Part 2

David tramped on, limbs free. At his shoulder the lake and the farther shore. The mist was lifted from the day. The mist was concentrate in clouds. The day and the water were clear. He felt this man beside him, sharp and strange, in the new lucid air.

His sharpness seemed right for the city. This man was a city man. David did not think there could be dim things--dim lights--ever in New York. Yet that picture he had of the law-school.

“--an ideal setting, don’t you think?” Tom said, “for learning the law?”

David walked with the picture of Mr. Devitt’s shop. He loved it.... A long low dirty room behind the bike-store. He went in. It smelt of leather and glue and oil, of rubber and sweat. That smell left him. A gas jet burned in the piping that cut down crooked from the crumbled plaster. The dim noise of the place seemed almost to stop his pores. He looked at the gray refuse through the dirty window and did not like where he was. He went to work. His hands worked. His mind took on a leisurely gait with the room, took along with it the way of his hands. He liked where he was. His mind and his hands were clear of the room, moving with it. It was fun. When he tired, he stopped.... A city man. He was going to the city. A city man had looked at him and known he was going to the city!

“I wonder--will I ever be a New Yorker.”

Tom Rennard laughed. “Soon enough. Too soon.”

“I was born in Boston!”

Tom looked at him: “You are not like Boston,” he said. “--old Boston, perhaps:--a Boston that was really a field compressed, a gathering place of fields and of field-folks: a Boston I dream of--where Thoreau came.”

Still David was elate, not understanding. His legs and his arms were very free. He felt, walking beside this clear quick man, a cloudiness about himself. He had a distant sense of a David Markand: his legs exhaled a smell of rubber and grease, his shoulders pushed along like a slow hill rising to the horizon, his head moved faintly like a tree. If this distant sense came nearer he would laugh. He felt he was not a city man, even though he was born in Boston. He stopped. He stooped and pulled a clump of dripping moss with his two hands. He threw it away. He turned his muddy palms toward Tom.

“Look,” he said.

“Yes--I understand.”

David wiped his hands on his trouser seat. Tom laughed.

“I don’t understand,” said David. Then he blushed.

They walked in silence. David found that walking so in silence beside this man he could think: his mind took form: he felt he could direct it. He said to himself: “I must think ... about the city.... That is important. I am going there soon. I don’t know what to think.... What do I know?”

He said aloud: “What was it you said you understood?”

“How you feel--a little.”

“Why?”

“I also came to New York, a first time--once.”

“Tell me about it,” said David....

* * * * *

A faint trail lagged over root and moss through trees to a grove of locusts--a wide clearing with splotches of gold on blue grass. A girl stood before a tree-stump. It was round and quite smoothly cut. On it, at the height of her waist, was a clay model--reddish rich clay--and the crude hint coming out of a mother with a child.

The girl was plain and angular. She wore a drab brown smock. Her coarse skirt was high above mannish boots. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbows and the muscles of her thin arms were eager and tense. She stopped and wiped the stray brown hair from her eyes, looking at her work. A twig snapped: instinctively she fended her arm over the clay figure: she turned. Tom Rennard was there.

He sat on a rock. “God, that’s lovely, Cornelia!”

She came beside her brother. They looked at her work.

“The rain won’t spare this one, any more than the others.”

“Even in that tree hole?”

“You know, Tom, the squirrels will play heck with it there.”

Tom smiled. “Why not bring it home and put it in the parlor, where the Reverend Curtin Rennard can worship and adore it?”

This was a huge joke for they laughed: a serious matter for there were tears in the eyes of the girl.

“What do you think he’d do, Cornelia, if he found this place?”

“He mustn’t, Tom.”

“What a brute he is!”

“Bless him,” said the girl.

“Don’t you think, sister,” Tom pondered, “don’t you think mother perhaps was like that?”

“Of course she was, Tom. What other model have I got? I can’t really remember. Seeing I was three when you were born. Knowing father I bet mother didn’t nurse you except in a locked closet. But how else do I understand? And I do!”

“I can’t remember her at all.”

“I either. All one remembers home is father.”

Tom got up. “Prayer time, I reckon.”

They chose a close recess of little cedars, they hid the model and came away.

The woods straggled down into elders and a last thick cordon of callow poplars. Here was a field. It was untilled and ragged with brown hillocks and hollows. They passed their cow, tossing her tail. The breeze of the end of day glided under their feet, scattered through the field, swung up above the margin of trees. Near the house was no tree. An unpainted barn: a well with hood awry on a flag of shale....

