Part 7
Here: Lois was ensconced in a deep armchair of bronzed leather. She was examining her little feet that lay in a rich Turkish rug. A knock at the door.
“Come in,” said her father without looking up.
A young man, the symbol of subservience, stepped in.
He placed a group of papers before Mr. Deane, who did not look at him. He stepped back, threw up his head and waited.
Mr. Deane raced through the papers. He marked annotations. He grunted.
“You’ll have to see Mr. McGill about this”: the young man agilely stepped forward to ascertain which paper it was, and agilely subsided. “All right. Let Mr. Marton attend to the tax.”
He returned the papers to the young man, for the first time saw him.
“Here,” he smiled. “Why don’t you two greet each other?”
Duer Tibbetts moved jerkily forward and took his cousin’s hand. But the bondage of the room’s authority was strong on him. He seemed weighed down by this sense of special dispensation. Social talk was impossible in the august presence. He was soon gone.
Another five minutes of chat, another knock. This time a girl appeared with papers. The same subdued alertness, the same gingerly respect. Mr. Deane pressed a button. A boy bobbed in.
“Take Miss Deane to her carriage.” The boy fell back as if to flatten himself into the wall, while she passed him. Her father got up.
“Well, my dear. I am afraid I am too busy now”; in this splendid easy manner he dismissed her....
This transfiguration of her father into a man of power was a sharp new knowledge. But in the more persuasive color of her home, its lines grew faint. It soon withdrew into the limbo of things remote, scarce real, hence scarce remembered. It had little application to her world uptown. In consequence, it had no effect.
Lois left school in time for lunch. It was to be her last year at school. The lunches would go on.
Seated at the wide round table with Muriel and her mother, she instinctively inquired into her own future freedom: and in this mood studied them. She studied their dress; she studied their activities. She absorbed their judgments and their pleasures.
She was sixteen. A spirit of gayety and candor danced in her heart. But she had no knowledge to build a mansion for it: to train and cherish it: to give it weapons wherewith to confront the world. It was dancing, this unblemished spirit, dancing itself to death. For it was daughter of the sun, and it breathed no fresh air: it had been born careless and frail and all about it walls of convention: it was starved and forced to feed upon itself.
“I promised to go and have tea with poor Mrs. Dent.”
“Since when,” asked Muriel, “is Mrs. Dent ‘poor’?”
“Don’t you remember she has just lost her husband?”
“Oh, yes.” Muriel remembers.
Her mother goes on. “Do you think, dear, you can drop me there on your way to the Selby’s?”
“I don’t really see how I’ll have time, Mamma. I must take a rest after lunch. I promised to call for Aline King.”
“Can’t Aline get there without you?”
“I promised her, Mamma.”
Mrs. Deane will take the street-car. She does not like to squander money on cabs.
“You haven’t forgotten that you are going shopping with me, to-morrow morning. You promised me.”
“I saw just the loveliest hat, just to-day, Mamma, at Bertrande’s. I am having it sent home to you. I’m sure it will suit you. Then, we needn’t go shopping. I must write to Clarice sometime. I thought I’d sleep late to-morrow and write before lunch. She is getting a divorce, you know.”
Lois knew already the inwardness of marriage. There was much talk of this at the luncheon table. She had the right contempt for the girls who married unmoneyed men for love: for the men who risked their future--their finances--in alliance with unmoneyed girls: and for the novels she read where love was extolled and the sentimental match defended. These books were--well--for reading. Novels and stories were indulgences like red and emerald peppermints after dessert. They lied.
And Lois knew already the inwardness of friendship. Muriel and her mother had friends. They kissed them and flattered them and entertained them. At the luncheon table they discussed them. No one but was a tissue of deceptions, of selfishness, of deceit. Their morals were largely obstacles they were forever dodging. They flirted--with fops or fools. They angled--for goldfish. They were miserable at home. One was none too anxious to have children. One was none too faithful to her husband. All of them were none too good at all.
Immediately after lunch, Florence was to call for Muriel and take her for a walk. Florence was violently trying to win the King boy whose father had nearly a million. But it was hopeless because Mabel--mutual friend--had told Muriel all about it and _she_ was secretly engaged to Clifford King. Oh, Aline wouldn’t know! Clifford was bored by Aline. Muriel and Mabel had had a good laugh over Florence--poor child--such antics.
“She really loves him, you know.” Muriel smiles complacently. This is an interesting if somewhat superfluous detail in her wish to wed him. Mrs. Deane nods, mildly concerned.
Later: “Hello, Florence dearest. I was so afraid you’d be late....”
