Part 20

David had learned that the curb-brokers dealt in securities not listed in the new Exchange that stood like a Temple beyond the turmoil of the street. No other difference. So he knew these solemn walls were hypocrites. Within them, older men, better clad, better-paunched, buffeted and bid and bounced: at times--he was told--floored each other, blackened eyes, broke noses. All one: the naked and the canopied gutter: the scrimmage under sky and the scrimmage under marble. Buildings tiered and teemed, and in each cranny a fight. With polite tricks, men plotted and plundered, swung the whole of their vast might of concentrated work into the anarchy of Distribution. To the end of deflecting from its even channels the sap of Toil to their own bellies. Scrambling masters and myriad slaves who had not even the grace of scrambling for themselves.

David saw how he was in a Jungle. A high and splendid Jungle whose call to the hunt the minds of men had made complex and beautiful, but had by no jot lessened. On the high seas and in far countries they wrangled with fire and steel: in the curbs of the City they wrangled with their bodies: elsewhere they wrangled with sinuous thrusts of their brains, deceit of their mouths. But everywhere they were at a single, sterile Game. David had been willing to accept Tom’s symbol for it all: that black swarm of men, blotching the canyoned street--the brokers at the Curb. He knew it for what it was.

Now, David was beginning to see by a new light, to find different colors. Immersed in the struggle himself, he found that it had its appeal like any contest: its occasions for fun and romance, its release of the generous and the brave from the welter of uglier instincts. The strange thing about Tom was that he kept the attitude of the outsider. Perhaps therein lay his strength, the element of caution and command above the Battle. But if David knew from his boyhood what a terrible thing it was to watch two men beat each other in the street, he knew as well what a thrilling thing it was if he were one of the beaters--beyond pain and reason altogether, given up to the ecstasy of _beating_. So now, however arbitrary the rules, wasteful the blows and trivial the ends, there was a pleasure in this clinch of wits, a catching curve to this conflict. The glamor might come, as Tom insisted, from the prodigious expense of will and energy in those who struggled together. But glamor it was.... Was all glory on earth the glory merely of him who could see glory?

David moved to his new poise in the world on wings within him like the wings of a seed. He was part of that Spring, he would bud with it: he too sought sustenance for his green shoots, his frail flowers. His affair with Constance shed mellowness like a sun: his relation with Tom inspired at once a taste for mastery and the need of seeking it elsewhere since to Tom he was subject. In the particular detail of finding his life downtown an exciting game, there was his new Chief, the credit man, Mr. Christopher Barlow.

A little gray-haired man with blue eyes sparkling: a silent man who seemed unconcerned with giving him the most perfunctory explanations of the work he expected him to do.

“How the devil can I give satisfaction if Mr. Barlow declines to show me how?” said David to himself: and looked at Mr. Barlow: and found he was not near so ill-at-ease as the occasion called for.

Mr. Barlow did not ignore him. His eyes dwelt on David, reticent, timidly, as if he feared to intrude even with his eyes. But it was no professional attention. The embargo was strict on business. David had his desk. What should he do with it? He pondered--pondered long since there was nothing swift in David at all. He resolved to take matters into his own hands.

“I am here,” he decided, “I have to do something here. I’ll look about....”

He began to eye, finally to study files, to go through ponderous credit lists, to decipher, by the process of comparison, the marks he found against the names of customers. He read the classified papers on Mr. Barlow’s desk: those on the Wicker trays, before the stenographer filed them. Mr. Barlow saw him prowling. David was quite sure the sharp, kind face lighted up and the eyes twinkled. Mr. Barlow blew a sluggish ring of smoke from his cigar into the air, thrust through it with his pencil and exclaimed: “I got you!” to the ring. Cryptically enough. Yet it was such behavior that limited David’s discomfort. Mr. Barlow seemed quite manifestly pleased. He would go on prowling.

This continued for several weeks.

His uncle burst into their office with rustle of spread papers flying about him like sails. He made for Mr. Barlow’s desk without noticing David.

“Oh, Mr. Barlow: I wonder can you help me in this matter of Dehn and Penny. You know, they have sued for that fall shipment. Yes, of course: the shipper is responsible. But it’s a complex case. Whereabouts do we stand as to the next ten years, should we decide to compromise?”

Mr. Barlow made a coördinated reach for papers that were carefully set away in different drawers; at the same time he rang for his secretary. As he took a pad and began annotating: “File C-9, Dehn and Penny, Miss Loman,” he said and was at work. Mr. Deane was doubtless aware of the dispatch of his Mr. Barlow. He did not seat himself. He stood there, patiently waiting. He hummed a tune and beat time to it with the tip of pencil on Mr. Barlow’s desk. With a cloudy gaze he took in the cluttered room and David in the corner: then suddenly was lost in contemplation of the ceiling.

