Chapter XIII

Cornelia loved to sit by her open window and look out.

She had the need of seeing the City clear: a cold pattern. Her own mind was chaos and she saw no help to crystallize the swirling problems that consumed her. Like one who in great heat wins comfort from vision of cool waters, she thought of the City as a design, carefully plotted out.

It was not easy. Looking beyond her house, with the street swarming in her eyes and the battlemented roofs surging above her head, she was dim in revery. In the dimness, the City lost its geometric outlines. It veered in and out of her grasp like a delirious dream: its streets were parabolas, freighted with teeming particles of life which each had a centrifugal direction. It all was a frangent swarm, knotted, heaving upon itself, forever ashift. She saw it a monstrous replica of her own mind: there was no relief.

She struggled with it. She said to herself: “What is so regular as the streets of New York?” When she dispelled her inchoate vision, also there was pain. For now she had the sense of streets cut livid through human lives: each street was a sharp thrust and heaped about it mounds of desiccated bones.

At last Cornelia shut the City out. She sat in her little rocking chair with a candle glowing, and huddled upon herself as if her pains were a swinging swarm about her. With hidden eyes she came to a dim world of thought.

She had never needed to find the word for what she felt toward David. Often, she needed to say to herself in self-assertion: I am a woman. Her life brought doubt of that. Were women supposed, like her, to live alone and work, and have no home, and have no one to care for? Her instinct despaired often of the life she gave her body and her mind. In protest, sometimes it would speak: am I a woman? But here was a harmony so deep it required no voice outside itself: in what she felt toward David. Long since it was an atmosphere: a wide world she fed in or starved in: howsoever, lived and would died in. She did not say to herself: I am in the world. She did not speak to herself of her own self with David. Endlessly, now, she worried about him, asked herself how she could help him. Still more frequently, she asked herself how she could save him. And in her next question: Save him from what? she was already deep in her tangled problem. She was like one who lived at the edge of a dark forest: whithersoever she went, with a step there she was in it. Its tangled shadows were always at her side.

Cornelia could understand, could also not understand. She had the sense that David suffered: suffered with her brother. She had the instinct of some struggle hidden between them, and of danger for them both. She knew not what it was. So it was horrible: it was like the nocturnal stirring of unknown life in her forest. She knew it was not merely the worldliness of Tom, his efforts to make David worldly. She knew how eased she must have been to believe it was no worse. But touching upon this, the terror still prowled at large. She had no hold upon her terror.

It was years now, growing on her like the loom of a Curse. It blackened and dried her life. She lived with it. All of her being was a shrunken point, veering blindly about in order to forfend some visitation so obscure and vast that she was nothing before it. If it was fearful that she knew nothing to bring her comfort, it was fearful as well that she knew nothing to knit her fear. She was a little swirling point under a sky that was black.

Sudden words came, like jagged movements in her mood. She said: “It is not for me that I am miserable. I do not want him for myself. God knows I have no hope of him for myself. It is not that.... God grant it be true that under this all, it is not merely that I want him for myself.... Oh, God grant it be only this! No other danger. I will face that. How gladly then I will give him up!...”

She buried her head in her arms, she prayed: she knew not what to pray for. She had the sense of an unholy loneliness, of praying to herself. She sprang up, wide-eyed, looked at her long, transparent hands: she said aloud: “Why am I alive?”

A thought came sweeping and cleansing: she was like a sea torn by swift winds, now suddenly a sheet of rain came down and smoothed it, soothed it. So a thought came glancing and offered peace.

“I do not have to live,” it said. And that in her which alone she did not question, which alone needed no words since her whole life was its Word, gave answer.

“No: what of him? With David in trouble, I must at least be here.”

Once more she was a sea churned by the winds of her dilemma.

But at least she had the faith that it was good for David that she should live. No faith this. Rather the matrix of her life--the hollow of the world in which lay her sea, however restless it beat....

* * * * *

Through the City walked Tom. He and his thoughts were a nimble line parting the City. Through the warm weather and the thick crowds of men and women he cut. Past the great loads of stone, he made his way. He was in Cornelia’s room; it was as if his path had left a wake--half fire, half blood--where his thoughts simmered and soaked into the living City.

“Cornelia,” he said to her, “what is there wrong with us?”

She looked at him. She loved him. She was glad always to be with him. Why did he not come back to her? In that way alone could she save him. If he stayed where he was----

“Let us cheer up, Tom dear. We’re depressed. I wouldn’t have thought that father’s death could depress us so.”

“You know better than that!”

“Is there anything more wrong with us, Tom, than with the world?”

Tom smiled wanly.

“How like a woman that is. However deep we rot, if the world rots as deep, no matter? You women accept the world.... Cornelia, that thought which to you brings consolation, would make me desperate.”

She said: “Perhaps we have not found ourselves, yet, Tom.”

And he: “Father’s death has suddenly set me to thinking where we are: and you to feeling.”

“I am not thinking of father. Ruth’s letter made me think far more of Ruth. Poor wasted Ruth. And Laura--bitter, sick Laura. I think of them.”

“Are they the only victims, Sister?”

