Chapter XII (1)

The train swung Tom southward from Chicago about the duned neck of the Lake. The sun broke at last in clear sky upon him. The everlasting smoke sank behind like dust of a departed battle.... Tom had the vision of the town of his childhood.

The train was swimming up the path of the sun. The world cut flat from the train’s stride like a sea from the prow of a racing vessel. The horizon swayingly scooped: trees low and faint in the shrill sky, nude in young leaves, lascivious in blossoms, almost bowled over by the roll of the world--and the blue belch of sturdier chimneys beyond, scattered half-acres of hell spewing soot and shadow over a scarred and flowered prairie. In his eyes now an old sick town....

The long street swooned under foliage. Trees crowded between the two rows of houses as if they had burst them apart. Under their arrogant verdure the little wooden boxes of men crouched and were smothered. A man came out from the dull pressure: he walked into the sway of the trees: he went forth to his toil: he was immersed in the redundance of fields.

Tom went back to the town of his childhood armed with his intelligence. He thought he saw with understanding. Through the window of the train, he found his face fleeing across the prairie. “I understand,” he whispered to himself.

“I understand the tyrannies that oppressed my people: the tyrannies that formed them. The vastness of the soil and of its fruit: the dying spiritual world my fathers packed with them from Europe, and into which they tried to cram--what new bursts of passion, what new world’s splendors! I see what treasure and promise were these fields and hills--and the little hands, the littler minds and tools with which to work them. Of course, there came blindness upon the dazzlement, penury upon their drunken spending, fear of the Spirit upon their rape of the Earth. What masters my fathers must have been not to have been mastered by America!”

Tom understood why the men of ripe New York were shrunken midges beneath the stuff of their buildings: and the still unuttered fate of Chicago: and why Chicago, with its long soiled lazy hands, had held his heart.

“I am of the West. I had forgotten--but I am of the West! To think that ten years of New York could have made me forget. Chicago claimed me!”

New York was a place of exile. There they whose lives were done or were denied builded State upon the principle of their death. New York was a gaunt, ghost City: a dwelling place of shadows that towered above men.

What was New York against this splendor of plains, against Chicago? wide crude child city with the loud voice and the playful heart, with the swift gait and the lumberly laborer’s mind? What was New York against the love of his discovered home?

Tom began to wonder what irony had drawn him Eastward.

“The promise of life?” he whispered to himself, “the promise of life?”

His chair was toward the window, he spoke to his reflected face and the fleeing plains. A knoll of green flashed past with a stream curling and in the shadow a clustered farm: the remembered scent of clover and the warm sweetness of new green life were a cloud over his mind.

“I wonder, does the lure of death come always disguised as a fulfillment? Perhaps, when a man takes his life does he hope to achieve it? Cornelia and I--God! how we were glad of the calculated pavements of Manhattan.” But surely, he had left death behind? Was he growing sentimental? What a strange mood he was in. His father, the dilapidated farm--life, that? Very well: law, the nervous flutter he called success in the city--life, that, more? He shook his head. He saw he did not understand after all.... And yet, America in Chicago--Chicago in the American plains--gripped him and called him as never before....

Chicago? where Industry, a dirty giant, flung and heaped its refuse upon the dwellings of men? He could not understand. But he felt a poignance--of symbol--in himself yearning Westward, yearning _backward_ against the way of the train to where America lay impassioned beneath the coming sun.

* * * * *

He stepped into New York, its life came to him through splinter of movement with a sharp pathos. The dust of their traffic were these men and women swirling slow: their impress upon the places they had built was naught. An air of enervation lay over the clefts of houses, seeped down into the channels of men.

Then Tom lost the sense of separation. The great Metropolis came like an iron cloak and made him invisible....

* * * * *

Out of the confusion of his life he saw some things clearly and aimed at them: he saw some things vaguely and these he avoided. He sensed that the vague things were the vital: were of the color and stuff of that confusion which was his life: and that the dear things were trivial and lying.

Marcia Duffield and King Van Ness were not yet engaged. A particular and naked problem. Tom feared the cynicism of the girl he had loved. “One thing, one thing alone can spoil this,” went his thoughts. “If she out of some mood abandoned her resistance. She might for spite, bravado, bitterness, what not? One such false gesture and Van Ness stops the hunt. He might possibly do an injury to himself: grow thoughtful for instance. But he’d never marry a girl that let him kiss her without a diamond ring.”

Laura Duffield held out her hand for his. “I am young yet. This is my only life. What am I doing with it?” Tom thought and clasped the hand of his friend and laughed--the lust of the Game, Van Ness, Stone and Company to be pried open, the delicious recalcitrance of Marcia to be tasted and crushed--and forgot.

“You are worrying about something? What is it?” At last he was conscious of Laura Duffield: his trivial words were over.

She was ageing. There was a drawn tightness about her eyes, a sag at her throat. It was a day on which she was not looking well. And looking well was coming to be an art, these years of life when art grows difficult. Debts. The incredible burden of holding up her head.

“Come and sit beside me, Tom.”

She was graceful. The couch was low. She sat ensconced in a corner, her outstretched arm hung in a flimsy sleeve, color of faded violet. Her skin like the sleeve was dim. Her eyes and the stones in her rings were bright.

“You are so quick to understand. I am going to tell you. I’m worrying about Marcia.”

“That won’t help us, you know.”

“Why can’t she make up her mind to love some one?”

Tom laughed. “What a lot of contradictions in a little sentence!”