Cornelia and Tom joined their brother and sisters filling the dim room with their thoughts and their bodies. Up to the flecked, stained ceiling their presence filled it. The room made them one. The empty chair that faced them on which lay the Bible made them a body lacking a head. Their shoulders were sharp against each other. Their eyes did not meet, save in the empty chair. Fear was the mold of the room, making them one. Fear also corroded them, shredded them apart, turned them into what each was: Clarence and Ruth and Laura, Cornelia and Tom.

The Reverend Mr. Rennard was very late. His empty chair grew emptier. The Bible faded. The room was losing its submissive creature. It was bleak, it was larger and less alive. The ceiling went up and the vagrant thoughts of them who waited went less to the ceiling, flew out of the window. Outdoors came in. The chirp of a cricket, the minor-third of a frog in the far marsh, the undulant sighing of trees losing the sun--came into the room. The charm was gone. The empty chair was a chair. The One was a group, jarred apart....

“Father’s not coming,” Clarence said. “When he comes he’s on time.”

“You tell the prayers,” said Ruth. She was the oldest.

“Nonsense,” said Cornelia. “We’ll call it off.”

Ruth smirked. She was glad her sister had committed herself.

Laura was silent: Laura who was the youngest and yet a terrible age had eaten her. She was lanky and somehow starved. Her eyes drooped, her large hands hung limp, her breasts sagged under a thick brown frock. She was all dull, she was mournful and dry like the bald patches of earth in the field. Laura was the one who was sorry. She did not wish to hear her brother: she missed her father. She loved the bite of his words, the frequent blow of his hand. The Hell he pictured was sweet to her since he consigned it. Laura loved her father with the harsh lust of brown soil for the water that does not come. She was dry and hot and sick with this sterile love of her father.

Clarence got up. “I guess not,” he said. “I’m going.”

He was younger only than Ruth. He was twenty-four. He went each day in the buggy to Dahlton where he attended the Presbyterian Seminary. He was following the career of his father.

Cornelia and Tom were alone. They looked at each other. A single instinct moved them. “Let’s go back,” she whispered. They clasped hands.

They heard the crashing of the underbrush, a deep sudden breathing. They stood there silent. A tall man backed out from the clump of little cedars. He turned and dashed the clay model against a rock. Cornelia screamed.

Mr. Rennard looked at his two children. His fingers trembled. He kicked the ruins of the statue back from his heels and came upon them.

“What’s that?... You scream?”

Cornelia was stark.

“Stand aside,” he ordered Tom. Tom moved as a muscle flicks to a nerve.

The man stood over his daughter. He was gray and erect. His hand lifted. He struck her sharp on the cheek. Then he smiled. His hand lifted again.

“No you don’t,” she cried. “No, you don’t dare!”

“You wanton----”

“No, you don’t dare!”

The old man looked at his son and daughter, his face was ineffably sad. It was sad with a sense of sacrilege and of a God proved impotent. It was sad with a hunger that only a blow could appease.

“Go home!”

His command straightened Cornelia and her face stayed Tom.

“We are going to stay here.”

The father faced annihilation. He must disappear--disappear from living, or he must find a channel for this surge of wrath. He found it since he was strong. Never had he been beaten in his home. But he had been beaten by life. The process was old with him. When life cast him out he prayed. He avenged himself on the nations of men and women who refused to be his. He sent them living into Hell. He avenged himself on the pitiful bitter hurt--on the remoteness--of Beauty. He called it Sin. Sweetly he escorted men and women and the burden of love into Hell with his prayers.

“Daughter,” he said, “you have committed sins that make me know the helplessness of intercession.” He was gone....

Tom was down with his head in his two hands, crying. Cornelia bent over him, smoothed his hair, kissed his wet face feverishly since she needed to do something with her tingling body. Her nerves leaped with strain. Deep down, something was alive.

“Tom,--Tom,” she whispered, “Don’t! I’m glad. Aren’t you glad?... It had to be. It is good....”

The boy looked up: he saw in his sister’s face what he felt in his heart--their life had died, their world had foundered.

“We’d better go,” said Cornelia. “You know what I mean. Life at home--after this?” She shook her head, her eyes closed.

Tom sat on his rock. He knew it was his turn. He knew he sat there, a child. He knew he must rise, a man. Never without Cornelia would he have dared, could he have found strength or direction. But could he fail of her challenge? Could he be a drag on her strength?

She stood, her eyes shut, over him, touching his hair. “I can’t imagine it,” she said. Still he sat. His eyes were open. They saw the mangled model of clay. He got up.

“We’ll go,” he said. “We’ll go East. We’ll go to New York! I’ll work. I’ll find work. You’ll have a chance to study.”

The blue mist of night grew between them as they faced each other. “Tom----” she faltered now. “Why not?” her faltering nerved him. “I can do anything.... You, sister, you’ve got to be an artist--a great artist. Wait and see.”

“Do you mean it, Tom?”

He was sober,--like a panting young creature after a race for life.

