Part 14

“Well: isn’t that life as well as this?”

“It’s dream!”

“I do not see the difference very clearly.... My mother was: and my love for her. They are more real to me than the hardness of the city. Perhaps, Tom, it is the hardness of men which is dream.”

“If your love and your life with your mother are reality, lean on them now.”

“I live with them, Tom.”

Tom walked up and down.

“I leave you in your dream, David. I want to. But some shock of the outer world will come and wake you. You are walking in your sleep. I want gentle hands to bring you to yourself, at a safe moment, at a safe place. Lest you fall, David.”

David was up also. They faced each other: the tall gentle unkempt boy and the sharp sure measure of Tom: the boy with bright slow eyes, against the weary quickness of the other.

“I may be more right than you.” David’s voice was low. It had a full cadence of shaded notes. “I don’t think what we reason out is always sure. I can’t explain. I believe that just the same.” About his low voice the room darkened. What was light and certain of the room was the spirit of the friends grappling within shadows.

David was speaking. “When I think, Tom, that there are millions, hundreds of millions of men and women: each of them has feelings deep like mine, feelings of doubt and happiness and sorrow. It seems very wonderful to me that the world should be so rich.... I used to wonder about God. It didn’t seem to me likely that there could be one Mind who knew all about the billions of people that there have ever been, be interested in them, know what was good for them, love them. But I don’t feel like that any more. This huge sea of feelings, made up of so many billion seas--well, that is true, and that is quite as wonderful as the idea of God.”

“Do you think they all feel as you do?”

“Of course they do. I know that really I am no more than the rest. I know how huge my own feelings seem to me.”

“But most of them are luckless, David, stupid victims.”

David looked wondering: “They strike me as wonderful,” he said. “Every thing! People aren’t stupid at all. Perhaps rulers and philosophers are stupid. I don’t know. I don’t know how they work. I know that no stupid man could make a chair or plow a field. And a woman, Tom, who can give birth to a child that will grow up is not a stupid woman. Think, there are billions of women who have done that! All these things seem marvelous to me. Language! Think! The little mute creature who comes into the world, and in a few years he can talk. Is that stupid, Tom?”

David was near Tom’s desk. His hand lay on a flat, blank piece of paper, and an inch rule of thin, varnished wood. He picked them up.

“Look at these, Tom. Don’t you think they’re fairy-tales?”

Tom was smiling. But he was warm. “Compared to what some men have thought and done, all men are stupid. The first man who made paper had intelligence, yes. But the dull million imitators?”

“I don’t know how to make paper. It is all a mystery to me.”

“You could buy a book for a dollar, and read a few hours and know all about it. Is that achievement, to you?”

David was silent.

“Men are a race of monkeys. All of them, David. A few among them now and then who have the genius to create. Freaks. The apes harry them to death, then they follow them. They are no less apes because they steal and follow. Take from the annals of man the deposits of the lonely exceptions and they’d go groveling and dumb, as they did five hundred thousand years ago. Do not admire men, David. Admire the wondrous diseased and solitary freak who at times is born among them, who rises above them: who has given to the monkey-clan all the stolen toys they clutter their lives with. Paper seems a miracle to you. That is sheer ignorance: sentimentalism, if you will, which is the same. Look what the monkeys do with this paper: how they degrade and defile what the creators of paper destined for the recording of holy words. You can give a monkey a jewel, but he’ll hide it in his refuse, or he’ll decorate some obscene portion of his body with it. Is that not just what has taken place with the jewels of intelligence and genius? The plow is a miracle. But the average plowman is a slave who has debased both plow and soil. What has he done with the sacrament of the harvest? He has let his soil that should be to him as the woman he loves be stolen from him: he works it for hire: he sells its fecundity to ugly masters. The lot of women is a lovely thing. But how do women conceive? What do they do with their children? You marvel at language. What do you think of what men say? No, David: yours is an old sentimental fault. Through the ages great lonely spirits have worked for good: they found the uses of fire, they invented the wheel and the sail, the arrow and the lever. The swarms from whom they differed as gods from maggots took their generous gifts and turned them against life. Much of the march of civilization is the abject record of just this bitter process. The dull creature who drives your cab--how is he related to the hero that tamed the shaggy stallions of the Stone Age? or to the poet that dreamed The Wheel? Would the priest whose ecstasy brought forth fire be the friend of the janitor downstairs who tends my furnace--or of the filthy fool that cooks my dinner? What relationship beyond that joining the parts of a colossal joke binds the prophet who first pressed papyrus and the degenerate editor who buys his paper by the ton, dirties it with his lies and sells it to the herd for three cents each morning? Or binds a Shakespeare with the geese that have been quacking about him ever since he died? You have no right to admire the debased relics of greatness--their parodies. To do so is to do precisely the opposite of what you think: to flout the spirit that alone deserves your wonder. Look what the world of men has done. They have so perverted the gifts of the great that no free man can longer partake of them. Their vileness has a monopoly in the fruits of genius.”