“I don’t know--I don’t know what we may have to do.”

She seemed, after all, resigned. If Marcia could love no one, with her mind or without, let her stay single.

“She hasn’t accepted Van Ness yet?”

Laura Duffield shook her head.

Tom thought swiftly.

“Where is Marcia? Is she in? Tell her I am here?”

The mother arose and called the girl. Marcia came to the door, stood silent.

“Hello, Marcia. I came to see you, this evening. Not your Mamma.” He believed it. He wanted to be with her--all else was a pretext.

“Yes: and it’s lucky too,” Mrs. Duffield bustled to her desk. “I have a thousand letters to answer. Do be dears, and leave me alone.”

She was settled and her back was on them. She was looking better. Such confidence she had in Tom!

He followed Marcia. She went to the opposite corner of her room: near her cheval glass. She stood there. Tom closed the door, let his weight lean upon it, then seated himself in a broad arm-chair. Her whiteness was taut: her black hair and eyes were hot. A tremble swift and faint sang through her. She found she could not stop it. She moved and took up an ivory brush, she strove to let her trembling flow from her two hands to it. It was a very long time since Tom and she were alone.

“Marcia, please sit down.”

She complied at once: she flushed with anger that she had. Tom came and leaned over her. He looked obliquely at her great black eyes and the sharp perfection of her chin and the way of her white throat. He put his open hands on her hair, he turned her face upward toward him. He placed his dosed lips on her parted ones. His hands slipped down her face, her neck, her body. He stood away. She said:

“Why do you do that, Tom?”

“That is how I feel.”

“Don’t lie, Tom.”

“I am not lying, Marcia.”

Her eyes blazed up. It was a burst of bravery and challenge. They crumpled. She hid her head in her arms, she wept.

Tom put his hand firmly to the back of her head where the hair was caught away from the neck.

“Listen, Marcia, I am not lying. Listen, please, Marcia.”

She was silent, if she was still weeping. She did not raise her head.

Tom leaned and kissed her neck. The faint scent of her hair in his eyes.

Marcia straightened sudden. He met the attack of her gesture.

“Now listen, do you hear?”

She stayed balanced, looking at him straight: her eyes filled with an ironic hunger. So Tom wanted her. He began before she changed.

“You have never understood me, Marcia. I can’t blame you. I have never understood myself. I am honest with you. I have always been. Perhaps it was expecting too much, dear, that you should be able to stand that.... Marcia, I care for you now, as I did before, more than for any woman in the world.”

She dropped her eyes and began to finger the embroidery of her chair.

“I go through strange tides, Marcia. I cannot help that. Most men have hypocrisy to hide these ebbs. Most women have passiveness. I have neither. So I suffer.... Marcia,” he went on, “I do not want to lose you. But also I do not want to hurt you. Can’t I have you, without hurting you, Marcia! It was because I had not answered that question, that I forced myself away, forced myself cool.”

“What do you mean, Tom?”

He took a chair and brought it beside hers and seated himself. With a great calm he heard himself say:

“Marcia--will you marry me?”

“I should love to, Tom.”

“We could manage. I might even gradually start to pay off your Mamma’s debts. A little flat. Two weeks at the seashore. A cook....”

He spoke very seriously, with each item stroked the slender pearly hand he had taken.

Marcia withdrew it. “Don’t be a silly, Tom.”

He jumped up. He drew her after him: he held her close, kissed her throat.

“It is not impossible. I want you, Marcia.”

“You have had me.”

“I have never had you.” He thrust her away and walked to where she first had faced him. “You know I have never had you, Marcia. How can you--oh----!” He threw up his arms and stopped.

Marcia came closer. “Tom,” she said, “what do you really want of me?”

“Yourself....” He paused. “But without the sense that I am harming you. Yourself, without restraint.”

“Why did you leave me, Tom?”

“I’ll tell you. Despise me, if you will. I’ll tell you. Because I had a guilty conscience. Because I thought not alone of your future but of your mother. Because I seemed unable to be either your lover or your husband.”

She smiled.

“You’re not the sort of man one should marry.”

“Unfortunately I lack qualifications.” He put bitterness into his voice. She was sure--and glad--she had hurt him. “But civilized standards have nothing to do with love. I could love a woman, if only she were in a civilized way disposed of, so that we could afford the luxury.”

Marcia laughed and placed her hand back in his.

“Why have you never put things this way before?”

“Never put things this way before?” He was amazed. He burst out laughing. “Really, my dear, this is too ironic. I had given you up: I had given you a free hand to marry. I was prepared to lose you permanently rather than stand even temporarily in your way. But you did not marry. What did that mean? I didn’t know. How could I? But what should keep me from hoping? Any fool may do that. At least there was the circumstantial evidence that you had not married. That is why I came to-night, Marcia. I came to ask you to marry me. To plead with you. For the first time I was prepared to sacrifice you for my own desire--altogether. And now, when I am acting my most selfish self, for the first time you see the sacrificial mood that I was in before!”

She placed her arms about him.

“Strange contradictory dear.... You shall have me, dearest. Wait and see how soon. I think I never wanted you quite so much.”

“Marcia!”

“Don’t let your feelings blind you to reason, Tom. _Our_ feelings. You don’t want a wife. If I was rich--or you were--even then, would you want a wife? You want _me_. I you. Without alloy, dear. I’ll marry King.”

She smiled brightly.

