Part 28

Cornelia mused away.... She need not worry about her guests. Mr. Purze had aroused Doctor Westerling to talk. He was saying serious things about the advance of Science in America, as compared to Europe. He had spent four years in Paris, Vienna, Berlin. It was plain he knew. Whatever he said he knew. He had taken up Mr. Purze’s challenge, “We are children in art,” as one would take up a problem to be answered.

“In America,” he said, “our art is Science.”

Cornelia watched him detachedly. He was talking really to impress Miss Daindrie. There was a caress in his voice as he said Science. What did it mean to him, that had a body and soul? He loved Miss Daindrie.

Did she love him? No. Would she? Cornelia leaned back in her chair.

For the first time, she noticed the tilt of Miss Daindrie’s head on her lovely neck: the whimsical curve of the cheekbone and the clear, almost protrusive outline of the jaw. There must be something Irish about her. Her father--Judson Daindrie--he was Scotch.... Doubtless her mother. Also there was something romantic. A pinch of romance, like a pinch of explosive powder. She was steady: her thrust in life was sure and long. This was one reason why the assertive and uncertain Doctor loved her. But in order to set her off, that pinch of powder. Did the Jewish scholar, exact and intransigent, hold the needed spark? Cornelia thought not. How those blue eyes could gleam! Could they gleam for him? Of course, she pondered, she might marry him, unlighted. He must have a pounding, indefatigable way. Look at him driving his point into Mr. Purze who was really not so very concerned. Yes: she might marry him. If no one else touched off the powder. If she remained unaware of it. She might go unmellowed through life, unfertilized. Such things happened. It would be a pity....

The talk was animated now. The party bloomed to its fullest life. Miss Daindrie was curiously self-conscious about Dr. Westerling’s oration. She was teasing him. How steady she was, for one with a perfume so diffident and sweet! He did not like her jests. His mind sensed only dully what they meant: sharply what she meant behind them. For some reason, a rebuke. He bore it. He was used to battle, and to resistance. He was used to rebukes. But he was uneasy. The cruder lists of argument and quarrel were more to his measure. It seemed to him that this Mr. Purze, if he was an artist, needed a lot of informing.

“We _have_ here a tendency,” he found the need of explaining his debate to Miss Daindrie, “----to misjudge America by overlooking what America excels in, and wishing in our hearts she were merely another Europe.”

Mr. Purze was suddenly agreeing. He saved the Doctor from another teasing. He was nothing, if not a soother of self-important people. He was marvelously informed in the prerequisites of his art of portraiture. He knew who Westerling was. Not rich, but already an emerging figure at the great Magnum Institute. Great men sat for portraits.

Westerling discoursed on the need of a new critical scientific standard in Art. Did not Mr. Purze agree? Oh, indeed. It was nonsense, was it not? to say that values in beauty could not be determined like any other element in a material solution. Painting was a chemical solution. Music and poetry were physical solutions: sound waves illustrative of certain documentary matter which of course was open to intellectual appraisal.... He was very interested in that.

“I was invited sometime ago to a private recital of Lahlberg. You know--that Russian pianist. He played many of his own compositions. I asked him to state to me in scientific terms what his music meant: why, for instance, he used seconds and sevenths where Chopin employed thirds and fifths. He was quite dumb, I assure you. I needed no further proof of what I had already expected----” the Doctor had meant to say “suspected”--: “the man is a clever charlatan.”

“But he plays so beautifully,” pleaded Mrs. Purze.

“We cannot trust uneducated senses any more than we can uneducated people.”

“No,” decided Cornelia in herself, “this is not what she wants.”

She had been watching Helen Daindrie with a growing singleness of interest. She saw how the girl’s body faintly stiffened when the Doctor spoke. She was aware of the implied direction, of the source of the heat of his words: she was attentive, she was respectful and impressed. And yet, Cornelia felt a specific turning away in the young girl’s mind, a wavering of interest, almost a recoil and a revolt from this intellectual tribute. He did not really hold her. When she wandered, Cornelia saw her relax. Now, during these last long words, suddenly Miss Daindrie turned and met Cornelia’s eyes. In them a twinkle of disdain, a gladness to be looking away.

“Have you heard Lahlberg?” Cornelia asked her. Dr. Westerling still talked.

“Yes.”

“Do you care for him?”

“I think he is very wonderful,” said Miss Daindrie. In her remark there was specific rebellion against what Dr. Westerling was saying. Cornelia noticed. It proved to her that there was danger after all of the Doctor’s winning....

Suddenly, she said to herself: “_Why do I care?_”

She had been watching Miss Daindrie. Now, for the first time, she watched herself to know why she was watching.