“I never meant anything before. We’re going.... We’re going to-night.”

They clung heart to heart like lovers....

Curtin Rennard returned to the house and sent them all--who were there--to their rooms. Laura asked after the absent Cornelia and Tom. He struck her. The household slept in a silence like black in which many colors are lost.

Within this silence came Tom and Cornelia. Two candles burned in the room of Ruth. She sat on her bed. Her brother and sister stood. She was in her nightgown, a fat miserable woman of twenty-seven. Her body, folding and breathing, seemed a part of the heavy matting, of the rugose cover, of the thin sheet. She was stout and her voice was thin. She had fat wide arms and her nose was sharp and thin. She twirled her misshapen toes.

“Come along with us, Ruth,” said Cornelia.

“I can’t.”

“Do you like having to run over to Dahlton every time you want to see Jack?”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t you want to get free?”

“I can’t.”

“--Hiding like a sneak in the woods to love: just because Jack’s a carpenter.”

“I can’t.”

“You could marry Jack, if you left.”

Ruth was silent. She sat, transfixed a moment. A great tide of misery swept her: she crumpled back in her bed. She wept.

“I can’t. I can’t,” she looked up. “It’s too late,” she ended.

Cornelia seemed to understand, though it was all blank ugliness to Tom.

“Last year, even--if I’d dared. If you had helped me then. Now----”

“Ruth!” Her sister went to her and held her.

“It’s all over now. He’s had about all he wanted....”

She wept. Cornelia was helpless. A great shame was in the room. It took Cornelia and Tom and branded them. Their youth was a sin. Their courage was a heartless boasting. Before this miserable sister who had lost her hope their lives were suddenly sweet and simple. They felt shame.

Tom took Ruth’s hand. The woman sat up again and looked at her brother. All the shame was with him, with Cornelia. Ruth sat in her nightgown, her body naked before them; she was simple and undismayed. It seemed to Tom in this hour Ruth was great.

She was quiet. She held Tom’s hand, she reached for Cornelia’s. She kissed first one hand, then the other. She smiled.

“You--go,” she said. “I stay here, but you--go.”

Her tears were past. It was as if she had passed from herself. She said: “I’ll bet you’ve no dollar to go with!”

This was Tom’s business, he felt. But in the candlelight and before this so strangely noble wreckage of his sister he could say nothing. She laughed silently. She pattered to a cupboard under the two glowing candles. She dug beneath a bewilderment of clothes. She drew out a wallet. She came back to her bed.

“There are two hundred and twelve dollars in here,--and I must get rid of them. Yes: I stole them bit by bit from the house allowance. God! I’m glad. But I can’t stand the thought of them being here any longer.”

Her words came more hard.

“I did it for us--Jack and me. I was going to bring it as a surprise the day we ran off. I never told him.”

There was a pause: a song in it.

“Please!” she thrust the wallet into Cornelia’s hand. A pitiful blend in her voice of beseechment and command.

She got up. She kissed her sister’s mouth and eyes. She faltered downward until her head touched Cornelia’s skirt and the hand clasping the wallet. So, half kneeling, she stayed long.

A sudden resolution lifted her. She took Tom in her arms. Always Tom had despised her. He had known her, hypocritical and false, the meticulous slave of her father’s household. Why was she great and noble only now when hope had left her? Why, thinking these things, could Tom not abide the hot fold of her embrace?

“Good-by,” she said. “Hurry.”

She urged them to the door. All three of them wept....

* * * * *

This life, which Tom’s words had given, was now David’s. They walked. They sat on a rock fairly dry. David paddled Tom in his canoe. David was alone at _The Villa_. This life which Tom’s mood had given, was now David’s....

“All the time,” Tom had said, “I was dreaming to be a lawyer. Sister was dreaming to be a sculptress.”

“Is she?”

“Yes.... Both of us what we dreamed to be. Neither of us what we dreamed to be.”

* * * * *

The week went. The last day came. They decided to go to New York together. They packed each his bag and sent it ahead to the station. They were free-footed under the last free morning.

The field was a gash of brilliance across the wooded forehead of day. The trees were very tall: their feet dwelt in dawn, their heads touched the noon. August--and David’s mother dead since May. The field was a gash of light in David’s mind....

He loved his mother. But his love remained at the depth where it began: one with his needs when he was an infant and she nursed him, a child bruised against the world and she consoled him. She was gone: but the glow of her motherhood still warmed through his life. Like his love, his loss was mute. He did not know how deeply he loved, he did not know how deeply he had lost his mother.

He wound up his affairs--or rather he watched while the benign agency of his uncle wound them up for him. He pocketed a fabulous mass of bills. Almost in the spirit of a wanderer after Beauty he came away.