“Do you know why I put it off? Because I thought it might mean real captivity. It must have, Tom--without you, there, to rescue me. Oh,” her face darkened, “I could not stand the thought of him without the antidote!” She was silent, brooding. Her eyes seemed full of the picture of her life with the dull rich man. It stifled her, blinded.

“I could not have stood it, Tom. I can now! Without you, it must have meant prison. Now, it means release--adventure. Yes!” She seemed to be emphasizing her resolve--bringing it clear before her eyes to see it. “You’ll see that I am game. I am almost happy.”

She sank down in her chair, and smiled at him; tears kept her from seeing how he smiled a bit wistfully away.

She needed to be silent. If for no other reason, for the tears.

She wanted to ask him simply: “Do you _love_ me, Tom? For Tom, if you did _love_ me....” She did not dare her question. She did not dare, even in her silence, to conclude it. She was afraid of his answer. Both for him and for her she was afraid. Both of his “yes” and his “no.” After all, her mind faded and veered, she had better marry King. It would be going on.

She was dry-eyed.

Tom took her hand and kissed it.

* * * * *

“What do I really mean by all these things I do?” When Tom was alone his question came often, came without answer. When he was with David, it hurt and these things he did were like ash in his mouth. But even the hurt was better than the reverberating silence. So Tom fled solitude.

But what of David? What did he want of David? Was he glad of him or bitterly, passionately sorry? Did he want him close or far away? His acts and moods, were they designed to hold or to repel him?

Tom was at a pass where all these things were chaos. The clear facts of living were straws in a heaving sea: straws he reached for. He went brightly about his profession. It prospered. But it became more and more a thing to hide from David. And all such things were more and more to be hidden from himself. Marcia was engaged. He feared her marriage which he had manoeuvered, vaguely, as the time of a demand he could not face. Also he looked forward to her marriage: the senses of him: his blood and his wits as well. Marcia’s marriage must be a function of both.

He tried, close to David, to blot out his conflicts. He tried to realize that it was David himself who brought about the conflicts: and to pursue the rational conclusion that it was David who must be blotted out. His reasonings had the way of playing him into some dark dilemma. The forces driving him toward the constant agitation of his wits seemed all too clearly irrational and heart-sent. He could not isolate the verbs of his reason. If he did, he found them without subject, object--dead waifs of sound flecking a hollow mind. His reaching for the true drive within him left him a streak in imponderable Space, as if he had grasped a Comet. It was better to be confined to straws.

The schemings pertinent to Marcia, straws: the intricate work downtown, straws also: the being with friends, the satisfaction of his senses, straws again. The effect upon his mind--this passionate bestowal upon work he could not respect, upon pleasure he could not enjoy--was a slow desiccation. He was dry, cynical, erethic. He needed to rouse himself to heights of activation: his work called for no less. And the impulse rousing him was ever one he was cold to. A strain on his nerves. As in a man making himself drunk with drink he forces himself to swallow.

Needfully, since this vast disharmony gained on his life and since each part of it warred against the others, Tom came to bestow upon its various factors the quality of respite and escape. He needed a makeshift harmony in order to live. One instant of admitted anarchy in our minds means madness: in our bodies death. Since discord was there, it must be balanced with other discord. One group of his thoughts swelled, sagged out of place: he propped it into a semblance of poise with another hypertrophy. So discord propagates itself. Life went on.

David was there to cleanse him of the tastes of his worldly work, restore his self-respect, give him a vantage point against the scheming Tom of the day. His other friends--shallow, quick fellows ready to give what he asked and forward-coming, helpless women like Laura Duffield--were there to balance the reticence of David, ease his diseased hunger, throw him momentarily free of the strange dissatisfaction of his one satisfying friendship. The function of work was to sustain him, flush his energies until such time as he knew how he wanted to play. Marcia was compensation for that in him which could not look to David. David was compensation for that in him which was ashamed of Marcia. His hours with David and Cornelia were sleep in which he lived as he dreamed, won strength to face the waking: his hours of work were respite from the starved clamor of his dreams--a way of winning time from their insistence.

So his life stumbled and shook ahead. It held together. But it was textured of half-true, half-meeting elements. Its hazardous solution caused a continual ferment. The sign of ferment was his growing pain in a life stumbling, shaking ahead.

He walked down a Square with that lithe pacing stride of his. Half clenched fists swung at his side. There was a fairly constant strain in his eyes that lifted them in their sockets. With teeth tight set, he hummed a tune. Energy was forever thus escaping from him. When he did nothing, he fell at once into a state of preparedness for flight. He wanted to get away: get out. He could not. Life gripped him and he loved it. But much energy was born of this deep impulse to escape. He scattered it about. Much he applied--and applied to perfect the conditions of that very life from which his nerves rebelled. His vitality in talk, his speed of impressions, his plasticity of posture in the world grew from this energy. So that he shook along in a vicious circle. Much of his power to throw life into his work came from the secretions of his dissatisfaction with it: from the energy of his dissatisfaction. But life is full of such mechanical paradox. All of civilized life is such a one. Many a man succeeds in the conscious world because of the failure hidden in his heart.

Tom stopped. He was before a crumbling brownstone house: a rusting iron grille, a gate thrown out on useless hinges. A tiny plot of grass flanked the narrow walk. The soil was rocky: sediment of the City--cans, flakes of cloth, splint eyes of glass--choked the slim green. From the low stoop the house flared up, soft in decay.