Cornelia was pale. She drew back in her chair as if Tom threatened to strike her. Tom leaned toward her and with a quiet voice went on:

“Cornelia,” he said, “Father is dead. The father we revolted from and left. Tell me, Sister, how have we improved upon him?”

There was a silence. There was calm, very deliberate in Tom. He was smoking a cigarette. He took the red-tipped toy and held it before his eyes and looked at it; he blew on it with his half-parted lips. His lips were very hard against his teeth. The burning tip of the cigarette flared for an instant under the draught, burned more ash.

“Is not that the question which haunts us, Cornelia?”

She had no word for him. She felt he was unjust and cruel. She was helpless under his mood. Always in the past, she had been able--the sister, the mother in Cornelia--to veer him from himself and from herself when his mood went shattering. She had been wise and poiseful. Now she lay quivering with him, underneath his words.

“We don’t talk very often, do we, of father and the past? I wonder why we avoided them. Were they not the scene of our great Victory? Where is our pride, Cornelia?” He was deliberate and slow: his irony stiff like a rod.

“Just think,” he said, “what we left: what we overcame! Father! He is dead now. His remains--all of them, including Ruth and Laura--lie rotting on the Farm. We should be able to make some sort of estimate of what he was....”

She wanted to stop him. She wanted to know. Tom was right. Let them make some estimate of what they were.

“... a man whose blood had turned to poison.... Do you remember how he used to beat his daughters? The thing to remember in that is that he loved it. He had one successful daughter: Laura: she loved it also. And the world we lived in, Cornelia. Few children are brought up in so real a world. We alone had no illusions about America. We knew that in America, quite as elsewhere, only the few were to be saved. The rest were damned. We knew that the deeds of the masses were damned deeds here, quite as in Europe. Yes:--were there illusions about what he told us of the Revolutionary Fathers? or the Pioneers? We were wise children. And the reason was simply that Father taught us to see the truth. Have you ever thought of that? He taught us better than he knew, himself. For Father saw through the real world: he saw what a cold and lustful monster it all is. But he had his way of refuge. He had his God who had predestined him to heaven. Blessed Father! He had his revenge, for there was always the same God damning the irritating mob to hell. For his sake, Sister.... Do you see what I mean? Father gave us his knowledge for weighing facts, which means that he gave us his disillusions about Earth. But we did not stop there. We turned that same power against his own fairy-tales. God went, heaven went, hell went also. All that remained was the Earth that he had taken from us....”

Tom was silent. He smoked measuredly. He went on:

“Father was a happy man: he had a place to go to, from this desecrated world. Father was a strong man: he had his God. Where is our God, Cornelia?”

He sprang up. His eyes flashed. Deep anger was with his hands above his head. He sank down once more, and dropped his cigarette.

“We have no gods,” he said. “We have lost the old one. We have won no new ones.”

He smiled with the same hard half-parted lips. “I am not sure that we were so very wise. All the searing and desecrating vision that Father gave us of this reality was mere preparation for his Faith. He and his kind helped desecrate the world in order to enjoy their heaven. Without his heaven, is this reality he gave us altogether truth? Where are we with it? What is an abortion in relation with a life that is fully born? We rebelled; we left him and his blows and his hell and his God. We took with us the corroding poison of his blood. Were we not fools, Cornelia?”

“But, Tom, what else could we have done?”

“Nothing, of course.”

“Then, perhaps----”

“Be brave and honest, for once! A little more like father. His souls in hell could also not have done otherwise....”

“Tom! I won’t believe....”

He cut her short. “Very well, then: what _will_ you believe?”

She was silenced. His smile was over her, a hateful bitter triumph.

“That is it, precisely. Don’t you see? What _will_ we believe, Cornelia?”

He came and lifted her out of her chair. They sat down on the couch. His hand was very gentle on hers. He kissed her.

“We are neither the old nor the new, Sister. I sometimes think we are nothing. We are not happy. We are not strong. We have no gods at all.”

“We are unhappy, Tom.”

He looked at her fiercely.

“Are we that?” he asked her. “Have we the strength to be unhappy? To remain unhappy? Oh, how I wish I could believe that!”

He was grasping both her wrists. He dropped them.

“No,” he said. “It’s a lie. We are nothing. We are not even martyrs. I with my Law--my successful rotten Law. You with your paltry, remunerative Art! We are on the way. Something is on the way, through us, perhaps, through the wilderness of life. We are they who shall fall by the wayside.”

He looked over his shoulder, out of the window. The night was a blue haze, deep and far. It was streaked with the murmur of men, with the glow of a million lights. A tremor ran through him like the pulse of blood, and came about them, seated in the room.

“Let us face that, Cornelia....”

“But Tom:--in what you said--that is faith of a sort. You spoke of a wilderness to go through. Of a way. It must lead somewhere. There must be something else?”

“For us?”

“Perhaps not for us.”

“I should like,” Tom pondered, “to have some Church in which to perform a service for my father.”

She looked at him close. His head was down. She took his face in her hands and touched his shut eyes with her lips.

“Dear Tom! Don’t I help?”

There was a great hope in her. If she could find him again: hold him again! Tom, her first child....

