Part 4

So far as work emptied him work was good. A new experience was a new vessel--what David needed to pour of himself. But the season was dull. Mr. McGill was gone, and already his first task, to sort and enter bills of lading, was a tedious habit. It seemed not work to David but the kind of punishment that was occasionally meted out in school: like copying the commandment one hundred times: “I must not talk during hours.” There was nothing more or else to do, until the Manager’s return.

The office was a haphazard, a languorous, loose beast functioning dully through the inertia of its past and the prod of its future. Clusters of girls formed like flies on a kitchen table. They chatted and laughed and wiped the clotted powder from their cheeks. They took long hours for lunch, buying cakes and cream-puffs and olives from the store and eating in the office. The boys hovered about like greedy dogs, barking and sniffing and showing a tendency to rear on their hind legs. The girls, loving the sense of their desire, kept them unsated. Most of the occupants of the inner offices were absent. On the other floors, above, below, the rumble of the packers and the crash of boxes made a dusty murmur. David had seen these infernos of industry, caught the acerb flavor of wet tobacco and sweat and heat, observed men moving in the mist of their hands and women serried at filthy tables, with haggard arms that were forever plying and hot eyes that were still. He preferred his purgatory. He hated the hour of lunch when he must step down into the flaming stream of the canyon and be part of it, hunting his food. He was glad when the hour of closing came like a silent charm, stilled the drone of the work. No clock was needed to announce this hour. It went over the cluttered room like an invisible hand: its tenuous sweet fingers touched every one and everything. The girls at the writing machines clicked more slowly, their eyes wandered more and more, their hands brushed back their hair with a new hope.... A last spurt puckered their brows and their lips: then the power died. The boys at the tall ledger tables twisted legs about their chairs and stopped sharpening pencils. They whistled sudden snatches of a tune. Wide ranges of conversation sprang up. Talk wreathed forth until girls in the new silence of their machines addressed each other clear across the room: the men in the ledger alcoves laughed at jokes given forth from the front windows....

Sudden, like the last spin of a top, a tremor ran through the office, work toppled dead on its side.

Girls were in hats: cigarettes sprouted on the lips of the boys. Overhead in the sudden noise of stillness, the new mood of the machines. Life was out of the window. In groups of two and three the girls were sucked away to it: the boys followed, with noses forward and dragging limbs.

The streets were cauldrons that had overflowed. The sluices of pent life emptied upon them. Work had banked these fires: routine had stifled them to smoke. Now, the coals were strewn low and long. A draft of release whipped down the channeling gutters. There was flame. The houses brooded like disused ovens, storing their heat and their rust.

The vision of this was a searing stripe on David’s mind as he lay within the night: was a dark band as he awoke upon the morning. He was naked in bed. His strong arms were thrown up like an infant’s. His open palms pillowed his neck. As he breathed, the muscles in his abdomen rolled gently. He was a powerful boy, with white skin and a wave of golden hair upon his body. He had pulled his bed directly beneath a dormer window. The sun bronzed his head. The clear soft strength of his face came out in this sleepy light. David dozed and prodded his senses into getting up. He was strong and refreshed in the morning. He thought of work as a contest and knew he would win. The Hell of labor was upstairs where the men sweated in open shirts rolling cigars, and he had seen the women fold back their waists till the tawny dust grimed the skin of their breasts. He was in this world’s Purgatory. In the quiet offices beyond, the inner ones bound by invisible threads of gold to the ease of high houses in the winter and the distant smile of the mountains, was Paradise and was the goal. David thought that he had given up the free fields of his home and that now, already he was set on winning them back. This, it seemed to him, was droll. He wondered why he had thrown the fields away, when so evidently the promise of the City was to be able to revisit them. He wondered why _he_ had done so. He thought of Anne, who perhaps was forgetting the scent of the clover. He recalled that if he hurried with his bath, he would have more time at breakfast--more time to be with Anne. His long legs were out of the bed.

It was hard to pierce to Anne. Both he and she were embarrassed with their desire to speak freely. They were shy. One morning she said to him:

“Mr. David, if you would want to, why don’t you come back and I’ll cook you your dinner.”

He thanked her and refused.

“You’ve worked enough, I think.”

“Oh, I don’t mind.”

She had not pressed her offer. He had commanded his pleasure. So it must be her pleasure. She was that sort of woman.

“What do you do in the evenings?” he asked her.

“Oh, not much. I’m always to bed early. It’s too hot for dancing, ain’t it?” She hurried through her answer.