Tom turned his back on the house. He looked North on the Square. In his eyes was a hunger for open places. His glance consumed the narrow breadth of the Park with its dapper walks and its trees. It broke impatient on the row of red-brick houses. It spent itself. Tom’s gaze narrowed. He turned and went up the stairs. They were dirty and dark--four flights. Odor of mildew and misspent lives seeped from brown plaster.

He struck his fist on the door. Behind him was a hall painted the color of stale chocolate. In the center of the fly-blown ceiling a sudden cupola, picked out in glass--green, yellow, blue. Sky came through dim and soiled.

A young stout fellow opened the door and gave a cry of pleasure: let Tom in.

“Hello, Rennard! Flora. Florissima! Company’s complete.”

Tom pressed Lars Durthal’s hand. “Hello, Lars,” he passed him.

A long narrow table spread in the square small room. The heavy mantel was ribald with knick-knacks of varicolored glass, purchased in useless shapes at Coney Island and Asbury Park. Their gayety, adance in the boxed mirrors of the yellow wood, seemed irrelevant above the table, with its high unlabelled bottles of red wine, its mounds of Italian bread, its platters of cervelat, tomatoes, sardelles. The table’s order was disturbed by its broken wreath of guests.

Most of the diners lounged already in their chairs. Between laughter and smoke they sent their eyes lazily toward the kitchen. They had begun with their wine.

“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” a slender fellow spoke, upon whose long neck poised a head remarkably round and small; within his face with its fat sanguine cheeks the eyes and mouth and nose took up an inconspicuous space.

“Good evening, Marquese.” Lagora was a nobleman: a dealer in marble according to his one report, in Italian oils and spices according to his other. A clever, shifty, cloudy fellow with hands like a girl’s.

Tom sat down with an air of temporariness beside him.

“Well, Dounia--comment ça va?” He leaned and placed a finger on the cheek of the woman across the table. Dounia Smith put down her glass. “I’ve no cigarettes.”

Tom placed a box in her expectant hand. They were enormous hands: gaunt, naked, acquisitive, with a wrinkle about the finger-joints that was sinister against the smooth calm of her wrists. Behind her hands, Dounia Smith rose diminished. She was tall, handsomely cut: her hair swept black and low over her temples: her eyes had a gray slant that offset the thin lips, the sharp tilt of her chin. When she lighted her cigarette she showed all of her teeth. They were white. But as the gaunt huge hand came near her face, the rest of Dounia Smith went into eclipse.

A man came up, neatly and drably dressed, with a red tie that flared against the pale primness of his face.

“Glad you’re here, Rennard. Business particularly boring, to-day. Fun particularly needed, to-night.”

This was Christian Hill--sedate, rebellious--a man of business who craved intoxicants of life. All his sentences sounded like telegrams. All his money, too sanely earned in a broker’s office, was at the disposal of his search for madness. He looked on Tom as his ideal. He would have sold his wife into slavery for a lust sufficiently great to make him commit the folly.

“I want to introduce you,” he beckoned toward a girl that had sat yonder beside him. “Madeline--this is Mr. Rennard--Miss Gross.”

She came sidling. She was richly clad, very blond, very powdered. Beneath the simper of blue eyes, the hot curl of placid lips and the ringlets of blond hair teasing her tiny ear, Tom saw that she was Jewish.

He took her tiny hand, gloved in fawn-colored kid.

“It is nice to have you here, Miss Gross. I hope our rough manners won’t shock you.”

She propelled herself a little nearer.

“Oh, please do, Mr. Rennard!”

“You want to be shocked, Miss Gross?”

Hill intervened. “But you can’t, Rennard. You don’t know my little Madeline.”

The little Madeline simpered and tapped her escort’s mouth with the back of her gloved hand.

“How do you know, Christian? Just because _you_ couldn’t.” Bending her body back, she threw her head back also. She gazed at Tom through the lashes of her half-shut eyes.

Durthal came up.

“Your place is there, old man. Between Lunn and me.”

“Good evening, Flora. Say, you have room for Markand? I made him promise he’d be here.”

A thick-set woman, with face incredibly composed and large bare arms crossed over the gray width of her dress, nodded to Tom and to the others.

“Good evening, Flora.” “Hello, Flora,” the greetings came. Flora did not budge from her place in the kitchen door. Hill dragged Miss Gross through the scatter of chairs.

“Oh, Signora Sanni,” he said, “I want to introduce my friend.”

Flora Sanni wiped her right hand slowly, methodically on her apron.

“Buena sera, Signorina.” She took the gloved hand, dropped it, turned about. Her eyes were steel. She had taken longer to wipe her hands on her apron.

Tom moved in Durthal’s power toward the nearer end of the table.

A young girl shut the door.

“Here you are,” muttered Lagora.

She nodded timidly to her neighbors--maliciously to Dounia Smith, a defensive malice--and sat down beside the Marquese. He drew close his chair. The two began muttering together. Lagora leaned forward. The girl bent back from the thrust of his mood and his body. She was a frail creature--a tissue of harried nerves with great black teeming eyes. Her hand tapped on the plate. She lit a cigarette, inhaled a great gust, emptied Lagora’s wine glass and then blew out the smoke. Her body was draped in a short tight smock of blue hung from her shoulders. Her tiny breasts stood up in it quite clear. Lagora’s brows worked up and down. Her big eyes sharpened and cut him. He looked at her twitching shoulders.

“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” she cried as she passed him. She threw up a diminutive hand. Her breasts bobbed.

“How are you, Lettie?” Tom, taking her hand, had the sense of Lagora smiling with snakish eyes. He passed on.