He was searching her with eyes her lips had opened.

Her thoughts ran on. Dimly she felt the peril in her thoughts, running along.... No, Tom was not her child. Tom, no longer. He was like her. It was true. Only, he would not accept. She knew the wilderness of life stretched mountainously far beyond where her feet could bring her. She knew the truth for her in what Tom had said. She had hoped, not for herself, but for him. She had hoped falsely. They were one--they were one. For there was another who was so infinitely more, that they were nothing.

And so her mind ran on, while Tom’s eyes searched her. David was not maimed like them. In his eyes was the promise of a new God. And Tom was waging war against that promise. Talk as he would, understand as his mind made him, Tom waged war against that faith in David which he lacked. Strove to snatch it from him: steal it and wear it dead, rather than let David go on alone, with his eyes living.

She had said to him: “Do I not help?”

With an uncanny closeness, Tom sought in herself the answer.

Cornelia turned her eyes away. She could not look at her brother. It was her brother whom she loved. Yet, turning away her eyes, she felt that she was leaving him by a wild wayside, to parch and perish. She felt that even so let it be. All of her must be girded beyond him.

He also had said no word. He went to the window and stood there looking out. She knew that both of them had understood....

* * * * *

Twelve years before they had set out on a great enterprise together. They had come up from a common childhood which was a common suffering. They had reached Being together. Everything they had was a thing they had shared. The sere soil of the world was a single path they had traveled. Their hands had been joined. Now, facing each other over the communion of their years, they were prepared for war.

The bitterest of all was this: that it seemed natural. It was as if their common anguish, the hopes born of their hated home and the fruits they had wrung courageously from their adventure, pointed inevitably to this end. For the most natural of all was this: that the end also should be bitter.

The death of their father had brought Tom for the moment closer to Cornelia. He was coming again to see her. There had been months without a sign of him. She knew that when this mood wore out there would be months again. If she had questions of Tom, there was no time to lose.

It was bitter hard to bring herself to speak of David. She did not flinch:

“How does your friendship stand with him?” she asked him.

“It is stormy. It will always, I guess, be stormy. But it will always be.”

They were at war, but they were generous to each other. Their war was a hidden and a sacred thing: it was not more nor less than the confronting of themselves upon the path they had helped hew, had helped each other walk. It was a hidden thing, but they had no desire to conceal it. They were open to each other insofar as each could be. They were the brother and sister who had waged life and war together.

“Do you think it is helping David--this ‘friendship’ that will always be?”

“I have not your acute moral sense, Cornelia. How should I know?”

She bit her lips.

“Why,” he asked with his ironic smile, “why don’t you ask if it is helping me!”

“You have made it plain to me, Tom, that you do not need my help. Out of self-protection I had to withdraw thinking too much of that.”

He nodded as if he understood and agreed. This hurt Cornelia. Even the words of contradiction would have been hostage to something precious.

“David is growing masterful. That much I can say for our friendship. I told you how he turned Lunn and Durthal out of our place, one evening. What I did not tell you was this: the following day David was contrite. He wanted to apologize for the splendid thing he had done. I would not let him.”

“Why?”

“What he did was himself. It is himself I care for. I will not let him be a renegade to his own instincts.”

She laughed at him. It was an effort, turning her bitterness to laughter.

“In the contradiction, you simply had a higher sort of triumph. Don’t you think I understand? You labor to beat him down and break him. When you see signs of your work you turn about. When you get him beaten and broken at last, doubtless you will have no more use for him.”

“Doubtless, Cornelia.”

“Tom! Leave David alone!”

His cutting calm had parted her restraint. All of her fear threatened to burst out. She was close to Tom, beseeching. In a moment, her hands would be suppliant.

He let her plead.

“Do that for me, Tom. Leave him! Insult him! Turn him away!”

“I often try to. It’s no use. I can sustain no mood long enough for that.”

She was blinded by his words into a sense of hope.

“Oh, a little longer! Send him to me. He never comes to me, now. He will if you send him. I’ll help you, Tom.”

She stopped. She saw the folly of her outburst. Was there not war between them? He was there with his irony.

“What have you, really, against our friendship? There is something unreasonable in this. What is it? Of course, I shall send him to you. I promise that.”

Never had she seen him so contained before her. He was winning. A flourish and a dare in his promise to send him. She pressed her lips with hands that had been almost suppliant before her brother. She would accept his ironic bounty: turn it against him. Many a battle was lost through excess of confidence. She could not answer his questions.

“You talk, positively, Sister, as if I were ruining the lad,--instead of slowly bringing him up.”

“Bringing him up to what?”

“Well, to what? I ask you?”

“Tom, I cannot explain. There is something here I cannot explain. I want David to be free of you. That is all.”

“So you can have him?--is that all?”

“You know that’s a lie!”

She was breathing hard with her hurt.

He examined her. “Yes: that is a lie. That would be a reasonable reason. Too reasonable for you. I could respect that: even coöperate with it. If there were any chance of success,” For an instant, he had tricked her into stirring toward him. She winced. “You can’t expect me to crucify myself and David for your vague philanthropic folly.”

