Part 26

The pall lifted that was over his great hurt, he knew how he was suffering. The world had been clear--their room--and he in cloud: it had been like a shrill close lake under a hidden sky. Now all else was dim save the burning sun of his hurt. The letter was from their sister, Ruth: it told of the death of their father.

Tom hid his face, he buried also his hard hands in the cushions. That he might clench his fists and his teeth, unseen. Cornelia placed her hand on his shoulder. She was torn by his weeping.

He righted himself. His eyes were burned with tears. Cornelia sat beside him. She took his hand. She placed his hand to her lips.

“Dear Tom!” She was trying to smile. Instead of the smile, came tears to her also. She turned away her face, struggling, not understanding.

“I am not weeping for father,” said Tom. “I am weeping for ourselves.... So are you!”

Cornelia gave way. She also hid her face in order to give way. Tom, stroking her hand, looked beyond them: from the sun of his hurt into the dim world.

XIII

Cornelia loved to sit by her open window and look out.

She had the need of seeing the City clear: a cold pattern. Her own mind was chaos and she saw no help to crystallize the swirling problems that consumed her. Like one who in great heat wins comfort from vision of cool waters, she thought of the City as a design, carefully plotted out.

It was not easy. Looking beyond her house, with the street swarming in her eyes and the battlemented roofs surging above her head, she was dim in revery. In the dimness, the City lost its geometric outlines. It veered in and out of her grasp like a delirious dream: its streets were parabolas, freighted with teeming particles of life which each had a centrifugal direction. It all was a frangent swarm, knotted, heaving upon itself, forever ashift. She saw it a monstrous replica of her own mind: there was no relief.

She struggled with it. She said to herself: “What is so regular as the streets of New York?” When she dispelled her inchoate vision, also there was pain. For now she had the sense of streets cut livid through human lives: each street was a sharp thrust and heaped about it mounds of desiccated bones.

At last Cornelia shut the City out. She sat in her little rocking chair with a candle glowing, and huddled upon herself as if her pains were a swinging swarm about her. With hidden eyes she came to a dim world of thought.

She had never needed to find the word for what she felt toward David. Often, she needed to say to herself in self-assertion: I am a woman. Her life brought doubt of that. Were women supposed, like her, to live alone and work, and have no home, and have no one to care for? Her instinct despaired often of the life she gave her body and her mind. In protest, sometimes it would speak: am I a woman? But here was a harmony so deep it required no voice outside itself: in what she felt toward David. Long since it was an atmosphere: a wide world she fed in or starved in: howsoever, lived and would died in. She did not say to herself: I am in the world. She did not speak to herself of her own self with David. Endlessly, now, she worried about him, asked herself how she could help him. Still more frequently, she asked herself how she could save him. And in her next question: Save him from what? she was already deep in her tangled problem. She was like one who lived at the edge of a dark forest: whithersoever she went, with a step there she was in it. Its tangled shadows were always at her side.

Cornelia could understand, could also not understand. She had the sense that David suffered: suffered with her brother. She had the instinct of some struggle hidden between them, and of danger for them both. She knew not what it was. So it was horrible: it was like the nocturnal stirring of unknown life in her forest. She knew it was not merely the worldliness of Tom, his efforts to make David worldly. She knew how eased she must have been to believe it was no worse. But touching upon this, the terror still prowled at large. She had no hold upon her terror.

It was years now, growing on her like the loom of a Curse. It blackened and dried her life. She lived with it. All of her being was a shrunken point, veering blindly about in order to forfend some visitation so obscure and vast that she was nothing before it. If it was fearful that she knew nothing to bring her comfort, it was fearful as well that she knew nothing to knit her fear. She was a little swirling point under a sky that was black.

Sudden words came, like jagged movements in her mood. She said: “It is not for me that I am miserable. I do not want him for myself. God knows I have no hope of him for myself. It is not that.... God grant it be true that under this all, it is not merely that I want him for myself.... Oh, God grant it be only this! No other danger. I will face that. How gladly then I will give him up!...”

She buried her head in her arms, she prayed: she knew not what to pray for. She had the sense of an unholy loneliness, of praying to herself. She sprang up, wide-eyed, looked at her long, transparent hands: she said aloud: “Why am I alive?”

A thought came sweeping and cleansing: she was like a sea torn by swift winds, now suddenly a sheet of rain came down and smoothed it, soothed it. So a thought came glancing and offered peace.

