface of her mind.

Tom knew he could spread a bath of acid that might take its time in eating downward, yet leave its mark.

“I think, Cornelia, I have the same love as yourself for making forms. But there is something perverse and accurst in me: something that keeps me from spending my appetite on some reasonably complaisant substance, like clay or pigment or even words. Like you.... _I_ must of course write my poems in human life. And, Cornelia, it doesn’t work.” He paused. “I dined with your friend, David, last night.” Again a silence. “I ended by running off to a trumped-up engagement because I simply could not stand his bland stupidity any longer.”

He got up and took a cigarette and lighted it. It went out at once. “I am a fool,” he said.

Slowly he began to tell the wall against which he pressed his cheek, half plaintively, the misery of the man whose medium is action. Cornelia destroyed her boy’s nose. She remodeled it. While he talked, crouched with his cheek flat to the wall, she hummed an aria from _Lohengrin_--desultorily, false-simply, with evident satisfaction to herself.

“Is there no mellowness in America? Is there none of the sweetness of ripe soil? David can be as vulgar as Ruth’s carpenter-lover. Sometimes I wonder is the chief product of American activity to be sweat. Bah! We sat there: and David lectured me. To the effect that truth and beauty are antagonistic and we must side with truth. When I asked him what was truth, he answered: ‘Morality is true,’ When I asked him, ‘Pray what might Morality be?’ he said: ‘If you don’t know, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! If you are going to be flippant, we’d better go back to our last subject.’ And, Lord of Hosts! our last subject had been _Balzac_!”

Tom was gone. Gone so abruptly, the door stayed a-jar behind him.

Quickly Cornelia threw the damp cloth over her model and seated herself on the couch; she held her head tight in her two hands. Her mind was quick with the sharp-eating lines of her brother.

“They will never get along. Never. Never. They are so different: as different as ...” She stopped: she said to herself that this was her brother whom she loved, and how could she think unkind thoughts of her brother? It must not be. In the stifled conflict, she was moved. She got up, flung wide a window.

Night. It was cold. Gas-lamps blinked and strutted through the air. Their lights were false: they brought out only darkness. The street lay low and reeled and swung away on either side like the deck of a pitching vessel. The vessel was the world. It crashed through a sea of love that spumed upward to Cornelia’s eyes. Her heart’s heat condensed it; there were tears. She had a sense of the bleak urgency of life: of its passage and of its passengers. She had a sense of the element through which she and those she loved and the vessel plunged: how it was a sweet element and dim and how hard it was not to forget. Surely, all thought in her cold day was a denial of the Sea through which life was a passing: denial of all save the vessel: denial of the terror of its movement and of its passionate immersion. She, also, forgot. She, also, was a coward with the rest before such words as “religion,” or as “mystic.” The salty tang of this Sea beyond her plunging little world was in her eyes and her mouth: all her body wept silently....

The cadenced strokes of an elevated train knocked at her mind. The truth faded.

Cornelia brushed back her hair from her brow. “You are a silly woman,” she said aloud. “He doesn’t care for you really. You don’t really care for him. He will go away, and marry. He lives after all in a different world. Tom and I will console each other.”

She was relieved at her brother’s bitter mood. She was weary, as if she had been on a great journey. She lay on her couch and closed her eyes.... The air of her room was thick and was running in massive current. She felt herself swept along. The tickings of the clock on the mantel tore past her and caught in her dress like little strayings of straw. The air surged over her head; she saw a house flung upon its current and dipping across her window. Where she was it was quiet. Tom came up to her; in his hand was a gleaming scalpel. “I am going to mold David’s face,” he said. She said: “You can’t, Tom, because he is done: I have done him already.” Cornelia looked at her model of a boy: it was all wet: suddenly it sprang and David threw himself upon the ground, and broke. Her father stood over her hurting her wrists. Her wrists hurt in his fierce grasp: but she felt how her father had no hands and was armless. He stood towering beyond her, high, and hard like a stick. Cornelia knew that a string was attached to him, and that Tom held the string: he was going to jerk it, and then her father was going to fall. She was afraid: her father was going to fall on her and she would be crushed. She saw that he was a child, she was full of pity. Her face was upturned toward him. He was above her. She felt she was going to kiss him.... Over her eyes, there was David, peering through turbulent shadows into her, curious to see, since her eyes were open and she was not asleep, why she had not heard him enter....

The mood held. She remained in that palpitant hinterland where all the nerves and senses of herself met all the beings of her past. David impinged sweetly upon this swerving world. She lay, scarce breathing, looking at him with eyes that denied the rest of her.

The world where he could thrust in his head without violence receded. It went. Again, her senses were enemies, strangers. That was a man to whom she had not given herself. Her senses stormed her recovering mind. “Why does he not take me in his arms?” they pleaded. She was on her feet, shutting herself away.