“No, Tom--I cannot.”

Then: “Tom, are you altogether frank with me? Do you really think my haunting fears are due to a selfish cause?”

“No, Cornelia.”

“Do you think, Tom--answer me on your honor--do you think they are really vague and foolish?”

Waiting for his word, as he stood silent, she found that she wanted him so to think them.

His answer came: “No. They are not foolish. And only we are vague about them.”

“Tom!"...

She must look out. She was so weak before him. She was ever so near to dangerous pleading. She straightened herself back.

“----but since _we_ are so vague, Cornelia? Necessarily so. I call the whole discussion nonsense.”

He was flippant over her tragedy: over her life. He was clear-eyed admitting it, and then he was flippant! He stood next to her with his light grace and she hated him. For he was the brother whom she loved.

He went and did not for a long time come back. He stayed away too long. But he wrote her a note:

_Dearest Sister_:

In accordance with my promise, I have urged David to go and see
you. I scolded him for a thoughtless friend. He is thoughtless,
you know. I have found that out, many a time, to my unhappiness.

These books I am sending you I have just read this year and liked.
I am sure you will like them also.

Lots of love, dearest Sister, and good fortune.

TOM.

How sure he was of David! How sure he was of her. She saw that he loved her in the same deep confident way of the younger brother whom she had nursed and led. The eternal way. She had unending hurt of this. For how could she deny the call of his love through his little note? And how could she answer it? She was torn. She knew there was now a reason for Tom’s staying away. She wondered if Tom knew how he tore her. But if he had written her coldly, cruelly, would it have been less cruel?...

* * * * *

Cornelia found herself nursing in her arms a life that she must make to thrive against all hazards: the little life of a great resolve. She looked at it, and gave herself up to it. Dimly she knew that if she held it close enough, and warm, and endless against her breast, it would gain in strength.

David must be saved!

From now on, she went about with it. While she worked or played--seldom this was--and went through the grimacings of a social creature; while she slept--there it was ever upon her breast: that David must be saved!

He had not come to see her.

She said to herself: it is no matter. To have seen him would have been joy, or rather ecstasy so packed she could for many days have had her joy of it. It was no matter. For she had no plan. What would she say to him, or do, when he came? Let him stay away until she was more ready. It was bitter to know he had not come, and she expecting him. It was no matter.

Her sleep was a strange thing. No real dreams--streakings of thought and dream ran through her night like falling flames. So that her night was neither sleep nor waking. It was an endless trembling between two worlds, it was a part of Chaos. She lay there and her body was a restless weight holding her down. She was like a little boat tossed at anchor by a broken sea. Her body and her consciousness: these were the anchor. They kept her from running wild with the waves. And the waves kept her from being quiet at her anchor. She was torn. She was a continuous play of hindered movement.

When the day came, she lay there wearied as if she had been swept by a great fury.

Her nights were streaked by these running ribbons of dream: and always they were the same insofar as always they were really nothing. They were David. Her problems in David. Her plans and her helplessness to solve them. Never, even in her sleep, did she sink to some quiet haven of dream with David: have him there to talk to gently, to be with gladly. Something surging within her took this great Wish and cut it up into bloody fragments and strewed her night with them. All of David was never there: nor all of a single moment with her holding his head on her breast. David’s laughter or David’s troubled frown or David’s voice: or merely David’s name--David, David, David--falling down her night like drippings of blood. And she, lost in this welter of struggle between wish and the real, unable to take sides.

There was no rest in such nights. She lay in her narrow bed, cast up in her cell-like room as upon some rocky shore. And looking back upon her sleep, she had a sense of a delirious underworld, yellow of hue with veins of livid red wriggling athwart it, and of herself who followed the veins. It was a shattered and scattered self that had been thrown through the night, thrown, somehow intact, upon the shore of the morning.

Like a bruised woman, she was out of her bed. She placed the coffee on the gas-burner, and took a bath. Cornelia had no pleasure of her body. Unclothing herself, she did not care to look at her lean nakedness. It was as if she had feared to find great bruises upon it. She laid her gaunt hands on her breast and shivered, for it was cold and the water was none too hot which she had heated. She noticed how small were her breasts and that they had begun to droop. She remembered that once they had been beautiful and that she had been tempted to use them for a model; she had not dared, since then people would look on them. And after all, they were girl breasts, not those of a mother. Now they were neither. They were beginning to shrink and narrow and droop. They were becoming the breasts of a woman who had not lived. Yet, looking at them now, Cornelia felt no sorrow or regret. She took this fading as she took the world--the world outside her. She was outside herself. She did not care if her breasts were no longer beautiful. Who, indeed, had ever seen them? What good had she had of their beauty?

She stood before her dresser and put on her clothes. She dressed meticulously. There was no warmth in the care with which she braided her thin hair and knotted it into a Psyche back of her head. What was her hair to her? There was no warmth in her choice among her waists of the one she would wear that morning. She smoothed the loose ends under the belt and tidied the little linen collar. Her hands were fast at their work. They did not fail: also they did not linger.

