Part 18

So the days and the nights: the weeks and the months. Tom direct toward his several goals; David involute and hesitant, sinking, it seemed to him, forever deeper from mastery of self and from some vague light he yearned for. Each of his revolts from Tom had the same ending: found him contrite and dedicated to his own unworthiness. David did what his friend wanted. Even to the extent that when he was with Cornelia he came away disillusioned. He patronized Cornelia. He evolved a superficial concord with his relatives and their friends that left him free and fitted Tom’s measure of the way to handle such useful, lower factors in one’s life. He went with Tom’s friends when Tom took him along. His work downtown was satisfactory. He was industrious, tactful, busy. He was not happy.

“Perhaps,” he said to himself, “perhaps I do not give myself enough to all these things.”

He looked at his life and was amazed to find how little he did, even how little he went out, of his own accord.

Yet, his uncle said to him: “My boy, I am delighted with you. Do you know what you have? You have imagination. I am beginning to realize already on my investment of you. Come up, can you, this evening? Aunt Lauretta has asked the whole lot of Tibbetts.”

He saw Cornelia with fair frequence. She never asked him to come: and yet how happy she was when he was there! She disturbed him not at all. She let him go his way. She came seldom to their flat. But she was getting somber, it seemed to David. Older as well. The glow of her great eyes had been a virtue in her homeliness. If they faded, she would be ugly. Sometimes David thought that they were fading.

“Don’t forget,” Tom said, “Cornelia is past thirty.”

But aside from these rather bleak activities, David found himself empty. He had no way of making joy and sharpness from his world’s encounters.

When he reflected, he was inclined to blame his dullness. “I am stupid!” he thumped himself with. And he reflected more. He decided to change. He did not know in this very decision the kernel of what he sought. Having resolved to change, he was changed already.

Perhaps it was the new year blossoming. It had been an unusually severe winter. All winters in New York are unusually severe, and most summers. New Yorkers have no memory for their chief source of conversation: a fact that serves to keep it green. But now came occasional mild days colored blue like the sky, keyed low like the clouds that dawdled over the City. The great town was no longer an imprisoned foe underneath the air. It went forth and the air and the town joined forces. David walked the streets with his coat flung wide so the breeze could seek him out and thaw those crannies of himself that had been frigid and asleep.

He made several excursions to the country--alone. They proved abortive. He found it painful to reach the drowsy earth with his drowsy mind. And yet the earth’s call was dear, now that the buds stood hard on the hard wood. He could not respond. He could not keep from trying to respond. A strain.

There were dinners and theater-parties with Caroline Lord. But one day David found in himself the courage to decide that he detested her. That this strapping, full-blown woman should take the airs of a secluded virgin was ill enough: but that, with all her experience of life, she should display a virgin’s judgments was unbearable. Was Miss Lord perhaps trying to impress him with her endless thrumming on respectability, her hymned pæans to the moral outlook? Why should she care so much for the standards of wealth, who was forever insisting that her family had been penniless but of high social value? Either this woman was ashamed of her own intelligence and enterprise or else she thought David would like to deem her so. David was not sure. Soon he did not care. Her vigorous solicitude for the manners and customs which she assumed were _theirs_ had an offensive note. It made David silent and reserved. It left the field to Miss Lord. So that the efficient lady preened herself and spread herself and paying no true attention to her friend had no idea of her effect upon him.

Tom laughed when he told him about her. David found that there was no difficulty in speaking to Tom about Miss Lord.

“But why should you expect something better of her?” Tom asked him.

“Well, she _is_ capable----”

“Bosh, my dear man. Look at her straight. The only strength she has, I am convinced, is the strength of Deane and Company--a strength she sucks.” Tom had met her once. Since then, he had skillfully avoided all David’s efforts to make him join them some night at dinner. “Now tell me frankly can you imagine that lady, with her advertised virginity, her mincing mind and her stiff sense of right and wrong, careering in open battle? Don’t you see that she is something only in her position? Her substance comes from the fields whose produce she helps distribute at a profit.”

“She seems to be forever bowing to judgments like those of Aunt Lauretta.”

“Of course, since she gets her keep from the same place.”

David had many evenings alone. He found he liked them. He had never been included in more than a tithe of the whirling activities of Tom who, now, had added politics to his program. Tom was a member of Tammany Hall.

