Part 24

... Wine soaked soft these men and women--these prisons of sense. Sense swirled unhindered upward, danced with spiraling cohesion beneath the gasjets....

The door pushed open again. A man, dull shouldered, with heavy head and tread and unlit eyes, came in and nodded and sat down at the end of the table beside Korn. With the door wide for a moment a strange world stood in the hall beside the room: a world, cool and hidden.

He was also an accustomed guest. He came with heavy breath as if each breath lifted a weight of flesh against some obstruction in his gullet. He nodded dully, with a brighter gaze alone for Tom.

“Too bad you weren’t here earlier,” said Tom. “The law needed your defense.”

“So?” he was dully aware. His eyes peered out, like a big dog’s, disturbed at feed.

“I think Officer Murphy might do well to ar-r-rest you all,” said Dounia.

“Oh, you wouldn’t have him do that,” cried Hill, with a slightly trembling voice. “It is such fun breaking all the Commandments.”

“So long as glasses are not broken,” said Tom.

“How is work, Murphy,” asked Korn with a serious full face whose irony was far beyond the detective’s wit.

“Oh, slow ... _glp_. Ain’t much ... _glp_ ... doin’.” Murphy looked up and down the table, interested at last, lacking something. “Say, Flora,” his gross voice thrust out. “A little of the red?”

The gathering paused momentarily about the intrusion: swirled about it. He was a gap in its midst, a load on its vital spirit. His fleshly dullness must be smeared over with raillery and laughter. The crowd began to digest him. Murphy disappeared.

His heft, now dissolved, was an added strength in the room’s swelter.

Tom rode the wave of broken personalities and whipped it and steered it. Lagora forgot his duties toward Lettie and tried to make love to Flora. He flattered her. He owed her money. He thought it might be well not to have to pay for his dinners. Signora Sanni flicked off his words like flies. She was learning the unlikelihood of being paid. And Lettie Dew, released, allowed herself to gaze full and long at David who was back in the storm taking its breast, distinguishing no thing. Phoebe was moist and breathing hard. She was safe, however, beside Korn. Her sense of safety crowned with smugness her bibulous affection.

“I believe truly,” she said to David, “we should be going.” She had said this over and over. It gave her the excuse she somehow wanted for finishing each succeeding glass of wine. She spoke measuredly. She was passionately anxious to have David know she was more the lady than Dounia Smith or Flora.

Lettie leaned over and smiled at David. Very suddenly. David smiled back. Lettie scowled. David was hurt. As soon as he looked away, her eyes were once more on him.

Miss Gross, cool, unliquored, chuckled and took the varying scene; she wondered why Mr. Rennard evaded her diagnosis. She knew that later, Hill would try to kiss her. He would take her home in a cab for no other purpose. She was debating whether she wanted to be kissed by him, or no. It might be fun. He was a married man! There he was pendulous, at her side. He looked down more daring at her light-lashed corsage. How far dared he be mad--was Madeline worth madness? The price----: He was dismayed to find himself sobering under his question: deciding against it.

“Damn it!” He jumped to his feet and brandished his glass. “Let’s be--let’s be----” his voice died down: “----free souls, to-night.”

He found his seat limply. It was his tragedy to be sane. This Madeline Gross--pretty though she was--was not yet the creature for whom he expectantly and religiously waited: not yet the love for whom he was to abandon his wife and child, with whom he was to be lost in the sacrament of irreparable Folly. Not yet. Perhaps never! He was sober. He put a bottle to his lips and emptied it. It gave him a stomach-ache. He began to recall that Madeline lived far uptown, and that a cab would cost a considerable lot of money.

The night was mellow and soft. It grew smeared with the sweat of wear: hard with broken clusters of decay. It was over....

* * * * *

Tom and David walked homeward in silence.

David knew one thing, and it hurt: Tom had been showing off to the man called Korn. He had one question. At last he asked it:

“Who is Mr. Korn?”

Something quailed in Tom. He took his answer, flung it brutally against his quailing.

“Korn?” He was looking ahead, far ahead. “Korn--why, Korn is a pickpocket.”

There were no more words. They went down the hall of their home: each entered his room.

Tom closed the door.... It was very white and very quiet and clean. He sat on his bed. Resting his chin in his hands, he went on looking ahead, looking far ahead. Seeing nothing. The alarm-clock was obtrusive with its tick-tack-tick. The window was open from the top. A faint breeze made the white mesh curtains stir. Tom felt a soiled self sitting on the bed, felt soiled feet on the tidied floor. Tom felt a desecration.

He was up. He was almost like a somnambulist. He was in David’s room. They were looking at each other.

