Part 15

David knew the nepotic alloy in his good fortune. It did not trouble him. He thought, somehow, he deserved it. He recalled vaguely an old remark of Tom’s about another matter. “Men who get what they deserve always do so, you will find, for inappropriate reasons.” David was letting the sweet illogic of America come in on him. He was lost in wonder at the perfect and complex weave of manifest occurrence which armored the reality, latent and different, beneath. The weave was one of grace, good will and beauty. It was in contradiction to the moving nakedness he felt fatefully aswing below his life and the whole City. He was after all in much a child: one who wanted the world to be good to him: to whom the real was the most splendid of fairy-tales. He fitted into this social structure so close akin to the land where hags turn into princesses and pumpkins become coaches. He was that sort: the sort who wanders blithely through an enchanted forest where great black trunks of trees stand under a green sea of murmur like protective stanchions and who picks up an acorn, finds it to be a golden apple, eats it with neither indigestion nor surprise. The whirling petulance of American life, its oneness with the tempo and technique of the dream, was very near and very sweet to David.

There was then a true immersement of David in this world. And in this fact a danger. Nothing is so rebellious as reality. No man who does not first move with the world can change it. If the deep mute sense of life in David pushed ever upward in revolt, that revolt would be the mere fused head of all his being: of the world’s: it would find its articulated deed. He would go farther, infinitely, in rebellion, than the rebellious Tom whose mental area of understanding kept him in a sort of passionate inertness. The emotions of Tom Rennard were conservative: the part of him that loved loved what was still and plumbed--and _there_; the manifest world he found rather than its latency of change. Only his mind ventured ahead into potential realms. His mind was much like a courier at work in advance to fit and to pare down conditions for the advent of his master.

So Tom felt a hazard in his friend. He wished to live in the world that he found. He wished to live with the friend that he had found. It was needful, therefore, that his friend should live there also: that he should change just in so far as to fit Tom’s world, yet not so greatly change as to be no longer David. Tom realized that the world’s acceptance he desired in David, and its possession he feared, were very close to one another. He looked at his friend, and wondered....

David lay back in his rocker, with his legs out straight and the mist of his pipe rising above his upturned head. He was comfortable: above his waist his body huddled in a condition of collapse that made the rigid straightness of his legs and of his arms falling down by his side a comical diversion. Tom looked at him from his rush seat chair, direct and simple. He sat at ease, straight. He picked a paper from the floor, but below his waist his posture was unaltered. His head moved on his neck like a hinge: his torso moved on his hips like a hinge. There was David reaching for a match: his legs shifting, his chin dropping upon his chest.

David’s arms went out, and he yawned. His body was rigid. It seemed to press out the energy of words: “Oh--_O!_ I am sleepy.”

Tom laughed. He had come in far later--from a dance. He had been up an hour earlier. “Why don’t you lie down, then?”

David’s eyes seemed to exercise command over his sluggish state. They thought the idea a good one. The big body lifted heavily from the chair, went wide and down to the floor. David lay on his back. Tom looked at him. He could have raised his foot and placed it on David’s stomach. One hand, palm upward, slumbered directly beside Tom’s chair. Tom could have stepped on it. The temptation ran humorously through him.

“Why you should be sleepy, my dear man! I’ll bet you slept ten hours.”

“Well,” after a pause, “it’s Sunday.”

Tom laughed again. “You’re still a lazy country lout.”

David snorted and smiled. He rolled his generous round head away from Tom and closed his eyes. Since his eyes alone had borne the quality of resistance that was his space in the world, David lay prone and altogether passive: he was a little like a flame that has been extinguished.

Tom began to contemplate his friend. David breathed deep and low. Looking and pondering, Tom came to breathe in unison. His shorter, tighter body made this anomalous. They breathed together. But David was sleeping. Tom’s breath brought him discomfort. A tithe of it he discharged by stirring his foot to within an inch of David’s hand. It stayed there. He was forward in his seat. His gaze went forward fixed on some vague moving object that swung in a pure parabola away. All of him followed.

They had been together a month. There was David’s face fallen away on its side. Tom could see the slight strained tendons of his neck. His sleepy hair was a mood apart from the floor it touched like a mist thrown from the alert earth in the morning. His pipe had slipped and cast its ashes. Tom wondered if he was closer to his friend after a month, and how far closer he could grow. This the question he followed. As if in search of it, he leaned agilely forward, immersed, and picked up the pipe next to David’s hand. He was again erect in his chair. He held the pipe before him. Not seeing it. He was very awake thinking. Suddenly he looked at his hands, amazed. They were empty. The pipe was in his mouth. On his face came an expression of motion, as if he wanted to get away. He thrust the pipe back of him, on the tabaret. Again, rest came to his features. They no longer strained in the symbol of the need to move. He was in contemplation. His lips parted and pursed at a faster tempo than his breathing. His eyes hardened. He took a long draught of air as if his sluggish breathing had half stifled him. Once more he breathed at his wonted measure.