The spirit of one who believes in the presence of Peace like the running on of the wind, like the running on of a river, like the spreading of flowers upon the fields of the world.

He had come to this lake, gemmed in green purpling hills. His calm came with him. He listened to neighbors’ talk, he wondered pleasantly before the world. All of it was a thing outside. He saw himself at work in a repair shop, at table with the gentle woman whose breath was a well of feeling. He lived in a dream that was real and was not yet over.

Sudden this man! Walking beside him now, upon the gash of the world, his new experience was a hand that touched him--brushed back the hair from his sleepy eyes--pressed fever to his brow--grasped his throat so it was hard to breathe--struck him!

David found he walked in a hurting wonder: the woods were part of this wonder: the man beside him was part of a whirling wonder. He was like a slumberous water that the wind struck sudden from all sides. The waves of his feelings were up and down. His deep self--his past--rose through the lashed fissures of his mood. He knew that his old life was dead and how he loved it: that his new life was being born and how he feared it! At the day’s close the night: at that day’s close the City!

The day was gleaming glad but David walked in storm.

The vision of his mother ... he raced home against the thunder he could see above them. Great drops of rain were already on the pavement; the day was night. He burst into the kitchen where his mother worked. “My! it is going to storm.” He saw that somehow it was still light in the kitchen. It was different from outdoors. There about his mother was a bright calm spot of day in the body of storm.

She said: “Well, David, you got home in time. What are you worrying for?”

David looked at his companion. Tom Rennard was clad in strangeness. David looked at Tom Rennard and the room where his mother worked receded: he could burst in on it no more, hear her say:

“Well, David, you got home in time. What are you worrying for?”

It was all moving away and his arms were helpless. There was Tom looking at his watch. Tom looked at him, who somehow was breathless beside him.

“Well, we got here in time. Fifteen minutes ahead. What are you worrying for?”

A shudder through David. The world was magic--black magic. He went beyond the station to a little hedge where a tree stood alone. He sat there alone. His heart made a beating music through his head. He held his head in his hands, there were tears in his mouth.

“Mother, mother,” he murmured. “I miss you, mother.”

The train crashed into the station: he had to return.

II

The pulse of moving left them numb. The pensiveness of rapid flight through the world came near them, could not transfix their numbness. Men and women in a railroad car--serried, determined; pointed the train, flung it against the city. David sat next the window. He saw the world fly past as if afraid and offended. The green comfort of meadows was too sweet for the sharp earnestness of the travelers. They had no will for the shadow of trees and the cool ambiance of little rivers. Their mood was a straight hard hot track of steel along which they flung: their mood cut through smile of fields, slumber of towns. Their minds hurled the train....

Tom and David sat together swathed in the pensiveness of travel. David was restrained and somehow broken. Tom made efforts to read. Mostly he held the book in his lap and looked before him. He spoke to David but David was impossible to speak to. Tom understood.

His own coming to New York, eight years before, was there. It was an ecstasy, an angry birth. Manhattan girdled in flame, Manhattan a woman, terrible, virgin, and he aware of his own love and of his impotence before her. Moving in the train with Tom, this time beside the mystery of David, as that first time beside the mystery of his fate, was the seed of Tom’s fate--his past. Moving in Tom along the iron rails....

The train and the rails and that world were gone: were become a cloud of sense lifting him elsewhere. He dreamed of New York, of Ohio ... locust grove, slender, reticent, athrill with the restraint of some secret ... he dreamed of them as if they were not, he only was ... he a dream.

Night cast down curtains. Tom looked at David again, and seemed to enter and know him. David was moving forward to the City as to a death he must pass through. The City was a cloud for them both ... though a different cloud ... whose blackness wreathed far over their afternoon. But David was distant from Thomas Rennard. David felt he might know this man and the City at a single moment: know them at once and together.

Sharp long shadows crouched across the aisle of the car. Heads and shoulders of men and women loomed from a common gloom that expressed their oneness. Men and women were single-mooded, single-loined, they were a swaying, night-bound creature.

Four men--more nearly boys save one who was old--got up and reached to the racks above the windows. They took violins and mandolins from cases. They tuned them. The old one who was leader struck a chord. A chorus of voices--male and wistfully female--quavered about the car.

Only the four who stood were visible. Song rose from underneath them, tremulous and pervasive, rose from the gloom of the car. It was a song of folk, a song of yearning. Passion shot it through and passion ribbed it, it was a song of tender sorrow. The voices of women rose in it like waving of lonely trees in a wide bare field--rose and swayed, wept and subsided. The voices of men rose higher, mastering, comforting the low wail of women.

The melody throbbed higher. Sharp flashings of desire were now the women’s voices: the men were weary and disconsolate, dying down. The song was over.