David suddenly knew that when his sickened will and stinging senses came to the house at night, she was there also! While he lay awake in his bed, a wall was between his nakedness and hers. It was both painful and sweet to think of this.

The black heat rolled with enforcement through the City. Life was wet fire. A murmur of anguish was the breath of the night. He lay wide-eyed, dreaming. The air was a prison. His senses yearned toward the quiet of death as release from this breath of the world--from these fumes of a dead sun. He was under surprise when it knocked at the door.

“Mr. David, I’ve brought you a cool drink. May I come in?”

He did not move. He did not reach for his sheet. Anne came through the blackness and gave him a glass. He gulped wet coolth.

“Thank you--Anne.”

She took the glass. She bent down, her hair was a wonder over his eyes. A wonder, since her hair was hot and still it was good. He felt her moist lips on his chest.... There was the constant spirit of the house, the forbidding intrusion of knowing that he was a guest and she a servant, that this was evil.... Anne was gone.

No word at breakfast.... That night David found he was awaiting her and she came. His sheet was over him. He took the glass she offered and placed it on the chair; his arm drew her down till she sat beside him on the bed. He felt her body burning under her cool gown: all the world was distant, so that the house was distant too, and for once the Deanes were in the mountains.

“No, Mr. David....”

He laughed. He was scornful: the Deanes were in the mountains.

A hot black sea was the world, rolling away. His bed rolled upon it; only his bed was above the sea. It was haven. It was haven for him and his woman. He drew her down, and his mouth sought her lips, her neck. His mouth felt the wide loveliness of her body. It was distant still, there was a gown between them. The gown was wide as a world. Her body was growing great, until it was another sea that would cool him. It was a sea of fire, but the fire was white and would cool him. It was needful so.

She struggled.... Sudden she came of her own broken and sick will. Their wills were healing each other. She was willfuller now than he. She held his head in her arms, her flesh was all about him. Her gown was gone.

He found that she was lying beside him, crumpled: holding herself away. He found she was a little bruised woman with bruised little breasts and hair tangled, knotted in heat. He found he was moving away from her.

He found that the night was coming back. It was scornful and triumphant. It waved onward, and upon its bitter burning waves came the Deanes who were no longer in the mountains. There they were in the room. A vast febrile room. Filled with the City and its desolate shadows, filled with the Deanes. Huddling diminished in a corner a guest and a servant.

He spoke to her: “Anne.”

She answered: “Yes, Mr. David,” so he knew she knew this also.

At breakfast the sweet silence of restraint. A Puritan’s vow in the withdrawn eyes of each other.

But the heat did not stop: nor the wearing away of will and the rebellion of nerves. Anne came again. It had nothing to do with the wide remainder of their lives. It was somnambular. She was the soul of the heat--the gladness of it. So they got to be happy together and not to mind very much. They got to laughing and to forgetting. There were never many words. Breakfast was the break from a dream.

David deciphered her silence.

“I am wiser than you believe. I am wiser than you,” it said. “I am thankful for you. You need not worry. Oh, I am very thankful.”

All one week, Anne’s step on the threshold of his room was gone. David fumbled in bare feet along the tunneled hall. His flat palm felt her door. It was locked. The end--sweet end of unreplenishment.

No word further: no glance toward the past to open it once more....

* * * * *

They were really there--the Deanes! A cool, bright night with stars crushed above the crude wave of the city streets. They had traveled through that night and those stars for this city. They were there in the early morning.

They came in discussiveness and noise, as a luxurious gift comes wrapped in crackling paper. Once unbundled, they were rather silent. David sensed an unease and discomfort in their coming--a token of what happened in souls of their kind when they were taken even for a day from the rounds of their habits. David observed with what swift recuperation they merged into the imprint of their house; how their house seemed to sigh and settle with the recapture of its soul. Sudden, there was David, completely strange, dizzily away: with the memory of his amour an unbelievable, discreditable dream.

He watched Anne with the other servants that had come sink swiftly into the cloud of servience: lose her charm and her sex: dwindle in an instant to be an appendage of her mistresses, an inflection of the wishes of these reigning women. By the shock of this a sort of osmosis went on in David.

He found himself partly identified with Anne: had they not been one together?--and, so, diminished, humbled. Another part of him flung her off and merged with his cousins, his flesh and blood; become Anne’s remote and indifferent master.

He stood there awkward while the process shredded and dazed him. Between these warring halves of himself, he fell away from the sharp social trial of the moment--the need of fronting these women. His aunt took note of a vacancy about him.