“I do not have to live,” it said. And that in her which alone she did not question, which alone needed no words since her whole life was its Word, gave answer.

“No: what of him? With David in trouble, I must at least be here.”

Once more she was a sea churned by the winds of her dilemma.

But at least she had the faith that it was good for David that she should live. No faith this. Rather the matrix of her life--the hollow of the world in which lay her sea, however restless it beat....

* * * * *

Through the City walked Tom. He and his thoughts were a nimble line parting the City. Through the warm weather and the thick crowds of men and women he cut. Past the great loads of stone, he made his way. He was in Cornelia’s room; it was as if his path had left a wake--half fire, half blood--where his thoughts simmered and soaked into the living City.

“Cornelia,” he said to her, “what is there wrong with us?”

She looked at him. She loved him. She was glad always to be with him. Why did he not come back to her? In that way alone could she save him. If he stayed where he was----

“Let us cheer up, Tom dear. We’re depressed. I wouldn’t have thought that father’s death could depress us so.”

“You know better than that!”

“Is there anything more wrong with us, Tom, than with the world?”

Tom smiled wanly.

“How like a woman that is. However deep we rot, if the world rots as deep, no matter? You women accept the world.... Cornelia, that thought which to you brings consolation, would make me desperate.”

She said: “Perhaps we have not found ourselves, yet, Tom.”

And he: “Father’s death has suddenly set me to thinking where we are: and you to feeling.”

“I am not thinking of father. Ruth’s letter made me think far more of Ruth. Poor wasted Ruth. And Laura--bitter, sick Laura. I think of them.”

“Are they the only victims, Sister?”

Cornelia was pale. She drew back in her chair as if Tom threatened to strike her. Tom leaned toward her and with a quiet voice went on:

“Cornelia,” he said, “Father is dead. The father we revolted from and left. Tell me, Sister, how have we improved upon him?”

There was a silence. There was calm, very deliberate in Tom. He was smoking a cigarette. He took the red-tipped toy and held it before his eyes and looked at it; he blew on it with his half-parted lips. His lips were very hard against his teeth. The burning tip of the cigarette flared for an instant under the draught, burned more ash.

“Is not that the question which haunts us, Cornelia?”

She had no word for him. She felt he was unjust and cruel. She was helpless under his mood. Always in the past, she had been able--the sister, the mother in Cornelia--to veer him from himself and from herself when his mood went shattering. She had been wise and poiseful. Now she lay quivering with him, underneath his words.

“We don’t talk very often, do we, of father and the past? I wonder why we avoided them. Were they not the scene of our great Victory? Where is our pride, Cornelia?” He was deliberate and slow: his irony stiff like a rod.

“Just think,” he said, “what we left: what we overcame! Father! He is dead now. His remains--all of them, including Ruth and Laura--lie rotting on the Farm. We should be able to make some sort of estimate of what he was....”

She wanted to stop him. She wanted to know. Tom was right. Let them make some estimate of what they were.

“... a man whose blood had turned to poison.... Do you remember how he used to beat his daughters? The thing to remember in that is that he loved it. He had one successful daughter: Laura: she loved it also. And the world we lived in, Cornelia. Few children are brought up in so real a world. We alone had no illusions about America. We knew that in America, quite as elsewhere, only the few were to be saved. The rest were damned. We knew that the deeds of the masses were damned deeds here, quite as in Europe. Yes:--were there illusions about what he told us of the Revolutionary Fathers? or the Pioneers? We were wise children. And the reason was simply that Father taught us to see the truth. Have you ever thought of that? He taught us better than he knew, himself. For Father saw through the real world: he saw what a cold and lustful monster it all is. But he had his way of refuge. He had his God who had predestined him to heaven. Blessed Father! He had his revenge, for there was always the same God damning the irritating mob to hell. For his sake, Sister.... Do you see what I mean? Father gave us his knowledge for weighing facts, which means that he gave us his disillusions about Earth. But we did not stop there. We turned that same power against his own fairy-tales. God went, heaven went, hell went also. All that remained was the Earth that he had taken from us....”

Tom was silent. He smoked measuredly. He went on:

“Father was a happy man: he had a place to go to, from this desecrated world. Father was a strong man: he had his God. Where is our God, Cornelia?”

He sprang up. His eyes flashed. Deep anger was with his hands above his head. He sank down once more, and dropped his cigarette.

“We have no gods,” he said. “We have lost the old one. We have won no new ones.”

