Part 29

He became part of the round table. Feeling himself a part and feeling Mrs. Daindrie at his left smile and be warm to him, David was eager to move himself away, just so he could truly see that he was part of this bright round table.

Miss Daindrie smiled at him, as at an accomplice.

“These are my family,” she seemed to tell him.

He was at ease. He was unafraid of silence. So was Miss Daindrie. He said to himself: “I am sitting here quietly silent, just like Miss Daindrie.”

“Well, Mr. Markand? I understand you are musical. You play the piano?” asked Mrs. Daindrie. Quite abruptly she put her inapposite questions.

“_Do_ have some more of the fish!”

“I imagine you feel quite like a New Yorker.”

She left him alone. All of them left him alone. He was of them all.

They tightened into a unit--they became a family--they discussed some family event or listened with a sort of mystic understanding to unleavened words from Miss Laurence whom they seemed fond of, as one is fond of one’s own foibles. In these gusts of attention away from him, David was comfortable. It seemed to him that Doctor Westerling was not.

There was a fragility about Mr. Daindrie. The skin was translucent and tight under the upstanding wave of his gray hair: the blue eyes were far in from the white tufts of his brow. His hands were very small. Even sitting there and taking the plate from the maid and thanking her, and listening with respect to the prattle of Miss Laurence, David felt that he was a little man who limped. Intelligent. Why did he have the sense of conflict between his intelligence and his gentility; the sense of his head bowing?

In another way Mrs. Daindrie was slight. She had a freckled smile and the puffs of her brown hair blew out the laughter of eyes. She was satisfied, it seemed to David, with the perpetual courtliness of her husband. Against their mood he felt Doctor Westerling veering stiffly. He wondered if this was why he felt this grain of resistance in them all against the doctor.

“Why, then, do they have him to dinner?”

“But why do they have me?”

He was a stranger, more so than Conrad Westerling. Yet, he was taking the soft patter of Miss Laurence less to heart. Could this possibly be of importance?

The door had opened.

“Come in, Hope.” Her mother spied her. “You may say good-night.”

A little girl stepped carefully through shadows that lay from the door to the bright table under its hood of electric lights. She dashed swiftly to her father and jumped into his lap. She hid her face.

“I said you might come in, Hope, to _say_ good-night.”

Hope faced about and smiled with a mischievous triumph. She had had at least this moment from her mother’s precept. Her father placed her firmly on her feet.

“This is my youngest,” Mrs. Daindrie explained to David. “I believe you have never seen her. Hope dear, don’t you want to say good evening to Mr. Markand?”

“Why am I so little surprised?” said David to himself. What was there growingly strange in this quiet night? “Does she remember me?” He felt the hollowness of nervous strain, as the little girl of the car came up to him, held out her hand.

“I know you already,” she announced quite clear and high.

“Oh, do you?” said Mrs. Daindrie.

“I know you also,” David spoke to Hope.

Their words caused no great interest. Doubtless, on one of the occasions when he had been there before they had met. In the lack of concern the two felt protection.

She took his hand, he looked into her eyes.

They were not quite so dimpled.

She tossed her head and withdrew her hand and left him.

David watched her giving the same hand to Doctor Westerling, watched her embrace her sister with a burst of fondness, watched her recoil from the clumsy hug of Miss Laurence. He tried to believe that what she had given to him was secret and different.

She was gone.

He felt at home in this strange house. He felt intimate deeply with this little girl, whom he had watched for a moment out of their wide lives in a public car. He accepted her in this house as he accepted physical laws of life. Miss Daindrie had ears where they should be and they heard what they should hear when he spoke words to her. So this warm home had the little girl whom he loved, had his comfort. He did not fathom how now his love for Hope was a quieter thing. He accepted--didn’t we?--miracle. So he thought. He had looked on the girl of the car with less intimacy after all. Intimacy was the denier of quiet? Words were the denier of knowing? Was he comfortable, intimate, what was he here in this relevant night? She led out of the room where he sat embraced with Miss Daindrie. Did she lead forth--him? Whither? Who was she after all?

Doctor Westerling had an uncomfortable smile or an abstract frown when he was quiet. Mrs. Daindrie remarked this. She found she could better leave David to himself. He did not mind. Wherever the talk was, and for whom, he listened pleasantly. She must pay attention to Doctor Westerling the more since she realized that her daughter did not seem to care if he was at ease or no. A strange unwonted character in Helen. There must be a reason for her willed indifference, at bottom flattering to the Doctor--he was there invited. Anything from Helen not properly pleasant was flattering. Mrs. Daindrie had respect for those who had the respect of her daughter.

