Part 23

He tried, close to David, to blot out his conflicts. He tried to realize that it was David himself who brought about the conflicts: and to pursue the rational conclusion that it was David who must be blotted out. His reasonings had the way of playing him into some dark dilemma. The forces driving him toward the constant agitation of his wits seemed all too clearly irrational and heart-sent. He could not isolate the verbs of his reason. If he did, he found them without subject, object--dead waifs of sound flecking a hollow mind. His reaching for the true drive within him left him a streak in imponderable Space, as if he had grasped a Comet. It was better to be confined to straws.

The schemings pertinent to Marcia, straws: the intricate work downtown, straws also: the being with friends, the satisfaction of his senses, straws again. The effect upon his mind--this passionate bestowal upon work he could not respect, upon pleasure he could not enjoy--was a slow desiccation. He was dry, cynical, erethic. He needed to rouse himself to heights of activation: his work called for no less. And the impulse rousing him was ever one he was cold to. A strain on his nerves. As in a man making himself drunk with drink he forces himself to swallow.

Needfully, since this vast disharmony gained on his life and since each part of it warred against the others, Tom came to bestow upon its various factors the quality of respite and escape. He needed a makeshift harmony in order to live. One instant of admitted anarchy in our minds means madness: in our bodies death. Since discord was there, it must be balanced with other discord. One group of his thoughts swelled, sagged out of place: he propped it into a semblance of poise with another hypertrophy. So discord propagates itself. Life went on.

David was there to cleanse him of the tastes of his worldly work, restore his self-respect, give him a vantage point against the scheming Tom of the day. His other friends--shallow, quick fellows ready to give what he asked and forward-coming, helpless women like Laura Duffield--were there to balance the reticence of David, ease his diseased hunger, throw him momentarily free of the strange dissatisfaction of his one satisfying friendship. The function of work was to sustain him, flush his energies until such time as he knew how he wanted to play. Marcia was compensation for that in him which could not look to David. David was compensation for that in him which was ashamed of Marcia. His hours with David and Cornelia were sleep in which he lived as he dreamed, won strength to face the waking: his hours of work were respite from the starved clamor of his dreams--a way of winning time from their insistence.

So his life stumbled and shook ahead. It held together. But it was textured of half-true, half-meeting elements. Its hazardous solution caused a continual ferment. The sign of ferment was his growing pain in a life stumbling, shaking ahead.

He walked down a Square with that lithe pacing stride of his. Half clenched fists swung at his side. There was a fairly constant strain in his eyes that lifted them in their sockets. With teeth tight set, he hummed a tune. Energy was forever thus escaping from him. When he did nothing, he fell at once into a state of preparedness for flight. He wanted to get away: get out. He could not. Life gripped him and he loved it. But much energy was born of this deep impulse to escape. He scattered it about. Much he applied--and applied to perfect the conditions of that very life from which his nerves rebelled. His vitality in talk, his speed of impressions, his plasticity of posture in the world grew from this energy. So that he shook along in a vicious circle. Much of his power to throw life into his work came from the secretions of his dissatisfaction with it: from the energy of his dissatisfaction. But life is full of such mechanical paradox. All of civilized life is such a one. Many a man succeeds in the conscious world because of the failure hidden in his heart.

Tom stopped. He was before a crumbling brownstone house: a rusting iron grille, a gate thrown out on useless hinges. A tiny plot of grass flanked the narrow walk. The soil was rocky: sediment of the City--cans, flakes of cloth, splint eyes of glass--choked the slim green. From the low stoop the house flared up, soft in decay.

Tom turned his back on the house. He looked North on the Square. In his eyes was a hunger for open places. His glance consumed the narrow breadth of the Park with its dapper walks and its trees. It broke impatient on the row of red-brick houses. It spent itself. Tom’s gaze narrowed. He turned and went up the stairs. They were dirty and dark--four flights. Odor of mildew and misspent lives seeped from brown plaster.

