Part 21

Blackness ... ultimate texture of all colors ... light. A world of infinite color, infinite flesh: himself within the world, himself carried within it through it. Himself of the breakless tissue of the world. Flesh of sweet smells, sweet odors, sweet fluids. Flesh altogether and altogether about him. He altogether touching all Flesh--and All. David knew through his shut eyes, walking the world, how he was carried within a world of ceaseless substance: how he was substance within it: how his moving and knowing through Flesh was Spirit.... He walked--he worked--he ate. He had a woman’s body, he earned the bread of a man, he held the love of a friend. Flesh, all. And his moving through Flesh, his moving through infinite immersion through the Night, through the World of Flesh--Spirit and Dawn.... His eyes were shut. But his mouth was open! David saw with his mouth. And though he knew not he had seen, there was within him, there would be now forevermore within him, life of a vision.

The world was a Dark Mother. The Night of the miracle of worlds was fleshed and was a Mother. She moved in infinite directions an infinite path. She was moveless. And he within her, moving with the world toward the movelessness of birth.

David was unborn. But his mouth sucked vision. Sucking the Night sucked vision. He slept again. Slept long.... Slept years.... But he lived.

* * * * *

David and Tom came back from dinner: they sat together for a last smoke in their room: the world they willed came to be. David lit his pipe: it was the one smoke that gave him comfort. Tom sat gloomy, nervous, flicking his cigarette until he had destroyed it, lighting another. He tore open his collar as if he needed air. He whistled the last half of a tune, stopped, met David’s eyes and broke from the strain of their mutual discovery by jumping up and gazing into the night. David did not budge. The room was filled with a strange restraint. Somewhere a struggle was, in which his mind grappled against a sinuous opponent. Why did he have to struggle even with his friend for the friend he wanted?

He was sick of struggle. Was not all struggle a lie? Life was work enough. There was no repose even in strength. There was no repose even in pleasure. David thought of Constance. Yes: even _there_ was work. Was respite in weakness? David doubted, seeing Tom, thinking of the pelt of his wit, the curves of his mind striving for attention. In death?...

Tom was back of his chair, standing above him. He put his hands about David’s neck, drew them close.

“What are you thinking?”

David was silent. Tom’s hands drew closer.

“I could choke you,” he said. “----if it weren’t that the cigarette smoke gets in my eyes.”

They laughed together.

David was sure he understood. Tom would change. Tom must change! When Tom changed it would have been by David’s help. Meantime, he must abide by him, not tire, and watch. For David could not easily endure the ways of his friend. He might well know what they meant: he need not therefore deny his unhappiness before them....

Yet unhappiness must be too heavy a word. Discomfort rather. The base of a friendship such as this between them must be happiness. For the base was solid!

David knew little how he built on this. Without faith in Tom’s absolute fidelity to him Tom’s infidelities to himself and to the world must have been insufferable. But with this faith, all the rest of Tom--his excuses, his associates, his excesses--were urgent reasons why David could not turn from him, must come closer. Tom said: “You are my best friend. With you I am the truth.” This was the Law whereby David took him. All else Tom said, Tom did, was in its very contrast emphasis of the truth. All else could by it be redeemed and solved. Let the Law however not be shaken!

What if the Law was an invested fort he had at times to defend against misgivings? against Tom’s own behavior? Was he not full of an unuttered life that invested contradictions?

David’s contentment was unshakeable. It took to itself all hesitant things, made them over. He wanted to feel that with him as with Tom, the truth lay clearest in their lives together. How was he so different? In business? with Constance? He also had his sophistries and abdications. He took pride now in this kinship. It gave an added spell to the haven of their friendship where they withdrew from a falsetto world to the lone reach of the truth.

Soon David forgot the hushings altogether that were needed to create this haven. Subsided were his doubts with Tom, his blanchings when they drew close, the lack of visible background to their friendship. It was strange: their friendship was deep yet what vistas had it leading back to a common source, what forward avenues of life? It was full of fire, this friendship, yet where was its warmth? It was needful to him, yet what rest had he of it?

David who had sucked vision could forget....

XI

Constance Bardale had left early that Spring for Europe. David could not say that he really missed her. He had great pleasure in looking back upon the reality of them together: a certain satisfaction in the prospect of her return in the Fall. He was not prompted to wish to hasten that return. He did not know if this was missing her.

