Part 22

He was not wasting his free afternoon. This was health indeed. It was health to feel this pour of a thousand homes upon him: all of these homes’ secret tenderness and passion. It was health to shake his head at the hard buildings, and know them worsted by women!...

But tiring. David boarded a car.

The car gave a lurch. The movement split the car’s inhabitants into two separate groups: they who smiled and they who grumbled. David was smiling. Clumsily he righted himself, he found that he did not wish to change the position of his eyes. They were looking at a little girl, who had been smiling also. But now, the two were serious looking at each other.

She was a little girl riding beside her governess. She had great black eyes. The gleaming iris almost crowded out the white. She had brows that were high and thin and arched and between her brows and her eyes the flesh was dimpled.

She tilted her head backward and smiled at him.

David gripped his seat with his two hands, and smiled at her.

She was beside an opaque cutting thing that was a woman and was a governess. Thick glasses tied to a black string that ended in a hideous enameled clasp on a white starched waist. Eyes shiny and convex like the glasses. Nose pointed down, mouth cutting in, chin pushing upward. And beside her a loveliness that came across the car and that he held now far from the car and the street, in his silence.

It came to David softly that he loved this little girl. She smiled at him, as if she thanked him and were glad. Could he put his love in a smile and give it to her?

She stirred in her seat. She tossed out her legs, first one, then the other. She threw herself back so that her legs thrust out, she met him fully and beamed on him.

She was unafraid, beyond all he had ever known. What could he give her, and do, to show her his love?

He had his eyes and his smile. To give her his life with. He put words into his look at her: till his eyes had tears of their fullness. He said to her so:

“Little girl with the gray fur bonnet and the gray fur coat and the laughing soul, I love you. I have never seen you before. I shall never see you again. I shall always see you----”

She was smiling so clear! What did she know? What did she not know, perhaps? Pain stopped the words of his eyes. He got up. He passed her. Why could he not touch her, why could he not come and play with her where she lived? A little girl!

He stood in the street and the car groaned past him. She was kneeling on her seat and her face pressed against the window. She was motionless, gazing into him with serious lovely eyes while the car swung her away into the trackless future.

David’s lips moved: “Good-by. I do not understand.... Do you?...”

She was gone.

Many things were gone.

David, walking the dim sunless City, walked as through himself. And as he went he missed the lights that an hour before, of their own cheer, had lit the corridors of his being and made him all, all of the City, so glad a habitation. He missed these things, he learned how many they were.

He did not think of the strange little girl. She had been fleckless beautiful. She had been more than that in the miracle of her spell upon him. For this he groped. In his mind was the vision of her budding life, sweet, ineffably sweet like an unopened rose in the dew of the dawn. She had left a wound in his heart--the stab of her vision--from which now his blood seemed unstintingly to flow.

He thought of himself alone. Sudden all his proud contentment was away. Not clouded, this time, as it had been so often. Away. It was gone surely, like the little girl.

His contentment. What then had it been? The parts of it that were no more he could piece together into a memory of his contentment.

It had been a haze covering the way of his feet, blinding his eyes, wrapping him in darkness. He saw now. He saw that his feet had carried him a way different from the haze of his contentment.

He thought of his emptiness. He seemed to recognize it, now, as if it had long been there. The absence of Tom and Constance--was this the absence of two great parts of his emptiness permitting him at last to know them--since their absence was in a measure their negation, the first timorous return from an emptiness that filled him to a fullness that he lacked? He could not go in very far. His mind was strangely cramped with pain. He knew much, however. He knew he did not love Constance and that there is no substitute for love. He knew he did not fully respect his dearest friend and that for this there was no solace. Most of all he knew his life was sterile: despite its blandishments and its colors, its devouring of hours, it lacked something he needed. Something he needed as he might thirst for water in a land that held everything else.

Sterile work: sterile friendship: sterile embraces. It was not so simple as this, but here was the germ that desiccated him, turned his impulses from action, deflected life from living. _He did not live._ Thence came that he did not risk, that he went safe, that he won materials and pleasures. To what end since he did not live? He compromised with love, he compromised with dreams. That was the technique of his succeeding: to cheat his body into love-affairs, his mind into business, his loyalties into friendship. To what end since he did not live? And if the miracle was, that life lay in the risk rather than in succeeding, in love rather than in the love-affair, in the dream rather than in any fact?

Oh, he could not understand. He did not know what to do. If his ways were wrong, his relations false, how could he change them? He dragged through a morass, not knowing.

