Part 5

“Really,” he said, “the true inwardness of New York’s rising sky-line has been the passion of New Yorkers for high rents. Have you ever thought of that? What a handy substitute for other, remoter standards they have found in the price of housing? Of course the gullible talk of the fact that New York is a crowded island. They forget the miles of dilapidated and discarded masonry within hail of their stylish towers. Some day the historian will understand. He will say this: ‘Money was so deep their worship that they mis-prized all treasures of life which did not blatantly announce it. They left their walls empty of beauty, their larders empty of health, their houses empty of grace, in order to pay high rents to the lords of land. These fabulous sums were the pride and the decoration of their lives. The height of New York rentals and the high buildings that were their symbols became the chief expression of Metropolitan Art!’”

He laughed. Cornelia kept silent.

“The historian will finish in this tone: ‘Surely these were a foolish people, ripe for destruction.’”

“Give me another cigarette, Tom.” She was resolved not to help him along. Tom came to silence. He felt her mood.

“Well, what is it?” he asked.

“You had better look out, brother mine. You could easily get to be a typical New Yorker. I hate talk.”

“What I said wasn’t true?”

“Yes. But it was talk.”

“Oh, boo! Don’t be so serious.”

“Weren’t you?”

“Of course not. I was speaking the truth. Even, I was prophesying. To be serious at such a game is to risk being a fool.”

“Most of your talk, Tom, is a side-stepping of something in you you want to hide. I have noticed that.”

Cornelia was half up on her couch, facing him straight. Now, she was ready to pin him. “It’s a bad convenience, dear,” she went on, “putting up all these brittle outer observations when some one threatens to get under your skin. You do it so well.”

She smiled; Tom straightened his legs and met her gaze. He knew her direction. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said.

“Why? Just because you don’t?”

This was a true shot. He acknowledged it.

“Very well,” he spoke dryly. “There was a boy--a mere boy--up there. From New England. For some curious reason he upset me. I don’t like to talk about him. I do want to see him again. It’s all rather odd because he was really quite dull. We had damn little to say.”

In a flash Cornelia’s mood changed. Her perceptions had controlled her--the acute and angular and severe in her. Now she was seated toward him on the couch; it was as if dominion had passed over to her eyes that were large on her brother. She spoke tenderly:

“It’s not a girl yet, is it, Tom?”

“You know it never is. Girls can’t disturb me. I can master women. I am cool and sure before them. But so I was with this--this fellow. Yet it seems, as I look back--quite irrationally, mind you--it seems as if we had had a contest and he had won.” He paused.

“You probably _talked_ to him--flaming revolutionary talk.”

Tom shrugged.

“And he was shocked.”

“Precisely,” Tom burst in. “He was the shocked one--the dominated one, the silenced. Then, why this foolish desire to see him again and throw him on his back?”

“It has been troubling you?”

“I have imaginary conversations with him. I walk up and down Broadway with him, and say: ‘See! what a Gehenna this country’s greatest city is?’ I take him to theaters and gloat and declare ‘Trash, eh? They call it art in New York.’ Even at my office. I show him through my papers. ‘All chicanery,’ I announce. ‘That’s what you want to enter, is it?’ I shame myself before him.”

“Think it over, Tom,” Cornelia followed his silence. “You should be able to find out the thing that is troubling you.”

Tom sat a bit diminished on the floor. Sedulously he flicked the ash from his cigarette, each vestige of the ash; his fingers close to the hot, red tip. He looked up:

“This chap has something I lack and want: a sort of pure sincerity. He’ll go far--and be miserable as the devil.”

“Look out! Aren’t you the one who is afraid of misery?”

“True. I want him to give me the saving treasure. I want to give him the saving moderation. Then we could both be saved.”

Cornelia laughed. “What _are_ you talking about now?”

But Tom was very sober. “He is all wings. He has no eyes. He’ll dash himself against the sun. I am all eyes. I see everything. But where are my wings? I’ll freeze to death from far away, seeing the sun.”

He got up. He paced the room.

“Oh, this is nonsense. You are right. I liked him because he was a naïve, country lad. I was afraid I had hurt his innocence----”

“You are dying to kill it.”

Tom stopped and faced his sister. “That’s not quite fair, Cornelia. Not kill it. Steal some of it, perhaps.”

He was talked out of his mood. He was light-hearted and full of interest for a thousand things. It was a trifle after all.

So they played through the afternoon, they went arm in arm to dinner, they spent an hour in a terrace with liqueurs before them. They talked of her work and her triumphs and the quaint jealousies of artists. All this because it was his greatest pride. And several times Tom broke out in admiration of New York: in praise of her vast largesses. He was confident and proud. Cornelia smiled again--her angular, critical self....

Before her door he kissed her good-night.