He was like the warming weather. He had his days of retrogression, even of chill, when his mood was overcast and moist. But there was ever the underlying progress into Summer. All of him seemed opening. All of him was turned toward some generous source of energy within that made him fresh and green. He was resilient with growth. The squandaries of the world had no effect on this deep calm of his state. He moved in rhythm and with no jarring upward. Even so does a flower, despite the crust and the stone it must push through. The observer might have deemed him motionless: a poor observer who could have said the same thing of the flower.

He had said good-by to Constance naturally enough. That was the most delightful thing about her. She compelled candor.

She moved among hat-boxes and deranged chairs draped with flowing garments.

“David, I hope you won’t be bored without me. Come. Good-by. You had better run along. You’ll only be in the way when aunt arrives.” She traveled with her aunt. “If you feel like it, write me.”

She kissed him swiftly on his lips--and even then, though in her one hand was a pair of shoes, in the other a pile of lingerie, and though her eyes were upon the door expecting her aunt to open, still there was passion in that moment. She was a wonderful woman: a true American in specialization. She had managed to pack her trunk and pack away her lover without placing passion in the bag or meticulousness on her lips.

David went satisfied, without a hint of her ingenuity in bringing this about.

And now his emotions were relieved of a fixed objective goal. They could waft outward, vaguely. David found delight in their vagueness.

It was the same, though less pointedly, with other dwellers in his life. Cornelia was always and largely removed. Unconsciously, David kept her and wanted her so. He saw her not more than once in a fortnight. He did not really see her then. He talked to her; looked at her; listened to the sounds of her voice which easily resolved into the accepted syllables of words. But he was deeply unaware of her. And sadly. Since she bled for this and was yet unwilling to shock her boy into a knowledge of his selfishness.

She knew she might have. Had she said: “David, you are far away. What is between us? David, look really into my words, look really into me. Don’t you see how I suffer when you remain outside?” David would have come to her indeed, like the half-tamed, clumsy cub he was, into her arms and begged for forgiveness. But that could not be. So Cornelia, also, was pleasantly removed for David. And this was good, since then he could read into the picture those details he liked: delete the others.

It was the same with Business. It was always so with Business when one so wanted it. David discovered that Business was more like a woman than he had discovered women: in its reticence, in its immediate response to his desire, either to be all taken up and quick with it, or to be left spiritually alone. He found as his moods veered and alternated, so followed what he could give to his affairs downtown. If he was full of energy to spill and full of fancies to weave, Business was a romantic game that grappled him and spent him. Mr. Barlow had taught him that. But if he was misty and gray and low, Business became a habit exercise that barely held his mind, unobtrusive and gray like his own forces. And without disaster. He could plunge into it, work upon it with every muscle of his body. Or he could hold aloof and run it with two disdainful fingers. He could thrust eyes upon it close, and have joy of its jungle of tropic passions, or poise it philosophically from afar, as a flat patch in his life where he grew his bread-and-butter. Now he was holding it endearingly aloof. It was an accommodating thing that used up just enough of his time and energy to leave him peaceful and ruminant at night.

Even Tom was away. He was gone West on business. David did not write. He made no effort to touch the actual departed friend. He dwelt with his own vision of Tom, unhampered now in his deep will to find it altogether perfect. For the nonce, this wearing struggle to hold it perfect was over. This Tom in his mind had no unfitting angles. Nor the Tom abstractly speaking to him from afar.

That morning, he had received a letter. It read:

_Greetings, dear friend_:

You were going to write to me first and you have not, and so I write to you, because I am thinking of you this evening, and that is the time to write, is it not? I have been thinking good things of you; it seems to me that your flavor has precipitated, and that I feel the form of you, as I never have this past short year. I find myself in consequence in an apologetic mood--and perhaps you will accept even that and not be repelled, since you have accepted so many moods of mine, and been dear about them, and filled me slowly--I am aware of it now--with a respect and an admiration and, yes, something deeper than these, of which my actions and my omissions were scarce able emissaries. You are away now, while I am in Chicago--silently away, since you have not even thought of me to write to me, and I find that I do not blame you at all: that I admire your taste and your silence, and that I shall look forward to whatever response this brings of your deigning with an eager gratefulness that surprises you no more than it does me. Tom chastened: Tom in full view at length of a loveliness that he sensed and went for, perhaps as one goes for the summit of a mountain: the moment one is upon the trail, all one’s energies are lost in climbing and fighting snags and underbrush and rocks, and the summit is beyond eye and soon out of thought: yet is it the less for _it_ that the unblazed trail is dared? You are a very rare person: you have given me so much of myself that I shall be happy of you, even if I continue in this mood of being mad at myself that I did not give more. And yet what more could I have given? Would you take more, David? It is true that I have an excuse. You found me in the flush that was really the sign of a true decomposition, a deep giving away of my nerves that might have been ruin in one less trained to fighting. Or that might have been nothing in one less addicted to work. You see, work-to-success seemed necessary to me. When I do no work, my mind gets me into trouble: I am a geyser of wastestuffs: if I cannot empty myself into work, I am likely to empty some one else in a perverse replica of play. You have seen that, David. I worked while I should have been in some happy clime watching the skies and bathing and walking and smoking pipes of peace (if only pipes did not make me sick): I worked while the day’s task used more than the night brought of strength. I neared bankruptcy, but being an American that did not bother me--and I put on brighter colors for the approaching doom. In the crisis of eight years of this, you found me, David----: and what a dour childhood of preparation before it! Endless, endless. Working for Cornelia, working for myself--working toward nothing. For I am in it still. I shall try to put off the day of bankruptcy until I am fifty or more: then liquidate by dying. But you caught me in the first cold experience of being weak and sick and unable to spend prodigally and not feel anything but bulging coffers in the morning: in the first terrible condition of knowing I must work, though work was vile, and that no other work was present for my hands. That, does it explain my sudden horridnesses, my fevers, my cruelties to us both--your word? I am not cruel, Davie, I am full of love. Oh! why won’t you--you and a few blessed others whom I need the knowledge of in this fearful gorgeous world--why won’t you _understand_? Can you not see me going out into the streets of New York--yes, even here in Chicago--full of love for the dull men and the stricken women, ready to give myself to them all, if only they would take me--take me a moment----: full of love for the magic of their flesh and the mystery of their life and the splendor of their anguish? Oh! David, I love so much more than there is in the world willing. I am a sea of love cluttered in a basin. And when I am cried a little welcome, I mess everything up in my attempt to fit to a mortal measure. I have spoken to you--we have even quarreled--about little children. Don’t you see why? Why I was enraged at the idea of your _speculating_ upon whether you wished a child or no? Identification. Suddenly, I am a child, and I do not care a damn about reason, I want only not to be left outside and unalive by my beloved. Often when I speak to a man or woman, Davie, something bleeds in my breast. And then I have headaches, and the wise doctor says: use ‘brakes’--do not give yourself so much--walk the streets _indifferently_. Easy, eh? _Indifferently!_ When all of life floods all my senses like a corybantic passion: a perpetual sea of infinite elements each of which is attached to my nerves and to my heart. I cannot help loving people, so I hate them. For they are not what I would have them be: they are deaf and they do not love me. And children--whose lives go before me out of my hands and my sight like the horizon and the skies--is it a wonder my hands are stretched after them and that I suffer at my impotence? But, Davie, I am not cruel. I love--and I cannot reach what I love. My hard-headed lawyer friends quip me, calling mystic my wandering thoughts--the best of them. But I am filled with a sense of dimensions, flaring and parabolic, and the world their sense is comfortable in, is a strand of what I feel and see: and the magic that draws me to the world is the fact that it careers in an element outside myself. There, perhaps, imprisoned in the flesh of a woman is the thing I love--and I am outside--oh, fatally outside. If I open that flesh I am laughed at by blood and death. Life--life, I seek it. For I see it: and it is maddening to be alive.

This is a funny letter, is it not? But you must understand, and never again call cruel the man whose eyes are forever full of the vision of loving, and whose body is a prison, a terribly real prison--and who knows that the world is a bewildering texture of abyss and reality, of filth and flowers. I shall go hunting, killing myself through life, David, simply because I am hungry. Do not forget that. I know the falsehood of the game. Do not forget that either. My real self, my mocking sense of life, my outrageous need of love, of love, of love--that will go silent to the grave, when the gods have had their laugh of it. For truly I am a little like a toyboat that the gods have placed upon the waters, and blown upon, that scuds its pretty maddening moment, steerless, useless, against the inevitable stop on the pool’s other side.

Write to me.

TOM.

David’s day was pitched by it still higher. His moving through the life of the City had a lyric lilt. Its meanest shred came to expression in the tune he hummed. Until Mr. Barlow said:

“Is that the one song you know?”

David stopped. His energy was only for the moment without outlet. He jumped up, and used it to propel his body.