She plied him with questions. She could not hold his interest. The words each of them called forth died out like a too short fuse. Mr. Daindrie looked about the table. He saw that Westerling was being bored by the questions of his wife. He took umbrage neither for her nor against him. He was a quiet man, accepting the world’s clashes.

“I suppose you are only waiting, Doctor,” he said, “to take up your practice as a specialist?”

“I never intend to practice,” Westerling replied. There was an emphatic note in his voice that brought silence over the table.

Helen looked at him, proudly. She knew the integrity of his mind. She knew her father’s would meet it and be pleased. Always she was saying to herself and to certain of her friends: “I have great respect for Doctor Westerling’s mind.”

“Oh?” questioned Mr. Daindrie.

“You see, sir,” Westerling went on, smiling with a new satisfaction that showed how exclusively his satisfaction dwelt in knowledge, in discussion, in release from the naked domain of emotion, “you see, when I graduated from Medical School eight years ago, and from the hospitals here and abroad, a strange revelation had come to me. I had lost faith absolutely in the practice of medicine.”

Mr. Daindrie was a good listener; a stern one. He bowed his head judicially. Westerling talked exclusively to him. But loudly. So that his consciousness of other ears must have gone to the volume of his voice. Perhaps, it occurred to David, he was trying within this little cozy table to address the world.

“It was a problem to face, let me assure you. Like one who graduates into the Priesthood, perhaps, and finds he no longer believes in the Divinity of Christ. Harder, much harder, I suppose--since in medicine the régime of study is terrific.”

He said these words coldly. He seemed to avoid a tone which might bring sympathy, conviction. He had no eye for the faint shadow over Mrs. Daindrie’s face, at his allusion to Christ.

“But how do you mean, you lost faith?” asked Mr. Daindrie.

“I had believed myself devoted to a science. I found that the present practice of medicine--the practice of medicine as it must be to-day in _lack_ of science--is an empiric fraternal order.”

Mrs. Daindrie gasped.

“I am convinced that most of the therapeutic practices which occupy so overwhelming a part of the work of the doctor must go. No; I don’t know to be replaced by what. But the principle of introducing specific drugs into the system to right specific maladies, right wrongs--I know it is false. Some day most of our medical practice will be regarded as medieval, quite as we look on the humors and the cuppings of the Sixteenth Century leeches.”

“But there is nothing known to take the place of these medicines?”

“Nothing established.”

“Then, until such time, must we not use what we have?”

“Doubtless we must, sir,” Westerling spoke with a certain condescension. “But I cannot devote my life to the application of guess work and patch work which, I am convinced, is altogether based on erroneous premises.”

“As sweeping as that ...?” Superlatives, absolutes, all tendencies toward violence brought out in Mr. Daindrie the deprecatory smile.

“Yes. The sole sound future of Medicine must rest on the discovery of principles beneath effects which we call physical and mental life; principles the pursuit of which will make the introduction of alien curative elements into our bodies simply absurd. I am referring not only to medicines but to vaccines, anti-toxins--surgical makeshifts. The true curative elements of life must be inherent in us. Somehow we have lost them. I am convinced the reason is that we have lost certain unconscious principles of behavior in which they are implicit. I am convinced that drugs are superstition.”

“But bacilli--the trouble makers!” pleaded Mr. Daindrie.

“Harmless to the properly ordered organism. Immune to anything so isolated as the effect of drugs. We are subject to germ diseases, I am sure, because we are not masters of our independence of them. I am sure that some day it will seem as absurd to introduce drugs into our systems in order to kill bugs, as it would be now to say prayers in order to drive out devils.”

“But the devils don’t exist!”

“I’m not so sure of that. The instruments don’t exist--as they do for bacilli--for seeing devils.”

Mr. Daindrie was dazed by what seemed the man’s veering from pure science to superstition.

“You’re a bacteriologist!” exclaimed Miss Daindrie, sensing her father’s state.

“I am working to find out what disordered conditions of our tissues and organs give the bacteria their chance--the pernicious ones. Or rather what conditions develop the pernicious ones, for that is essentially what our bodies have done. I am interested in nothing else.”

Helen felt there was no answer: Doctor Westerling was interested in no answer. She kept silent.

“Well, we do need doctors,” contributed Mrs. Daindrie. “Fortunately, not all doctors refuse to help the world, like you, Doctor Westerling.”

A faint sneer crept over the young man’s features. It covered a hurt. David alone saw the hurt. Mr. Daindrie answered the sneer.

“Yes,” he said, “we must get on with the drugs, while you have yet to prove we can get on without them.”

“Don’t you believe in any of our curative or preventive service?” asked Helen Daindrie.