Indeed, Lois knew already the inwardness of life. Life was, in the patriarchal term, a “business proposition.” Out of the arcana of the past her intellect could summon the picture of a free land peopled by striving men and women. This land was America. Its freedom meant the opportunity of all “to get along”: to become rich. Men achieved this in business, women in marriage. The sublime distinction of America was that no castes interfered with business, and no classes with marriage.... Sharply there emerged from this hallowed field one man and one woman. The man was her father. He had grown rich by being quick and clever. The woman was her mother. She had grown rich by being sensible, by seizing her chance. Romance in their lives was a hidden function, if it existed at all. It was bound up with the mysteries of birth and sex. These things took care of themselves.
The important thing for Lois, since she was a woman, lay in the need of being sensible. Lois knew what this meant. She knew as well the proportional insignificance of her own girlish impulses. Lois loved to play, loved to be loyal to a friend, would have loved to love a man. But these were part of her childhood, and childhood was a special state. Its needs were indulgences one must outgrow. Childhood was of the same dim category as art and stories. It wasn’t true. It was “make-believe.” It lied. Muriel had already cast it aside like her short dresses. Lois was aware she was carrying it a bit too far and too long. She was sixteen and in ankle skirts and her braids were already gathered on her head. She deemed herself brave and a trifle foolish to be so frolicsome at sixteen. She was unswervingly confident of knowing how to change at the needed moment. Meanwhile, she felt herself slightly inferior in the things that held her and in the moods she loved. The rule of life was to harden the present into a mold for the future. Yet Lois could not resist pouring herself still into immediate and short-lived moments: giving herself to emotions that must have no future. The gay spirit still danced fast. Inexorably, from without, the things she learned bore inward, seeped downward, stifled the things she had merely always felt. Her acquired consciousness was a slow acid mist that would eat away the stir and laughter of her birth. The gay spirit danced fast, though it was dancing to death.
All this was Lois. All this was drawing, with her and in her, near to David. With David the stalwart muteness of the years that inclosed him with his mother: the sting and the song of his father: the drowsy stir of the Town not yet awakened, not yet awakened to its death in the crash of the industrial Age.
Two little teeming worlds, spying each other, craving each other across the Nothing....
* * * * *
David and Thomas Rennard had agreed on an evening by letter. They were going to dine together, and then to theater. Tom waited in the lights of a Broadway chop-house.
He would not know the man he met: this he knew. He stood quite still and gauged the crowds. The heavy strokes of their passing fell against his measured life. They separated him as he stood there from the thoughts and fruits of his growing. Tom stood graceful and free as few men do. His weight was equal on both feet: his arms were unpropped: his back curved subtly in rhythm with his head. Only in the faint peer of his eyes was there defect. Tom was nearsighted. He did not admit this. He wore no glasses, despite the advice of doctors. His best friends had no inkling that when he recognized them, distant, on the street, it was not by sight of their features but by knowledge of the accents of their walk.
The crowds flayed him with dull black strokes and Tom was separate from his first months in the City. He twined this with thoughts of David. It was different of course. David must have found a ready welcome in the house of his uncle. Tom knew of Anthony Deane: his name was that of a big-hearted, well-liked merchant. Tom had come with no reception, no one to remake and to keep him. He thought of a stone fallen in a wind-shattered sea, how it sank with no slightest added tremor of wave and no sign from the swinging heavens. He knew what the City had done upon him. The terracing steel had rivetted his eyes and writhed him. The clamor of this world had soon enticed him from the call of his old thoughts. Old dreams were outrun by the faëry of the City.
He stood naked there, and emptied among millions. Cornelia was distant with her cold hand in his. But he was more alive than he had been. He knew this, because his nudity was not stark. It was encased in a great trembling. It was cold with a great hunger for warmth. A fire of will stirred in him: darted from him out and became vision among the millions. He had seen. He saw that these millions also were naked and forlorn from themselves. No one was at home in the City: no one was himself in the City! Tom had found himself smiling, known himself strong. He was naked no longer. _He was clothed in the knowledge of the nakedness of others_.... At once he had looked at his hands and found money. He prospered. But Tom knew that this light from within himself which played about among the darkness of men and brought him the strength of knowledge could not go forth from him and stay in him as well. When it was away, outside, doing his work Success, he was unlit himself.
Would he find David still shivering in his new nakedness? Tom remembered the distinction between them.
“No,” he said aloud: “he’ll be thinking there’s darkness and confusion all about, in the blinding blare of his own light. And blaming it all on himself.”
He winced, suddenly finding it cold. The dark pupils of his eyes distended, the mouth drew downward over the lower lip, the skin was taut on his cheek-bones. Then a recovering spark in his eyes illumed their warm particles of bistre, the defiant smile of his mouth pointed upward.