“We’ve made a pretty good start, from Dahlton, Ohio, haven’t we, sister? Pretty good, pretty fair.”

She changed once more to the tender part of her nature: she ignored his mood.

“Good-night. And Tom--that country boy--bring him up some late afternoon?” Her eyes alone smiled. Tom startled, imperceptibly.

“Surely,” he hurried to say. “Surely ... if I see him.”

Nature cellared its profusion. The sap of life was sucked to the roots of things. As the year died, the house of the Deanes came to life.

Chests gave forth finery and color. Curtains were up, barring the archaic sun: dun colors were away from the florid chairs. The safe-vaults let go their silver plate and their gold, and from the hot-houses came flowers. Streets were chill, skies were mournful; in the narrow endless purlieus of the disinherited, of the nine-tenths, began the hunger for coal.... But it was summer in the City.

The position of David was straddling, but not too insecure. He was part of the Deane household. How goodly a part devolved on his own discretion. If he made himself liked, there was no comfortable share he might not win. He was part of the Deane Company--the Deane machine of subsistence. A small and trivial part with a distinction. This he did not feel until his fellow-menials later had ceased feeling it for him. In his low place there was always the seed of future sharing. He was the Boss’s nephew. In the low places of the others, there was always the seed of permanence. These were the Boss’s victims. The Boss would keep them victims if he could. He would have all the pretty terms of a century of special pleading to hallow his act. But surely the world was a smiling place for David Markand.

“My boy,” said Mr. Deane, “you are on probation. If you prove your worth, as you may well imagine, I will be glad. American enterprise is the home of the free, the contest of character and brains. The true man wins the prize. And of course, I don’t forget who you are: that you are the only child of my dear sister. Nor must you, my boy. I have no sons of my own.”

Uptown he was still somewhat the stranger. But he was the friend of Lois and he grew confident. They liked each other. Different dispensations from far separate sources had thrust them close. Now both of them stood together at the gate of the brilliant world Muriel went to evening after evening. They saw Muriel return, full of tokens of its splendor: full of weariness and hidden joy, full of pride and hidden knowledge. David meant to enter the gates with Lois. In the waiting it was natural that they talk, hold hands.

She would have said that she found him interesting. There was her own life, which in her mind lacked quality. It was an empty atmosphere occasionally pierced by suns and falling stars. The light of these was her sustenance and was rare. So Lois starved.

She would have said that he was easy to talk to.

In the conventional sense he understood nothing: in the sense in which life was a ruled open page for Muriel and her mother. But in the outlaw sense where these two were blind, he understood miraculously well. She could skip the roted things of the world in talk with him, dwell on the stirring and uncharted. They met in a sort of reticence about the obvious. Not deliberately, but because he could not otherwise have understood. Two persons speaking different tongues could live on elemental planes. They could convey and satisfy the sense of hunger, they could fight, they could make love. The difficulty might come when they attempted to dine together, to quarrel civilly, or to get married. Here, a common set of words was needed.

So between these two. Social engagements, family traditions, judgments of the technique and manner of existence she could not broach with him. She did not need to. Her school, her friends, her family webbed her in such subjects. The wider ranges that Muriel would have cut through as vague became their meeting place. They talked about life and beauty and the future. She was sixteen and David twenty. In these vast fields they were one fledgling age.

They were often alone together. The room on the third floor that faced the street was the living-room of the sisters. And Muriel was usually out: and the parents stayed in their own quarters below.

Dinner’s end was release. David sat there uncomfortable and Lois sat there indifferent. Mr. Deane had few words. He was weary at night. What energy he had poured into the business of eating. Mrs. Deane was voluble enough, but she needed no attentive ears and she had none. She talked: her husband ate: her daughters spoke low together: David made his shoulders narrow and occasionally straightened with a shock when his aunt’s eyes turned on him. The last sip of coffee meant the last moment at the table for the girls, whether their mother was in the middle of a sentence or their father was asking them a question. In this case, the question could be curtly answered in the process of exit.

“Come, David,” from Lois, “you’re finished, aren’t you?”

If at first David was reluctant to leave so suddenly, he learned that nothing different was expected of him. Mr. Deane lighted a cigar. Often he was left alone to smoke it. He sat, his body folded and heavy in his chair, his eyes folded and heavy behind smoke. Anne came and went, clearing the table. He was unperturbed. His soft mouth wreathed and pouted: occasionally he smacked his lips. He was the picture of attainment. In his empty gaze, in the lack-reflex slumber of his muscles, in the dim movements of the heavy smoke, there was a gross Buddhistic character. It was clear that attainment in his American faith tended not toward heaven, but toward a sort of flatulent Nirvana.

Meantime, Mrs. Deane was upstairs, under a lamp, reading a novel; and when her husband did not eventually shake himself, with a slow and sleepy evolution, to his club, he was in bed before she closed her book.

