Part 9

Tom Rennard and his sister stood under a house with a high straight stoop like a dozen alongside it. They looked up. Behind them their passing through Stuyvesant Square. The sky was very deep and warm on the moldering housetops, beyond the cool clouds. These skimmed their shadows across the Park’s shut green. They threw small puffs of gray on the gleaming creepers of the Church. They dropped to the squat red meeting-house of the Friends and lightened its brick with their dark. They went westering over the bleak dense City.

“This is the number.”

They mounted the stoop.

Each had a hand on the iron rail that rusted under crumbling paint.

A piercing rumble lay in the Park. Jangle of horse-cars, stir and laughter of children, the dry gasp of life hot over the Park from four dense sides, as over a cool well. And the Square merging with these the distances it caught on its church-steeple: hoot of river craft, gashes of dull speed echoing into sharpness as an elevated train passed through muffled houses. All of it funneled down the narrow eastward street that fell from the Square to the River: rose above the shoulders of these two: flattened back against the reticence of brownstone walls.

“Not a bad house,” said Tom. “Relic of Knickerbocker glory. Some less brilliant Stuyvesant cousin may have lived in it once.” He pulled a bell-handle: its call pierced and lingered in the old mansion’s depths. The house stood unmoved like a ventriloquist.

He turned. The sun was aflame in the Eastern windows. He faced the Park. Slow swarms of men and women crawling and scattering like bugs. These drew away his thoughts from the house and Cornelia. She stood laughing at the ornamented vestibule: its florid crimson plaster.

“Strange, isn’t it?” she said. “When they tried to add beauty to their houses they made them hideous. Why is it?...”

Tom’s new partner, Gilbert Lomney, who was a cousin of the President of the Fidelity Bank, who was a nephew of the General Manager of a great Railroad System, who was among the loyal stags of Mrs. Astor’s balls, who was a fellow with no moral and no professional sense--he wondered how he was going to get along with him. He brought in business well enough. But Tom had misgivings. He thought about them now. Lomney’s most brilliant feature was his glasses: his best achievement was his neckties. His glasses had a way of catching the sun whenever there was any sun around. His neckties were striped and of three colors. Without his glasses, Lomney was dull. Without his neckties, he would be naked. His eyes were flat. His complexion was habitually gray. About his mouth were the heavy lines, the puffing pucker that denote a sluggish kinetic system. One thing, to be sure: Lomney’s head was long--what Tom knew to be a generous head. But he was not sure of the brows that seemed dissociate from his eyes. Well: this was his partner. That day there had been a rub in the office.

Lomney came in smiling in the morning.

“Rennard,” he said, “is there no way of getting out of this contract cheaper than by paying the indemnity?”

“Why doesn’t Murchison pay it? Good God! it’s scarcely a mutual document at that!”

“Well, if he has to, he’ll have less respect for us.”

Both of them knew that Murchison could afford to be fair: that Sampson could not afford to be cheated. But, “It’s not a question of that,” said Lomney, “It’s a question of how we are going to stand at 79 Broadway.”

“Let’s have all the facts--since the contract.” Tom easily devised a plan. He had taken it to Lomney, who rejoiced.

“Come out to lunch, oh, Daniel!” He flourished a silver-headed cane.

“No, I’ve an engagement.”

“Very well. Ta-ta. I’ll not be back to-day.”

Tom sulked at his lonely lunch. He did not mind the trick he had played for Lomney’s client. But the unctuous pleasure of his partner was an ill thing to accept. It made him clear away his desk that afternoon with a fresh disgust: and be improperly amiable to Ladd, their abject clerk: and smile at Lomney’s fizzle of a brief to be argued in the morning.

“Let him lose the damn motion, I’ll win it back on appeal for him. More glory, more money----” Standing on the stoop, Tom saw and added: “--More satisfaction in having Lomney lose.”

He went on, while his body waited: “Why should I be doing these clever things for the half benefit of Gilbert Lomney? Don’t I know? I have the brains, but he has the pull and the people. Face it, man, it’s the game.”

He knew he would have to. There was little use in being clever at the Law save one could sell one’s cleverness. There was little use in treasuring even in some mute corner of his soul the dream that ability, unorganized, was profitable. It could only spoil his humor: perhaps his chances. Some day, Lomney might find him lunching alone and think it queer. This above all must be avoided. Lomney had his Class’s phobia for queerness. He would not have trusted Solomon in an outlandish cut of vest.

Coming this late afternoon to see his friend, Tom found the check on his tangents of mood abominably hard. He must take Lomney to his bosom and cherish him: as a man should another who was to multiply his power....