Now suddenly, his clear thoughts held within them, as if in an embrace, the little girl. He saw the resilience of that fresh young life: its pride, its firmness. He saw how it must stoop and bend and _give_, if it would avoid the pains that waited it growing into the world. If it would win ease, it must lose--lose all that made it lovely! Lose its fine fresh sweetness. David pondered on this. Would that election satisfy him? Would it be well to see that loveliness gray away in price for the escape from pain? He heard his answer clear. At all costs the bravery of youth, the firm coolness of which her flesh was symbol--at cost of any pain, of all defeat!

A deceiving gladness came to David: a gratitude that he was still somewhat like that little girl.... Had they not smiled at each other?

XII

The train swung Tom southward from Chicago about the duned neck of the Lake. The sun broke at last in clear sky upon him. The everlasting smoke sank behind like dust of a departed battle.... Tom had the vision of the town of his childhood.

The train was swimming up the path of the sun. The world cut flat from the train’s stride like a sea from the prow of a racing vessel. The horizon swayingly scooped: trees low and faint in the shrill sky, nude in young leaves, lascivious in blossoms, almost bowled over by the roll of the world--and the blue belch of sturdier chimneys beyond, scattered half-acres of hell spewing soot and shadow over a scarred and flowered prairie. In his eyes now an old sick town....

The long street swooned under foliage. Trees crowded between the two rows of houses as if they had burst them apart. Under their arrogant verdure the little wooden boxes of men crouched and were smothered. A man came out from the dull pressure: he walked into the sway of the trees: he went forth to his toil: he was immersed in the redundance of fields.

Tom went back to the town of his childhood armed with his intelligence. He thought he saw with understanding. Through the window of the train, he found his face fleeing across the prairie. “I understand,” he whispered to himself.

“I understand the tyrannies that oppressed my people: the tyrannies that formed them. The vastness of the soil and of its fruit: the dying spiritual world my fathers packed with them from Europe, and into which they tried to cram--what new bursts of passion, what new world’s splendors! I see what treasure and promise were these fields and hills--and the little hands, the littler minds and tools with which to work them. Of course, there came blindness upon the dazzlement, penury upon their drunken spending, fear of the Spirit upon their rape of the Earth. What masters my fathers must have been not to have been mastered by America!”

Tom understood why the men of ripe New York were shrunken midges beneath the stuff of their buildings: and the still unuttered fate of Chicago: and why Chicago, with its long soiled lazy hands, had held his heart.

“I am of the West. I had forgotten--but I am of the West! To think that ten years of New York could have made me forget. Chicago claimed me!”

New York was a place of exile. There they whose lives were done or were denied builded State upon the principle of their death. New York was a gaunt, ghost City: a dwelling place of shadows that towered above men.

What was New York against this splendor of plains, against Chicago? wide crude child city with the loud voice and the playful heart, with the swift gait and the lumberly laborer’s mind? What was New York against the love of his discovered home?

Tom began to wonder what irony had drawn him Eastward.

“The promise of life?” he whispered to himself, “the promise of life?”

His chair was toward the window, he spoke to his reflected face and the fleeing plains. A knoll of green flashed past with a stream curling and in the shadow a clustered farm: the remembered scent of clover and the warm sweetness of new green life were a cloud over his mind.

“I wonder, does the lure of death come always disguised as a fulfillment? Perhaps, when a man takes his life does he hope to achieve it? Cornelia and I--God! how we were glad of the calculated pavements of Manhattan.” But surely, he had left death behind? Was he growing sentimental? What a strange mood he was in. His father, the dilapidated farm--life, that? Very well: law, the nervous flutter he called success in the city--life, that, more? He shook his head. He saw he did not understand after all.... And yet, America in Chicago--Chicago in the American plains--gripped him and called him as never before....

Chicago? where Industry, a dirty giant, flung and heaped its refuse upon the dwellings of men? He could not understand. But he felt a poignance--of symbol--in himself yearning Westward, yearning _backward_ against the way of the train to where America lay impassioned beneath the coming sun.

* * * * *

He stepped into New York, its life came to him through splinter of movement with a sharp pathos. The dust of their traffic were these men and women swirling slow: their impress upon the places they had built was naught. An air of enervation lay over the clefts of houses, seeped down into the channels of men.

Then Tom lost the sense of separation. The great Metropolis came like an iron cloak and made him invisible....