“I have done nothing. You fool, acting as if you were guilty!” he said to himself.

“Yes, Tom?” David did not understand the stillness.

Tom was in conflict. “Are you sure--are you sure you are not guilty?” Words cried to be spoken. He had none.

“Don’t be shocked, Davie,” he spoke at last. “One must meet all sorts----”

“I am not shocked. But it is strange. He seemed so intelligent a man.”

Tom pounced, with passion of relief.

“He is intelligent, Davie! That is life. You don’t know how life is lived in New York. There are no sharp distinctions, Davie, between criminals and honest men....” He stopped. That sounded wrong. He plunged in, to make it right. “--- What I mean is, the ways allowed by the law and the other ways--there are conventions, Davie. Now-adays, to get along, a young man must break in, must break in somehow. Strictly speaking, that is never quite a righteous----” He stopped again. David looked with gentle eyes: was Tom pleading, was Tom pleading for Korn or for another? Tom’s rage came sudden, a birth of weakness....

“Look here,” he attacked him, “what a prig you sometimes seem, man! What do you know about life? You who have always gone a greased path, sliding into fortune! Do you think all men have uncles to do the cheating and the robbing for them?”

David’s fists closed. He held himself.... By God, was Tom right?

Tom felt his victory. He was enraged still more. He struck again. “If we all had the fat lap of your aunt to coddle us, or the pure lips of your cousin to teach us love for nothing! Perhaps you think that any man who hasn’t some one else to lay the dirt for him had better stay under? A lot you know about life.”

“But Tom----”

“Look about you. I don’t apologize for Korn. He is what he is. He is the typical social being. Nakedly. The rest of us think we are the pretty names we are called by.”

He stopped. David was silent. A great fear ran through Tom.

“When you learn, David, to be a man, to give a little understanding--you may deserve the friend you have.”

Still David looked at him, looked beyond him, searched for a reason. Tom went out. It was as if the air that enveloped David sucked him backward.

Once more Tom was in his room. Its clear white calm was unbearable to him. He would be less harried in the dark. He shut off the gas. He flung himself upon his bed. He could not bear the darkness. He could not bear the light. Doubtless, next door, David was quietly taking off his clothes. Slow, slightly puzzled--unbearable David! Oh, he could murder! He jumped up. Something dim, something gray, something dirty and simple and soft: this was his need. He rushed down to the street....

* * * * *

Reaction.... Tom was contrite. He watched David sharply, aloofly even, then did some good thing for him. Some intimate thing none but a loving eye could have devised: and with a quiet tact. So there was David more bewildered than before. But not David alone. He understood no less than Tom. The storm of their relationship seemed moving toward no issue.

David was sick--a little sick.

“You shan’t go downtown, to-day, do you hear!” commanded Tom. “This is a busy day for me, but if you don’t give me your word you’ll stay home, I’ll stay home myself to make you.”

He went out and telephoned to David’s office. He came back with a doctor. Tonsillitis.

Tom nursed him. Mrs. Lario found there was really little she could do. David had an assortment of dainties to sip. “This won’t hurt your throat.” He had books. He had a splendid array of cushions architected for his back to prop him for reading.

Mrs. Deane came and found her nephew lying happy in the large front room.

“More sun,” Tom explained. “It was no job moving the bed.”

“It is wonderful, child, how Mr. Rennard nurses you. I would no more dream of interfering.... You do not appear to be very busy downtown, Mr. Rennard.”

Tom laughed. “Oh, no, Mrs. Deane. Nothing to do at all. But do not give me away.”

David understood.

“Supposing work does go to hell? It won’t. But supposing it did? Pooh!”

David could not forget such things.

Nor, in their light, could he forget Tom’s accusation that _he_ was selfish: that _he_ had no idea of service. This one rift there was in the harmony of Tom’s helping: a certain flavor of rebuke as he served, a certain stress and reminder. “Here is how _I_ serve my friend.” Yet David could not be sure. The rebuke he felt in Tom’s ministrations for his own lazy selfishness might altogether lie in his own guilty conscience. What did he ever do for Tom? So far as he could see, what did he ever do for any one at all? His life was a sliding down greased paths. Fortune or no fortune, what hold had he on the way? Lying there on his cushioned couch, he found himself wishing Tom had not come back so soon from work in order to see how he was. And wishing this, he felt his guilt the more....