He struck his fist on the door. Behind him was a hall painted the color of stale chocolate. In the center of the fly-blown ceiling a sudden cupola, picked out in glass--green, yellow, blue. Sky came through dim and soiled.

A young stout fellow opened the door and gave a cry of pleasure: let Tom in.

“Hello, Rennard! Flora. Florissima! Company’s complete.”

Tom pressed Lars Durthal’s hand. “Hello, Lars,” he passed him.

A long narrow table spread in the square small room. The heavy mantel was ribald with knick-knacks of varicolored glass, purchased in useless shapes at Coney Island and Asbury Park. Their gayety, adance in the boxed mirrors of the yellow wood, seemed irrelevant above the table, with its high unlabelled bottles of red wine, its mounds of Italian bread, its platters of cervelat, tomatoes, sardelles. The table’s order was disturbed by its broken wreath of guests.

Most of the diners lounged already in their chairs. Between laughter and smoke they sent their eyes lazily toward the kitchen. They had begun with their wine.

“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” a slender fellow spoke, upon whose long neck poised a head remarkably round and small; within his face with its fat sanguine cheeks the eyes and mouth and nose took up an inconspicuous space.

“Good evening, Marquese.” Lagora was a nobleman: a dealer in marble according to his one report, in Italian oils and spices according to his other. A clever, shifty, cloudy fellow with hands like a girl’s.

Tom sat down with an air of temporariness beside him.

“Well, Dounia--comment ça va?” He leaned and placed a finger on the cheek of the woman across the table. Dounia Smith put down her glass. “I’ve no cigarettes.”

Tom placed a box in her expectant hand. They were enormous hands: gaunt, naked, acquisitive, with a wrinkle about the finger-joints that was sinister against the smooth calm of her wrists. Behind her hands, Dounia Smith rose diminished. She was tall, handsomely cut: her hair swept black and low over her temples: her eyes had a gray slant that offset the thin lips, the sharp tilt of her chin. When she lighted her cigarette she showed all of her teeth. They were white. But as the gaunt huge hand came near her face, the rest of Dounia Smith went into eclipse.

A man came up, neatly and drably dressed, with a red tie that flared against the pale primness of his face.

“Glad you’re here, Rennard. Business particularly boring, to-day. Fun particularly needed, to-night.”

This was Christian Hill--sedate, rebellious--a man of business who craved intoxicants of life. All his sentences sounded like telegrams. All his money, too sanely earned in a broker’s office, was at the disposal of his search for madness. He looked on Tom as his ideal. He would have sold his wife into slavery for a lust sufficiently great to make him commit the folly.

“I want to introduce you,” he beckoned toward a girl that had sat yonder beside him. “Madeline--this is Mr. Rennard--Miss Gross.”

She came sidling. She was richly clad, very blond, very powdered. Beneath the simper of blue eyes, the hot curl of placid lips and the ringlets of blond hair teasing her tiny ear, Tom saw that she was Jewish.

He took her tiny hand, gloved in fawn-colored kid.

“It is nice to have you here, Miss Gross. I hope our rough manners won’t shock you.”

She propelled herself a little nearer.

“Oh, please do, Mr. Rennard!”

“You want to be shocked, Miss Gross?”

Hill intervened. “But you can’t, Rennard. You don’t know my little Madeline.”

The little Madeline simpered and tapped her escort’s mouth with the back of her gloved hand.

“How do you know, Christian? Just because _you_ couldn’t.” Bending her body back, she threw her head back also. She gazed at Tom through the lashes of her half-shut eyes.

Durthal came up.

“Your place is there, old man. Between Lunn and me.”

“Good evening, Flora. Say, you have room for Markand? I made him promise he’d be here.”

A thick-set woman, with face incredibly composed and large bare arms crossed over the gray width of her dress, nodded to Tom and to the others.

“Good evening, Flora.” “Hello, Flora,” the greetings came. Flora did not budge from her place in the kitchen door. Hill dragged Miss Gross through the scatter of chairs.

“Oh, Signora Sanni,” he said, “I want to introduce my friend.”

Flora Sanni wiped her right hand slowly, methodically on her apron.