Waiting made them pensive, forgetful. The doors of the vestibule sucked suddenly in. Cornelia and Tom gathered themselves with an alacrity determined by their recovery from its opposite. A woman was there. Her bare arms were folded: a gray apron spread across her body like a sooty mist over a fertile field.

As they stepped in they left the day. They entered another time. In the transition they were quick to both. It was September and hot. Beyond the bricks and the pavements, Indian Summer made the world glad. Trees waved in their new bright colors like flowers sprung up over night: earth was a-dance with insects, was leaping drunk from sharp liquors: air trilled with seeds for the next Spring. In New York heat was empty. Tom and Cornelia thought this. David also.

He sat upstairs in his room, looking over the Square.

Tom and Cornelia were out of the day and into the hall. About them the odor of endless passions, innumerable steps: the acerb sad odor of the lodging house. More lasting and more real it was than the lives of the creatures who came and who went. Here in this breath of the dark halls, their one permanence.

David had but recently moved in. The room was still somewhat strange to him: it was hard to rest in it, to rest asleep in it. Being with it stirred his nerves. The need of repose sent him to sitting in the Park. Also, he was still weary in the change from his vacation spent in the mountains with the Deanes. The first days of return had been dense ringing blows on the slumber of his nerves that were once more glad--glad as never before--in the free welcome of the woods. This was gone--gone echoing as David refitted to the City.

He was pensive, waiting for his friends to see his new room and take him to dinner.

He sat with his elbows on the base of the open window and was glad when the breeze touched his face. Also he was a little irritated when it fingered upward and threw his hair in his eyes. He had to move his hand to move his hair. Unwelcome. His mood was the immobile one in which the Past alone may move. The wind was the stir of the outer world, the world in which was his future and from whose moving he was momently apart.

It had been hard to leave the comfortable Deanes because they were so good to him and made him welcome and made him feel that he was theirs. It was a little easier to go, because of Lois. She held him suffering near to her, with her lips turned away. But the real reason of his going was a hidden spring that David could not name. He knew vaguely his going had to do with this same comfort which made his going hard. One quality held him, drove him. There was much to ponder in this, since, had he but known it, there was much of David in this. He needed to move on.

He found reasons for his impulse, worthy reasons that his aunt and uncle were the first to admire.

One morning in the mountains, sudden, he listened to his words: “Aunt and Uncle,” he said, “don’t you think I will be training better for an independent life if I learn to do without your dear hospitality?”

A ponderous sentence. It emptied David whose native tongue was rounded, poetic, simple. He stood ponderous and awkward like it, above his uncle.

Mr. Deane was in white flannels and a blazer coat that was almost unheard-of in America and had come blushing from London. It was red and yellow and purple: striped it was and flaring in front so as to leave way for the hospitable stomach. Mr. Deane sat curling his legs and peacefully tasting his cigar. One difference in Mr. Deane on a vacation was his less unnerved way with his cigars. In the City he chewed them, in the country he smoked them. Mr. Deane was altogether a more delightful and more generous person. His little blue eyes looked larger as if they were more alive: his cheeks hung less heavy: his sparse hair was less awry. In particular, his voice was different, what he said. It came in less hectic bursts, less flurries of sudden release. His voice was almost an easy monotone. He could speak more on a single subject without wandering or strutting away. He could find more subjects on which to speak. In the City any family discussion left him somehow outside, though he himself had started it. His eyes stared away, he retired, he became abstracted. Soon he was forgotten. He sat there at the table, chewing his cigar, glassily looking inward. His brow furrowed moistly, his cheek-jowls had pleats like an old dog’s.... But this Mr. Deane was alert and full of jests. Each afternoon, he trudged forth with Lois and David, grunting along a tree-swooned road to a distant woody place where he might ply them with candies and tea. He appeared in the morning, a racket in hand:

“Well, young man, are you ready to be beaten?”

And since David was a beginner at tennis, his uncle whipped him. He twisted his body into intricate designs, he served a high slow ball, surged forward with racket _en couche_ like a spear or _en garde_ like a shield. He laughed when Lois laughed from her bench, was happy in his 6-4 victory over David--far more happy, it seemed to David, than any business success had made him in the City.

The brief time her father was with her in the country, Lois escaped her friends. The pair played and chatted together: occasionally, she read him a story from one of the magazines or faced him over a card-table. And these activities, in which David joined on his own brief sojourn from work, went on without the interest, almost without the notice of Muriel and Mrs. Deane.

Summer to them meant merely a transfer from the City of the business and paraphernalia of City life. “A change of air” was what they said, and what they actually meant. They were sure to go where the greatest number of their friends went also. Such activities and such relations as the summer brought of itself they disqualified before the more serious continuance of City social life. Of course Lois could not be spared: but she was far less tolerant with the free toss of the greenland and the glint of a lake to formulate her appetite for somewhat else. There seemed less excuse for her dapper friends and the conventions of pleasure, under the stars and out in the open breezes. Lois could not know that these enhanced her feeling for herself: that it was against this feeling the world so painfully grated.