He smiled with the same hard half-parted lips. “I am not sure that we were so very wise. All the searing and desecrating vision that Father gave us of this reality was mere preparation for his Faith. He and his kind helped desecrate the world in order to enjoy their heaven. Without his heaven, is this reality he gave us altogether truth? Where are we with it? What is an abortion in relation with a life that is fully born? We rebelled; we left him and his blows and his hell and his God. We took with us the corroding poison of his blood. Were we not fools, Cornelia?”

“But, Tom, what else could we have done?”

“Nothing, of course.”

“Then, perhaps----”

“Be brave and honest, for once! A little more like father. His souls in hell could also not have done otherwise....”

“Tom! I won’t believe....”

He cut her short. “Very well, then: what _will_ you believe?”

She was silenced. His smile was over her, a hateful bitter triumph.

“That is it, precisely. Don’t you see? What _will_ we believe, Cornelia?”

He came and lifted her out of her chair. They sat down on the couch. His hand was very gentle on hers. He kissed her.

“We are neither the old nor the new, Sister. I sometimes think we are nothing. We are not happy. We are not strong. We have no gods at all.”

“We are unhappy, Tom.”

He looked at her fiercely.

“Are we that?” he asked her. “Have we the strength to be unhappy? To remain unhappy? Oh, how I wish I could believe that!”

He was grasping both her wrists. He dropped them.

“No,” he said. “It’s a lie. We are nothing. We are not even martyrs. I with my Law--my successful rotten Law. You with your paltry, remunerative Art! We are on the way. Something is on the way, through us, perhaps, through the wilderness of life. We are they who shall fall by the wayside.”

He looked over his shoulder, out of the window. The night was a blue haze, deep and far. It was streaked with the murmur of men, with the glow of a million lights. A tremor ran through him like the pulse of blood, and came about them, seated in the room.

“Let us face that, Cornelia....”

“But Tom:--in what you said--that is faith of a sort. You spoke of a wilderness to go through. Of a way. It must lead somewhere. There must be something else?”

“For us?”

“Perhaps not for us.”

“I should like,” Tom pondered, “to have some Church in which to perform a service for my father.”

She looked at him close. His head was down. She took his face in her hands and touched his shut eyes with her lips.

“Dear Tom! Don’t I help?”

There was a great hope in her. If she could find him again: hold him again! Tom, her first child....

He was searching her with eyes her lips had opened.

Her thoughts ran on. Dimly she felt the peril in her thoughts, running along.... No, Tom was not her child. Tom, no longer. He was like her. It was true. Only, he would not accept. She knew the wilderness of life stretched mountainously far beyond where her feet could bring her. She knew the truth for her in what Tom had said. She had hoped, not for herself, but for him. She had hoped falsely. They were one--they were one. For there was another who was so infinitely more, that they were nothing.

And so her mind ran on, while Tom’s eyes searched her. David was not maimed like them. In his eyes was the promise of a new God. And Tom was waging war against that promise. Talk as he would, understand as his mind made him, Tom waged war against that faith in David which he lacked. Strove to snatch it from him: steal it and wear it dead, rather than let David go on alone, with his eyes living.

She had said to him: “Do I not help?”

With an uncanny closeness, Tom sought in herself the answer.

Cornelia turned her eyes away. She could not look at her brother. It was her brother whom she loved. Yet, turning away her eyes, she felt that she was leaving him by a wild wayside, to parch and perish. She felt that even so let it be. All of her must be girded beyond him.

He also had said no word. He went to the window and stood there looking out. She knew that both of them had understood....

* * * * *

Twelve years before they had set out on a great enterprise together. They had come up from a common childhood which was a common suffering. They had reached Being together. Everything they had was a thing they had shared. The sere soil of the world was a single path they had traveled. Their hands had been joined. Now, facing each other over the communion of their years, they were prepared for war.

The bitterest of all was this: that it seemed natural. It was as if their common anguish, the hopes born of their hated home and the fruits they had wrung courageously from their adventure, pointed inevitably to this end. For the most natural of all was this: that the end also should be bitter.

The death of their father had brought Tom for the moment closer to Cornelia. He was coming again to see her. There had been months without a sign of him. She knew that when this mood wore out there would be months again. If she had questions of Tom, there was no time to lose.

It was bitter hard to bring herself to speak of David. She did not flinch:

“How does your friendship stand with him?” she asked him.

“It is stormy. It will always, I guess, be stormy. But it will always be.”