Very neatly, Cornelia spread a napkin for a cloth on the table and placed down the tray and proceeded to eat her breakfast. She took a slice of bread and butter and an egg, and two strong cups of black coffee. She loved coffee. It was her one real vice. Lately she had needed it more than ever. Night gave her no rest: and coffee weakened the pall of morning.

She cleared away her dishes.

There was her work before her and it was time to be working.

She looked at the little huddle of clay on the level of her head. She unwound the clinging cloth. She knew that she was bored. It was nothing but a huddle of dull clay. In it was lost somewhere the head of a boy. It was her task to find him, to bring him out, so she could go on when her model came. She found she did not care. The clay and the boy’s head were remote. With all her effort, she could not bring them nearer. She looked at her work as if it had been the work of another person, very dim and weak, and very far away. She saw that it was hopelessly bad. She saw that Tom was right. He did not take her Art with any seriousness. That did not matter. Plenty of people did. She had won prizes. She was on Committees of Exhibition. Last year the Metropolitan Museum had bought her Dawn. But all of this was wrong. She did not care. She knew! She knew her Art was worthless. Because it bored her. It was a task. Ever since she had had time to give herself to it, it had not deceived her. Ever since she was an artist she had known she was no artist at all. David never spoke of her work. It meant nothing to him. He said he did not understand such matters. Nonsense! She remembered his childish outburst of joy at a Chinese vase they had seen one day in a shop-window on Fifth Avenue. What did he know of Chinese vases? Yet he had loved it. Had he once captured such a moment from her casts, it had perhaps been different.

How strange it all was, what an ironic time of it the world was having with its men and women! She had yearned to escape in order to be an artist. She had left home, risked life. She and Tom slaved, at one time nearly starved, while she pursued her dream. Here she was: Cornelia Rennard, Sculptress. And ashes in her hand. But what was more than strange: she did not seem to care. It all seemed natural enough. Like a tale whose end she knew and whose telling bored her.

Tom was right....

She found she had unconsciously redraped the wet rag around her model. She thought of David. The resolve: the resolve! How dimly she reacted to life this morning! Not alone this morning. She had never thought even of looking out of the window. Look! it was snowing. She leaned against the window-seat. The snow came swirling, merry, through blue air. There was little wind. The street was muffled and passive: strangely quiet street under the merry snow.

David might have come. Did he hate her? she wondered. She was importunate, cloying perhaps. Young blood hates such a woman. Almost she blamed herself for the fact that her nights were streaked with yearning for him.

“But he does not know. He does not know. I have not bothered him _really_....” She pleaded with him. Let her have at least her nights of broken dreams, her days broken with worry.

She had definitely given up her modeling for the day, she had a sense of relief.

“Giulio does not seem to be coming at any rate,” she excused herself. She went on: “If he comes, I’ll pay him and send him off.”

Why should she worry about work? She had plenty of money. She had enough left over from last year to take her through two seasons. She spent so little.

Her relief widened and deepened. It was as if she had found for herself a holiday. Let her be alone with her reveries and her anguish. Let her vegetate, if she would, or die. Let her art die, at any rate. Who cared?

As she went musing about, she hummed a broken aria, from Tristan. Very broken since all now that came from her was broken, and since, besides, she had no ear for music. But often she went to the Opera--away upstairs--and listened to the cloudy and clotted passions of Richard Wagner.

Almost unknown to herself she had taken a pile of paper and all the paraphernalia of water-color from a drawer; set it out on the table. There it was! She looked at it and smiled.

“Oh, you lazy one,” she said half aloud, “what an escape from your real work! What nonsense!” Under her hand was a set of sheets she had already daubed. A new foible, this: which she never more than half allowed. There was much of her father in Cornelia. Her sculpture she admitted: it was work. These blind, wandering daubs were play--were some sort of dissipation--were nonsense and wicked.

This morning Cornelia was indulging herself. Giulio had not come. Let her be wicked. It was no worse to be wicked than to be a wearied artist. So she spread out her daubs of water-color and examined them. And they were unlike the model of clay in this, that they seemed near her; she let her eyes and her mind wander among them and they were very near herself.

She grasped a brush and wet it and sat down. Something dim came over her eyes. It was as if they turned inward. Cornelia relaxed. Her breathing came more like the natural ebb and flow of a tide within her. Her head and neck fell easily forward. She had the sentiment of having returned, sweetly and without effort, to her night. It was like the coming to a loved trysting place. She was once more with her sleep, streaked in shreddings of dream. Her brush made strokes on paper....

Suddenly, whatever this was she painted was done. For she stopped. She left her night-world. She held out the sheet at arm’s length and tried to look critically at what she had committed: she tried to laugh. It was a very mad and incomprehensible design. It was nonsense. But she could not laugh at it. The colors _were_ somehow lovely. Of course, color was not everything.

All the little paintings were different, yet each of them in some mysterious way was a record of her broken nights. Each of them had come to being while her mind returned to some dim hinterland, and found her nights, and brought them back. Swathes of color passionate against a brooding background; spirals of flame in space: parabolas of red and gold and green dragging a fever across darkling worlds of black and gray. In all of them was a phantasmagoria of design Cornelia had no name for: but could not wholly reject. They were herself. The diary of her passionate anguish. No one would ever see them. Whom did they hurt? She had joyous rest in looking at them, in letting herself out among their distances. She promised herself that she would always laugh at them: when she felt a little stronger and her fight was won, she promised herself to leave them and return to her Art.

