Part 17

Van Ness was flattered. Tom threw his head back, looking at the big man in a way that drew a line between them. Van Ness came up, he seated himself beside the pair. Marcia’s lips curled as if they had been stung. Van Ness beamed on Tom, as he might have if Tom from great natural kindness had done him a good turn. Marcia was stiff in her chair, looking away. She seemed to be suffering and not to care for the instant if others saw it. Then, her face covered. Why did David sense bravery in that? Marcia thought she could wound either man by being affable to the other but she wanted to wound both. Then it occurred to her that smiling on Van Ness might delight Tom merely. She knew his game. He was done with her. He was putting her away, neatly, satisfactorily--as he did, doubtless, all things. The bitterness was, she could not but fall in with his plans. They were her plans also. None fitted them better than King Van Ness. If only Tom were not thrusting her into his arms! If only she had the madness, the courage to flout Van Ness in order to spite Tom! She believed she might. But if she failed, thereafter, to marry as well? her humiliation would still be before Tom: he would laugh at her, or pity. It was all one. He was capable of saying: “Why didn’t you take Van Ness? Don’t say I stood in your way!” Marcia knew she must take him, some time. If only she could in the passing send an arrow to the man who, having been her lover, had now the impudence to tell her: “I am your friend, Marcia. I am deeply concerned.” Her friend! She had never been able to discover her successor. She sat now, finding in her negative aloofness the one sure way of not satisfying Tom in an attempt to hurt him. He took pleasure so strangely!

David was next to Mrs. May Delano. She straining to take some humble part in the near tête-à-tête of Fennido and Stegending with Constance Bardale. She discerned David’s separation from the group: deduced therefrom his inferiority. She was afraid to give much heed to him. She was a proper, nervous little woman. She had revolted from her world because she was so like her stodgy mother, so much attached to her thrifty and careful father. She had married a mentally inferior Irishman because he owned two theaters on Broadway and was hence in touch with “art.” All her life was a pursuit of “interesting” people: in reality a retreat--equally vain--from the middle class whose manners and beliefs rooted in her soul. Her simple Jewish family took up her husband with delight. “I think, dear,” he told her in order to give her pleasure, “I think I have more good Jewish friends than any other sort.” She was, indeed, miserably married....

David was not averse to her leaving him alone. He felt what this woman was, since he was untutored in the symbols of her pose. He wondered why Mr. Stegending bit his lips.

Fennido was lyric against the baited Stegending’s silence. Stegending brooded and tried not to listen to the intimate badinage of Constance and her foil. His eyes rested glowering, stiff on this supple woman; wandered off to some dimmer focus. A strange sorrow pervaded his hard face, the sorrow of an animal rather than of a man. In this state, David almost liked him. He looked less wise, less strong, more full of life when he was full of this strange sorrow. Constance Bardale snatched him back from his withdrawal; with a word fixed his eyes once more on her. It was as if she needed him there in order to go on with Fennido. Stegending’s face sharpened, it fell again into its mold of human cunning: it was nearer this woman, farther from what David had cared for in him.

Constance got up; she took May Delano by the hand and placed her glowing in her chair. She turned her back on the two men who watched her slipping from them as one stares at an impossible offense.

“Well, Mr. Markand, are you coming to see me ever of your own accord, or will I always have to wait till there’s a dinner?”

She sat beside him, bringing her chair still closer. She smiled with her full face and her sinuously deflected body.

At once David knew that this which was happening to him was like the other things which he had watched. He was part of this buzzing world. But outside of it, so that he still could understand.

“I think I shall come, Miss Bardale. It is awfully good of you....”

“It is not good of me. I have no one in my place out of kindness. With me, I assure you, charity stops at home.”

David flushed at the abrupt nakedness of her compliment. He gathered from the candor of her example the courage to look at her as she had looked at him.

She was not beautiful. Her skin had a strange olive tinge: it was fleckless smooth: it was not transparent. Her hair was heavy, not fine. He noticed her wide short hands. Capable hands. The sense of her flesh, under the quiet silken sheath of her gown had a disquietude and a heat that won him. For the first time he realized how a woman whom he was able to know not beautiful could be desirable. She made a direct call upon his senses. His senses answered.

“You can’t possibly like me, yet, Miss Bardale? You do not know me. Why, then, except to be polite----”

She laughed. Her laughter went into words.