“Buena sera, Signorina.” She took the gloved hand, dropped it, turned about. Her eyes were steel. She had taken longer to wipe her hands on her apron.

Tom moved in Durthal’s power toward the nearer end of the table.

A young girl shut the door.

“Here you are,” muttered Lagora.

She nodded timidly to her neighbors--maliciously to Dounia Smith, a defensive malice--and sat down beside the Marquese. He drew close his chair. The two began muttering together. Lagora leaned forward. The girl bent back from the thrust of his mood and his body. She was a frail creature--a tissue of harried nerves with great black teeming eyes. Her hand tapped on the plate. She lit a cigarette, inhaled a great gust, emptied Lagora’s wine glass and then blew out the smoke. Her body was draped in a short tight smock of blue hung from her shoulders. Her tiny breasts stood up in it quite clear. Lagora’s brows worked up and down. Her big eyes sharpened and cut him. He looked at her twitching shoulders.

“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” she cried as she passed him. She threw up a diminutive hand. Her breasts bobbed.

“How are you, Lettie?” Tom, taking her hand, had the sense of Lagora smiling with snakish eyes. He passed on.

A lumbering boy got up, nodding and saying no word.

“Well, Darby?” Tom sat down. “I’ve not seen you in a week.”

“A long time,” synchronously growled the other. Tom heard him and laughed.

“And the painting?”

Tom and Darby Lunn were lost together in talk. From the table’s farther end Durthal saw them together. The laugh of Dounia Smith, the shrill sneer of Lettie tossing her heels, the mutter of Lagora were a wave, gathering, crumpling upon the calm of Signora Sanni. Durthal extricated himself from Hill and Miss Gross. He headed through the disserried chairs. Stretched arms reached for wine and tastes of antipasto. The evening splintered and swirled. Food would draw it together.

Durthal stood over Tom.

“Here, old man. Change over. You sit between us.”

Finding his seat, he also had the sense of haven beneath the spray and scatter of the room.

Of the three, Tom was the only one whose voice carried beyond them: laughing. Dounia Smith eyed him with a tilt of her head. A finger, like a talon, flecked her cigarette. Her brows were thin and straight like the stroke of a sharp pencil on hard paper.

Flora Sanni stood above the table, with a vast white bowl of _minestrone_. The crowd coalesced.

The table narrowed. The chandelier, relic of fluted brass and drooping crystal, took on the tawdry tone of office and gave its light, self-consciously, heatedly, like an old servant, too laden with memory and years to want to work for so crass a gathering. The carved clock ticked: a clatter of plates drew down bent necks, beading foreheads. Sharp streakings of sound ribboned the table: swathed it: covered it with a warm liquidity. Then the whipped undertone of selves seeped up again, lapped over the inorganic sound, deluged it, drowned it in angular surge of assertions.

The door gave a knock that was heard at last....

David had followed upstairs a pair who were held to slowness by the constant claim of the woman that she was too weary to go another step.

“Come along, Phoebe!” The man had a high straight back. He wore a soft collar that bared his neck. David observed that it was wiry and clean. The hairs were clipped high from it. David had time to observe. Whenever the pair came to a rest, he rested behind them. Something impeded his passing. Timidity in part. The disclosing thereby that he had overheard them, that they were moving too slowly. His own scarce unconscious resistance to mounting those stairs at all. He hated the place. But he had no reason to give to Tom. And Tom took offense at his not wishing to come.

“Why, dear man. Don’t you like Flora? I think Flora is splendid. Such poise! Or is the place too noisy for you. David? Davie, you must get accustomed to dirt!”

A vehemence in Tom that silenced David. Doubtless this was life, and life no thing to shrink from.

“But I do like Flora!” He could not add that he felt that Flora did not like him: did not seem to like any one who came there: nor the feeling that if she had known him different and uncomfortable, perhaps she would have liked him.

“Well, then!” said Tom.

The stout lady was sighing. “Why we ever come here, Jack! These stairs!”