Often members of the plenteous family of Mrs. Deane came to dine. But the atmosphere of the table was ample enough to embrace them. There was the same dull air, charged with the vocal passion of Mrs. Deane and the sharp reserves of her two daughters. Only one sister--a Miss Dikes--could match the commanding Lauretta. They were profoundly sisters: when she was at table, the currents of air were shifted rather than changed. Always, Lois and David were willingly excused after dinner. And Muriel managed often to be out when her relatives were there. Her mother scolded and occasionally wept at this disloyalty in her child. But the child was already stronger than the mother. Muriel seldom quarreled back. She sneered and her eyes flashed: when she spoke, it told.

Upstairs David reached for a book.

“You have your homework to do, I s’pose?”

Lois smiled and nodded. “Oh, yes.... But I’m not going to do it.”

“You’ll not get your certificate if you don’t watch out.”

“And what good would it do me, if I did?... We’re going to talk.” She snatched his book.... “Unless, of course, you are more interested in _The Banking System of the United States_.”

“Lord, no!” David laughed.

They sat together on the broad, cushioned couch whose gay blue and dull gold were a telling contrast to the dull blue and bright gold of the mother’s room below.

“What are you going to do when you become rich?” she asked him.

He looked at her. She asked him this as once before he had said to her: “When are you going to get married?” She had answered: “I am not going to get married, perhaps.” He had laughed her denial away.

So now: “I am not going to get rich, perhaps.” And there was she, scoffing at him, holding back her head and saying: “Please, do be serious, David!”

He was. He began to think aloud.

“Not everybody gets rich.”

This had no effect on her. As his silence marked his words as her answer, she shook her head with a faint impatience.

“I know. But what’s that to do with us? You’re my cousin, aren’t you? You’re our sort. You’re in Daddie’s business.”

“What sort don’t get rich, Lois?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She looked at him as if he were stupid. “You ought to know, better than I. You see ’em all around you at Daddie’s business.”

She also had been set to thinking. “How are they different from us?” she asked. Then: “Father says they simply aren’t as clever. Most of them drink too much: and have packs of children: and don’t bathe very often. I guess it’s all these things.”

“It must be. But you can’t really see much difference. Of course, _you_. You’re different. You’re a--why, you’d die, you couldn’t have been born, anywhere else. But I work with five other chaps in the shipping office, and they’re just like me.”

Lois laughed. “What nonsense. They’re not! You’re much nicer.” She was giggling in foretaste of the wicked truth she was about to utter, “you’re--I’m sure you’re _much_, much cleaner.”

She was like a pricking rose under his face, laughing there on the couch. David resolved to be angry.

“That’s rotten of you, Lo. You’re no democrat.”

“Of course, I’m not. I’m a Republican.”

David, enjoying his indignation and unconsciously aware of the excuse it gave him, reached for her wrists.

“Don’t!” he commanded.

“You are!”

He pulled her to him, and put his arms around her waist. He said: “Stop making fun of people.” Then he kissed her.

Lois stopped laughing. She was very still. Her eyes glistened.

“Do you think, if you hadn’t been _nicer_, and _cleaner_ and everything, I’d let you _kiss_ me?” She jumped up and away.

He liked her intimacy. It flattered him. He did not wish to tell her of his work at Mr. Devitt’s, and how easily he might have stayed there long and forever. And she liked his reticence, feeling its power. She liked the veiled promise of pleasure and strength that he suffused from all of his big being. It frightened her.

She was seated as far away from him as she could manage. Her bare elbows were on her knees and her chin was cupped in her hands. The pressure upward faintly distorted her soft mouth: one corner was open and two teeth bit white and hard against the lip. Her throat tremored with her amusement; the rose mesh of her waist fell forward in suggestion of the warm swell of her girlish bosom. David believed that she was purring. He saw her teeth biting their hardness into the blush of her lips: he saw how smooth and round her arm was. He said:

“You let me kiss you because I’ve a right to.” He was aware of the retreat in his words. “...because we’re cousins.”

She merely lifted her face a bit, as if he were stirring away. “All right. We’re going to play now that we are _not_ cousins. We are just you and me, do you hear? So you mayn’t kiss me anymore.”

Already he was forward. The game started. The goal was implicit with them both. In a fortnight’s time, David had won his kiss. He was very sure that Lois was very lovely: he was almost sure that she did not return his kisses because he was unworthy....

* * * * *

David sat at his long table in the office, lost in a maze of figures which gave a different answer each time he questioned them. He was languidly certain the figures were laughing at him, held him in contempt. About him yellow pine, hard human bustle. He looked up through the mist of his discomfort; he saw above him a slender and sleek young man with a smile on thick lips.