A lumbering boy got up, nodding and saying no word.

“Well, Darby?” Tom sat down. “I’ve not seen you in a week.”

“A long time,” synchronously growled the other. Tom heard him and laughed.

“And the painting?”

Tom and Darby Lunn were lost together in talk. From the table’s farther end Durthal saw them together. The laugh of Dounia Smith, the shrill sneer of Lettie tossing her heels, the mutter of Lagora were a wave, gathering, crumpling upon the calm of Signora Sanni. Durthal extricated himself from Hill and Miss Gross. He headed through the disserried chairs. Stretched arms reached for wine and tastes of antipasto. The evening splintered and swirled. Food would draw it together.

Durthal stood over Tom.

“Here, old man. Change over. You sit between us.”

Finding his seat, he also had the sense of haven beneath the spray and scatter of the room.

Of the three, Tom was the only one whose voice carried beyond them: laughing. Dounia Smith eyed him with a tilt of her head. A finger, like a talon, flecked her cigarette. Her brows were thin and straight like the stroke of a sharp pencil on hard paper.

Flora Sanni stood above the table, with a vast white bowl of _minestrone_. The crowd coalesced.

The table narrowed. The chandelier, relic of fluted brass and drooping crystal, took on the tawdry tone of office and gave its light, self-consciously, heatedly, like an old servant, too laden with memory and years to want to work for so crass a gathering. The carved clock ticked: a clatter of plates drew down bent necks, beading foreheads. Sharp streakings of sound ribboned the table: swathed it: covered it with a warm liquidity. Then the whipped undertone of selves seeped up again, lapped over the inorganic sound, deluged it, drowned it in angular surge of assertions.

The door gave a knock that was heard at last....

David had followed upstairs a pair who were held to slowness by the constant claim of the woman that she was too weary to go another step.

“Come along, Phoebe!” The man had a high straight back. He wore a soft collar that bared his neck. David observed that it was wiry and clean. The hairs were clipped high from it. David had time to observe. Whenever the pair came to a rest, he rested behind them. Something impeded his passing. Timidity in part. The disclosing thereby that he had overheard them, that they were moving too slowly. His own scarce unconscious resistance to mounting those stairs at all. He hated the place. But he had no reason to give to Tom. And Tom took offense at his not wishing to come.

“Why, dear man. Don’t you like Flora? I think Flora is splendid. Such poise! Or is the place too noisy for you. David? Davie, you must get accustomed to dirt!”

A vehemence in Tom that silenced David. Doubtless this was life, and life no thing to shrink from.

“But I do like Flora!” He could not add that he felt that Flora did not like him: did not seem to like any one who came there: nor the feeling that if she had known him different and uncomfortable, perhaps she would have liked him.

“Well, then!” said Tom.

The stout lady was sighing. “Why we ever come here, Jack! These stairs!”

“You know it is lots of fun, Phoebe. Go along now. You like it as well as I.” He spoke immaculate English, and urged her with a slap on her rump.

“Well, the people----”

“----the food?” he chuckled. “The mysterious bottom of Signora Sanni’s pot. One more hoist, old lady. Th--th--ere! Where else, pray, can one meet such a delightful assortment of bulls?”

“Don’t call them bulls, Jack Korn! Call them detectives.”

“Here we are, dear.”

David and they entered together.

“Korn, I _am_ glad to see you!” Tom reached over the table and greeted him. “How’s business?” He had nodded to David and Korn’s woman with a perfunctory politeness.

“Meet my dear friend, Mr. Korn,” he laughed. “Same profession as myself.” The three sat opposite Durthal and Tom and Lunn. Mrs. Phoebe Raymond was on one side of David. On the other sat Dounia Smith. All of them laughed, except David.

He looked at Korn. A big, athletic fellow, clad in somber serge. He had black hair and a significant nose.... Why had all of them laughed?

“I have never seen you here before, Mr. Markand,” said Phoebe Raymond.

“I--I come quite often.”

“Well, I don’t,” she looked full at him. “One gets so little time.” Her round face was pretty. But it was fat: its petite features were lost in flesh. Her bosom obtruded like a robin’s breast. David seemed to see, investing the round comeliness of her mouth and nose, layers of sloth and greed. A scaly dimness was already over the blue eyes. “I like small gatherings more, don’t you?” she confided. “One could get to _know_ a person then.” David had the sense that if he drank enough of the wine Mrs. Raymond would seem very pretty indeed.

He began to eat. Words pattered and burst about him. The food had an exotic charm. The air was full of heated eyes and bodies. Glances and edged remarks trembled like flung spears in the flesh of the women. David kept still and went on eating.

Phoebe Raymond tried to engage him in talk.

“My husband and I were in Maine at the time. Do you know New England, Mr. Markand?”

“Of course he knows it! Can’t you see it written all over him, Phoebe?” It was Tom drawing her away. “How dare you talk to my friend about your husband! Have you no sense of decency?”

The immediate half of the table was his. He played it like an instrument. His eyes were too bright and too hard, thought David. He had little to say to him. To Durthal and to Lunn, to the women on David’s side, to Hill even and Lagora, he had more to say than to David. Most of all to Korn. But he looked often at his friend--sharp glances while his attention swathed from right to left. David was enmeshed in his running comment: all Tom said seemed to run through him and knit him.

“It is hard not to be moral,” he said. “One is pushed so into good behavior.”

Jack Korn sat back smiling. He was a strong man. He was very quiet.