“You know it is lots of fun, Phoebe. Go along now. You like it as well as I.” He spoke immaculate English, and urged her with a slap on her rump.

“Well, the people----”

“----the food?” he chuckled. “The mysterious bottom of Signora Sanni’s pot. One more hoist, old lady. Th--th--ere! Where else, pray, can one meet such a delightful assortment of bulls?”

“Don’t call them bulls, Jack Korn! Call them detectives.”

“Here we are, dear.”

David and they entered together.

“Korn, I _am_ glad to see you!” Tom reached over the table and greeted him. “How’s business?” He had nodded to David and Korn’s woman with a perfunctory politeness.

“Meet my dear friend, Mr. Korn,” he laughed. “Same profession as myself.” The three sat opposite Durthal and Tom and Lunn. Mrs. Phoebe Raymond was on one side of David. On the other sat Dounia Smith. All of them laughed, except David.

He looked at Korn. A big, athletic fellow, clad in somber serge. He had black hair and a significant nose.... Why had all of them laughed?

“I have never seen you here before, Mr. Markand,” said Phoebe Raymond.

“I--I come quite often.”

“Well, I don’t,” she looked full at him. “One gets so little time.” Her round face was pretty. But it was fat: its petite features were lost in flesh. Her bosom obtruded like a robin’s breast. David seemed to see, investing the round comeliness of her mouth and nose, layers of sloth and greed. A scaly dimness was already over the blue eyes. “I like small gatherings more, don’t you?” she confided. “One could get to _know_ a person then.” David had the sense that if he drank enough of the wine Mrs. Raymond would seem very pretty indeed.

He began to eat. Words pattered and burst about him. The food had an exotic charm. The air was full of heated eyes and bodies. Glances and edged remarks trembled like flung spears in the flesh of the women. David kept still and went on eating.

Phoebe Raymond tried to engage him in talk.

“My husband and I were in Maine at the time. Do you know New England, Mr. Markand?”

“Of course he knows it! Can’t you see it written all over him, Phoebe?” It was Tom drawing her away. “How dare you talk to my friend about your husband! Have you no sense of decency?”

The immediate half of the table was his. He played it like an instrument. His eyes were too bright and too hard, thought David. He had little to say to him. To Durthal and to Lunn, to the women on David’s side, to Hill even and Lagora, he had more to say than to David. Most of all to Korn. But he looked often at his friend--sharp glances while his attention swathed from right to left. David was enmeshed in his running comment: all Tom said seemed to run through him and knit him.

“It is hard not to be moral,” he said. “One is pushed so into good behavior.”

Jack Korn sat back smiling. He was a strong man. He was very quiet.

“What do you think of good behavior, Korn?” Tom asked him.

“It is as good a game as another.” He paused. “Surer.”

“But why should we want to be sure? Since we are already sure of death? Look at Dounia, there. She has never done a risky thing in her life. Run over her investments. Burton, Klein, La Soule--all good gold bonds. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, my dear. You remind me of Markand’s uptown relations.”

“And what are you crowing about?” Dounia retorted. “You’re as safe as an eel.”

“I have at least the good manners to be ashamed of it,” Tom laughed. “To hide it and even lie about it. I am gaining strength.”

He looked admiringly at Korn. “Here, old man, I drink to the logic--to the beauty of your life!” He held forth his wine glass.

Korn raised his to his eyes, nodded and sipped. Tom drained.

“Did you get that, Davie?” he said. “The contempt Korn showed in answering my toast? I do not blame him. I’ve never earned his respect. Think how he must despise _you_!”

Korn did not turn his head. Lunn grunted and smirked--in his plate. Dounia and Phoebe came to David’s rescue.

From Dounia: “I am sure Mr. Markand is br-raver, much b-raver than you!”

From Phoebe: “Jack, deny that you despise Mr. Markand.”

Tom drove ahead. “But I’ll earn your respect yet, Jack Korn. I may be earning it now....”

Christian Hill was nudging Miss Gross.