“Well, David, it’s been a long time waiting to know you.” She added to herself: “He’s stupid.”

Her second daughter, Lois, supplemented her aunt as one generation should another: “I think he’s dear”; she looked at him keenly, “but what’s bewildering him so?”

She came very close to him, and held out her hand. “I’m awfully glad to know you, David.” He took her hand so patiently, that she held up her lips, “We’re cousins,” she explained and she laughed.

With great seriousness, he kissed her and liked her.

Muriel, who was nineteen and three years older and wiser than Lois, watched the little challenge of acquaintance, smiled sourly, busied herself with her bags.

“Well,” she said, searching for her powder puff. “I suppose it has been frightfully hot?”

Mr. Deane had been quarreling with the coachman about the fare: his own carriage was not yet in service. He puffed into the room. David saw and at length realized how changed he was, in the true setting of his wife and daughters. He scarcely noticed David.

“Got everything?” he asked excitedly. “Nothing lost? My! it’s hot! That robber robbed me. Lauretta--you have the keys? I must run along. Where’s breakfast?” He mopped his brow, he paced; and David wondered whether the executive task of shipping his family to New York--or some obscure disturbance--was the thing too much for him.

David stood quietly apart. He unstrapped bags; untied boxes; stacked rugs and tennis rackets into obtrusive corners. They let him work for them, quite as they let Anne work. He found himself dwindling from them: he wondered why he minded performing these casual tasks. He found he did not care for this identity with Anne, although a part of him knew it existed only in himself. He looked at her--not even in her. She was very moist and humble and unattractive in her black skirt and her white apron tucked high in her corsage. He could not separate her body from that apron--chiefly from that attitude of serving. He wanted to say to himself “Well--she served me!” He wanted to be high-handed, cynical, indifferent. He managed to lose all sense of this toiling, nodding girl as one with the sweet woman he had held in his arms and held with all his body. There he was, scrutinizing Lois: her smart slimness; the perfect abandon of her body not to him but to her own position. His cousin wore a bright blue satin dress, simple and short and trim. Her corsage was caught up in white lace:--the scheme was near enough to the livery of Anne to make the difference crying. Her half-bare arms were white. Strangely white. David guessed what pains she must have been to so to keep them. She had taken off her hat; her golden hair fell daintily--unmoist, immaculate--upon her forehead, and in crisp ringlets down her neck. She had a tender smile that seemed to take one in and laugh one out. Her features were smiling, soft and round, and were yet tinged with an astute concern that contradicted their benevolence. The white-slippered feet and the white-stockinged legs were an increased offsetting flirt of humor to her serious brown eyes. The attentive quality in Lois was her grace, her tender aloofness, her sixteen years full of pride. David found himself quite willing to deny his amour with a servant.

Anne needed to come up to him and ask him:

“Will you be going downtown to-day, Mr. David? Or will you be here to lunch?”

“I’m going downtown,” he said sharply. He looked in her face and found the soft intimate sense of her offensive: a too cloying sweetness for his stomach. On the heels of his discovery a great remorse and disgust at himself. It drove him toward a demonstration of bravado: he needed almost to make clear to this searing presence of the Deanes that he owed Anne much, was more like Anne than like them, and was aware of it. This too was checked, left him dangling.

Lois caught him looking her through, and came over to where he worked at a stubborn bag: she said: “Let me help you, David.”

“No need,” he said with a tone studiedly similar to the one he had addressed to Anne. There was balm in that. It seemed, however, not to disturb Lois: and Anne was out of the room.

His cousin helped to the extent of loosing one strap. She sat on the gladstone and was suddenly languid, and forgot....

With Lois cornering his eye, David found he had the whole group in his mind. Mr. Deane was still at paces on the floor, calling for breakfast. David was amazed at his insignificance in this concise room. His wife paid him no attention. Twice she brushed against him, crossing the room: twice also she brushed against a bag. Her reactions were one. Muriel went up to him and said: “Father, let me have about twenty dollars more, will you?” Mr. Deane’s pacing slowed against this new ordinance. He stopped, snapped the bills from his wallet and handed them to his daughter. Muriel was at the moment looking over her shoulder, giving an order to Anne. She did not stop. Her eyes did not go with her receiving hand. Mr. Deane resumed his pacing. His wife said, half in the air: “In a moment, Anthony, we shall be able to spare Anne.” Lois, musing in her corner, suddenly flared forth: “Father, you are making me nervous with your walking like a lion in his cage!” But at once her face went soft, she forgot what she had said. Then her father had left the room, following the bright discovery that Anne had left before him.