“How you frightened me, David! I guess I fell asleep.” In her panting words, she was gone from him. She could dare to say: “What a pleasant surprise, your coming! I am so glad you came.” She gave him her right hand: the left hand followed. He held them both: she drew them from him.

“I thought I would chance it. Have you had dinner?... What were you dreaming about, Cornelia?”

She laughed, her low, stalwart laughter. “What would you imagine?”

“You looked so strange, so far away. As if you were in a spell. Even now, you are not quite out of it.”

“I was in myself, I guess.”

“You won’t tell me what you dreamed?”

She looked at him.

Big, burly boy, with his blue muffler over his throat and his hands hanging so limp beside him. He was so at ease, so friendly curious, so cool. While she was white inside with the need of telling. It was impossible. In the shadow, a pain viced Cornelia’s homely face--lent accent to the wrinkles already upon her brow. It went, leaving its sharp bite.

“How have you been, David?”

He might still ask her, force her to tell him.... David began to talk. He rambled along the flowered paths of his own green life. He forgot about her dream, he forgot about Cornelia. As her chance of self-bestowal, of drawing him back with her to the self-land she had left, faded before his dear indifference, Cornelia’s hands were fists, her soul retracted with hurt.... He chatted.

She left him to put on her hat. She saw herself in the mirror: plain Cornelia, Motherer! who had found her boy at the age when boys go forth. Her mouth affirmed the bitter resolution that must make it hard: her eyes fought against their tears--David was there--with a dry will that must dull and dim them. The ineffable glow of confidence and of the sense of being sweet faded still farther from her face, leaving it older and less sweet.

So she returned to David: they went out to dine.

VII

There were times when the two young men sat in silence, looked at each other: and Tom was depressed and beaten by the world: he needed comfort of his friend. Then, out of the silence, David talked. A new way he had of bending low in his chair with one leg curled beneath it, the other straight out, while his arm rested on the forth-stretched knee and his palm turned upward. He would talk low then, try to give to Tom a thing he was not sure he had himself, and was not sure but that Tom had far more than he. He believed he was recalling Tom merely to his own possession.

“Think of what you have done in your life! You should think of that.”

“What have I done? What does it matter what I have done? What am I?”

“You conquered your life, you made a new one for yourself.”

“David, our deeds are not ourselves. We are what we are, not what we do. Our deeds, if anything, are what we have thrust from us. If I have done much, I am the emptier.”

“Are you not always living and being anew?”

“I am engulfed in a vicious world whose viciousness I know. I am false, David. I play dirty games, dirty tricks. I do my share of the betraying of the world, before I get my share of the thirty pieces of gold. You do not know. I have open eyes. I betray, loving loyalty: I do dark work, loving the sun.”

Tom was up from his chair. “Look at this flat!” He parted the curtains of pale lavender that subdued the room to a quiet steadfast chromatic scale. It was afternoon of Sunday. Swift and passionate the sun came in. It made the curtains tremorous with fire: it cast a radiance upon the cream-dun walls. It sang through the room, with light feet tripping the soft rug, with tawny fingers touching the books and the vases.... Tom and David sat within miracle.

Tom’s voice was dark in the sunlight.

“This rare thing,” he said, “who can purchase the sun in the city? Not your saint, not your artist and lover! Only creatures like me who serve darkness. The Law that I serve lives in shadowy dusty places. Its priests are men too crafty and bent to be honest thieves. So I have the sun. And, David, I love the sun. I hate what I must do to earn it. I am a man who can keep his love only with gold that he gains by his love’s prostitution.”

The last splendor of day. The sun’s arms turned upward, suppliant in death. The vast Star sank beneath crumble of buildings. Tom and David shivered at the eternal surcease.

“I feel that the sun some day of its own accord will go from me because of what I do against it.... Go at midday, as it has gone just now.”

New shadows rose, they were silent like lips that have just spoken. The glow was gone from the room: it throbbed still in their minds. A flower faded.

David said: “I wish, Tom, I could help you.”

Tom did not smile.

“I feel you are unjust to yourself. Perhaps unjust to the world also. It can’t be as evil as you paint it. As for you, I know how far you are from what you say of yourself. You deserve the sun, Tom.”

Tom did not move.

“Just think! Over there, in the East--those black belching houses where you say they slaughter cattle and brew hops--the sun will rise to-morrow. Before you awake.”

“Where do you get your idea of the world?” ... A sharp question. It left David blunt.

“I can’t explain. It’s not reasoned out. My idea of the world I guess is chiefly what I feel.”

“And what do you feel?... Your own past of feelings, that is what you feel. Your mother, your easy village life alone with your mother. Nine-tenths of it.”