A thought came sudden from the outer world.

“Why,” she cried, standing up, “it’s Thanksgiving Day! No wonder Giulio did not come.”

She put away the sheets of her confessional.

“I must have a walk. Goodness! I nearly forgot. People are coming to tea!”

She had marketing to do. The stores would still be open in the morning. She trudged through the bright pink snow: she said to herself:

“I wonder if I am mad making these mad pictures. They _are_ mad. They have no subjects or anything. Well, I don’t care. Supposing I _am_ mad?...”

The pink snow danced lazy through blue air. The City was a great beast snoring with snout on the ground. She pondered.

“It sometimes seems to me things are not really half so clear and concise as we artists make them. I wonder if we would be more concise painting these misty moods....” She saw how fluent and filmy a thing was the snowing City. People passing were strokes of smudge across the snow.

“They aren’t really like people at all--noses and limbs and thoughts!”

But she was at her shop. She was buying chocolate éclairs: very clear things, these, with particular prices. Her inspiration melted in the sticky air. Cornelia had no fingers to grasp these luminous moments fleeting across her.

As she came back a little cavalcade of ragamuffins pranced and begged pennies. She gave each of them five cents. They danced and cavorted in the snow. Their faces were running with grease and paint. The boys wore women’s skirts tucked high under their armpits, feathers in vast broken derbies abandoned by their fathers. The girls were trim in trousers: their little buttocks pointed rakishly back under their flowing curls.

“How like flowers they are, in the snow,” said Cornelia to herself. “And the great monster City with his snout snoring away. They’ll tickle him with their antics: he’ll shake himself and snarl and swallow them up.”

The mood was thinning. Once more she was thinking of David and of the tea that was to be a torture. What did she want of friends? What did she have to give them? How, with no work and no joy in her heart, was she ever to pass through the countless hours of life?...

A doctor would have said to Cornelia: “The trouble with you is, you do not eat enough.”

Thus this day, when Cornelia was once more in her room, she was too tired to go out again to dine, too bored to cook a dinner for herself.

“I’ll eat at tea,” she explained to her sense of unfitness. She brewed herself a cup of coffee. That was easy.

She recalled her last Thanksgiving. She and Tom went together to the New Jersey heights above the Hudson River; they dined at a mushroom farm. What a jolly jaunt--only a year ago! The last, she thought, of her excursions with Tom. A silent rule they had had always to spend their holidays together--a rule unbroken for twelve years, broken now by the war between them that broke all things.

She sat sipping her coffee, and wandered over the frozen hills where their feet had struck. They pitied David laughingly, that day. As so often on set occasions, he had been gobbled up by the Deanes. The conventional time, they found, for not counting on David was the conventional feast-day. She remembered what Tom said: “These families have so little imagination! They cannot even invite a chap to dinner except on a public holiday.”

Cornelia thought now how good it would be to be embraced in some convention: however stiff it was it would be warm to be shut in tight. She had been alone the Christmas of last year. She was not used to it. Christmas was coming again.

She made herself a little mound of cushions on her couch and settled with a book. It was a silly novel some one had given her. There, uncut, was the package of books in the corner, which Tom had sent. Something kept her away from them. She was not sure what shafts Tom might thus unsheath and aim at her. She was not suspicious but indifferent. Her mind was torpid. They must be heavy books. She would have to work to understand them.

The novel, on the contrary, did not make demands enough. It was the story of a Belle of Philadelphia, loyal to the Revolution during the British Occupation. It was very plain that the lovely American was to win valuable secrets of war from the vicious British officer who loved her: would give them after hazardous adventure to Washington’s aide-de-camp who was her true love and so help win the war. Sure enough, there she was galloping the dangerous country to Valley Forge. Cornelia’s mind wandered as she idly turned pages. She put down the book. Her mind was a weary woman stumbling with dead feet across the snow. She ached. The snow had stopped. A gentle pall came in from the muffled world. The elevated trains were a memory, life stirred like a larval city hidden from her eyes. She lay in a blue night, and the name of David fell across her night in livid snow. The name of David and the eyes of David and the thoughts of him, cutting her face and melting. Cornelia was on horseback, although she could not see her horse; she was hurrying to Valley Forge with an important secret. Her horse stumbled: he was forever turning, forever turning back. He was trying to carry her into the snare of the British officer. The officer was a short, slim man, he was Tom. Cornelia was lifted up. Her eyes seemed to peer through a viscous film and part it. She lay there prostrate, now, and conscious, neither asleep nor awake; she felt the weariness within her body and the great strain of how she lay, like a wrack upon her. She was tired, tired! Could she not sleep? Could she not have rest? Let her but stretch out and relax and fall away, deeper down where the hectic grays were black.

She remained as she was. She felt that she was tied in a hard knot. She was caught in the vice of her nerves. She could not swing herself free: she could not hold herself fast. She lay there and suffered. Though she was half asleep, she could feel her energy fall away in her strain, and her thoughts bound and strike her like iron balls.