* * * * *

Out of the confusion of his life he saw some things clearly and aimed at them: he saw some things vaguely and these he avoided. He sensed that the vague things were the vital: were of the color and stuff of that confusion which was his life: and that the dear things were trivial and lying.

Marcia Duffield and King Van Ness were not yet engaged. A particular and naked problem. Tom feared the cynicism of the girl he had loved. “One thing, one thing alone can spoil this,” went his thoughts. “If she out of some mood abandoned her resistance. She might for spite, bravado, bitterness, what not? One such false gesture and Van Ness stops the hunt. He might possibly do an injury to himself: grow thoughtful for instance. But he’d never marry a girl that let him kiss her without a diamond ring.”

Laura Duffield held out her hand for his. “I am young yet. This is my only life. What am I doing with it?” Tom thought and clasped the hand of his friend and laughed--the lust of the Game, Van Ness, Stone and Company to be pried open, the delicious recalcitrance of Marcia to be tasted and crushed--and forgot.

“You are worrying about something? What is it?” At last he was conscious of Laura Duffield: his trivial words were over.

She was ageing. There was a drawn tightness about her eyes, a sag at her throat. It was a day on which she was not looking well. And looking well was coming to be an art, these years of life when art grows difficult. Debts. The incredible burden of holding up her head.

“Come and sit beside me, Tom.”

She was graceful. The couch was low. She sat ensconced in a corner, her outstretched arm hung in a flimsy sleeve, color of faded violet. Her skin like the sleeve was dim. Her eyes and the stones in her rings were bright.

“You are so quick to understand. I am going to tell you. I’m worrying about Marcia.”

“That won’t help us, you know.”

“Why can’t she make up her mind to love some one?”

Tom laughed. “What a lot of contradictions in a little sentence!”

“I don’t know--I don’t know what we may have to do.”

She seemed, after all, resigned. If Marcia could love no one, with her mind or without, let her stay single.

“She hasn’t accepted Van Ness yet?”

Laura Duffield shook her head.

Tom thought swiftly.

“Where is Marcia? Is she in? Tell her I am here?”

The mother arose and called the girl. Marcia came to the door, stood silent.

“Hello, Marcia. I came to see you, this evening. Not your Mamma.” He believed it. He wanted to be with her--all else was a pretext.

“Yes: and it’s lucky too,” Mrs. Duffield bustled to her desk. “I have a thousand letters to answer. Do be dears, and leave me alone.”

She was settled and her back was on them. She was looking better. Such confidence she had in Tom!

He followed Marcia. She went to the opposite corner of her room: near her cheval glass. She stood there. Tom closed the door, let his weight lean upon it, then seated himself in a broad arm-chair. Her whiteness was taut: her black hair and eyes were hot. A tremble swift and faint sang through her. She found she could not stop it. She moved and took up an ivory brush, she strove to let her trembling flow from her two hands to it. It was a very long time since Tom and she were alone.

“Marcia, please sit down.”

She complied at once: she flushed with anger that she had. Tom came and leaned over her. He looked obliquely at her great black eyes and the sharp perfection of her chin and the way of her white throat. He put his open hands on her hair, he turned her face upward toward him. He placed his dosed lips on her parted ones. His hands slipped down her face, her neck, her body. He stood away. She said:

“Why do you do that, Tom?”

“That is how I feel.”

“Don’t lie, Tom.”

“I am not lying, Marcia.”

Her eyes blazed up. It was a burst of bravery and challenge. They crumpled. She hid her head in her arms, she wept.

Tom put his hand firmly to the back of her head where the hair was caught away from the neck.

“Listen, Marcia, I am not lying. Listen, please, Marcia.”

She was silent, if she was still weeping. She did not raise her head.

Tom leaned and kissed her neck. The faint scent of her hair in his eyes.

Marcia straightened sudden. He met the attack of her gesture.

“Now listen, do you hear?”

She stayed balanced, looking at him straight: her eyes filled with an ironic hunger. So Tom wanted her. He began before she changed.

“You have never understood me, Marcia. I can’t blame you. I have never understood myself. I am honest with you. I have always been. Perhaps it was expecting too much, dear, that you should be able to stand that.... Marcia, I care for you now, as I did before, more than for any woman in the world.”

She dropped her eyes and began to finger the embroidery of her chair.

“I go through strange tides, Marcia. I cannot help that. Most men have hypocrisy to hide these ebbs. Most women have passiveness. I have neither. So I suffer.... Marcia,” he went on, “I do not want to lose you. But also I do not want to hurt you. Can’t I have you, without hurting you, Marcia! It was because I had not answered that question, that I forced myself away, forced myself cool.”