“Honestly, it is all nonsense.”

“All of it?” She was withdrawing. But Westerling had a truth and he must pursue it first.

“I am sure modern practice has done more harm than good. Operations clean up appendicitis. We know that. What we scarcely guess, is how many nervous systems, kinetic systems, circulatory systems are wrecked by successful operations.”

“I had always thought the American surgeons were great scientists.”

“They are great virtuosi,” declared Westerling.

“Yes, but----”

“----virtuosi should practice on pianos.”

He was very excited. He said no word of his own doubts. He said no word of his vast sacrifice which his unproved convictions had forced upon him. He could have become rich in the practice of medicine. No one knew this better than Conrad Westerling. No one more than this Jew of sensitive family and depleted means loved the luxury and the freedom of money. All his life he would labor at an insignificant salary because of the depth of his sense of service. A true poet of Science. But of all this he said no word. He could not. To one person he needed to say all this: the person he loved, to Helen. But until she said that she loved him, he could not even to her. The strategy of showing his better self, of gaining her allegiance to his cause in order to help win her, was beyond him. Speaking stridently and harshly now, it was his need of tenderness and his deep respect for the tenderness of Helen, that spoke.

The Daindries could not know this, could not quite conceal their shrinking from him. It was not a question of right, it was a matter of taste. A too passionate devotion to an ideal was an untoward display, it was out of place: quite as would be a too naked display of devotion to a woman. This stern stiff man was at work perhaps wiping away an entailed incubus upon the life of man, but he lacked amenity. Their nerves told them this. Their minds hinted that he had intellect and courage. But like all proper people, what their nerves ordered came first.

David had liked his words. They excited him. He had understood them less than Mr. Daindrie or than Helen. But he had visioned more. What came in to him was precisely the personal anguish, the personal immolation--though he could not configure them beneath his antagonizing words. He saw also Helen’s shrinking from the violence of those words: as if they laid hands on her, threatened to exclude all others and possess her. It seemed that Helen did not want to be possessed by truth. It must be something warmer, something smaller perhaps, that would possess her. So David felt the true content of Westerling’s words. They held a burden of great courage, a plea of love: these he was really offering to her: these she would not accept.

David walked a few blocks to the car with Westerling. He held out his hand.

“I like what you said at dinner, oh--so much, Doctor!”

He wanted to say far more.

“Do you?”

Westerling looked sourly, haughtily at him, as if David were trying to hurt him. With a stiff body too erect he shook David’s hand--dropped it with a gesture of completion.

“Good-night.”

So David could not go on.

But he went to Cornelia, to whom he knew he could speak.

“I don’t think,” he said, “I am going back ever again to see Miss Daindrie.”

Cornelia’s heart stopped its beat. “_I am glad_--I am--no, I can’t be glad.” Sense and will turmoiled against each other. David saw her sitting quiet there, looking at him. It was quite natural, he thought, that she could not understand. He had come to tell her. It came to him: “She must think it funny that I should tell her this. What can it matter to Cornelia?”

Cornelia, feeling he would go on and that for this he had come and that himself would tell her what to do, began to go deeper into his coming. He had sought her out: this was rare: for a rare incentive. He had sought her out because he needed to talk about Helen. To no one else could he talk. From no one else could he hope for the persuasion he wanted: to send him back to her. Here was a problem that hurt him. She could smoothe it. For this he had run to her. When she had done her part, he would leave her and go back to Helen, he would live and play once more....

“What is it, Davie?” she asked aloud. She was ready for her part.

“I am not--not good enough for her, Cornelia.”

Good enough to come to her when she could soothe him: not good enough for Helen.... “How do you know that, David?”

“Because I know some one who is.... Conrad Westerling is good enough for Helen. I admire him immensely. I know he loves her. I know it hurts him when I am there. I have seen that. Why should I hurt him, Cornelia?”

“But what about Helen Daindrie?”

“Why shouldn’t she love him? He is strong, and courageous. He has wonderful ideas. His whole life--I feel that--is nothing but his ideas. She _should_ love him.”

“Is there room for Helen in one so full of ideas?”

“He loves her, so there must be.”

“She does not love him, so perhaps there isn’t.”

Cornelia looked at him blushing.

“She does not love him, David. What is it to you? Can you make her love him, David, by staying away?”

David’s blush was crimson.

“I--I don’t mean that. N-no. I--I don’t know what I mean.”

He began pulling at his handkerchief with nervous fingers.

Cornelia steeled herself.... _Yes she could!_ She laughed at him.

“Why you funny person--you funny Quixotic David!” A pause. “Or are you merely awfully conceited? Answer me, then: how will your staying away help the lost cause of Doctor Westerling?”