“I can’t feel that.”

Tom was bitterly happy. He rushed on. “Well, tell me then: could your ideal artisan work in a factory? He worked with his soul and his hands, the artisan you might admire. It was his love that spoke as he worked; as he sat lost in the magic of his tools, his hands touched the wood with a caress from which came beauty. Machines and trade-union rules would make short shrift of him! There is no place in labor for the man who wants to love while he works. Or your farmer--your true breeder of the earth--can he plow a hired field and then truckle with parasite middlemen to sell and adulterate his fruits? What must his attitude be to the loafer who ‘owned’ his soil and to the loafer who ‘handled’ his products? And the poet-priest that loved his paper and placed the mystery of his love on it--where would you have him write his love to-day, in the Dailies or the Magazines? Where would you have him sing and act his love, in vaudeville or the ‘legit’?”

“I am not up to reasoning with you, Tom. Not yet. But I shall be.”

“Am I wrong?”

“I am certain you are wrong. I feel these things--love and brotherhood--the many people somehow creating and creating. I am stupid, perhaps?”

“You are not stupid, David.”

“Then they aren’t stupid either! Any of them. They are just like me. They are not so very different from poets and inventors. I feel that. You say I am not stupid.”

Tom took David’s hands. “I am the stupid one. That is why I need reason. Dear, confident boy. Please convince me!”

He looked hard, almost fiercely into David’s eyes: dimly glowing they were, or rather their sentiment than themselves, in the shadow.... Tom’s hands hardened over David’s.... David grew aware of a faint unease that was sharp against the sweetness of his mood. Something imperceptible drew back in him: blanched. Tom felt the withdrawal: he dropped David’s hands--suddenly: almost he flung them from him. He stepped back and sat on the couch. His hands held his head so that they did not tremble. His voice came vibrant from the darkness.

“Do not listen to me, David. Though I out-talk you a thousand times, it is you who are right. I am of an old travel-weary race that has lost its gods and that has found no others. I feel you young and fresh beside me, though in our years there is no great difference. Your childhood was not full of false beliefs. You are strong now to go in search of your own dear Mystery. I have cast off false gods. But their hands were about my heart: and my heart went with them. They are indeed discarded and dead. But my heart is dead along.”

David came through the room: it seemed a cavern as he made these paltry steps to Tom. He sat beside him. Still, he was ill-at-ease. He felt so suddenly strong, and stronger than his friend. While Tom talked, it had been hard for him to master the despairing sweep of impotence over his body as his mind. Now again, coming of his strength beside his friend, he felt a chord draw him, held outside himself; so that his coming was weakness. This could not be. Surely, it was good to sit beside his friend and comfort him, to be glad of the mystic glow that touched from their two bodies and made him feel Tom’s breathing, made him feel the palpitance of Tom’s thought like a butterfly in his close-cupped hands.

Tom said: “Sitting beside me, you are sitting beside nothing.”

David was still.

“At the heart of me, David, there is an empty place. What you call my success has been a violence wrenched from me. David, have you ever walked along a country-road, taken a flower in your hand that grew beside it--pulled, hoping as you walked on to unearth it by its roots: and have you ever found in your hand a pitiful crumpled heap of petals and pollen, with the nude stalk still fast behind you in the ground?”

“I wish I could reason out how wrong you are. I suppose for you I would have to make a very clear argument. My feeling does not help you.”

“Are you sure?”

“If I am downcast, argument to prove I am all right is not the thing I want. I am different from you.”

“Perhaps not in all things different, dear David.”

“I know you are wrong! I have watched you. We are friends, now, for so long a time. I could have told you this, almost when we met--when I paddled you about and you let your wrists play in the water and sprinkled me. You have a funny habit, Tom, of hurting yourself. Lord knows why you should like to! You are not satisfied with the world because you are so much better. It is no sin, Tom, to live in the world where we were born. It is splendid that you have such dreams of a far better one. Your life proves how true and real you have been--perhaps more so to Cornelia than to yourself. I am sure you would be the same for me.”