He looked down at David, for the first time naturally: as if David were this expected object at his feet, and not some threshold beyond them.... They had been after all a mere month together. Why was he counting time with David, when elsewise he was glad to take his days in gross, and the thought of the years like steps of a painful stairway to be mounted toward the flat respite of death? In this lingering with David and his hurry elsewhere, there was a discord, a whirling that made him dizzy. One part of him moved faster than the rest. He turned and turned around. Tom’s eyes were seeking again. He must hold on to something to stop this spinning. His jaw dropped an instant, before he had caught himself up. There were his hands once more athwart his chest: in them David’s pipe. Tom jumped from his chair. Carefully, however: David was sound asleep.

It was a day of clouds low-scudding over the City.

The City crouched hostile and sharp, as if it felt the universe its foe. The City of men. With its roofs like an upstanding fur, it lay there, a cattish monster. The wind boomed afar, plunged near, whistled and shook the windows and was off screaming with fright at its courage. The City was tense and cold under its houses. A lighter shadow cut down from the retreated pall of the skies. The sun was up there somewhere. The shadow mushroomed forth, losing its lightness, swelling with relief into the wider darkness: disappeared. The City breathed again. Another shaft of light, of greater vibrance, lanced it, made it quiver, faded once more. These alternations were a rhythm, like breath, on the City. And in the room, where Tom stood looking out and David slumbered, these rhythms were compressed and sharpened. The swathes of lighter shadows--strugglings of the sun--brought unrest. The City was easier in the greater gloom. Was the sun what it feared? The gloom was a cloak, hiding the foe. When it parted a sword flashed. When it parted, the City trembled.

Tom felt the acerb coldness of this maze of stone and brick. A testaceous monster crouched beside the hidden Hudson. It lost its unity: it broke into parts. The City became a swim of brittle points, a sea and a foam of iron. Tom wondered how the soft breasts of the dwellers had conceived their City that was more hard and hostile than the whipped heavens. He saw them under the mountains of their handicraft like shell-less creatures huddled in a mountain of waves.

He was back from this fury to his chair. There slept his friend. He was aware of David gently asleep and of the surge of the City and of the skies a humor of hostile motion. He was aware of all this suddenly at once. The contrast was like swift heat on the smooth surface of his consciousness. It cracked. In the fissures light to see by....

The deposits of his last summer. He had gone away, for his two weeks, alone. This was his custom, and the one who might have led him to disregard it was unwilling. David had earned the respect of Mr. Deane by declining to take a vacation. He might have gone, as the year before, to spend it in the mountains with his uncle’s family. He had no stomach to. He was very far from Lois. He believed she was engaged, though he had purposely avoided the confidence she almost forced him to ask.

“You don’t seem to want to know anything about me, David.”

“What is there to know?”

“There might be many things. Why don’t you ask? Then you may find out.”

“What could there happen to you?”

“Oh, indeed, sir! So nothing could happen to me to interest _you_!”

David thought she was inviting him to bare his breast for her knife-thrust. He was long past the desire of sensation from Lois at the expense of pain. He looked dull. And Lois stamped her feet. “Then I shan’t tell you. Now!”

Tom had suggested a plan. But he was half-hearted about it. He did not want to go to the old place with his friend. He did not want to go with him elsewhere. He went off alone. He selected the seashore. There seemed nothing strange in this. He thought it was the turn of the sea. Here too he did not altogether understand. He was afraid to tempt the old place with David. Surely he would not enter it alone.

He went through a little huddled city, sweating and plethoric with high-colored houses and swift dilapidations: a city with the face of a slovenly fishwife, peeled by the summer sun and cut by the winter winds.

Beyond it the beach: a great golden girdle beneath the quiet bosom of the sea. The ocean breathed gently there. It rose and fell passionless and sweet, touching the word of men with virginal disdain. The sun smiled aslant, as if half turned away out of compassion for the feebleness of men. But despite its clemency, the human swarm was like a pullulant emanation in a rich yeasty substance. Women and children and men shifted like black maggots in the luxuriance of summer.