In flashes, like blaze in an empty sky, the emptiness of David came to him and filled him and gave him great hurt. Whither indeed was he going, and where was he? If Tom was querulous, irritable, weak, if Tom scoffed at his relatives, refused to be serious about his friends and would hear no word of his loves, what was David to complain? His relations were nothing to Tom: he knew too well what earthy ones they were. Had David respect for his own brief amours? Was there one of his relationships with man or woman that was noble, that lifted him up? Was there one, who worked for him and served him, as Tom did? Tom was faulty. Yes. But David was a monster in that he seemed to partake neither of the virtue nor of the sin of man. He was a trimmer. He was clamped down in some chill Limbo. Knowledge came to him, even now, of his idle and empty ways, like lightning in a lazy summer night: flashing and gone, muttering afar, doing no work upon him.

He was a spiritually sprawling creature. He had no coördination. If his heart was touched, how did his mind respond? If his mind, where was the response in deed? It seemed to David that what he did wore away the energy of his mind, dullened his heart: and what he felt and thought became impediments to those acts which his living called for. He was a loose-bound bundle of life, rolling down a chute....

In the fall, Constance Bardale telephoned to him.

“I am back. When can you come to see me?”

It was always hard for David to meet a sudden situation on the wire. He needed a face and a warm smile to talk to. He was afraid he had been dull in greeting Constance. For so long a time he had not thought of her at all!

“Then, I’ll expect you Saturday to tea.”

She had not suggested an evening. The choice of the formal hour meant nothing to David.

“I must make her know--somehow I must make her know I can’t go on.”

David said this to himself, going to see her. He did not recall that he had failed to write since the apparition of the little girl in the car. The poignancy of that vision was faded. But it had left its mark. In its loveliness it had blighted certain ugly things in his heart: disappeared. The condition whence sprang the ugly things was still in David. He was not cured. He was merely bitterly aware that he was not well.

Constance Bardale appeared different. Her new Paris gown was strange and stiff and be did not like it. She was far away within it. Even her voice had the apartness of alien adventures.

She took his hand swiftly and manoeuvered him into a chair.

“It is good to find you so flourishing. What _do_ you get out of New York air to make you flower so! I thought of you particularly in a little Normandy town where we stopped with friends. A Napoleonic Baron--very plebeian that, for France. There was a gardener--of the château--who had the one true aristocracy. A big brusk fellow. How he adored his flowers and his vegetables! He reminded me of the way you are sometimes.”

David thought how hard it was going to be to break the news of his resolve to Constance. It dawned on him now that it might be unnecessary. Of a sudden, “She has decided for me!” he announced, amazed, to himself.

He looked at her. Once more she meant discovery. For months, now, she had been far from his senses, but his mind had thought her close. Now his mind knew her far away, and his senses clamored.

They were at a point far anterior to their first warm meeting. No hint of intimacy: no hint that it had ever been: no credible sign that it could ever be. She talked fluently, her words and gestures took on for David the nature of a sinuous veil, a blank blue of smiling nugatories behind which the woman he had known retreated.

Apart from her now as he had never been, he wanted the warmth of her nearness. His resolution to break off was a dim thing. He could not understand it. He sat there and had forgotten it. This helped not at all. Her way with him was beyond the mutability of a resolve. It seemed a natural condition.

It was as if she had looked on him never closer before. She was a lady with all the aloofness of her sex: not one to let him fling off her clothes, let him lie beside her. The hope was monstrous of what once, without hope, had been fact. It was over....

In his chagrin he could not find the comfort even of supposing that she had sensed his decision and simply gone before him. He could not lave his hurt in the thought that his long silence, with her in Europe, was perhaps an introduction she had understood to her own course. He was like a child: so aware of his own grievance, and of the sanctity of his mood, he had no knowledge of hers. Like a child he came away, routed, fascinated, fingering over and nursing his several hurts.

But, looking back, what humiliated David most was not these bruises to his pride--was rather the dispatch with which he had recovered from them. Neither the revelation of the little girl had held him, nor the shaming lesson at the hands of Constance: neither inspiration nor defeat. He had a slow pervading sense of his unchastened nature....

He dined with Caroline Lord. No rare occurrence; but this time Constance was no more, and for the first time Miss Lord said:

“Let’s try to amuse _ourselves_ for a change. What do you say? Don’t you think it’s a confession of no resources to be always going to the theaters? You have never been to my apartment. Come and see _me_, to-night.”

They walked up a residential avenue east of Central Park, where the cars swerved swift and remote between sedate, slow houses. They climbed a high brownstone stoop. They passed through a corridor echoing faintly with their steps.

She lighted a table lamp. Color spread out from the emerald-silk shade above a tidy stack of magazines, showed the room close and impeccably neat. Each chair was in its place. The broad couch with its upstanding cushions was smoothed of wrinkles. Gray curtains stood discreetly before tall windows.

It was a cool room, methodically pitched. David found himself not terrified by its neatness. Miss Lord seemed to be glad when he sank down on the couch and rumpled it. He let his head lean against a steel-engraving on the wall. They both laughed. A new Miss Lord.