When it was time, she got up and prepared the tea things.

The day was low and away. Where had it gone? It seemed to have left her behind. She had the haunted instinct of having been abandoned. Looking back on the day, it seemed a vivid thing, swift and heavy with laughter and paint-smudged children: it had rolled over her body and left her behind. She was bruised by its passage. Day of Thanksgiving!... And here about her now, where the Day had been, a void gray like her sleep: within it just such scant scatter of life--herself.

Each little thing that stirred--a teacup against a saucer, the tick of the clock--had a thousand jagged echoes.

The bell rang. It jangled against her nerves.

Cornelia gripped herself. She had a sense of her head careening.

The door opened. She went forward and smiled.

A stately woman with a gentle face came in, behind her a little dapper man. She kissed Cornelia. Seeing Cornelia she stood on the threshold of some passionate understanding. But her husband broke the warming silence. He ran about the room and chattered. He was very gay. Cornelia smiled wanly at him.

It was Sylvain Purze, maker of fashionable portraits: and his wife, maker of Sylvain Purze.

They sat, the two women sheathed themselves up, so the little man should not be hurt with any truths. Mrs. Purze was a woman bathed in a sweet melancholy. Her fine features were a little vague under the dawn of her gold hair.

“What a jolly place you have here, you know, Miss Rennard!” exclaimed Mr. Purze. “How I envy you your simplicity. Ah, me!” He sighed, thinking with satisfaction of his luxurious studio on Gramercy Park. “When you’re married----” he intimated treacherously. But his wife did not mind. She knew Cornelia’s opinion of her husband’s talk. She knew her own. The trouble was precisely that her husband had never given her the excuse to leave him.

Cornelia’s mind was a twilight swept clear of the mists of the sun. Each nerve stood out alone, and took its toll of its surroundings. The bell jangled again.

A young girl came in, diffident, spring-like; before a tall dark man with head thrust stiffly back, so that he seemed to be leaning in the direction contrary to his coming.

Cornelia greeted her with real pleasure. Cornelia’s sudden brightness was like a pitiful flower budding above strewn ashes.

“Helen! I am so glad you thought of coming. And this is Doctor Westerling?” She shook his hand silently. “I have heard of you.” She was not interested really. She introduced them.

“Miss Helen Daindrie....”

She had expected the Purzes only. No one else would come. The little party caught from the hostess the sense of its completion. It threw out its arms and wove a comfortable net about itself. It settled down.

The talk ran easy and subdued: a sluggish circulation within this temporary creature. Mr. Purze was suave with words. His wife had a poise that cradled all the room and gave the creature rest. Dr. Westerling was taciturn: but he was intense in listening. He was a pleasure to Mr. Purze. And Helen Daindrie sat there sweetly, neither talkative nor silent. Cornelia had no need to exert herself. The party would be an easy one. It would live and come to a good end. She found herself looking more and more at Miss Daindrie, drawn to her by a fascination bitter-sweet. She wondered why. She asked her senses. They were clear in their reports like bells.

She was a little woman--half girl, not more than twenty-two. She was rather plump, but gently so and with grace. It was a quality, invisible like perfume, that came from her. Under her prettiness a sturdy note. She must be capable. Her eyes were a light blue: Cornelia saw them in the candles she had lighted: but her mouth was straight, long, even, and her chin had strength in its womanly rondure. Looking at her, Cornelia felt the great good health of this woman.

Her career told something, but what Cornelia’s sharpened nerves now gave her told more in an instant. Miss Daindrie was a college graduate, and a student in medicine. She was going to employ her science not in practice but in expert work among the children and mothers of the City. This sounded serious almost to forbidding. But the girl, sitting quiet and drinking her tea with a sober head, as if this were a meal, not a convention, was different from her work. She was at once lovely with youth and indestructibly firm with a quaint mother-sense. Her stalwartness was about her girlhood, protecting it, as her strong full body was about the dance of her eyes.

Cornelia mused away.... She need not worry about her guests. Mr. Purze had aroused Doctor Westerling to talk. He was saying serious things about the advance of Science in America, as compared to Europe. He had spent four years in Paris, Vienna, Berlin. It was plain he knew. Whatever he said he knew. He had taken up Mr. Purze’s challenge, “We are children in art,” as one would take up a problem to be answered.

“In America,” he said, “our art is Science.”

Cornelia watched him detachedly. He was talking really to impress Miss Daindrie. There was a caress in his voice as he said Science. What did it mean to him, that had a body and soul? He loved Miss Daindrie.

Did she love him? No. Would she? Cornelia leaned back in her chair.