As she went groping, she understood.

For a long time she had walked through a dark cave with a lantern, placing it against the dripping walls, seeking a certain thing.... Sudden, there was her lantern against it, what she sought!--and she recoiled, she withdrew her light, she did not want to see.... With her body strained and her nerves singing against the pull of her will, she lifted her light again, she forced herself to look.

She felt it ... in her heart she could have no doubt of it.... Helen Daindrie was meant to make the rescue of David!

How clear it was, terribly clear. The one way! She wondered by what painful blessing she had not seen before. She knew that she had seen and had not wanted to see it. It was too bitter, too cruel. Unfair! How could she stand this, who was willing to bear all things? This giving David into the arms of another woman? How could she be sure? How dared she? Reasons had tumbled upon her: knowing was blotted out. Now, what had been dim was clear: what had been so hard, seemed strangely natural and easy.

She looked at Helen. She felt her presence. Never had she so felt a life before. Helen was lovely and girlish and strong. She would lead David the way of his dreams, the way of his young gods--they must be her gods also! She would lead him firmly. Her sense of right was clear like her blue eyes. Feeling her there, Cornelia loved Helen Daindrie. Her heart went out to her, her hands pleaded to embrace her. She seemed to hold her face in her trembling hands and to look deep in Helen. Yes: she was lovely, for she was to be the beloved. She was sacred, for it was she who was chosen.

Tom’s hold would fall away when once David turned and wanted to move toward Helen.

“Bless you!” her eyes said, “God bless you. And do as I want. And love him as he deserves.”

How very certain it all seemed to Cornelia! There sat Helen Daindrie, talking, smiling, frowning a little perhaps, and nothing had been said. Nothing had happened. Yet Cornelia was sure that this girl would win David’s love, and win him from Tom and save him.... Win him forever from herself.

So let it be. There was no bitterness in her heart. No hurt, it seemed. For all of her was the fullness of her hurt. Her hurt was about her, surrounding her like air. Without it, she must have stifled.

She wanted to get up and take Helen’s hand and kiss it. She was her David, looking at this woman. She wanted to kiss Helen’s eyes and tell them what it was they would soon see. She forgot the Doctor. She no longer saw him. So sure she was.

She sat there, full of her vision. “Nothing has happened. They need never meet--unless you force it,” was a faint whisper she had no ears for. She must go on in this greater ecstasy than she had ever known. She must make her vision live. Who was she--Cornelia, or David? or was she this sweet fresh girl with the loyal eyes? A great faint ease moved through all her body, as if she were bleeding to death.

She had no words to say to Helen, nor to herself. She longed only to touch her hair, kiss her eyes. David was to touch and to kiss them! Her nerves, that had been taut and clear in the drunkenness of fasting, slumbered now as if they had feasted. Her eyes were dim and saw no further thing. She was indeed swathed warm and happy, like one bleeding away and bathed in her own blood.

But nothing happened. She had no further sense of the room save that it held her up: nor of the easy talk save that her knowledge of it let her float slumberously, in the sea of her blood.

All her blood was outside her. It was no longer a beating surge within the pent walls of her soul. She was emptied of desire and of pain.

She felt that something was to happen: there would come some proof to her vision. She would look upon it sweetly as upon her death.

She awaited her death. She was smiling.

The bell rang. The door opened. David came in....

XIV

David had long intended to see Cornelia. Tom reminded him more than once: reminded him perhaps a bit too often. There was a stubborn touch in David. Something within him seemed to resist his going, and even he knew moodily that the something was kin to Tom’s insistence. He had a way of sallying forth on a Sunday afternoon, resolved to walk an hour and then go to her place: and of forgetting. Until it was too late. He would say: “Next time I will not forget.” At last the “next time” came to be Thanksgiving.

He dined with the Deanes. He had no plans at all for after dinner. The dinner would be big, he lazy. If his uncle offered him a cigar and Lois was amiable, he might sit around all afternoon. He did not much care. But his uncle had his erratic ways: in and out of business, one never could tell about him. Doubtless the moody angles of Lois were due to her father. Sometimes he would treat him as a man:

“Have a cigar, sir?” David accepted and liked this. Moreover the effect of a cigar was always to make him heavy and sleepy: unfit either for walking or a visit: in no heroic mood for visiting a friend toward whom his sense of guilt made him uncomfortable.

Then again, his uncle would light his own cigar and forget him; perhaps even say:

“Well, children, I am going to take a nap.... Run along.” He napped on the dining-room sofa.

This happened on Thanksgiving.