“Here you are, Mr. Deane.” His uncle was startled as if from a revery. It was an effort to take his gaze from the fly-specked ceiling down to the pad of paper with its squad of figures.

“Hm--yes--Hm,” said Mr. Deane as he studied the array.

Mr. Barlow gave him sufficient time to study the report. Then, “There are two human elements besides,” he said, “Faraday is an erratic salesman. He may possibly lose us the account.” Mr. Deane nodded thoughtfully. “And on the credit page,” continued Mr. Barlow, “their new treasurer, Clumberg, is a man of intelligent imagination. His investment in Dehn and Penny means confidence, and his presence there means improvement. He is the sort of man who may be guided toward us by this very matter.”

Mr. Barlow was silent. Mr. Deane stood a moment rigid in speculation. Then he relaxed. He had found his decision.

“Very good. Very good. Thank you, Mr. Barlow. It is a good risk.” He turned to go.

He paused at the door. His face was relieved of his stern cloud. In the wreathing of his mood, his eyes wreathed also and took in David: this time, not as a part of the office’s equipment, but as a young man in whom he had an interest.

“By the way, Mr. Barlow,” he had David in his eye, “how goes our young rascal? Is he behaving himself?”

“He is making progress.”

Mr. Deane chuckled a bit with his big stomach and disappeared.

David was bewildered. He had not been sure that Mr. Barlow had noticed him at all, much less, observed if he was making progress. He thought the best way to hide his rather uncomfortable pleasure was by burying it in a litter of accounts where personal data concerning tobacco dealers--their wives and their habits--mingled fantastically with cold figures. But of one thing David was already sure. He was groping confidently in a labyrinth of business detail to whose end he had been offered no key and no direction: he was assistant to a man that ordered him and asked him nothing whatsoever. Yet he liked that man immensely. And he observed to his surprise that he was working harder than he had ever worked. He was soon to know that also he was learning faster. There was in the queer antics of Mr. Barlow a design. In a tacit way, he had been set to a test. In a hidden way he was being watched! Business was a brighter thing. He came each morning to his work with his nerves tingling. He was eager to plunge in and pull out more prizes of knowledge. Since the standard of Mr. Barlow was so dim, David put it high and worked the harder to attain it: put it at the height of himself.

Then, the business of his office dawned on him as a mystery no longer. He seemed to know where he was and whither he was going. The mists were lifting, there was a pleasant terrain under his feet. Mr. Barlow said no word. But David felt like swinging his arms.

Evidently even this secret impulse was no secret to Mr. Barlow.

“Mr. Markand.”

David startled. As he got up from his little desk, he felt as if he were at the beginning of a race he had long prepared for.

Mr. Barlow handed him a batch of papers; “Make a report on this,”--and resumed his silence.

David went back to his corner, his hands a-tremble as if he held at once a testimonial of merit and a maze of magic words he must by some fantastic grace decipher. Would he prove equal to the test? He looked at what was in his hands. With difficulty, he focussed his eyes and read. He seemed to know! Very slowly, step by step, he followed. All the papers he had surveyed, all the correspondence left--by accident, he wondered?--on Mr. Barlow’s desk swung now into line like an army of reserves to help him. He met his battle, he was half dazed by his ability to advance against these intricate problems. He gained confidence as he moved. After an hour’s work:

“Mr. Barlow,” he said, as if he had said the same thing a score of times before, “I shall have to make a couple of visits for this report. I must go to the stores--and----”

He dangled.

“Well, then--why don’t you start?”

In the relief he had of the answer, David knew the depth of hesitance that there had been in his announcement.

He went and succeeded. He was a little amused to find in himself that he liked every one he met in his visits, and that despite this fact his report was unfavorable. Mr. Barlow made no comment at all.

“It must have been an easy one,” said David to himself.

But he realized that he had had a bully time: he was winning his spurs.

Occasionally now, Mr. Barlow broke his silence: in the unobtrusive way with which he kept it. David was bewildered at his chief’s understanding of him. He had an uncanny way of choosing subjects for chance observation that came close home.

“Could you find anything more human,” he once asked, “than this job of ours? Yet it deals with the cold matter of financial credits. The point is, Mr. Markand, there is no such animal as the ‘cold matter of financial credits.’ There’s human warmth, human smartness, human weakness everywhere. You can just bet there’s never another thing. You know it in a play of Shakespeare, don’t you? Get to know it in this play and you’ll have fun.”