David felt it was time to be off for downtown. He went to his aunt.

“Good-by.”

“I hope, David, you don’t squander your money at those expensive lunch places.”

David said he did not. He did not add he was afraid of them. He went to Lois.

“Good-by.”

“Good-by,” she smiled. “Come back soon.”

He went to Muriel. She looked up surprised.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Good-by.”

And the revelation came to David. These four persons were not a group: in no true sense were they a group. The families that he had known were strictly groups.... Even his own, though in his father’s days the rhyme of it was pain. Some single rhythm, some common color composed them. Here were four persons. Their spirits had nothing to do one with another. He was quite sure their spirits were not aware one of another. They spent one man’s money: they obeyed one woman’s orders: they lived at the behest of a sort of mutual complacency together, sharing the pleasures that were in need of union for support. But they were not united. David felt it, touching their fingers, as he said:

“Good-by.”

It gave him a strange, even a sick feeling: as if he had seen a man devouring his own hands.

IV

It was voluptuous for Tom Rennard after the trees and the birds to give himself once more into the bond of his profession. Through the free woods he walked in manacled anarchy: through the City’s thralldom he walked free. He plunged into work. He touched the tasks of the approaching season, knew it would be his best, measured his dominion above success and was glad like a bird perched on top of its cage. He prepared a brief for a case months away from trial: he played with the strategy of an appeal in a suit not yet argued. In the brash nights of the refilling City he sat in hotel lobbies and let his mind cut clear through the flaccid provincial crowds. He journeyed uptown to a baseball game: drank in the rawness of the joy of others in a ball swiftly caught and clouted: let his heart fill with the tang of the game’s intricate and lissome grace against the sprawling pleasure of the mindless. Once more New York, an atmosphere, lay, swirled, clouded and shone around him. Then he shut his desk, an early afternoon, and went to see his sister.

Her studio was unfashionable in location. It was the top floor of a crumbling red-brick house in the moiled middle East Side of the city. It was east of Murray Hill, west of Stuyvesant Square: the elevated trains snorted their cinders not far from her flowered window. Cornelia began to make money and her habitation blossomed. Persian shawls appeared in appropriate corners: new rash adventures in color out of Paris gladdened the white walls: slender vases came from exile in Chatham Square. Tom called the place his refuge from the city.

“Hello,” she said. “I am glad you came. I’m lazy this afternoon.” Tom folded his coat away in the little bedroom. It had the air of a cell. The white walls were bare, the white iron bed was narrow; a small pack of books stood in the corner of the floor.

“You take it easy,” he said, already at the task, “and I’ll prepare you some Turkish coffee. Have you any of that orange essence left?”

He was adept and he needed to ask no further questions.

They settled and sipped and talked. Cornelia was on the couch. Tom squatted on the floor. Both of them had lighted cigarettes.

“Well, what adventure?” she asked.

She looked more than the three years older that she was. She wore an unembroidered smock--a dull, muslin drab. Her feet were sandaled. Her hair was drawn tight back over her head, where it could not interfere with work. Her eyes were soft in the harsh angles of her face.

“I was on a vacation, Cornelia. You know that means that I took care nothing should happen to me.”

She laughed. “That efficient you’re not, dear boy.”

“Well, there was no semblance of adventure. I tramped and drank a lot of glorious milk and slept nine hours a night.”

“And----?”

“And swam and paddled.” Tom wagged his head with the catalogue.

“You met somebody interesting?”

He stopped. “How do you know?”

“You always do, don’t you? Who was it? The girl, at last?”

“No--not the girl. And you’re wrong. Really, I had a deliciously dull time.”

She did not press the matter.

“Daydon says I ought to move now I’ve won that prize. He says no one will visit a studio so near Third Avenue.”

“Are you going to?”

“I am not.”

“I am glad, Cornelia. Just because you have begun to have money is no reason for spending it all on rents.”

“That’s just what most New Yorkers do, is it not?”

They both laughed, and were silent.

“What you said has a lot of truth in it,” Tom spoke at last. And his sister knew he had pounced on her observation as a text. He was comfortable now. He had been just a bit uneasy, questioned about his trip. There was the sign of a release from nervousness in the brightening of his eyes and the slower puff of his cigarette--the way he curled up his legs, limbered his arms and began to talk. Cornelia watched him with a vague amusement and a subtle reservation. She would let him have his speech; then she would pin him back to his trip and the thing in it which made him nervous. In this mood she listened.