His head was left out of it. She was a body. His own body told him. Suddenly her talk and his seemed remote from the main purpose of their nearness as if they stood in opposite corners of the room, tilting at each other with long sticks.

He had to go on tilting. He could not come nearer. However inclined he was--and to his own amazement--to drop his guards.

Her talk, he vaguely knew, made easy his sitting there. In the same distant sense he felt that his defensive parries were not unworthy. But all of this was not very conscious. The part of David given to their talk was swimming along with a free stroke that the heavy touch of his deliberation could only have disturbed. Indeed, a part of him was absent, and was busy elsewhere. Their words rose up like a pelting fire. By its light, David could look beyond, could peer into the spiritual corners of the room, could see their darkness.

There seemed no affection at all: no fellowship. Even for themselves, these persons had no affection. Their egoism was a hard and desperate passion: fruit of some perennial resistance. David could not have reasoned out why this should be: how affection must die in a hot contest: how either it must die or it must share the intensity of the combating forces and turn to passion. The way of these men and women toward themselves had much the way of animals fiercely competing for food and for love. In a less bitter contest they could have played together: like children or like animals that are fed and tamed. Now they were playing at playing. David felt, in this, their wide distinction from animals. A whole array of impulses and thoughts muddied and distressed what might have been the clear flow of natural conflict. They were whipped up into a delirium of broken starts that in the end lacked all direction. Endlessly at work, in the upholstered room, under the gowns of silk and the starched bosoms, a scrimmage of cold desire. Some things each desired of the others: a body, ruin, disappearance, help.... David thought his impressions strange. Surely, he was mistaken, seeing nonsense?

No doubt, however, of what Constance Bardale was now about. He had no idea of her goal: it was plain she was testing him. As surely as if her capable hands had moved over his body, she took his measure.

He knew now what he was doing, with his parries. To defend himself was to accept her gage of battle. He was meeting Constance Bardale in the field she had chosen. This was precisely what he now no longer wanted to do. He became silent. And she who knew a way for his defensive was helpless against his retreat. Against his resistance, she could display her forces, but she was scattered and spent in the emptiness before her. David sat back in his chair, looking beyond, thinking, and gave her nothing.

Constance Bardale got up and left him. “Let him stay alone if that is really what he wants.” She thought in the falseness of a moment’s pique she had been moved to rescue him from a painful solitude among the chatter of others.

As she sat again, talking elsewhere, she had David in mind.

“What is it?” She recovered herself. “Is he a ninny or was he just bored? I don’t think he’s a ninny.” She had intelligence to know, at least, that he had not been frightened. There had been a calm in his sudden withdrawal which was the contrary of fear.

She took his hand at the door, and now when the invitation she had so unconventionally stressed would have been a mere matter of form, she kept silent.

“Good-night, Mr. Markand.”

“Good-night, Miss Bardale.”

He was very serious and far away. She had the wit to smile and turn to the others....

* * * * *

It was a crystal night of autumn. David and Tom could not think of taking a car.

David was sorely troubled. He was glad Tom made no effort to talk. A question from him would have thrown David into panic. It was about Tom he was troubled. And about himself.

“I am afraid. I am afraid to meet a woman flirting with me. I am a coward,” he muttered to himself. Constance Bardale had understood him better. She had glimpsed under his sudden tenacity of refusal to meet her, to meet even her eyes or her laughter, some deeper preoccupation which her profane self must not be allowed to enter. But David walked with a sense of discomfort--wide and profound--as if all life were a garment that fitted him ill. Tom was a mere most sensitive spot where the ungainly garment caught.

He had the sad conviction of Tom’s dishonesty from the fact that he went so well in that dishonest group: of Tom’s equal striving to overcome, to grasp, to possess, he could have no doubt. It was all very ugly to David. That did not matter. It mattered painfully that Tom should be ugly! Tom was his friend whom he loved: whose life he was entering more and more. Who was at fault that these constant doubts flared up against the passage?

Now he wanted to talk to Tom. Tom always took these doubts and talked them away. He wanted Tom to dispose of the night’s new accumulation.

Tom walked on. He seemed troubled also. This was a new thought lancing into David. His own misgivings were a shade less clear. Tom was troubled. Perhaps Tom had a grievance against him? If he did----

“What makes you so silent?” he asked, before he knew: reflexedly as one jumps from a danger and then looks to know what it is.