The lamps of the restaurant façade fell over Tom and bathed him. He had the sudden pain of feeling himself a black spot in warm blaze. He moved aside to shadow. He stepped out, and grasped David’s hand.
A coachman stood at the corner beside his horse. Idly he flapped his arms--a habit caught from the cold winters--against the musty broadcloth of his coat. He saw the two young men in the light. Their profiles were sharp. An eager alert young man and a drowsy one, passive before him. A clear laugh and a muffled laugh that followed always. The coachman turned to his horse: “Well, young feller, have some oats?” He prodded his soft nose. The other two were gone.
Three houses stood far separate in the City. The house of the Deanes where the old world of David dissolved into a frantic chaos: the house of the Company in whose gathered fires his new world formed from the running welter: the house on whose top floor lived Thomas Rennard. These houses threw a vivid stirring like the glow of lamps. The spheres of their activity converged. As they burned and moved, a myriad other burnings rose and met them, intermingled and transfused them. A single light, drenching the City. It fell like an eye upon these two talking: it fell with the same singleness upon each spot where men and women were, where men and women loved. From each spot came a glow, from the myriad glows rose back again the transfusing fire, deeper than consciousness, more real than the separate lives which fueled it, as the glow of coal is deeper and more real than the black coal itself. But through the brightness was a vibrancy: and where David and Tom sat, had they been wise enough to follow its receding lines, their vision must have reached back to the three houses. From other spots the grain of the light traced back to other sources. From these sources forth again to farther ones.... To a white cottage in the Eastern village, to the leaning plains of Ohio. Thence again away to beneath the hearts of two dead women stirring there, quiet--still--once more outward--perhaps to find each other behind the sun. Close, there: and here at the chop-house table seeking to be close.
* * * * *
David and Tom, together, were not on Broadway but at Cornelia’s studio. The studio had swung to place under their feet; Broadway lurched on, the footing of others.
Cornelia had not mentioned again her wish to meet Tom’s new friend. It was not necessary. The relation between them was too intimate for that. Tom knew when she was thinking of this: Cornelia knew when Tom had understood her.
“Well, how was the dinner, brother?”
“Are you busy next Sunday afternoon?”
“No.”
“I told Markand you were anxious to meet him. He is in a state of perturbation I hope won’t interfere with his royal job of clerking.”
“Oh, I am glad. But--how was the dinner?”
“You are the first artist he will have met. I have told him about us. Cornelia, you must wear something brighter than that Russian thing. Will you? The sandals will do. Stockings under them, however. A little more air in the meshes of your hair. Yes? Why not that green silk blouse with the orange smocking. I want him to see you’re an artist in some outward visible sign.”
“And the work----?” Cornelia looked at her clays.
“I am afraid he is not quite up to these.”
“Oh, nonsense, Tom!” His sister turned on her couch, her favorite seat. She tucked a foot beneath her and laughed. “To hear you talk, one would think the boy was dull--or that my art was inscrutably profound.”
“He’s not dull. I was amazed last night....”
“At last, the dinner!”
“I was amazed at the bright muddle he’s in. I tell you, he’s inquiring and inquiring. It’s glorious! He told me the Spanish-Cuban question was not a mere matter of relief for the _reconcentrados_! ‘There’s something else beside Principle,’ he announced.”
“Whereupon, I am sure, you added: ‘The same’s true of the Monroe Doctrine.’”
“If I had, it would have shocked him. I did not. His new searching eye has not yet reached that sacrosanct past. I was in no mood to startle him, Cornelia. I felt different. I like David Markand. I respect him. What if he has the usual illusions? In his soul, they are no longer the smug knock-kneed lies I hate. They become true: at least, beautiful. My facts seem shoddy and ugly--and lying, in the warm glow of his faith.”
They were silent both. Tom did not often speak so tenderly.
“Wait and see,” he concluded.
“I see already,” said his sister.
So David came.
He was to leave at once after the Sunday dinner: push his way through the depleted Sabbath City: he was to ring the bell on the brass-plate marked _Rennard_, come up three dusty stairs and find them waiting through the door that made two worlds of the black hall and the bright room.
“I am so glad to see you!” Cornelia had him at once in hand. He looked very tall beside her sharp slightness. She took his hat and his coat.
“Do sit down.” David was anxious to look everywhere about him, to touch all these mysteries with the warmth of his eyes so that they might be cold and strange no longer. He did not quite dare. He kept looking near Cornelia: then, with still greater ease, toward Tom. In this his sensitivity was clear. A glance was an intimate gesture, a visit, to David. He could not comfortably look at what he did not already comfortably know.
“Tom has told me not half enough about you. Just enough,” she smiled, “to make me know it was not half enough.”
Tom apprehensively tested his new friend. His gladness at seeing David understand Cornelia released his worry into laughter.