The sea rose from the night as a jewel glows and burns beyond itself. The sun swung into the sky and made of it a luminous flood that poured gold on the beach, splintered mazes of sapphire, emerald, bronze on the breasting waters. Yet of itself the sky was no color and no thing. The sun fevered and sank away, leaving the sky a-tremble with its passion. The sky lingered, lost in the haze of the sun’s mystery, given to the rapture of remembrance that is night.

Within this stillness the broken hurry of people. Men and women were a low spawn flecking and feeding on the universal fragrance. Tom walked among them and tried to amuse himself. Never had human life been so distasteful to him, so anomalous.

He rose early to escape it. A line of boarding houses and hotels lay along the sand. A motley strewing. High barracks with false Colonial fronts and rococo pillars scarfing their dismal heights. Smug cottages burdened with great names: _Sea-Crest_, _Manning Arms_, _The Breakers_. Sprawling, winging frames with turrets that twirled and were picked out in colored glass.... On the beach, when Tom set out, a sparse sprinkling of children. Mothers gossiped low in the background and a few bathers, loosed from the conventional bonds by the tart spell of the water, screamed, laughed, gesticulated, bounded. Tom left them behind. The sea combed back and the dwellings of men were lost. All about, flatness. The grass ran silver away across salt meadows that were ruddy in sun.

The sea was broken here. It lapped idle, and was green and halted by the blue purl of the river that came out to be lost in the sea’s freedom. The bay was quieter than the scudding grass that marged it. There was a rocking stillness everywhere against which the earnest and sharp sally of the pipers in the sea-weed was a dissonant shred. Here Tom threw himself down and took the pungent air into his eyes and mouth and let it moisten the strain of his body. He was immersed in the sweet summer.

A mood grew on him. He learned of a mistake that he had made. Upon the contrast and the stillness of this place came something from without and filled it and made its song. He found that he was longing for the comradeship of David.

Sitting idle and full of the sap of the summer, he found that the part of him which warmed him was straining outward, toward a vague thing indeed--since he wanted no specific thing of David--but with a pull that had no vagueness. He found himself unable to partake of the gentle world he was in. He found himself tangenting from it, making of his wish a rod to vault him back into the burning City. He sat musing, half asleep, without sense of time. He dug with his fingers in the sand. He watched a bug voyage from spot to spot with a rapt floating interest. He tried to enjoy a cigarette, with a sense telling him that the air had a sweeter perfume, could he but swing himself to know it. Unease was on him. He consulted his watch and its denotation of the hours was like news from a far country. Impulse to move was balked by lack of desire to go. He stayed, balanced, bored, strangely exhausted with these hours of indolence, glad of the excuse of hunger to make him move.

The beach was bedlam. He went through the throngs, as if he were wading a morass.

Only the buffet of the waves when he swam beyond the breakers gave him a resistance where he could dwell with a certain comfort. But he could not bathe all day. He went in to dinner. A sort of immersement in a black pot where food was. Clatter of dishes, hot stickiness of human motion, flies stuck on paper. It was hard to part the tasteless substance of his neighbors from the sodden stuff he prodded down his throat.

He escaped to the sea. While the populace digested, he could be alone with it. It beat in monotone upon his world: it flayed it. The sea lay there cruelly content, droning its repetitious chant. Until the endless song mounted, terraced, burst in his ears like a vast shout of conquest. Tom felt an invasion. His small body was being swept by a terrene monster. The sea’s laborious approach against his nerves was no relief from the crepitous _guerilla_ of the women, children, men, beating their individual sticks and stones upon him. Tom went back to the deserted bay where the sea was less the sea. And, gazing at the watery world, he wondered by what spell the ocean had even been a balm to him: by what strength he had dared love it.

He said aloud to himself in the silence: “Well, leave here. I give you permission. Go somewhere else. If this bores you.” He had no answer. He did not wish to go somewheres else. He wished to go back.