Lois was somber. David knew that her engagement--it had never been more than a casual trial--was broken. Once more she was in the open field. And more cynical, more difficult than ever. She had been spiteful, it seemed to David, on this Feast of Thanksgiving. For the first time in a rare long stretch, he had almost preferred the flinty steadiness of her sister. Lois had nothing to say to him, to do with him. When she spoke, she managed an air of objective and disdainful interest that was worse than indifference. As if she were thinking: “What can this specimen possibly have to say?” After dinner, she struck out her hand and smiled formally into his face:

“Good-by, David: I have a date and it’s late. Can I drop you somewhere?”

He spurned her offer. He found himself out of the house, it was still snowing. He had a sentimental turn over the snow and his loneliness, his being turned out lonely into the snow.

He began to trudge and to enjoy the walk. He had had no cigar. He was clear-headed. The snow ceased, the air of the darkling City was soft like the touch of silk. He trudged for several hours. Five blocks from her house, the summons came to Cornelia.

He hated the Deanes that afternoon. It was an old track in his brain that led him now from them to Cornelia, as his old revolts had led him three years before. True, Mrs. Deane had said to him: “You can stay, dear, if you want and entertain _me_.” True, the thought came that this might have been more comfortable after all. He did not want to go home. Tom had a way of wreathing their room in smoke and cynical smiles on holidays. It was plain that the time had come to go as his feet now took him....

At the tea, nothing visible had occurred. Cornelia was behind her guests. Far away: pleasantly so, since if she held a rebuke for him it was far away also. There had been a girl with a sweet voice. He did not recall her face. He had come late, left early.

Now a note from Cornelia. She had scarcely seen him on Thanksgiving. She wanted to see him. Would he come the following Sunday to tea?

He was there, she was not alone. This was rather strange, thought David. Evidently she was not so anxious after all to see him really. He had exaggerated her feeling. Doubtless she did not care enough to have a rebuke for him. At least he could not detect it. It was a pleasant afternoon. With Cornelia was a girl--“my dear friend,” she called her--Miss Helen Daindrie. A very sweet girl, thought David. Rather distant.

“You funny person!” she said to him. “Why didn’t you offer to take Miss Daindrie home?”

“I thought I’d like to see you alone, for a minute.”

“Nonsense! You know you’d have preferred escorting her.”

“Well--is it right--at a casual tea--the first time you meet a person?”

“The first time! Why, David! You met Miss Daindrie on Thanksgiving.”

“Oh, did I?”

She was looking at him with a cloudy reserve on her eyes he could not understand. Why should she be offended, if he did not remember Miss Daindrie? Did Cornelia love her so much?

“Now, run along.” She almost put him out.

He thought her strangely cavalier and distant. He enjoyed her. For the first time, in long, he did not find Cornelia cloying. There had been none of the warm discomfort.

He was glad to come again. He was glad, now, in his supine state, when he was lifted in any way from his comfortless closeness with Tom.

It was a little party. Cornelia entertained quite often. She had always said, in the old days: “David, I do not invite you. What should you do with all these stupid people?--stupid and self-important. When I see you, David dear, I want _you_.”

Now, how different was Cornelia, how light and easy to get on with! David began to question, should he really want to see her alone, could he succeed? He came to just such a party of self-important people, nondescripts of whom he had met none before, with their endless chatter about remote, allusive topics, and wished to see none ever again. It was almost like meeting an old friend to find Miss Daindrie there. He reckoned that she and Cornelia must be fast friends. She was strange. Each time he met her she seemed to him so different he could not be sure he had met her before. He talked with her a great deal that evening.

Cornelia said: “There is only one person here you could possibly be interested in. Don’t mind being selfish, dear. Devote yourself to _her_. I’ll manage the others.”

He did. He scarcely spoke with Cornelia.

A pause of several ordinary weeks: a visit to the Magnum Institute.

“Would you like to see the great laboratories and the hospital?” Cornelia wrote him. “Doctor Westerling said I might come, and bring a friend.”

David escorted her. They went through a long, high room, cold and metallic and full of corrodent odors. It was painful to David. He felt that he was being cut by a very sharp steel blade, so that there was no pain, and yet it was painful Miss Daindrie was there in a white apron and a white stiff blouse. It seemed to David that the hard starched linen must cut into her softness. His teeth were a bit on edge, and he was afraid to look too close at the acids and the test-tubes full of evil germs and the smears of blood. The Doctor explained a culture of gelatine in which grew billions of organisms and over which Miss Daindrie pored as over a cradle. This brought nausea to David. He knew he was silly. “I would not want to be a doctor,” he whispered to Cornelia. He saw that she too was in pain in this chill temple of science.