“Oh,” said David, “it is just the same in my case with what Mr. Rennard has said about you.” He looked at the little cast between the windows and blushed: he folded his hands and looked at them.
Tom remained silent. There was no need of talking: and although he talked much it was deeply true that Tom talked only when he had need of talking. He was comfortable now. He lit a cigarette, and lay prone, propped by his arms, on the window-seat; he let the conversation of the two go over him and smoked.
“You know,” Cornelia said, “we are not New Yorkers either.”
David met her eyes. “Your brother told me about how you ran away.”
Cornelia was silent. What could she say to swell the room’s slow freedom?
“My case”--David went on--“I am so different. I always lived with my mother and then she died. And then my uncle took me--took me really in charge. That is why I came. I have never done anything because I wanted to, really--that I can remember. Except perhaps work in the bicycle shop. Mother wanted me to stay longer at school. But--” he looked at his hands again and stopped, then met Cornelia squarely with a smile, “the truth is mother said to me: ‘Do as you please, son.’ And--and I was bored by school. My best friend, Jay Leamy--he worked at Mr. Devitt’s also.”
“You never told me that,” said Tom.
“He didn’t stay my best friend. I guess that’s why. I guess I was a better friend than he.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Cornelia.
“Well--it was natural. He was ten years older than I. He got married. He got a better job at the Arms factory just outside Town. We didn’t see each other so much after that. He sort of lost interest.”
Cornelia laughed. “I think that’s a little hard!” She did not want this word. She was sure “hard” was an ultimate wrong word for David Markand. She was vague in her misgiving. “Probably, his wife and--he had children? Well, they must have left him far less time.”
“It is not a question of time, is friendship?” David asked.
“Well, left him far less----” Why did Cornelia find this difficult? “Less _emotion_ perhaps. I can understand that. With a wife and children.”
“It would not have made any difference with me,” said David simply.
Tom was leaning over. “Perhaps you don’t know what it means to have a wife and children.”
“I know what it ought to mean to have a friend.”
“Are you sure?” said Tom.
“After we had shared so many thoughts, don’t you see?”
“You must be capable of deep friendship,” Cornelia thought aloud.
Tom was somehow crossed by her remark. He lay back once more, brooding. The talk was easy now between the other two. So easy that even silence did not disquiet them. Tom seemed far away.
Out of a silence, David asked: “Is that sort of friendship rare?”
Cornelia, not knowing, did not answer.
“If it is rare,” said Tom, “there must be something wrong with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The good things in the world are common. Sunlight: moonlight.”
“Mother and I were that sort of friends,” said David.
“I hope Tom and I are also,” laughed Cornelia.
David looked at her close. She was a woman who made beautiful things. That was her life. It seemed to David she was not so very different from many women he had known who were nothing but mothers. She was not pretty. It never occurred to David that she could be less than beautiful. So he accepted her.
A vague questioning flew through his mind like a scarf of cloud: Were things in the world that had different names so different after all? Artists and mothers, friends and mothers, sunlight and mothers.... The questioning faded.
It was good in this room.
Cornelia felt the trace of his mood on her flesh, found a warm pleasure in talk with this earnest boy whose mind could touch truth without the stiff proddings of the clever. It seemed to Cornelia that David was steadfastly strong like a tree.
Tom jumped out of his smoky silence and brewed coffee. They threw cushions on the floor. They laughed a bit at David’s awkwardness at squatting. These shadows in the room were good. Tom came forward now. The ease of his revery and of his listening had distilled some new disquiet. He needed to get at David.
He would have said: “How little this boy knows himself! What passion lies behind this dream of friendship! What will the world do when he goes asking impossible treasures?” The thought gave him worry. He would have said: “The City will not make him. Thanks for that. But break him, break him, perhaps.” The fear made him urgent: David must be flexible with his terrible strength. His spoken words were: “I am reminded of a story----”
“There was a man.” Tom did not know what he was going to say. His head swam. He was suddenly tired and full of power. He wanted, not sleep, but dream---- “who loved his friend. This man loved his friend and a woman came into his life whom he loved also. He asked for her in marriage, she gave her promise. So he went to his friend and told him. And the friend cried: ‘Do not wed her. Remain with me!’ And the man said: ‘I love this woman but you are my friend. I remain with you.’ He dismissed the woman whom he loved.
“Now, thereafter, all was sorrow in the home of the man and his friend. One night as the man slept an angel came to him. The angel said: ‘Thou who art so loyal to thy friend, name a wish and it is granted.’ The man, half-unknown to himself, cried out: ‘Make a miracle! Make one my friend and my lover. Then I may be loyal and yet be happy.’ The angel smiled. ‘So it is already.’ The angel disappeared.”