“Do you want to know?” Tom’s voice was hard. “I am going to tell you, David. Sometimes you make it anything but easy for me.... These were my friends. For my sake, you might have tried to be a little pleasant....”

“Wasn’t I pleasant, Tom?”

“Did you stir yourself to be? Oh, of course, I know what’s in your mind. ‘This is easy for _Tom_. _He_ takes to all that frivol naturally.’ Well, I assure you, my dear friend, you are mistaken. I do nothing of the sort. But I have a sense of the world and of the need of living in it. That sense at times, fortunately for me, is greater than my sense of my own importance. Your sulks are nothing but conceit. Believe me! If I am distressed, it is because I am anxious. I want you to grow up. I take you to places where you meet mature and interesting people: people with minds. You might do me the honor of trusting my intentions: enough not to sit there as if I had taken you to a dime museum.”

“Tom---- I am sorry! I did the best I knew how.... Something made me melancholy--yes.”

This was all wrong, all wrong, David was thinking. Yet how could he right it? Tom had no real grievance against him. It was _he_ who had the grievance! Why did things always take this perverse turn? Why was he always in the wrong? This time he _was not_.... Tom spoke on. He too hated the superficial form that social intercourse seemed fatefully to take. But under it the play of minds, the approach of men and women to each other was good: justified the forms and the conversations. He was no creative genius to revolutionize society. When David had succeeded in finding a more satisfactory way for friends to share their thoughts, he would be happy. Until then....

“But Tom--why did you, why did you have to make up stories that aren’t so?”

It was difficult for David to ask this. All his being and courage were summoned to the effort. Why should he need his courage?

Tom walked quietly on. David felt his vibrance. Either he was in wrath or in pain. “_So that is it?_” Again he was silent.

At last: “David, my friend,” in a low still tone, utterly changed from before. “Davie, you make me worry for you. This is not a mere lack of a sense of humor. This is something deeper.”

He went on quietly. His words cut into David like curved knives. Silently, David resisted. But the points of attack were too many. Attack whirled about him....

David was always looking for faults in him, doubting his honor and his word. Why? Had he so little faith in his friend? Let David tell him, had he given him cause to believe the first ill thing about him vagrant in his mind? David shifted to answer. Tom was attacking elsewhere.... David had no sense of proportion. He seemed to take from his remarks nothing but sources for quarrel. Or was it unwilling rather than unable? David was sure he could here give satisfactory answer. He was perhaps too serious and dull: he took everything Tom said so deep to heart! No cause for anger, really. Tom had veered far.... Oh, this was no exception. There were many things. The truth was David thought only of himself: David was selfish.

“Why should you always sit in judgment on me? Supposing I began this trick with you of weighing your deeds and your words to see what direct pleasure they brought to _me_, as a miser might sift dirt to find the grains of gold? Do you really think I _couldn’t_?”

A list.... The other evening, when Tom had had a headache, David had gone around smoking and whistling. Did David recall the time Tom had brought _him_ his dinner? And the pique of David because Tom could not join him and Cornelia on some insignificant walk. As if Tom had broken a tryst. How David had his silences for a week, because of things like that. Did David perhaps remember how he had honored Tom’s desire to see him on his return from his vacation? honored it by dragging a dull outsider along for dinner. Let David think of himself wiring so to Tom. Perhaps he thought Tom’s silence meant he was not hurt that time when he broke their theater date because he had forgotten it was Lois’ birthday....

“But you said you could easily find some one else.”

“Yes, David. I am not like you. I was afraid, if I made it hard for you, I might spoil your evening. I put you at ease. The truth is, the tickets went to waste. Yes, both of them. I had set my mind on that evening belonging to us. Do you think I cared most about seeing Annie Russell? I did not choose to go with some one else, on the occasion when I had chosen to go with you. That night, if you want to know, I sat in the Library of the Bar Association and read law. It was not my sense of justice to spoil your evening which you had chosen to spend with your cousin Lois, because you had chosen to spoil mine.”

“You know that isn’t fair! You know I went to the Deanes, because I had to. Out of a sense of duty.”

“You have a sense of duty toward your frivolous cousins; none toward your friend. I admire your distinctions.”

“But, Tom, they would all have been insulted!”

“Whether I was insulted had no importance....”

So it went. David was inexorably and forever in the wrong.

“Your cousins, your uncle, your aunt. I am to judge you care more for them than for me. They mean more to you. Doubtless their ideas, also.”