“The young men are profiting by the folly of the reformers,” was the way Tom put it. “They have learnt, Davie dear, as I hope you shall learn also, generally speaking, that you can’t win a fight without joining with your enemy. We have done with kid-glove pats at corruption. We are going to clean up the undesirable elements of the Democratic Party by first entering their stronghold. That is why we are going into Tammany.”

David had never managed to believe in the monopolized purity of the Republican Party, although his uncle had spent some breath upon him to that purpose. Largely, he was indifferent and neutral. He had a sense of guilt in his organic ignorance about such vital matters. He asked:

“Is your partner, Mr. Lomney, also in Tammany?”

“Lord no!” Tom exclaimed.

And there it was--the incomprehensible that was forever cropping out! Why, in view of what Tom had just assured him about Tammany Hall, this protest of denial regarding Mr. Lomney?

“Lomney is a Democrat,” Tom went on. “A Gold-democrat, of course. But he has no party affiliations of a direct sort.”

“What other sort are there, Tom?”

“There are the really important sort,” Tom smiled. “We are vitally concerned in certain franchise concessions: traction and gas and the like. See?”

“Is that the reason Mr. Lomney must not belong to Tammany Hall?”

“That is the reason, rather, why I should,” Tom paused. “We are in where we should be, and out where we should be. Understand?”

Emphatically, David did not. All he could make of this party business was that it was a kind of game. The nation’s money-boxes had highly veneered and colored surfaces. The Republican was more polished, the Democratic had more color. If one said, “I believe in the blue and gold design” did one mean, “I get into the coffers by the side that is painted blue and gold?” David had these little speculations and was properly ashamed of them. He knew they were the sure consequence of his being unable to understand.

When he dined alone he was least troubled. There was a Hungarian restaurant he particularly liked because of the delicious thick soups and the beer and the caressing music. He went there often and ate perhaps more than he should, and sat about drinking his beer very soberly and slowly, puffing at the superb English pipe Cornelia had given him for his birthday. It had an amber stem and the one flaw in the delight of smoking was that he needed to be careful not to bite it through.

On this evening, as usual, he was not alone at his table. At this sort of place, where a sumptuous meal cost forty cents, one could expect no more than one’s own seat at the board. Mostly, men came and bowed stiffly for permission to sit down and were no sooner seated than they forgot him altogether in their torrents of strange words. Now came a man with his lady. David listened to them through the meal with an interest that might conceivably have flagged had he been able to understand the Magyar tongue. But the complete veil over their words made watching their faces and their gestures, noting the gait of their voices, a sort of game. It sharpened their personalities as these revealed them, and as the community of language must have dulled them. David took delight trying to break up the endless turgid flow into words and sentences. Mostly, he had delight in watching the woman.

She was a bursting healthy creature, not yet thirty but ripe and matronly and at her ease. She wore a pink gauze waist over a covering of creamy silk that lashed about the rondures of her breast as if its task were desperate against the fullness of all that flesh. She was not fat oppressively. Her form was impetuous against the insipid continence of silk and satin. Her cheeks and her lips were almost equally red. They were in perpetual motion with food or with laughter--at times with both. Her hands were short and slight: a wedding ring and two obtrusive diamonds overloaded the fingers. She seemed not to mind the floating gaze of David. She talked with greater lubrication when his warm eyes were on her. David, listening a little as at times to music, had the sense of clover fields astir with bees: cows brooding in heat and the smell of milk like mist upon the air. His pleasure of this buxom woman, whose fine hands showed her sensitive as well, was like his pleasure of warm spring days in his boyhood, when indeed the women had been drawn and dry enough but the fields very like this amiable matron, murmuring strange words across his table.

Most of the men and women he had known bore no kinship even to the soil they labored. This woman seemed a part of earth. It was a new sense for David. He leaned back, sweetly astir with his mood. It was over his loneliness like a miracle, like a sudden bloom of sun and meadow in the dank streets of the City. It glowed just so bright and wondrous, it was just so unreal.... He and the strange woman of whom he had no desire became one: there was a flower in this subtle penetration of her health and of his mood. About them the heavy clouds of smoke and the thick waves of words, all the heaving clamor of the room was like the shadow beyond the burn of a candle. And beyond still farther, the sudden laceration of the cars, the pound of the elevated trains, the wreathing weight of the bleak City.... In the heart of it all the single being of David. He took in fragrance of this outlandish woman as a bee sucks honey. He was alone with fertile fields....