The indifference of Muriel and Mrs. Deane was a delicious pretext for defiance. Not the least charm for Mr. Deane’s spirited revival was this half-sheepish, half-crude flaunting of revolt into the proper faces of his wife and daughter. It was as if he said: “I have my own way of taking a vacation. You think it foolish. Doubtless it is. But it _is_ a vacation.”

Now, in this climax of ease and pleasure, something spiteful had to commence to stir in David, to spoil it all. Something that came with a new burst of feeling for Lois, with a new glow of comfort in this family that was so glad to have him.

There was no doubt of that. His aunt’s note of a year ago had invited him to the house “until you find a comfortable and proper place for yourself in the City.” By Spring he knew that they had put aside all thoughts of his leaving, and that his uncle had no doubts of his being able to “do” downtown.

The Spanish war burst, half frolic, half business, upon the country. In February the battleship “Maine” went down in Havana harbor. In March, the Inquiry Commission backed the voices of papers and politicians shrilling for war, by its dubious decision that an outside mine had done the damage. Congress turned its trick of political revolution. President McKinley was swept from the saddle. His reservations were set at naught: his reluctances were negated to weakness. In April came the call for volunteers.

The crisis caught David in a tender mood. Stirrings of doubt concerning business and politics had died. This energy was being poured as fuel into the flame of Lois. As his energy bubbled up, there it went. There grew indifference for other things--for all things. Something in the casual technique of Lois kept the flame from spreading: sealed it in a tight place where it danced by itself, rather merrily than tragically: smartingly rather than to a sear. David went on with his affairs.

His weekly salary had been raised five dollars. He left off going to food-pens for luncheon. The spirit of earning more made him careless about spending. He came to find Miss Lord less noxious and took to asking her to an occasional meal. He went to theater, read novels, liked his Aunt Lauretta. He tried to keep clear of Lois: but after all the pleasure of her company was far more real than the pain. He saw the Rennards frequently: but their apart opinions stayed apart, they did not merge with him. His emotions and his nerves were a blind swirl within a rigid life.

Now, the call for volunteers. He was young and strong. Was it not his move to answer? He did not want to go. He was comfortable in his new indifference. Doubtless, the Cubans were not comfortable. But they were very far away.

He brought his problem to Tom. He did not know what he wanted of his question.

“Lord, man! Don’t be a fool.”

David had never seen his friend so moved, so angry, so tenderly savage. Tom jumped from his seat and paced the room. His hands were fists.

“David,” he stopped before him and spoke with a hot restraint, “I am ashamed of you. Why the Devil should _you_ want to go to War?”

David was sprawling in a wide Morris chair. He curled up a little under this onslaught like a furry caterpillar.

“Who is to go, if unmarried fellows like myself are not?”

“Who is to go?” Tom blazed at him. “Who is to go? I’ll tell you. Loafers who have nothing better to do. Men who are so miserable in their jobs they’d die for a chance to get away. Men who are so miserable in their homes they’ll die if they can’t get away. Unmarried, healthy men? The very last, I tell you. Let the sick of heart and the sick of life go first. They’ll find the Cuban fever far more like a pleasant change.”

“This is no time to be flippant.”

“I am not flippant.”

“Then you’re--you’re wrong. This is an unselfish war if ever there was one----” Tom’s smile choked him. “Well, darn it: we’re in it. We’ve got to see it through, however you may look at it.”

David was sensitive enough to feel the deep concern which Tom’s cynicisms covered. This was why he stopped his words of protestation. Strange unease came to him with the feeling. Tom wanted him to stay, to live. Why should he stir against his friend because of that? Tom stormed, making his friendship clearer, showing his affection warmer; David grew colder, less convinced, almost spitefully set against him.

He stood up. “Well,” as if to make an end of an unbearable thing, “I think I am going to enlist.”

A cloud went over Tom Rennard’s face. It was gray, feverish. His hands fell out as if a current had crumpled them and gone.

“It is up to you,” he said. David left....

How unfair, how like a woman he had been! Why? Why did this brilliant warm-hearted comrade lead him into moods that were womanish and unfair? He had left Tom as if Tom had insulted him. Could he have left otherwise, if Tom had said: “By all means go. You’re not worth saving.”

It was strange. It brooded in David for several inactive days.

Tom sat long, fingering his hurt, with a cold smile wavering away. His mind reached back to the first afternoon of the three at Cornelia’s studio: to the parable he had thrown off and that had had no sequel. Was this hostility of David’s perhaps its sequel?