Mr. Barlow indeed seemed to have fun.

“Well,” he greeted David, “ready this morning to sail the Spanish Main? Let’s see,--hm,” he was slicing his mail from one hand to another as one does with a pack of cards, “let’s see what’s on deck to-day.”

It was hard to guess how old was Mr. Barlow. His short-cropped hair was uniformly graying: it had been black, it was now neither black nor gray. He was clean-shaven. David noticed two wide, deep folds pleating the cheeks of his generous long face. But the air of Mr. Barlow was young. David did observe a certain resoluteness in his good humor--a consistency perhaps too nurtured. At times, when his eyes wandered from his work and he sat there rigid, slowly beating his hand from the supported wrist upon the table as if to some inner rhythm, David saw a gathering sadness in his eyes. Before it could spread to the rest of his face Mr. Barlow routed it. He got up, he walked up and down, his little body had the lithe quickness of morning. He shrugged his sharp shoulders quite as he did when he smiled. The sadness was gone....

* * * * *

It could not be long before this new bloom of contentment reached where Tom and David stood looking at each other.

It was come and working over him as does all bloom: subtly, hidden away in the slow hours, swift alone in the achievement and perhaps in the passing--a thrust here of green, a burst there of bud, the alternate warm cradling of sun and shadow....

He was alone in his room. By breaking early from his work he overtook the long rays of the sun of afternoon pointing across his window into the East where the night rose. He squatted on the floor with crossed legs, arms folded. He stayed unmoved, and let his thoughts swirl about his gladness like birds circling a light-house.

Swift shadows were his thoughts against the tower of his vision. David saw he was alive, and felt it good. Surely life was a miracle none could explain. Surely to approach the miracle was to confess it--bask in the glow of knowing life unknowable. He had a vision of the world of men and children and mothers--endless millions massing down the ages. All of them had eyes upturned, had eyes and lips full of prayer. All of them were on their knees. All the men and mothers and children of all ages were praying before the miracle of life! He thought of Science--he thought of Darwin, of the makers of systems and machines, of the weavers of dogmas and rules. He knew that all these were parts of the miracle and somehow good. But what did they know and what did their saying amount to? Could one of them explain what and why _Life was?_ the ecstasy of this teeming, whirling earth flung like a fleck of dust upon the whirlwind of countless worlds that, in their turn, lifted a shred of flimsy scarf on the tempest of unending Space? They could not explain. Their absorption in some speck of knowledge ended alone in this: that they forgot they could not explain ... so lost the one approach they might have had to the ecstasy of life. Their little speck of knowledge blotted their vision!

David sat thrilling with the thought of this adventure--this greatest of surprises:--he was alive! He seemed large in his vision, strong. He realized that Tom did not have this vision. He felt himself larger and stronger than Tom. He felt tender toward him for this. He forgave him everything, since everything was trivial to this: that he was stronger than Tom and loved him, and must therefore care for him. Out of the dim vision of all life, there crystalized for David a vision clear and single of his relationship with Tom. But in its superb folly, never could it have been engendered save for the truth of David’s wanderings among the stars....

So he was really stronger than his friend? And he had been unjust with misunderstanding? There were discrepancies of words and action, dubious things in Tom? Then let him out of his overflowing strength observe them.

Tom said to him: “You are my one real friend. You must believe that.”

And: “Whatever I may say or do with others to deflect me, to you I am the truth.”

Tom said these things often, because often puzzlement was in David and doubt near. Tom said to him: “Your standard of me, David, is a great injustice. Its height is unfair. I am not strong, David, I am weak. I admit all the hateful things you see in me when we go out together. A sort of drunkenness quivers through me. I have to say clever things, I have to please, I have to _control_. Damn it, man! you don’t despise it half so well as I. But, Davie, I am not like that, am I, when we are alone? Why won’t you judge me by my real self? Tell me, do you judge anything else when it is hidden and sick?”

Tom said to him: “You didn’t like the way I was to-day with Durthal? Oh, my dear fellow, it was plain enough. It was written all over you. My only wonder was what poor old Lars was thinking. What a dear, black grouch you can be, Davie.... Well, why should I not be cordial to Lars? Why should I not pay as much attention to him as I wish? And more than I do to my best friend--yes, my best friend whom I ignored? I know that, Davie. In company I do not need to pay attention to you. You are not part of company. If I ignored you--logical, eh? I have _you_ alone. And if, in yourself, you do not know the difference in the way I feel toward yourself and toward silly, empty-headed Durthal, do not expect me to make it clear with a room full of fellows. Because I won’t!”