“What do you mean, Tom?”

He took a chair and brought it beside hers and seated himself. With a great calm he heard himself say:

“Marcia--will you marry me?”

“I should love to, Tom.”

“We could manage. I might even gradually start to pay off your Mamma’s debts. A little flat. Two weeks at the seashore. A cook....”

He spoke very seriously, with each item stroked the slender pearly hand he had taken.

Marcia withdrew it. “Don’t be a silly, Tom.”

He jumped up. He drew her after him: he held her close, kissed her throat.

“It is not impossible. I want you, Marcia.”

“You have had me.”

“I have never had you.” He thrust her away and walked to where she first had faced him. “You know I have never had you, Marcia. How can you--oh----!” He threw up his arms and stopped.

Marcia came closer. “Tom,” she said, “what do you really want of me?”

“Yourself....” He paused. “But without the sense that I am harming you. Yourself, without restraint.”

“Why did you leave me, Tom?”

“I’ll tell you. Despise me, if you will. I’ll tell you. Because I had a guilty conscience. Because I thought not alone of your future but of your mother. Because I seemed unable to be either your lover or your husband.”

She smiled.

“You’re not the sort of man one should marry.”

“Unfortunately I lack qualifications.” He put bitterness into his voice. She was sure--and glad--she had hurt him. “But civilized standards have nothing to do with love. I could love a woman, if only she were in a civilized way disposed of, so that we could afford the luxury.”

Marcia laughed and placed her hand back in his.

“Why have you never put things this way before?”

“Never put things this way before?” He was amazed. He burst out laughing. “Really, my dear, this is too ironic. I had given you up: I had given you a free hand to marry. I was prepared to lose you permanently rather than stand even temporarily in your way. But you did not marry. What did that mean? I didn’t know. How could I? But what should keep me from hoping? Any fool may do that. At least there was the circumstantial evidence that you had not married. That is why I came to-night, Marcia. I came to ask you to marry me. To plead with you. For the first time I was prepared to sacrifice you for my own desire--altogether. And now, when I am acting my most selfish self, for the first time you see the sacrificial mood that I was in before!”

She placed her arms about him.

“Strange contradictory dear.... You shall have me, dearest. Wait and see how soon. I think I never wanted you quite so much.”

“Marcia!”

“Don’t let your feelings blind you to reason, Tom. _Our_ feelings. You don’t want a wife. If I was rich--or you were--even then, would you want a wife? You want _me_. I you. Without alloy, dear. I’ll marry King.”

She smiled brightly.

“Do you know why I put it off? Because I thought it might mean real captivity. It must have, Tom--without you, there, to rescue me. Oh,” her face darkened, “I could not stand the thought of him without the antidote!” She was silent, brooding. Her eyes seemed full of the picture of her life with the dull rich man. It stifled her, blinded.

“I could not have stood it, Tom. I can now! Without you, it must have meant prison. Now, it means release--adventure. Yes!” She seemed to be emphasizing her resolve--bringing it clear before her eyes to see it. “You’ll see that I am game. I am almost happy.”

She sank down in her chair, and smiled at him; tears kept her from seeing how he smiled a bit wistfully away.

She needed to be silent. If for no other reason, for the tears.

She wanted to ask him simply: “Do you _love_ me, Tom? For Tom, if you did _love_ me....” She did not dare her question. She did not dare, even in her silence, to conclude it. She was afraid of his answer. Both for him and for her she was afraid. Both of his “yes” and his “no.” After all, her mind faded and veered, she had better marry King. It would be going on.

She was dry-eyed.

Tom took her hand and kissed it.

* * * * *

“What do I really mean by all these things I do?” When Tom was alone his question came often, came without answer. When he was with David, it hurt and these things he did were like ash in his mouth. But even the hurt was better than the reverberating silence. So Tom fled solitude.

But what of David? What did he want of David? Was he glad of him or bitterly, passionately sorry? Did he want him close or far away? His acts and moods, were they designed to hold or to repel him?

Tom was at a pass where all these things were chaos. The clear facts of living were straws in a heaving sea: straws he reached for. He went brightly about his profession. It prospered. But it became more and more a thing to hide from David. And all such things were more and more to be hidden from himself. Marcia was engaged. He feared her marriage which he had manoeuvered, vaguely, as the time of a demand he could not face. Also he looked forward to her marriage: the senses of him: his blood and his wits as well. Marcia’s marriage must be a function of both.