He stopped smiling.

“God send, at any rate, he doesn’t go!”

And Tom did not believe in God. He believed in himself. The very following day he saw Mr. Deane in the latter’s office.

Mr. Deane beamed on him. “I have heard a great deal of you, Mr. Rennard--from my nephew. What can I do for you?”

“Mr. Deane,” Tom leaned forward in his chair. “You can’t do anything material for me. I hope you will forgive what may seem the impertinence of this visit.... You know what interest I have in David. I am eager to know how he is getting on: what you think of his prospects. I have long wanted a few words with you on this subject.”

Mr. Deane looked at the young lawyer quizzically, then in assurance.

“This won’t get back to my nephew?” Tom waved his hand in deprecation. “You see, Mr. Rennard, I am afraid of conceit. Conceit spoils more careers than drink. My long experience has taught me that bright young men are what you might call perishable goods. I encourage them only _so_ much. But in your confidence I am glad to tell you that I have great hopes of David Markand.”

Tom nodded seriously and held his silence. He knew this type of gentleman. Mr. Deane would presently go on. As he wandered further into the happy ways of his own conceits, he would be easier to manage.

“David has a good mind. He can work. He can apply himself. At first he was a little bewildered. He had a strange habit of asking my office manager a lot of foolish questions. I was afraid his mind was too much the wandering sort. But that’s over. That was mere strangeness here. I knew that. I could afford to smile at my manager’s worry. You see, Mr. Rennard, this is a personal organization. It’s a family. I know how my men are, and the women also. They don’t get into trouble in _this_ business. We satisfy them: our kind hands are forever on them: no inducement to discontent or worry. And it pays. It’s a way of keeping your machinery in good repair. Why, just the other day, one of our warehouse truckmen....”

He forgot Tom. He prattled on. Tom saw he would have to stem him back at some convenient crossing. The War was broached.

“I think David has some idea of volunteering.”

He said this casually, and peered sharp at Mr. Deane: saw the shock on his face, and was relieved.

“Has he?” Mr. Deane’s flow of words belonged to a distant mood.

“Yes. You know David’s generous instincts.” Mr. Deane sat abruptly straight: he grasped a pencil, tapped the desk with it. “When he reads the general language of the Call he thinks it means him. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if he tells you some fine morning that his business career is ended.... Well--and yet you know, Mr. Deane, there’s absolutely no such hurry.”

“Hurry!” the older man exploded. Straightway, he held himself down and was still.

Tom went on: “If the War lasts, why, then, of course....”

“Of course, if the War lasts. But it won’t.”

“America can’t squeeze all herself into Cuba. Our own affairs....”

“Precisely.”

A silence. Mr. Deane was thinking.

Tom jumped up. “Well, sir,” he thrust out his hand, “I hope I am pardoned for taking your time in this outrageous way. It naturally meant a great deal to me to have the mature judgment of some one like yourself on a boy whom I consider my friend. I am glad to find that you confirm my confidence in David’s real business ability. I needed your corroboration. To tell you the truth, Mr. Deane, David’s impetuosity worries me at times: that quality of giving without thought--without proportion. I was a bit afraid. You have reassured me. Thank you very much.” He was gone.

That afternoon, Mr. Deane devised a plan. Deane and Company must render its quota of service to the national cause. Deane and Company was a single unit in the zeal of its officers and employes to enlist. Some restraint must be placed upon such vast enthusiasm. The country could admit to its armies only the merest fraction of those champing with the eagerness to serve. Meantime, the land must not be dislocated. Business must go on. Another course, even if due to an heroic response, would virtually be to lend comfort to the Enemy. Wherefore, in order to save its employees the embarrassment of individual choice, Deane and Company suggested that enlistments be confined to unmarried men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty. To such, their positions would be found open on their return from service. David was twenty.

This suggestion was printed and posted. David sought out his uncle.

“Uncle, I want to enlist.”

It was his office; Mr. Deane was contained and strong with all the prestige and strategy of place. He did not want his nephew to enlist. This was to be a hot and nasty war. America had no need of his particular kin beyond his own chosen service for him in the House of Deane.

“Of course, my boy, of course. I don’t dissuade you. Although you have seen the ruling of the directors--it leaves you out. Your flying in the face of that regulation might well cause a stampede in the office. But never mind,” Mr. Deane hastened to add. He was not sure enough of that stampede. “Never mind, I am thinking it over. I want you to promise me you will do nothing until I have made certain inquiries regarding service. I will let you know.”

David came again. Again, his uncle put him off. He was expecting word from Washington about commissions. How would David like to go as a full-fledged lieutenant?