“My name is Duer Tibbetts. You’re Markand, aren’t you?”

David was not sure whether to keep his seat. He was twisted in indecision.

“I am a cousin of your aunt, I work over there under Mr. Herding in the Cashier’s Office. I have just come back from two weeks in Virginia. I was told to look you up and make you feel at home.”

For the pause, he stood there a bit ill-at-ease himself.

“I’ll come round at noon, and we’ll go to lunch.” He was gone.

David had the sense, walking through the streets, of a young man marvelously sure and hard and clever for his years. He gave forth the slightest word as a pronouncement.

“The very hottest weather’s over,” he declared. “Greibeck’s is a great café. You must go there often. I discovered it last year, one day I was lunching with Mr. Farnam--H. L. Farnam of The Liberty Trust. Always go downstairs. There are women upstairs. Downstairs is the place for talking business.”

Duer Tibbetts thrust the long printed card under his nose and then told him what to eat. He ordered as if he were in a great hurry. He drank beer with his meat. “Don’t you want _anything_ to drink?” he asked as if unwilling to believe in any organic deficiency in his new friend. He called the waiter by his Christian name--but never looked at him.

“We must get to be friends,” he announced. “Don’t bother about the boys in your office. They’re not our sort. Stick to work.... Stick to work and stick to your uncle. He’s a prince--a prince,” he chanted with emotion.

“I’ve been here three years. Since I was sixteen. No college nonsense for me. I’m assistant cashier. You’ll find the old man is hard, but he is just. Yes, he is that. But he has his silent little ways of pushing you along.”

For the first time, he raised his eyes and David met them. He liked him better. So this Duer Tibbetts was to be his friend? As soon as he began again to talk with his eyes once more down, David examined him.

He seemed engrossed in his own words. He paid them out, as if they were coin. He talked with a certain muscular emphasis of his lips, a periodic pointing of his left forefinger. His forefinger always was detached from the others. The rest of him remained immobile. A gold chain fell straight from his lapel to his coat pocket. His hair was so blond that near the temples and behind the ears it imperceptibly faded into the color of his skin. His fingers were wider at the tips than at their base. His voice was high pitched, coarse-grained, mostly a monotone.... David met his eyes and liked him again.

Tibbetts’ gaze clinched his firmly; almost too fixedly: as if his eyes lacked the pain of encounter. They were lashless blue. Tibbetts had the soft eyes of a boy, the shallow eyes of a man who has not ventured where the boy’s eyes yearned.

David turned his own deep uncertain gaze on him: in the retreat of his glance and the veil of warmth that suffused from the contact it was altogether clear which was in truth the older of these two. But neither David felt this, nor Duer Tibbetts, steadfast and staring. What came from their encounter was David’s sense of respect and wonderment for Duer Tibbetts, and Duer Tibbetts’ thrill of respect and wonderment for himself. To this end he talked. A gentleman can boast only before an equal. And Tibbetts was a gentleman, if for no other reason because he felt the quality of David.

“A smart chap. You know: the sort who get on in the end,” he reported to his father. The young protégé and the powerful attorney of Deane and Company discussed the new arrival. They said many things. The paramount detail that this was the nephew of Mr. Deane, they had no words for: but this was what they were keenly thinking. The suppressed thought came out in the rhythmic beat of Mr. Tibbetts’ thumb against the desk, in the over-emphasis of his son when he said such common words as these: “I like him. He is slow, but what is slowness? You never can tell what’s underneath. The fact that he don’t know much now shows merely that he has lived in a little town. Lots of good stuff has come from little towns.”

Now, he talked lavishly and with diligence to impress David who sat passive, trying to learn, telling himself that he was learning. He talked of projects and profits, of Mr. Deane’s subtle aggressiveness and of the Company’s prosperity. He spoke of the great law-suit which his father had won for the firm from the Feddlesby people. He spoke of a swinging figure that had gone from Deane and Company to help elect McKinley.

“Measure it with our payroll, if you want to _feel_ how much it was to give.” He did not divulge the payroll. He said, “We” when he meant David and himself; “We” when he meant the Company; “We” when he meant America. There was a deep philosophy in this confusion. But David was still far from grappling with it, and Tibbetts did not dwell in the sphere of definition and reflection.

“Yes, sir,” he pointed and flushed with his prophecy. “We’ll be in Cuba in less than a year. Don’t you forget it. We’ve got to kick the Spaniards out and go in ourselves. Then, we’ll earn enough from our dormant Las Daciendas plantations to buy up every relic factory in Key West. It’s a coup that’s certain.”

All this puzzled David. He was not sure whether the “We” who must kick Spain out of the West Indies was the payroll of Deane and Company: or whether the “We” that was to grow subsequently rich in Las Daciendas was the citizenry of America. It was all a bewilderment of lines.