“I could do anything for you.”

“I have nothing with which to cure you of your black doubts except a stupid faith that does not touch you.”

“Davie, it is the best in you. Give me the best in you. I want nothing better in all the world....”

Silence inclosed them, again.

David struggled with what he deemed his impotence. He was not very bright, he feared. Perhaps he failed to feel the stupidity of men because himself was stupid. Tom would not tell him that. A wave of the need of giving welled about him. He was warm and relaxed within this element whose indeterminate grain moved him toward Tom.... He relaxed. The same easeless stir, moving to stiffen him back, poison this sweetness, to make him one again with his threatened solitude. David struggled for the quickening of himself in self-bestowal. Tom sat in darkness, bitter, hard, his will a clenched fist over his body. With a strain so true that the muscles in his neck stood out, he strove to turn away from his loved friend.

But his hand went forth: his knotted hand that seemed beaten by the weathers of life went forth as on a journey hazardous even to its wisdom. It tremored close to the hand of David ... the warmth of the young hand made it cold.

A sharp shrill voice that sounded a shriek in the darkness.

“Let’s have a light,” Tom jumped up.

In the yellow of the gas, David sat blinking. Tom was all movement. He flung off his shoes, put on another pair. He changed his necktie. He hung away his house coat. He stood dressed for the street.

“I must be off,” he declared. “Which way do you go?”

He was decreased to a more comfortable pitch by this let of energy: he came to David; with both hands half-helped him from his seat.

They had been long in darkness: in darkness some strange light from each had played upon them. Now at the mundane level of the gas-lamp, they stood and needed to look into each other. Their eyes were venturesome, but their darts of laughter proved them timid. They stirred: their bodies and their minds: swerving away. As if they dangled loose from one another and were close-fastened only by their eyes....

* * * * *

David walked yearnful through the City. It seemed sure to him that his heart was empty. He cared for no one. He was a speck caught in a petty whirl that gulfed him quite as whole as if an ocean had risen to immerse him. Happenings of the day and of all other days lay in the back of his head in a shadowed corner where he flung what he was too weary to dispose of: the corner of a curiously cluttered room that had no dear thing in it. So, walking the wild City, it was to David.

He stood in a great Square and heard New York. Low, brittleness of wagons, liquid hoof-blow of horses sweet against the opaque call of drivers, beat of the herds of men driven by iron streets. High, murmur of lamps wreathing with air that dropped like weight of sadness from the sky: weary air, sinking to the City streets of its own helplessness, in love with the warm lamps that turned away from such anguish. The buildings hummed their tune of mastership. But these were low: was low the plaint of the air that was being breathed and defiled by the herds of men. Under all was the City: above all was the City’s voice. David stopped still and heard it. A sudden, solitary shriek, coming from afar, dying, born anew.... The City hurried and did not hear itself.

David walked again. The cry was gone. He was deaf also: doubting, forgetful.

He walked to the house of the Tibbetts, where he was due to dinner. A warm hall: carpeted stairs leading up like a schemer’s invitation: balustrades that flourished and bold flat pictures that grimaced against walls with the effrontery of servants. The door closed. David stood on the thick carpet and felt the harsh mahoganous gleam, the cushioned unresilience of chairs, the obtuse blindness of leathered walls. He felt this Fay and her mother, how they were hard and soft: the black sleek fatness of Mr. Tibbetts moved against him, held out wide hands to take him in. A forbidding brutal gloss, like the woodwork, sheathed a softness, a _give_ of sentiment and thought no more alive in these people than the red plush of the sofa....

All of it was suddenly obscene to David. He was in the mood he had found once in a house of prostitution: he had entered with a fellow from the Office in stern response to passion: he had fled as one flees in a nightmare. The Madame within the harsh green satin of her kimono, which was a mold for flaccid flesh: the hard faces of the women, the hard pastiche of their gestures upon which the flabbiness of their souls and the unexercised pulp of their minds came out, oozed out--David caught himself. What nonsense with these good friends asking him questions! What had that memory to do with this? He walked deliberately into the mood of the Tibbetts: he forgot his nausea, as he had forgotten the voice of the City.