“Do you think Durthal empty-headed?”

“You know he has just enough stupidity to make an intelligent professor of Swedish drill.”

“And Darby Lunn?”

“Lunn has talent, David. Whether he will ever amount to a thing as a painter is another thing. I doubt it. He is a bit mad, you know. Nurtures all the nonsense of his will with a great pride instead of trampling it under, as a true artist should. What I am trying to help him toward is knowledge of the folly of extravagance and wildness in so sober a calling as Art.”

“But you are wild with him, Tom. You talk nonsense and you act nonsense as I have never seen you do with any one else!”

“If I didn’t meet him on his own ground, what chance would I have of drawing him off it?... Really, Davie, you are a joke.”

“Are you very fond of him also?”

“Not also--and not either. I am interested in Darby’s hopeless talent: and in Durthal’s efficient helplessness.”

“They both believe, I am sure, that you’re devoted to them.”

“Well: they are devoted to me. Why should I not let them think what gives them pleasure? Do I harm them--does what I let them think harm you?" ... David often wondered if each believed himself Tom’s “only friend.”

But now he knew these doubts unworthy. He had a strength with which to exorcize them. He knew that _he_ was the real friend. He knew that Tom was not altogether conscious of his motives with such “friends” as Lunn and Durthal. The truth was, he loved power: loved the nearness of those over whose minds he was ascendant. Unconsciously, he fed to each a subjecting mental and emotional food. This was but one of the details of Tom’s curious character; David now understood.

The truth was, indeed, that Tom could be insincere: deeply so, never. His insincerity was superficial. It could come into play the world over: it went like a mist before the sun of their friendship. David must learn a difficult thing: to believe his friend when he spoke truth, to be unshaken when he scattered counterfeits. Was not the reason plain enough? Tom was sensitive beyond measure. As no one else he felt the scorn of life, the scorn of human imperfection. Among the false works of man he had to move about, to hunt and earn his living. Tom’s passionate disgust for the Law! How his too fine sensibilities were agonized by the Law’s lying ugliness: so that his native pleasure in its practice went and he had no eyes for the Law’s better side. Or, if he did have pleasure in the game--and he must while he played it--how quick it died away before the soreness of his nerves! Tom could not admit of the need of life’s imperfections: not face the imperfections in himself. Yes: that was it. When these imperfections called for their hour of air, they simply cast the real Tom out where he would not interfere. That was why the love of power and applause, when it did come to Tom, came like intoxication, overwhelmed him so that David looked in vain for his scornful and uncompromising friend. Now David would look in vain no longer. In the very perfection of Tom’s worldliness, he saw the measure of his contempt. As if Tom said: Here, my fools, you want me to dazzle you and play you? You shall have your fill. You have no interest in my real thoughts, my real self? You shall have no peep at them. The more, now, Tow hid himself, the more David found him.

All this David discovered for himself. All this, in many conversations, hinted or thrust sharply in, Tom had been preparing him to think. Tom--and an April sun upon the seed of himself....

David glowed.... What marvel what difference there could be in the same things! His cable-car flung grating shrieking on the corner: an adventurous jest which once was an ugly jolt against the tempo of his way.

The City!--the miraculous City! No trees, no fresh sod greening: an ailanthus bursting here and there through cracks--gray cold--in the pavements. But men and women in the streets! Now he saw what teeming creatures these were, the streets and their women.

Streets and women big with laughter and children. Teeming streets, teeming women.

It was hard to recall how dead he had been that winter. It was hard to recall the streets. Gray mournful fissures they were, cracks by the cold upon the flint of a barren star: ruts in the crust of a dead world. Upon them the chill refuse of chaos was cast down. Soiled snow, soiled creatures. They crawled from their crannies and over-ran them. They bore in their eyes the Sign of exile in chaos.

Now different streets--budding teeming streets: different himself, glowing through packed streets.

Women sat in shawls on the housesteps: doors opened into reeking, into pregnant darkness: children in rags among filth of gutters: horses rattling their carts through laughter of children. Mothers had gray long breasts--they held them to sweet red lips. Mothers had shrill words--they spoke love. High noon came on the precocious sun of Spring and clarified the crevices of filth between the Belgian blocks. Odors rose to the sun not sweet like the smells of earlier Springs. And yet no Spring was fertile like this Spring. No stir of field with young grass, with young flowers, with margin of maples ruddy in hard buds, keen in the glint of birds.... David lived. David for a moment saw with his eyes how his eye-lids were shut down against them. David saw....

* * * * *