“What do you think of good behavior, Korn?” Tom asked him.

“It is as good a game as another.” He paused. “Surer.”

“But why should we want to be sure? Since we are already sure of death? Look at Dounia, there. She has never done a risky thing in her life. Run over her investments. Burton, Klein, La Soule--all good gold bonds. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, my dear. You remind me of Markand’s uptown relations.”

“And what are you crowing about?” Dounia retorted. “You’re as safe as an eel.”

“I have at least the good manners to be ashamed of it,” Tom laughed. “To hide it and even lie about it. I am gaining strength.”

He looked admiringly at Korn. “Here, old man, I drink to the logic--to the beauty of your life!” He held forth his wine glass.

Korn raised his to his eyes, nodded and sipped. Tom drained.

“Did you get that, Davie?” he said. “The contempt Korn showed in answering my toast? I do not blame him. I’ve never earned his respect. Think how he must despise _you_!”

Korn did not turn his head. Lunn grunted and smirked--in his plate. Dounia and Phoebe came to David’s rescue.

From Dounia: “I am sure Mr. Markand is br-raver, much b-raver than you!”

From Phoebe: “Jack, deny that you despise Mr. Markand.”

Tom drove ahead. “But I’ll earn your respect yet, Jack Korn. I may be earning it now....”

Christian Hill was nudging Miss Gross.

“He’s a wonder, is Rennard. You must get him. The other man, the one in the black suit, Madeline, _he_--he is----” Hill whispered in the young girl’s ear. Her fork clattered: her little eyes lost their dim cunning: became bright and large.

“Really?” she gasped. She gazed at Korn and was speechless. Her hand went to the old bead bag in her lap.

Talk like a comet drew to the head of Tom and Korn. They held it: they swung it: it was a dazzle of gyre to the jerk of their directions. At the farther end of the table, Signora Sanni came and went: sat imperturbable. She was a woman of more than forty. Disillusion was sweet in her firm, strong face. It was a preservative. It did not keep her pretty, it kept her content. Her features had set. It was as if they had thrown away their woman’s tricks of blandishment and surprise: as if they had sold their power to impassion at the price of passion itself. At her side were Lagora and Lettie Dew. These three alone were intact from the ebullient pull of the other end of the table. Lagora was incapable of an objective interest. He ate seriously, he spoke to Signora Sanni, he nagged Lettie. The eyes of Miss Dew wandered from their circuit between her plate and the ceiling, to David. For a moment, their gaze softened; something swam in her eyes, something stirred like a cloud’s rift in her mind. With a violent gust of smoke--for she smoked incessantly--she blew it away.

“But I maintain,” Tom said, “that the law makes the game all the more delicious. The more rules, the more brains to overturn them.”

Korn smiled and nodded: “Goethe put it--‘In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.’”

“What does that mean?” Tom was held up.

“Just about what you are saying,” replied Korn.

“Well, then, Goethe is right.” Every one laughed except David.

Tom raced: “I like obstacle races: I like hurdles. Society is made up simply of men who run flat, like you, dear Korn, or go in for steeple-chasing, like myself. Now, I have a friend--tell me, Korn, what do you think of this for manipulation ...?”

It was amazing, thought David, how little Korn said for one who held such sure attention.

“----with the girl married, he controls her life. Do you see? Of course he must pay his minimum--let us say his taxes--for that. But say what you want, love or no love, there’s always about the same ratio of satisfaction in a love affair. Eh, Dounia?” he baited her. “Come, Dounia, tell us for once. Down with the veils. Is there so much difference whether you love the man or not? I am convinced that woman’s pleasure is utterly subjective. Who gives it to her is of no consequence--unless she lets herself be imposed on by Society’s mandates, standards, sentimentalities. Won’t you enlighten us, Dounia?”

She looked at him with a defensive sharpness. How did he guess how women felt? how utterly subjective passion was--at least in her? Phoebe also stirred back in her chair. His arrows were scattering too near. How could he tell--he was peering mischievously at her--that she strove often to forget her man in order to be happy with him?

“You see, she won’t tell. These women who think that being dumb is being secret. As I was saying, he controls the lady. And she controls her husband. And since he is high in power in the world downtown, my friend controls that also. No prettier, no more outlawed game could be imagined. I maintain it is pretty enough, Korn, for your praise.”

Korn chuckled. Tom raced on.

David had the sense that in a circling way he was the goal of Tom. Tom threw out flaring lines, struck here, flung there, with himself as center of his operations.

He lost this sense. It was replaced by the poignant one that Tom ignored him. If anything remained of the earlier impression, merely that the avoidance was planned. Tom paid more heed to every one in the room! His attention was flattering and was canny. He baited Dounia, but Dounia could not bait him. Durthal and Lunn were subsidiary strings that reënforced his theme: and the women. He wove his complex music with the lives and thoughts of all those present. And when he noticed David, it was to prod him--to hurt him.

Then, still another sense. David began to feel himself separate from this noisy element he was immersed in. He put forth spiritual fingers to explore it. He drew his shredded findings in; he began to explore himself.

He felt a hazardous balance, swung safe from fall by an impalpable thread, between himself and this room: himself and Tom. Even the gaslights, naked and stiff and hot, were elements of Tom. He was on the other side and was alone. But there was a joy in the experience of separation. He was apart, impregnable. He could poise somewhat the laughter, the surge, the flection about him; arrive at himself.... Was he impregnable after all? Why, then, hurt?