“He’s a wonder, is Rennard. You must get him. The other man, the one in the black suit, Madeline, _he_--he is----” Hill whispered in the young girl’s ear. Her fork clattered: her little eyes lost their dim cunning: became bright and large.

“Really?” she gasped. She gazed at Korn and was speechless. Her hand went to the old bead bag in her lap.

Talk like a comet drew to the head of Tom and Korn. They held it: they swung it: it was a dazzle of gyre to the jerk of their directions. At the farther end of the table, Signora Sanni came and went: sat imperturbable. She was a woman of more than forty. Disillusion was sweet in her firm, strong face. It was a preservative. It did not keep her pretty, it kept her content. Her features had set. It was as if they had thrown away their woman’s tricks of blandishment and surprise: as if they had sold their power to impassion at the price of passion itself. At her side were Lagora and Lettie Dew. These three alone were intact from the ebullient pull of the other end of the table. Lagora was incapable of an objective interest. He ate seriously, he spoke to Signora Sanni, he nagged Lettie. The eyes of Miss Dew wandered from their circuit between her plate and the ceiling, to David. For a moment, their gaze softened; something swam in her eyes, something stirred like a cloud’s rift in her mind. With a violent gust of smoke--for she smoked incessantly--she blew it away.

“But I maintain,” Tom said, “that the law makes the game all the more delicious. The more rules, the more brains to overturn them.”

Korn smiled and nodded: “Goethe put it--‘In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.’”

“What does that mean?” Tom was held up.

“Just about what you are saying,” replied Korn.

“Well, then, Goethe is right.” Every one laughed except David.

Tom raced: “I like obstacle races: I like hurdles. Society is made up simply of men who run flat, like you, dear Korn, or go in for steeple-chasing, like myself. Now, I have a friend--tell me, Korn, what do you think of this for manipulation ...?”

It was amazing, thought David, how little Korn said for one who held such sure attention.

“----with the girl married, he controls her life. Do you see? Of course he must pay his minimum--let us say his taxes--for that. But say what you want, love or no love, there’s always about the same ratio of satisfaction in a love affair. Eh, Dounia?” he baited her. “Come, Dounia, tell us for once. Down with the veils. Is there so much difference whether you love the man or not? I am convinced that woman’s pleasure is utterly subjective. Who gives it to her is of no consequence--unless she lets herself be imposed on by Society’s mandates, standards, sentimentalities. Won’t you enlighten us, Dounia?”

She looked at him with a defensive sharpness. How did he guess how women felt? how utterly subjective passion was--at least in her? Phoebe also stirred back in her chair. His arrows were scattering too near. How could he tell--he was peering mischievously at her--that she strove often to forget her man in order to be happy with him?

“You see, she won’t tell. These women who think that being dumb is being secret. As I was saying, he controls the lady. And she controls her husband. And since he is high in power in the world downtown, my friend controls that also. No prettier, no more outlawed game could be imagined. I maintain it is pretty enough, Korn, for your praise.”

Korn chuckled. Tom raced on.

David had the sense that in a circling way he was the goal of Tom. Tom threw out flaring lines, struck here, flung there, with himself as center of his operations.

He lost this sense. It was replaced by the poignant one that Tom ignored him. If anything remained of the earlier impression, merely that the avoidance was planned. Tom paid more heed to every one in the room! His attention was flattering and was canny. He baited Dounia, but Dounia could not bait him. Durthal and Lunn were subsidiary strings that reënforced his theme: and the women. He wove his complex music with the lives and thoughts of all those present. And when he noticed David, it was to prod him--to hurt him.

Then, still another sense. David began to feel himself separate from this noisy element he was immersed in. He put forth spiritual fingers to explore it. He drew his shredded findings in; he began to explore himself.

He felt a hazardous balance, swung safe from fall by an impalpable thread, between himself and this room: himself and Tom. Even the gaslights, naked and stiff and hot, were elements of Tom. He was on the other side and was alone. But there was a joy in the experience of separation. He was apart, impregnable. He could poise somewhat the laughter, the surge, the flection about him; arrive at himself.... Was he impregnable after all? Why, then, hurt?