He flayed David’s smugness: his cowardice: his failure to grow up. David’s sentiment was perfunctory: his sensibilities were dull: he had no recognition of what was going on in the minds and hearts of those who should have been dear to him. Loving meant taking. Tom flung him dolorously down to a level with that cousin whose company he had preferred and loyalty to whom, as against Tom, he had elected. David followed by the side of his tormentor, as by the side of fate....

Near where they lived was a little Square. It lay blue beneath the green haze of the lamplights. It was timid there under the sweep of the City. The buildings and the high flare of movement over the night made it deep like a well. Tom and David paced round it. Their steps were harsh to David as if in dissonance to the Square’s sweet reticence. They knew they must have this out ere they passed through the door.

A dull weight was on David. The crystal night was black and through the blackness pain flashed like lightning. All this was within him. About all this was he, numb and unable to feel himself. He knew the dark by the lightning.

It was not the sense of wrong that made him suffer. It was the impediment to that sense. Had he been able to are noble and I am unworthy, it would have been easeful and sweet. He had great longing to do just this. It was the something hindering him that hurt.

Why was it? He had no answer to Tom. One by one, his objections had disappeared as he voiced them--his objections to Tom. Was it perhaps that he was proud and vain--not big enough to avow his faults? Oh, if it was but that! And then, the hateful alternative that blocked his emotions. For was it, perhaps, that he had not really voiced his objections?... that all of these words were far from the true misgivings?

David did not know. He knew that at that moment he yearned to be fully convinced, to be convinced that he was fully wrong. He needed to force himself. His mind told him Tom was right. His heart willed Tom be right. Let Tom be sincere and the perfect friend: let him be the lacker! His mind argued, his heart sang for this sweeter way. They forced him through the forms of acquiescence.... Something neither mind nor heart could not, would not submit: waved frantic and helpless against all the world. This, the bleak hurt in David.

The battle was manifestly over.

They stood in the hall of their flat.

Tom was smiling. Tom suffered also. In his smile, as he put forth his hand, was a plea for forgiveness.

In that gesture, Tom spoke his deepest truth. He had been indeed on the defensive. Attacking David, he had fought for himself: fought for his place in the heart of his friend: fought to cover from David and from himself the flinching part of him which shrilled and manoeuvered for attention, plotted for power. With his soul sick in revolt. David’s rebuke was the rebuke and call of his own nature. Since David embodied this, Tom needed him, needed him to love him: also, since David embodied this, Tom needed to destroy him.

In the silence of the hall, the true Tom spoke. As if he had said: “I have said nothing. You are my better self, my deeper self. Stay near to me. Forgive me.”

David saw his gesture. He understood that it was sincere. He could not read its context. He needed no more than that it was sincere.

A sweet flood suddenly was over him: the certainty for which he had thirsted.

With both hands he took the hand of Tom. He held it close. His eyes were full of tears. It was David who spoke: “Forgive me!”

* * * * *

In the morning, David awoke full of weariness.

Tom bounded bright from his bed.

At breakfast he was loquacious. He teased Mrs. Lario. He had long spells of laughter over his attempts at Italian.

The heavy woman waited on them silently and let his pleasantries rebound from her like rubber balls. She was devoted to her “wonderful Mr. Rennard.”

“Let us get David to speak Italian,” he said. “David is altogether too provincial.” He threw out the terms he had picked up as if he were pelting David with them. David stirred languidly. He was full of sleep.

“Well, I’m off.” Tom jumped up, before David had finished. “Have a case to-day before Justice Bayne. Wish me luck, Davie. The problem is to keep the old fellow awake. Otherwise I’ve no chance. If he sleeps, I lose.”

He stood in the doorway, his eyes flashed, and laughed.

“You ought to see him, Davie, when he falls asleep on the Bench! He gets deeper and lower--in his swivel chair. His legs are always crossed. As he slides down, the upper leg grates in such a way on the other as to lift its trouser gradually up. Down goes Bayne: up goes the trouser. Till the leg is bare, and the garter visible. There is the Scale of Justice for you. Ha-ha!” He was gone.

As he raced to his elevated train, the last evening raced with him. He was going to his Office--to the law--into the world.

“When Marcia marries Van Ness she must make me a wedge into his law business. I must absolutely manage that! Lomney and Rennard, of counsel for Van Ness, Stone and Company. Gad, what a _coup_!”

He had no thought of David. He had no thought of himself, save as the instrument of his own progress....

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