... Wine soaked soft these men and women--these prisons of sense. Sense swirled unhindered upward, danced with spiraling cohesion beneath the gasjets....

The door pushed open again. A man, dull shouldered, with heavy head and tread and unlit eyes, came in and nodded and sat down at the end of the table beside Korn. With the door wide for a moment a strange world stood in the hall beside the room: a world, cool and hidden.

He was also an accustomed guest. He came with heavy breath as if each breath lifted a weight of flesh against some obstruction in his gullet. He nodded dully, with a brighter gaze alone for Tom.

“Too bad you weren’t here earlier,” said Tom. “The law needed your defense.”

“So?” he was dully aware. His eyes peered out, like a big dog’s, disturbed at feed.

“I think Officer Murphy might do well to ar-r-rest you all,” said Dounia.

“Oh, you wouldn’t have him do that,” cried Hill, with a slightly trembling voice. “It is such fun breaking all the Commandments.”

“So long as glasses are not broken,” said Tom.

“How is work, Murphy,” asked Korn with a serious full face whose irony was far beyond the detective’s wit.

“Oh, slow ... _glp_. Ain’t much ... _glp_ ... doin’.” Murphy looked up and down the table, interested at last, lacking something. “Say, Flora,” his gross voice thrust out. “A little of the red?”

The gathering paused momentarily about the intrusion: swirled about it. He was a gap in its midst, a load on its vital spirit. His fleshly dullness must be smeared over with raillery and laughter. The crowd began to digest him. Murphy disappeared.

His heft, now dissolved, was an added strength in the room’s swelter.

Tom rode the wave of broken personalities and whipped it and steered it. Lagora forgot his duties toward Lettie and tried to make love to Flora. He flattered her. He owed her money. He thought it might be well not to have to pay for his dinners. Signora Sanni flicked off his words like flies. She was learning the unlikelihood of being paid. And Lettie Dew, released, allowed herself to gaze full and long at David who was back in the storm taking its breast, distinguishing no thing. Phoebe was moist and breathing hard. She was safe, however, beside Korn. Her sense of safety crowned with smugness her bibulous affection.

“I believe truly,” she said to David, “we should be going.” She had said this over and over. It gave her the excuse she somehow wanted for finishing each succeeding glass of wine. She spoke measuredly. She was passionately anxious to have David know she was more the lady than Dounia Smith or Flora.

Lettie leaned over and smiled at David. Very suddenly. David smiled back. Lettie scowled. David was hurt. As soon as he looked away, her eyes were once more on him.

Miss Gross, cool, unliquored, chuckled and took the varying scene; she wondered why Mr. Rennard evaded her diagnosis. She knew that later, Hill would try to kiss her. He would take her home in a cab for no other purpose. She was debating whether she wanted to be kissed by him, or no. It might be fun. He was a married man! There he was pendulous, at her side. He looked down more daring at her light-lashed corsage. How far dared he be mad--was Madeline worth madness? The price----: He was dismayed to find himself sobering under his question: deciding against it.

“Damn it!” He jumped to his feet and brandished his glass. “Let’s be--let’s be----” his voice died down: “----free souls, to-night.”

He found his seat limply. It was his tragedy to be sane. This Madeline Gross--pretty though she was--was not yet the creature for whom he expectantly and religiously waited: not yet the love for whom he was to abandon his wife and child, with whom he was to be lost in the sacrament of irreparable Folly. Not yet. Perhaps never! He was sober. He put a bottle to his lips and emptied it. It gave him a stomach-ache. He began to recall that Madeline lived far uptown, and that a cab would cost a considerable lot of money.

The night was mellow and soft. It grew smeared with the sweat of wear: hard with broken clusters of decay. It was over....

* * * * *

Tom and David walked homeward in silence.

David knew one thing, and it hurt: Tom had been showing off to the man called Korn. He had one question. At last he asked it:

“Who is Mr. Korn?”

Something quailed in Tom. He took his answer, flung it brutally against his quailing.

“Korn?” He was looking ahead, far ahead. “Korn--why, Korn is a pickpocket.”

There were no more words. They went down the hall of their home: each entered his room.

Tom closed the door.... It was very white and very quiet and clean. He sat on his bed. Resting his chin in his hands, he went on looking ahead, looking far ahead. Seeing nothing. The alarm-clock was obtrusive with its tick-tack-tick. The window was open from the top. A faint breeze made the white mesh curtains stir. Tom felt a soiled self sitting on the bed, felt soiled feet on the tidied floor. Tom felt a desecration.

He was up. He was almost like a somnambulist. He was in David’s room. They were looking at each other.

“I have done nothing. You fool, acting as if you were guilty!” he said to himself.

“Yes, Tom?” David did not understand the stillness.

Tom was in conflict. “Are you sure--are you sure you are not guilty?” Words cried to be spoken. He had none.

“Don’t be shocked, Davie,” he spoke at last. “One must meet all sorts----”

“I am not shocked. But it is strange. He seemed so intelligent a man.”

Tom pounced, with passion of relief.

“He is intelligent, Davie! That is life. You don’t know how life is lived in New York. There are no sharp distinctions, Davie, between criminals and honest men....” He stopped. That sounded wrong. He plunged in, to make it right. “--- What I mean is, the ways allowed by the law and the other ways--there are conventions, Davie. Now-adays, to get along, a young man must break in, must break in somehow. Strictly speaking, that is never quite a righteous----” He stopped again. David looked with gentle eyes: was Tom pleading, was Tom pleading for Korn or for another? Tom’s rage came sudden, a birth of weakness....