They were at war, but they were generous to each other. Their war was a hidden and a sacred thing: it was not more nor less than the confronting of themselves upon the path they had helped hew, had helped each other walk. It was a hidden thing, but they had no desire to conceal it. They were open to each other insofar as each could be. They were the brother and sister who had waged life and war together.

“Do you think it is helping David--this ‘friendship’ that will always be?”

“I have not your acute moral sense, Cornelia. How should I know?”

She bit her lips.

“Why,” he asked with his ironic smile, “why don’t you ask if it is helping me!”

“You have made it plain to me, Tom, that you do not need my help. Out of self-protection I had to withdraw thinking too much of that.”

He nodded as if he understood and agreed. This hurt Cornelia. Even the words of contradiction would have been hostage to something precious.

“David is growing masterful. That much I can say for our friendship. I told you how he turned Lunn and Durthal out of our place, one evening. What I did not tell you was this: the following day David was contrite. He wanted to apologize for the splendid thing he had done. I would not let him.”

“Why?”

“What he did was himself. It is himself I care for. I will not let him be a renegade to his own instincts.”

She laughed at him. It was an effort, turning her bitterness to laughter.

“In the contradiction, you simply had a higher sort of triumph. Don’t you think I understand? You labor to beat him down and break him. When you see signs of your work you turn about. When you get him beaten and broken at last, doubtless you will have no more use for him.”

“Doubtless, Cornelia.”

“Tom! Leave David alone!”

His cutting calm had parted her restraint. All of her fear threatened to burst out. She was close to Tom, beseeching. In a moment, her hands would be suppliant.

He let her plead.

“Do that for me, Tom. Leave him! Insult him! Turn him away!”

“I often try to. It’s no use. I can sustain no mood long enough for that.”

She was blinded by his words into a sense of hope.

“Oh, a little longer! Send him to me. He never comes to me, now. He will if you send him. I’ll help you, Tom.”

She stopped. She saw the folly of her outburst. Was there not war between them? He was there with his irony.

“What have you, really, against our friendship? There is something unreasonable in this. What is it? Of course, I shall send him to you. I promise that.”

Never had she seen him so contained before her. He was winning. A flourish and a dare in his promise to send him. She pressed her lips with hands that had been almost suppliant before her brother. She would accept his ironic bounty: turn it against him. Many a battle was lost through excess of confidence. She could not answer his questions.

“You talk, positively, Sister, as if I were ruining the lad,--instead of slowly bringing him up.”

“Bringing him up to what?”

“Well, to what? I ask you?”

“Tom, I cannot explain. There is something here I cannot explain. I want David to be free of you. That is all.”

“So you can have him?--is that all?”

“You know that’s a lie!”

She was breathing hard with her hurt.

He examined her. “Yes: that is a lie. That would be a reasonable reason. Too reasonable for you. I could respect that: even coöperate with it. If there were any chance of success,” For an instant, he had tricked her into stirring toward him. She winced. “You can’t expect me to crucify myself and David for your vague philanthropic folly.”

“No, Tom--I cannot.”

Then: “Tom, are you altogether frank with me? Do you really think my haunting fears are due to a selfish cause?”

“No, Cornelia.”

“Do you think, Tom--answer me on your honor--do you think they are really vague and foolish?”

Waiting for his word, as he stood silent, she found that she wanted him so to think them.

His answer came: “No. They are not foolish. And only we are vague about them.”

“Tom!"...

She must look out. She was so weak before him. She was ever so near to dangerous pleading. She straightened herself back.

“----but since _we_ are so vague, Cornelia? Necessarily so. I call the whole discussion nonsense.”

He was flippant over her tragedy: over her life. He was clear-eyed admitting it, and then he was flippant! He stood next to her with his light grace and she hated him. For he was the brother whom she loved.

He went and did not for a long time come back. He stayed away too long. But he wrote her a note:

_Dearest Sister_:

In accordance with my promise, I have urged David to go and see you. I scolded him for a thoughtless friend. He is thoughtless, you know. I have found that out, many a time, to my unhappiness.

These books I am sending you I have just read this year and liked. I am sure you will like them also.

Lots of love, dearest Sister, and good fortune.

TOM.

How sure he was of David! How sure he was of her. She saw that he loved her in the same deep confident way of the younger brother whom she had nursed and led. The eternal way. She had unending hurt of this. For how could she deny the call of his love through his little note? And how could she answer it? She was torn. She knew there was now a reason for Tom’s staying away. She wondered if Tom knew how he tore her. But if he had written her coldly, cruelly, would it have been less cruel?...