But Tom he could not forget. His forgetting all else brought him inevitably to Tom. He was warm and alive with Tom. He felt that in Tom’s friendship more than in all else--more than in his work downtown or the slow reading of good books--he was growing up. He glowed with Tom as one might smile at the accomplishment before one’s eyes of a good prophecy.

All his life he had known that he was destined to become a man. An ecstasy, this, of wonderment and terror which ran, in a kaleidoscope of color, back to his childhood and to the time when his little arms had clasped his mother’s knees. _Some day he would grow up and be a man._ Whenever he heard these words inside him, they came by his mother’s voice. For she had brought them first like a fire to his life. She had burned him with them as a reproof, or thrilled him with their glow of destiny, or when her slow hands and her mouth upon him told of their imminent loss, lighted him as a sacrifice with their mysterious meaning. For in these words was a world beyond his mother. In them, coming from her mouth and from her breast that he loved, David knew the ruthless rhythm of his life away from childhood up to the passion of maturity: away from his mother to a motherless cold land for his own mastership. This destiny could be many things. It was a twinkling star he looked at from his safe world and laughed against: it was a fairy-field near only in his fancy, far from his being, dominioned by the will of his young ignorance: it was a menace from which he fled to his mother and toward which the vigor of his mother’s love yet drove him.

He stood at his manhood’s threshold, not daring to turn back. A deep and cavernous beginning. A passage lost in shadows. Not seeing the passage, he dared to enter. His mother’s going had been the bidding of her love that he should leave her. But David was not alone. A part of him was still the short and sturdy child that clasped his mother’s knees. All this was changed, and all this was eternal. For now, again, David was not alone. Tom who had shown him the coming of his manhood would accompany him through it.... His friend and comrade: though David knew it not, in a way marvelously true and false the legate of his mother.

VIII

David lived alone for a little more than a year. Already in that year’s Spring the two friends decided to find a place together.

Their living room opened from a narrow hall. Along a darkness, sidling, their two bedrooms, symbols of our forbidding attitude toward sleep as a dull thing crowded between bright periods of bustle. They blinked, these rooms, with their hopeless single eyes flat on the gray bricks of the adjoining house: blinked like purblind old women against something too close for focus. Here, sleep was imprisoned, that might heal men from the poison of their days, but that men have turned into a merely deeper and more occult brew of their days’ poisons.

The room where the sun came was the room they thought they lived in. Their home, that: though they spent far less hours there than in the blinking sleep rooms, and though, of course, the sun was usually there when they were not--they who weighted each day into the City as miners go down shafts. But it was good to know the sun was there even with them away: they had hunted long for a southward room. The resilient Mrs. Lario, with her bare arms giving to no touch and her smooth throat so palpably immune from the gust of a man’s passion, above the tight composure of whose eyes brooded her hair like a black tempest of contradiction, came and cleaned. She turned the mattresses: she sprinkled water for the dust of the crumbling floors. She made the rooms gleam with a moist complacence like her own widowed virtue. But then, beside Mrs. Lario, came the sun: dried the moisture of her mop, turned all this artificed cleanness that smelt so of its triumph over dirt into a health that glowed, self-sustainedly, without a hint of being mere reform. The sun came and balanced Mrs. Lario; and made her possible. So that when Tom and David were up, ruffled and wearied, through their shafts at night, they felt that their home had been not cleaned alone but redeemed also. And if there was a flavor of must in the tidied bedrooms, the rococo sitting of the pillow-shams, the somewhat chromo-patterned regularity of things left on their bureau, there was as well good air, still a-thrill with the sun’s last coming. On Sundays, they greeted the sun as one they knew, who knew their home better than they: greeted him a bit like a familiar god with his long frank strides shattering their windows.

David was making a success in his uncle’s business. He had at last achieved a salary determined rather by his place in the office than his relation with its head. Mr. Deane’s theory had unconsciously been one of compensation. He balanced his knowledge of the boy’s advantage by miserable pay. This enabled him quite honestly to say: “David gets no more than any other beginner.” An easy way of feeling just. Now David was beginning to lead the life of a young bachelor in the City. He had outgrown his little Eastside room: he was after all a representative of the Deanes. If he went to the theater, it was not right that he should sit in the gallery like a clerk. If he went hunting for rooms with this smart chap Rennard, he must not, by an admission of the low price he could afford to pay, reflect on the House of Deane. Mr. Deane was a little on his mettle with his nephew as most men with their sons. He was approaching the time of vicarious satisfaction. He made David assistant to the Credit Department, and gave him a good salary.