“I don’t feel a bit like working, this afternoon.”

“There you are, thinking of this as work! Can’t you get cured of that, David?”

The young man stopped at the desk of his Chief who had become his friend. He was pensive. He put one hand on the blotter and looked beyond the labyrinth of papers.

“How differently you and my uncle look at business! He prides himself that it is the most serious and laborious work in the world.”

“That is his play,” Mr. Barlow twinkled. Then they laughed together.

“You see,” he went on, leaning back in his swivel-chair and blowing the first fragrant puff of his new cigar into David’s eyes, “you see, my boy, your uncle is a romantic figure. That is why he takes business so realistically. I am a new generation: oh yes I am, despite my age! I am a realist: a man who sees exactly what there is to see: that is why I take business romantically.”

David thought this a bit topsy-turvy. But he had no way out; he started figuring Mr. Barlow’s words. Mr. Barlow kept blowing fragrant puffs up toward his face.

“That,” he went on, “is the reason why your uncle is so much more successful than I am.” His soft red lips curled cheerfully and he sent a mighty wreath of smoke as salutation against David’s nose.

David pondered. His uncle, who saw too little of the world even to understand the slightest of its parts, was by his ignorance able to take Business as the whole, throw all of himself upon it, and be rich. Mr. Barlow understood the pattern of life’s parts, was able to make a pleasant game of that portion of it where he found himself. And he earned an excellent living, even if he was not rich.

“You are happier than my uncle.”

At once, Mr. Barlow was pensive.

“Happiness is the biggest fraud of all, David. Have no dealings with it. If it tries to make terms with you, cut it dead.”

David noticed a peculiar trait. When Mr. Barlow’s face was in repose, as now, there was a sweet sadness upon it. But he could change this. It was as if he were aware of David looking at his sadness. His quick clear eyes began to twinkle as if this were in itself a joke.

“We must not compare happiness. That’s all nonsense.”

“What then is serious?”

“What is serious?” He leaned back and took David in. “It is serious that you should leave this office this very moment and go meandering as your fancy prompts. Go!... Get along.”

David ran for his hat.

“Well, that is for my happiness, is it not?”

“It is not! It is for your health.” Mr. Barlow looked very stern.

David hesitated at the door. He came back to Mr. Barlow’s side and once more, this time timidly, put his outstretched fingers on the blotter.

“You know how much I appreciate you, don’t you, Mr. Barlow?”

Mr. Barlow took up a letter, screwed his glasses grimacingly to his nose, and began to read.

“David,” as his head moved swiftly from side to side in pursuit of the words, “you are wasting your free afternoon.”

Now David was not wasting it. In his pocket was the letter of Tom. In his head was the cheer of Mr. Barlow. Before him and above him swarmed the amazing City....

* * * * *

He was on a street full of department stores. Women of all ages hurried past him, talking, ceaselessly talking. In their hands were the signs of the battle they loved to wage: packages, purses: in their eyes the promise of further conquest. David felt that he was in a strange, not hostile land. He was tolerated here, because he was not noticed. He stepped into a long, dense building. Endless counters packed with women led away in the bustle and gloom. Voices were not so high as the press of feet and the surge of skirts. Stiff men stood above the buffeting hordes like monstrous curios in their white linen and their flaring somber coats. Gaslamps tremored under the oppressed ceiling as if they stood guard against an invasion from below. It seemed that the frangent feminine commotion would swell, rise and sweep them out. David was stifled already. There was no room for him, there was no room even for air to breathe. He was in the street again. Here the flood had interstices of day: the day broke with its blue gleam upon the ranks of the women: splintered, but entered in and spread a living lightness through their heavy marches. Here one could see, not a mass alone, sweeping the street, but individual women with faces and eyes. Here even one saw pretty women.

David had not known how many pretty ones there were. It was bewildering, this extravagance of nature. The street was of stone and brick, it reared its jagged way through the world, loaded with the metallic cut of cars, flanked by the sibilance of uneven roofage and façades and the clamor of advertisements; it fell swift into smallness beyond a Square. Here it was arrogant, it domineered with its wide high skirts of stone and its bonnets turreting aloft--the shuttle of feet like a leather lathe beneath. And yet, immersed in it, David found that it was soaked in charm and that it drew his senses. For he had picked out the presence of women: women that had lips and warm bodies and whose arms could hold children. At once these were the street and were greater than the street. In their domain he was walking.