She was letting David talk. She was silent, so the “moral tone” was silent. Her body spoke and after all it was a lovely body.

David chatted. He was out of himself. His words came frictionless. His words slowed down. He was aware of the stimulus that had taken him out of himself, that had made him chatter.... Caroline. Lord. He saw her. Hands rested in her lap: white strong hands in a wide strong lap. A body luxuriantly full: it was strong. A wave of light from the lamp touched her hair, made it a glow in the room.... She had without words a maternal comeliness: she looked down, while he spoke, at her hands with a girlish reserve.... David got up and kissed her.

She flushed and did not respond. He kissed her several times.

He was up to leave, she stood close under him. She was warm. A certain discomfort kneaded her firm body, cloying it. She took his hand, looked down at it, she looked up to his face, not quite meeting his eyes. She squeezed his hand and pressed it against her waist. She said:

“You can’t really care for me, David?”

So David knew he did not really care. But she had one charm: the joy there was in bringing a timid flush upon so strong a body.

He came frequently. He delighted to kiss her. Caroline Lord loved to be kissed.

She had not planned this. She had in a deep way planned nothing in her life. But she had the gift, as each new fact dawned on the rim of her world, to be convinced that she had ordered it. Since David was there,--the nephew of Mr. Deane--and since her senses loved his kissing her, she planned a marriage.

The unfortunate circumstance was this: by the time she had hatched her plans and cleared the way in her mind, she had already tasted the delight of being kissed by David. And this was unfortunate because she felt as part of her campaign toward marriage the need of circumspection in such advances as kisses.

David noticed no change at first. Miss Lord feared to go too fast. She had a sickening sense that she might lose all in her effort to gain all. She found herself shamefully willing to temporize, and to enjoy the evils of the day.

But as he held her in his arms, her little shifts began.

She said to him: “David, you do care for me?”

“David, if I felt that you could misunderstand why I let you kiss me, oh, David,--it would kill me.”

“David, what is going to become of us? I feel that we must be doing wrong.”

David began to feel how she was indeed asking him a question. She was expecting something of him. He must give her an answer.

He said to himself: “She wants me to propose to her. Oh, I am sorry!” His passion was gone.

He was too kind abruptly to stop his visits. It would have been the kindest thing to do. But David was not egoist enough to know it. He came less often, and left her alone. He tried to talk to her. He realized how little talk there had been in the happy visits: how fully those evenings of delight had been evenings of kisses. The talk wearied him: the “moral tone” was pervasive and obtrusive.

“Give! Give yourself!” her blood cried against her temples.

Had she given, she might have won at least a part of him. David was in no state to resist self-bestowal. Unknown to himself, he was wandering through life, seeking the life that would exchange with his. Nowhere had he found it; without vision of that he would be ever tantalizingly remote from capture.

He was swollen in her senses, now that he held himself stiffly away in his chair and listened to her words. Her power to take-in flooded her body and mellowed it, left dim her eyes whereby to see him. She saw his sweet heaviness beneath the drab of his suit. She had a sense of her fingers running through his hair, of being drunk with him. And it was possible! The room was quiet and suppliant. The lamp was dim for such secrecies. She fought against herself, and passion ran through her, melting her, drenching her, like tears.

But she was a lady. She had not reached thirty years to be seduced by a boy who would not marry....

His visits filtered away: ceased. Again he invited her to an occasional lunch. In his heart, from it all, there remained chiefly self-rebuke. He had not been a gentleman. He had kissed her with casual flippancy: she had not understood. Why, he wondered, was he so superficial in his way with women? Why was their hold on him so slight? This was not love. Tom must be right, and love did not exist. Friendship was the deeper, lovelier passion.... At times, he recalled the little girl in the car or his mother....

* * * * *

An added year upon the emptiness of David.

He had a dream. He was in a pit--or was it a well? He groped round and round its circular bottom. He looked up. Far beyond his eyes was a dimness he knew was Light. It hurt him to look up. It made him dizzy. It made him tremble. He groped round and round.... Then, he stopped. Quite still. The bottom of the pit swung up and struck against his eyes. Tom lashed him from behind with a whip. “Go ahead!” Tom muttered. David faced about. The well began to swing maddingly around with shattering strokes like a vast piston. The bottom where he groped swerved up, went up, high, high. He had the sense of a terrific altitude. The well was upside down. He was tumbling, rushing down the well. Beneath him, infinitely far, he saw the dimness he knew was Light....

David awoke: horror crept over all his flesh. He clutched his bed. He lay there stabbed by every mutter of the night.