He had always loved this being close among the pleasure-toiling people. He had looked forward to the nights. The open theater, garlanded in paper lanterns, the carrousel with its comical rugose rounds of music, the dance-halls by the sea where the salt air swooned in the invasion of shuffled feet, of perfume, of pop and beer. The silent stretches away from the lights where he could see the couples under the moon discovering love, finding for once glad uses for their bodies. All this Tom loved, and for it had come.... There was the solemn jay decked in white duck trousers who walked as close as he dared to the girl in frills, with her face simpering down toward her languid feet. [How far her puff sleeves kept him off, how dangerous a sealing of adventure to take her hands! And her lips? Could he have them without the sea rocking upon them and wiping out the future?] Tom would dance with the prettiest girl he could find--then with the ugliest: and chuckle as he discovered the law of compensation unobserved. “She has less looks, no more sense.” He would be hero to a gang of boys, buying them soda and ice-cream: confidant of the pendulous matron in virginal crinolines who believed him when he said that he was sure she could dance: you must not let your daughters bully you, madam, into being old!... Then aloof, watching the prides, the passions, the innumerable nonsenses collect, become a single human clutter, astir in a flare of lights, a ribboning of banal music, a haze of sweaty odors.... Once more about him silence and at his feet a Sea--musing in its moveless might as if it were all the heavens, all the stars made through some portent palpable to him. It lay there aloof like truth. And he its master since it lay also in his brain. The crowds he had left were a sputter of sand fallen on the sea and gone.

So, once. Now nothing of all this. The world had fooled him. Ashes were in his mind. Yet he could not leave his mind and the world. Ten days Tom moved in this numbness....

Sudden, he went to the station, and sent a wire to David, returned to his hotel, paid his bill. The message was:

“I am coming home. Save supper for me. Will call for you.”

... He had a sense that if he visited the bay it would be sweet and fertile like a young woman who is warm with the breathing of her body: that if he had stayed to dinner at the hotel, the women’s chatter would amuse him, the naughtiness of the children under the frowns of their mothers shine like snatches of song. For he was on the train....

A heavy heated day met him in the City: one of those laden evenings when the air has lost its resilience to throw off the fetid waste poured by the turmoil of life. All that the millions, in grips with the materials of work, have thrown impure into the air remained for the millions to breathe.

But Tom was in high spirits. His ferry had moored him on the west edge of Manhattan an hour before the time to dine. In this coincidence of his train--the one good train to catch after his sudden resolution--he read a happy omen. He would have time to wash at a hotel. He had no fears because of the short notice of his message. David had few engagements beyond occasional visits to his family, very few indeed whose urgency would prevail against the urgency of Tom’s wire.

The thought of that urgency. Why was he so pressed to see his friend? He felt no need of explaining to himself. That part of him which appraised explanations seemed content without one--a strange thing in Tom--seemed willing to nod, to say: “Yes. No need of further words. You wanted to see him.” But what of the explanation to make to David? He might think the lack of one peculiar?... Something just above his ears, in the back of his head, cracked with a swift report like a cleavage in deep ice. It was an instant: it had not hurt. During it, this thought, marvelously elaborate and clear, touched light: he would tell the truth: he would take David to their favorite café--down steps on Sixth Avenue under the booming elevated structure--where his proprietary waiter, Charles, designed him dinners, according to the weather, according to the look in his face, without questions. There they would sit--he would say: “I missed you, David. My vacation was a failure without you. I had to come back to New York to see you.” Simple enough, and honest. Yet it had cleaved some icy armor in his brain in order to get free. David would blush. He was so droll, so like a girl with his ready blushing. And what would David answer? Tom walked along with his elastic bound. He was a little like a pony pacer--a svelte small one. David had had the simile. But above the sharpness of his steps, he swam in a mist of fantasy. He believed that his mind would compress this mist, make it clear solid fact. His mind seemed averse--indolent. Perhaps after all, it could not. An illusion of the mist perhaps that it had the substance of the fact-to-be. Tom saved himself from this conclusion: “Don’t live it now.... There’ll be nothing left after you’ve done imagining.” A faint reverberance set in: reaction. “Why should I not tell him I was anxious to see him? Truth is essential with a boy like David. I can’t give him any _other_ reason.” The steps of David’s lodging house were a bit steep.

He found himself outside the door. He was afraid to open. He knocked. He did not think it right to be so ceremonious. He entered.

David was there. Tom went forward with the slain feelings the occasion had given birth to. What he saw was a blight that had drawn the life of his coming. What remained, talking, moving, was a ghost. David was not alone. With him some friend.

“Farmer was alone. I happened to meet him coming up. I knew you would not mind, Tom, if he came along.”

“Of course--of course not”

Tom knew that soon he would understand. In order to be polite, he had better delay the moment. Perhaps, he could put it off till he was rid of these two fellows.

“Where shall we go. I’m hungry.” David seemed satisfied. He had worried a little perhaps? David put on his straw hat with a despicable slap of his palm.

“Where you say. It makes no difference to me.”

Their favorite café--and Charles? David suggested. Tom nodded.