He got up, he went to the telephone in the side office of the café, he called Constance Bardale.

“This is David Markand. I want to come to see you to-night.”

She seemed to hesitate: then: “Yes. You may come.”

He had not seen her at all in two months. He had never called on her alone. He had met her a few times. But always she had that forbidding smile and the sinuous smile he had known first was hidden away. It was as if she pitied him for a certain deep defect. She never sought him out. When they spoke, she had nothing to say. She had not again asked him to call.

Now, all at once, though five minutes before he had not dreamed of it, he was to be with her alone! There was a sharp tremor through him as if he longed to leap but the time was not yet, so that he was impeded: a tremor like that of a race horse at the post.

He found her standing in a little study he had not seen before. The maid shut the door behind him. A clouded room in which two lamps pendant with gray silk shades cast a languid light. Herself within it. They were somehow close, wherever they stood in the thick room. She wore a straight and filmy housegown of lavender caught loosely back over her narrow hips by a golden girdle. The braided cord fell loose and heavy in front. The room was a place where glowed her gowned body. David was conscious how he was placeless within it.

She took away her hand at once, sat down. She left him to find a seat. She had said nothing. He could see her teeth and how she was faintly smiling, and that her teeth were cutting white against the cloud of her skin. Her shoulders were sharp and dear in the faint stuff of her gown. He could have said to himself: “She has _on_ that gown. It is not she.” Her shoulders were articulate with little movements saying as much. Her arms came full from the folds of her drooping half-sleeves: her arms denied in their luxuriance the terse cut of her shoulders.

She left words to David. She did not help him find them. David took long selecting a place to sit. He took a chair and moved it and moved it again. He had to be in the right place for sitting: for talking, also.

She watched him, with an uncertain pleasure whose suggestion helped him since there was no hint he should hurry.

“It was very impetuous of me, I guess, to want to see you all of a sudden.”

“You see how much I mind.... Then before to-night you did not want to see me?”

“Did I say that?”

“I think so.”

“I did not, somehow, think of coming.”

“Is that the same thing?”

David paused. “I think not. I think if I had never wanted to come before I could not so suddenly have wanted to, now.”

“The wish burst out to the surface?” She seemed to be calmly annotating him.

“That must be it,” David spoke pensively.

“Then, you must answer me two questions.... Why didn’t you want to know before to-night, that you wanted to come? And what brought you to knowing at this particular time?”

She was leaning back in her chair and smiling; it seemed to David she was leaning forward and with serious face. As if this had been the truth, he reacted. He found himself withdrawing: slightly chilled at himself as if he had done an extravagant thing.

“Is there no such thing as a mere whim or mood?”

Constance Bardale understood his reversal in a flash. The contest was on: his dull playing to her hands was over. For a moment she had feared he was going to be sentimental. She was afraid of emotional words as a priestess of a desecration at her altar. Here he was, struggling away. Her delight released the energy of movement. A peal of laughter, low like her words; a somewhat mental laughter: flush of roused energy which in a more serious contingence must have turned into flight or pursuit.

She got up and redisposed herself on the couch. Her act was at once, in its motion, an expenditure of force and, in its specific nature, preparation for future outlet. David already found in himself the wish to go and sit beside her.

The fear, lest it be the false thing to do--lest she dislike it, rebuke him, misunderstand. Misunderstand what? David did not know, because he found that he did not care. He sat there now, measuring his wish to sit beside her with what was in her eyes--to find if it fitted.

They chatted. David knew less and less what he was saying, as he grew more engrossed in the problem of his desire. Did he dare go and sit beside her? He found no answer in her. Her look, like what she said, was oblique and opaque. She seemed impenetrable to his seeking mind, but in inverse ratio she seemed vulnerable to his fleeing senses. His mental will to measure the effect of his coming to her faded from inanition: his desire to come was less dependent on intellectual assurance.

He was unconscious of all this. Until, quiet and quick, he was up from his chair in a silence and beside her. Nothing had happened. He was dumb and he was empty, as if this coming close had been a mere beginning after all of what he was about: as if he were still upon his journey. Nothing had happened. David leaned over to her face that was at profile from him. At once she turned to him. She gave him her lips. Nothing happened. He kissed her. He sat beside her silent. The sense persisting of a way half gone, of a will half done. He felt the sharp power of her body under a frail gown. Nothing had happened at all. So he took her in his arms.