“Look here,” he attacked him, “what a prig you sometimes seem, man! What do you know about life? You who have always gone a greased path, sliding into fortune! Do you think all men have uncles to do the cheating and the robbing for them?”

David’s fists closed. He held himself.... By God, was Tom right?

Tom felt his victory. He was enraged still more. He struck again. “If we all had the fat lap of your aunt to coddle us, or the pure lips of your cousin to teach us love for nothing! Perhaps you think that any man who hasn’t some one else to lay the dirt for him had better stay under? A lot you know about life.”

“But Tom----”

“Look about you. I don’t apologize for Korn. He is what he is. He is the typical social being. Nakedly. The rest of us think we are the pretty names we are called by.”

He stopped. David was silent. A great fear ran through Tom.

“When you learn, David, to be a man, to give a little understanding--you may deserve the friend you have.”

Still David looked at him, looked beyond him, searched for a reason. Tom went out. It was as if the air that enveloped David sucked him backward.

Once more Tom was in his room. Its clear white calm was unbearable to him. He would be less harried in the dark. He shut off the gas. He flung himself upon his bed. He could not bear the darkness. He could not bear the light. Doubtless, next door, David was quietly taking off his clothes. Slow, slightly puzzled--unbearable David! Oh, he could murder! He jumped up. Something dim, something gray, something dirty and simple and soft: this was his need. He rushed down to the street....

* * * * *

Reaction.... Tom was contrite. He watched David sharply, aloofly even, then did some good thing for him. Some intimate thing none but a loving eye could have devised: and with a quiet tact. So there was David more bewildered than before. But not David alone. He understood no less than Tom. The storm of their relationship seemed moving toward no issue.

David was sick--a little sick.

“You shan’t go downtown, to-day, do you hear!” commanded Tom. “This is a busy day for me, but if you don’t give me your word you’ll stay home, I’ll stay home myself to make you.”

He went out and telephoned to David’s office. He came back with a doctor. Tonsillitis.

Tom nursed him. Mrs. Lario found there was really little she could do. David had an assortment of dainties to sip. “This won’t hurt your throat.” He had books. He had a splendid array of cushions architected for his back to prop him for reading.

Mrs. Deane came and found her nephew lying happy in the large front room.

“More sun,” Tom explained. “It was no job moving the bed.”

“It is wonderful, child, how Mr. Rennard nurses you. I would no more dream of interfering.... You do not appear to be very busy downtown, Mr. Rennard.”

Tom laughed. “Oh, no, Mrs. Deane. Nothing to do at all. But do not give me away.”

David understood.

“Supposing work does go to hell? It won’t. But supposing it did? Pooh!”

David could not forget such things.

Nor, in their light, could he forget Tom’s accusation that _he_ was selfish: that _he_ had no idea of service. This one rift there was in the harmony of Tom’s helping: a certain flavor of rebuke as he served, a certain stress and reminder. “Here is how _I_ serve my friend.” Yet David could not be sure. The rebuke he felt in Tom’s ministrations for his own lazy selfishness might altogether lie in his own guilty conscience. What did he ever do for Tom? So far as he could see, what did he ever do for any one at all? His life was a sliding down greased paths. Fortune or no fortune, what hold had he on the way? Lying there on his cushioned couch, he found himself wishing Tom had not come back so soon from work in order to see how he was. And wishing this, he felt his guilt the more....

In flashes, like blaze in an empty sky, the emptiness of David came to him and filled him and gave him great hurt. Whither indeed was he going, and where was he? If Tom was querulous, irritable, weak, if Tom scoffed at his relatives, refused to be serious about his friends and would hear no word of his loves, what was David to complain? His relations were nothing to Tom: he knew too well what earthy ones they were. Had David respect for his own brief amours? Was there one of his relationships with man or woman that was noble, that lifted him up? Was there one, who worked for him and served him, as Tom did? Tom was faulty. Yes. But David was a monster in that he seemed to partake neither of the virtue nor of the sin of man. He was a trimmer. He was clamped down in some chill Limbo. Knowledge came to him, even now, of his idle and empty ways, like lightning in a lazy summer night: flashing and gone, muttering afar, doing no work upon him.

He was a spiritually sprawling creature. He had no coördination. If his heart was touched, how did his mind respond? If his mind, where was the response in deed? It seemed to David that what he did wore away the energy of his mind, dullened his heart: and what he felt and thought became impediments to those acts which his living called for. He was a loose-bound bundle of life, rolling down a chute....

In the fall, Constance Bardale telephoned to him.

“I am back. When can you come to see me?”

It was always hard for David to meet a sudden situation on the wire. He needed a face and a warm smile to talk to. He was afraid he had been dull in greeting Constance. For so long a time he had not thought of her at all!

“Then, I’ll expect you Saturday to tea.”

She had not suggested an evening. The choice of the formal hour meant nothing to David.

“I must make her know--somehow I must make her know I can’t go on.”

David said this to himself, going to see her. He did not recall that he had failed to write since the apparition of the little girl in the car. The poignancy of that vision was faded. But it had left its mark. In its loveliness it had blighted certain ugly things in his heart: disappeared. The condition whence sprang the ugly things was still in David. He was not cured. He was merely bitterly aware that he was not well.

Constance Bardale appeared different. Her new Paris gown was strange and stiff and be did not like it. She was far away within it. Even her voice had the apartness of alien adventures.