What held him most was that Miss Daindrie had no eyes for him at all. She followed the white-aproned Doctor in rapt submission. And Doctor Westerling, David was sure, did not like him. He looked quizzically at David’s wandering attention.

He said to him: “You are not interested, I guess, in medicine--except when you have a stomach-ache?”

“No,” David answered seriously. “Isn’t that the one time when I should be interested?”

For a moment Doctor Westerling appeared to like him. His eyes widened, took David in as if with the help of a new light. He began nodding. “Why! You are right.” He laughed. Miss Daindrie came up.

“What contribution _did_ you make, Mr. Markand, to medical science?”

David was sure the Doctor stopped liking him at once.

Their meetings were casual but they were not infrequent. Miss Daindrie, he thought, must be a remarkable woman. For she was always affable to him; and always knew what he had said last time. Yet, her mind must be replete with significant affairs. How could he doubt through it all her strict inaccessibility?

One day, she said to him: “Why don’t you come and see me some evening, Mr. Markand?”--and laughed.

“Why do you laugh?”

“I almost feel you have vowed you would never ask of your own accord.”

She was full of assurance, and of a sweet timidity. It seemed to David she was so high above him she could fulfill whatever whim she wanted and lose not one jot of her stature. Such a whim, doubtless, was this.

“Oh, I should love to come.... I didn’t--I didn’t really----” he stopped. “Do you really want me to come, Miss Daindrie?”

She saw that he was serious. “Why should I ask you?”

That was convincing. “I don’t see,” he said, “what you could possibly find of interest in me.”

It was the beginning of the impulse he was always to have with her to speak out his mind.

She answered him seriously too.

“I want to find out, perhaps,” she said.

They were in a box at a theater. It was a special matinee of a comedy by Bernard Shaw: a strange new genius out of Ireland. Cornelia and Miss Daindrie had arranged the party.

“Shaw deserves to be supported,” Cornelia explained; even Tom had been willing to come.

She heard every word that passed between David and Miss Daindrie. Her neighbor in the Box was a young man she had never met before. He found her strangely distracted between the curtains. He said to her: “But after all, Miss Rennard, what are we to think of this man Shaw?” She answered, vigorously nodding: “Yes, indeed.” David was going to call? What a stubborn child he had been! A good sign, deeply. She believed she could see. Unknown to himself, he was struggling against Helen. He had an assured, comradeful way with women--the way of a boy: it was gone. A visit to a girl might mean nothing. After these resistances and the silence behind their questionings as they looked at each other, he might well ask why she wanted him to come. It was a bit disconcerting for the young man beside Cornelia.

When she was back in her room, Cornelia threw herself on her couch and cried. What a great Victory she had won!

David went about, filled with a new humility, a growing hatred of himself.

Nearly two years it was since he had seen in a street-car a small girl, and walked through a world suddenly shriveled. What after that? He too had shrunken and grown like the world, so that once more the world seemed right for him. Now another change. The world was gone altogether. None of its tortured standards near him any more to measure him and call what he was good. He stood naked in a sort of psychic space: he saw how soft, how idle, how small was his soul. It came to David how he hated himself, and how he was so full of this defeat upon him, that he could love no person and could have kind thoughts nowhere. All his senses were caught up in this tangle of himself. He felt he must grow far beyond the lowness where he now stood, to look with free eyes again upon another.

Tom was there, however. Tom was a part of himself--a part, then, of that he must detest. David called on Miss Daindrie. He went there and was silent. It seemed a place, wide like clear air, where he could look on himself. He had no sense of her.

He said to her: “Why do you ask me to come again? I am not amusing: I have nothing to give you.”

And she: “Come next week.... What night, next week, can you come?”

He did not understand.

But he was at a pass where even this element of not understanding could not much hold him. He was not interested in Miss Daindrie. He was rapt in a hateful inner spectacle. What he needed was calm and clarity and strength to look at himself. This he found, sitting in the room with her, and her few words glowing steadfast over his eyes like candles. So he came.

She invited him to dine.

When he entered the drawing-room he felt he was late and they were waiting for him. Doctor Westerling was there. A slight small man with a limp stepped forward from his chair and as David took his hand he liked him. Mr. Judson Daindrie. Mrs. Daindrie had a cordial smile. It was all strange to David--this warmth, this kindness. He could not understand it. He felt a cloud over the face of Conrad Westerling and the Doctor’s will dispersing it till it was gone. The struggle and stress of this he thought he could better understand. Mrs. Daindrie was saying to him:

“Won’t you take Helen down, Mr. Markand?”

And there was Westerling offering the precedence through the door to a Miss Sophie Laurence who seemed very heavy and stupid. All of these pretty ways were disconcerting since they hid something, David felt, and he knew not what.