She was looking with half-shut eyes into her self. Her lips were half shut. All of her. He kissed her again. Experimentally: he was trying to find a certain thing. His hands held the warm stillness of her body: against his hard breathing he had hidden softness. He kissed her. Then, he put her away. His heart raced; his blood panted after a sudden hunger and she sat there smiling. Nothing had happened.

He looked to where she was through a swirl of sense. What should he do? What should he say? How was it possible that she should love him so quick? that he had not known before this marvel of loving her?

He took her hand and kissed its open palm. It was cool. His hand ran up the naked flesh of her arm, thirsting, clamoring. Then, he dropped it and stood up.

He turned his back on her. He paced the little room. Once, twice: over and over. He stopped. He looked at her now as if he had never looked at her before. He was a little way from her. An abyss, an eternity of way which magic alone could empower him to pass.

Was he not friends with magic? Something spoke in him:

“You have only to step forward and take her.” He could not believe it. He had never touched her. Magic, magic....

She was a little huddled on the couch. A faint flush on her cheek and her brow. Her hands half clasped on her lap. Her sharp shoulders rounded forward. She was magical and helpless. David was strong against her. A pity came to him that she was so sweet and so resistless beneath his towering brutality. It was the pity that was sweet and was resistless. Feeling aggrieved for her that she sat there prostrate, he felt that he forgave her, that he loved her, and how by this love she must at once be saved. It was needful to go forth and hold her for her own sake. Lest she believe he had sullied her, lest she fear he did not know what this was between them. To herself as to him it was needful that what had come to pass be good.

He no longer saw her. He was full of the wonder of her sweetness and of his pity. He was full of the wonder of that she was a woman and given up to him. He drew all of her against him....

* * * * *

He knew he was walking homeward. The familiar streets whipped past, the world swung like a sea over the horizon and swept backward above his head. He walked because it had been impossible to sit cramped and still in a car. He had to race with his emotions, else something had broken in him. Calmer he said to himself:

“Why go home? You’re not sleepy.”

He did not know where to go. A garish coldness, the rancid cutting of alcohol across the sidewalk--a saloon. It appealed to him as a challenge to an ebullient giant. He entered. He needed to whet the brilliant splendor of his mood against what was most sordid and drear in all the world. He went up to the bar and ordered a drink and let it stand, unable to bring its desecration to his consecrated lips. He was throbbing gently as if he had run and won a race:--these were remnants of energy to be disposed of.

The place reeled a bit and then closed in on him. Several fellows sagged at his side by the bar. One was talking:

“I guv’ him hell. Y’ort to ’a’ seen me guv’ him hell.”

The barkeeper went over the bar with a wet rag and it gleamed. He looked in the mirror at his thick face above the serried bottles with undisguised affection. He took a comb from his white vest and parted his hair afresh in its oily middle. He loved that face. He leaned back and was lost in love and contemplation. Through a side door, two women loose over a naked table. Their faces were paste, their eyes were red-rimmed above two little glasses of whiskey.

“I love her. I love her. I must love her. Why does she love me? Why do I never understand?” The wonder of the world was as remote from his mind as his thoughts from this naked room with its hard wood and faces, its brittle bottles.

One of the women tried to catch his eye. She was half nodding with drink and disgust. A rotten night. David saw her examining herself in the mirror. Her face was suddenly sweet. She opened her coat. She folded in and downward the starched corners of her waist so that her neck showed and the gap of her bosom. She looked up and smiled at David. She called for more drink and beat her hand in supplement to her call against the table. David left. Her flesh had sounded dead against the shrill-varnished wood.

Tom was propped up with a book, in his black dressing-gown.

“Hello, Davie.” He looked up but did not move. “Have you read _Gulliver’s Travels_ since you were a kid? Take my advice and do! How that man Swift must have loved life to have hated men so!”

David thought this was nonsense. “What is there to hate in a thing we love?”

Tom laughed. “You talk like a god, David. Are you a god? Hate does not enter into love only where there is paradisal satisfaction. To what mortal is that granted?” He watched David stand pensively, glowing. With a searching smile: “Also hate may not enter where there is complete delusion.” David started. “To have perfection in one’s love, one must be a god. To have complete delusion one must be--an ass. Are you a god, Davie?”

“Good night,” said David....

* * * * *

The following evening, he was not to be with her. She had so many engagements. But she was going to break one so he could come, only three evenings later.