David bit his lip, turned pale, looked at his twitching fingers.

“I am a fool, am I not, Cornelia?”

“You must go on, seeing Helen. Your staying away _now_ would be offensive. What right have you to fight another man’s battle against Helen? Don’t you see how presumptuous it all is? She knows best what she wants, David darling, not only of Doctor Westerling, but of you also.”

“Westerling is a noble man who has worked and done things.”

“You will do things also. I won’t let you slight yourself. That’s slighting your friends. If you are good enough for me--and for Helen also?----” she found something near the playful smile she wanted, “must you not be good for something?”

“Cornelia, I don’t understand her wanting ever to see me.”

He was very mute and very timid, looking at his hands.

“And who are you to judge? What do you know of Doctor Westerling and of yourself? Live, David--spread out like a tree. Then we shall all know what you are.”

David got up.

“There!” She came up to him close. She took his head in her two hands. “Are you convinced?” He shook his head and her hands moved with it....

Since her plan had been found and she knew that it was working, there was peace in Cornelia. Her way with David was the way of a mother. She knew how this birth and this life had rended her: what it had cost her in blood and anguish. So is the mother peaceful, knowing this, with her unknowing child.

She took her toll of him, like a mother also. She held his cheeks with her hands and she drew him down and kissed him.

“And you see, don’t you, why you can’t stop so suddenly from going to see her? What would she think? The offense and the pain--yes, David, the pain, if you stayed away?”

He went back to Helen Daindrie. He went again and again. Cornelia had settled and given him what he desired. There was reason no longer for seeing Cornelia.

Spending his quiet evenings with Helen, he did not see the Doctor. He forgot him, he was ashamed, as Cornelia had cleverly made him, of the conceited presumption that he could help his cause by staying away. He came, therefore, feeling nothing but peace: wanting the right to feel no other thing. For in peace, he came to himself. And what he sought above all else was this. Coming to Helen and sitting there beside her, it was easier, somehow.

But it was easier most of all to look at Tom, and know he hated him, and know that they must part....

* * * * *

They had gone on living together. The silence about them, holding them in, was stiff and frozen.

David went no longer to Flora’s. He wandered about the City, seeing nothing, until his legs ached, and then he went to bed. He found that he needed more sleep than he had needed in years. There was a constant weighing soreness in his body. His head was heavy. His thoughts pushed through some clotted substance in his mind with a swerving pain. Often his eyes ached: often his food did not agree with him. Yet he was hungry. He needed great sleep, great food. After sleep, he was heavy, after food he was often sick with heartburn. He was like a pregnant woman. He went about loaded and diminished. His thoughts delineated no true objective world. What came with any sharpness into the mist of his mind, he hated. Thus Tom. What soothed his dwelling in these mists he courted. Thus Helen Daindrie.

His sleep also was strange. It was dreamless. When he closed his eyes he dropped, almost at once, into a profound close pit whose blackness held him moveless. When he woke, it was some force, far down where he had been, that had spewed him up: his brow aching and his body churned with a great dizzy distance.

He attended to work. There was always enough mental energy for that. In fact his work was his savior. It took him out of himself: but not upon some shattering objective world, shrunken and tortured and congested like that by which he had once measured himself and found that he was good. It took him out of himself into an easy world of conventions and abstractions: where figures had the relief of ineluctable laws, where there were fixed commodities like tobacco and freight-rates, where men were sure machines of buying and selling, where values and credit could be determined. A sweet, imagined, malleable world, the world of Business, in which each day for a few hours, David took refuge. Another such world he now rediscovered and frequented. He had greatly neglected his violin. Always he had played without consistency, and now be did not play at all. It must have been painful and intrusive to make music of one’s own, so David let the dust gather on his instrument and the strings break. It was different with the world of the music of others. David began to go to concerts: chiefly orchestral concerts. He did not care for the virtuosi, he detested Opera. The symphony of eighty upraised voices, marvelously artificial, essenced and controlled, swung him at once into a distant land. These worlds of the violins and horns and ’celli were also concise and constrained. Their ecstasy was a comfortable unit, as compared with the vast vagueness of a City street. In a way far more grandiose, music was a release, like business, for David.

With violent wrenching of his nerves, he forced himself to look at his dear friend.... This after all was Tom whom he had loved, who had found him at his advent into the life of the City and into life itself. This was that friend who had opened his mind, loosed his tongue, made him not too bitterly mourn his mother. This was Tom who, when he was ill, had nursed him and he had been so sure had loved him, whom now with straining nerves he tried to see, clear through a strange hot haze about them.