For the first time, she noticed the tilt of Miss Daindrie’s head on her lovely neck: the whimsical curve of the cheekbone and the clear, almost protrusive outline of the jaw. There must be something Irish about her. Her father--Judson Daindrie--he was Scotch.... Doubtless her mother. Also there was something romantic. A pinch of romance, like a pinch of explosive powder. She was steady: her thrust in life was sure and long. This was one reason why the assertive and uncertain Doctor loved her. But in order to set her off, that pinch of powder. Did the Jewish scholar, exact and intransigent, hold the needed spark? Cornelia thought not. How those blue eyes could gleam! Could they gleam for him? Of course, she pondered, she might marry him, unlighted. He must have a pounding, indefatigable way. Look at him driving his point into Mr. Purze who was really not so very concerned. Yes: she might marry him. If no one else touched off the powder. If she remained unaware of it. She might go unmellowed through life, unfertilized. Such things happened. It would be a pity....

The talk was animated now. The party bloomed to its fullest life. Miss Daindrie was curiously self-conscious about Dr. Westerling’s oration. She was teasing him. How steady she was, for one with a perfume so diffident and sweet! He did not like her jests. His mind sensed only dully what they meant: sharply what she meant behind them. For some reason, a rebuke. He bore it. He was used to battle, and to resistance. He was used to rebukes. But he was uneasy. The cruder lists of argument and quarrel were more to his measure. It seemed to him that this Mr. Purze, if he was an artist, needed a lot of informing.

“We _have_ here a tendency,” he found the need of explaining his debate to Miss Daindrie, “----to misjudge America by overlooking what America excels in, and wishing in our hearts she were merely another Europe.”

Mr. Purze was suddenly agreeing. He saved the Doctor from another teasing. He was nothing, if not a soother of self-important people. He was marvelously informed in the prerequisites of his art of portraiture. He knew who Westerling was. Not rich, but already an emerging figure at the great Magnum Institute. Great men sat for portraits.

Westerling discoursed on the need of a new critical scientific standard in Art. Did not Mr. Purze agree? Oh, indeed. It was nonsense, was it not? to say that values in beauty could not be determined like any other element in a material solution. Painting was a chemical solution. Music and poetry were physical solutions: sound waves illustrative of certain documentary matter which of course was open to intellectual appraisal.... He was very interested in that.

“I was invited sometime ago to a private recital of Lahlberg. You know--that Russian pianist. He played many of his own compositions. I asked him to state to me in scientific terms what his music meant: why, for instance, he used seconds and sevenths where Chopin employed thirds and fifths. He was quite dumb, I assure you. I needed no further proof of what I had already expected----” the Doctor had meant to say “suspected”--: “the man is a clever charlatan.”

“But he plays so beautifully,” pleaded Mrs. Purze.

“We cannot trust uneducated senses any more than we can uneducated people.”

“No,” decided Cornelia in herself, “this is not what she wants.”

She had been watching Helen Daindrie with a growing singleness of interest. She saw how the girl’s body faintly stiffened when the Doctor spoke. She was aware of the implied direction, of the source of the heat of his words: she was attentive, she was respectful and impressed. And yet, Cornelia felt a specific turning away in the young girl’s mind, a wavering of interest, almost a recoil and a revolt from this intellectual tribute. He did not really hold her. When she wandered, Cornelia saw her relax. Now, during these last long words, suddenly Miss Daindrie turned and met Cornelia’s eyes. In them a twinkle of disdain, a gladness to be looking away.

“Have you heard Lahlberg?” Cornelia asked her. Dr. Westerling still talked.

“Yes.”

“Do you care for him?”

“I think he is very wonderful,” said Miss Daindrie. In her remark there was specific rebellion against what Dr. Westerling was saying. Cornelia noticed. It proved to her that there was danger after all of the Doctor’s winning....

Suddenly, she said to herself: “_Why do I care?_”

She had been watching Miss Daindrie. Now, for the first time, she watched herself to know why she was watching.

As she went groping, she understood.

For a long time she had walked through a dark cave with a lantern, placing it against the dripping walls, seeking a certain thing.... Sudden, there was her lantern against it, what she sought!--and she recoiled, she withdrew her light, she did not want to see.... With her body strained and her nerves singing against the pull of her will, she lifted her light again, she forced herself to look.

She felt it ... in her heart she could have no doubt of it.... Helen Daindrie was meant to make the rescue of David!

How clear it was, terribly clear. The one way! She wondered by what painful blessing she had not seen before. She knew that she had seen and had not wanted to see it. It was too bitter, too cruel. Unfair! How could she stand this, who was willing to bear all things? This giving David into the arms of another woman? How could she be sure? How dared she? Reasons had tumbled upon her: knowing was blotted out. Now, what had been dim was clear: what had been so hard, seemed strangely natural and easy.

She looked at Helen. She felt her presence. Never had she so felt a life before. Helen was lovely and girlish and strong. She would lead David the way of his dreams, the way of his young gods--they must be her gods also! She would lead him firmly. Her sense of right was clear like her blue eyes. Feeling her there, Cornelia loved Helen Daindrie. Her heart went out to her, her hands pleaded to embrace her. She seemed to hold her face in her trembling hands and to look deep in Helen. Yes: she was lovely, for she was to be the beloved. She was sacred, for it was she who was chosen.

Tom’s hold would fall away when once David turned and wanted to move toward Helen.

“Bless you!” her eyes said, “God bless you. And do as I want. And love him as he deserves.”

How very certain it all seemed to Cornelia! There sat Helen Daindrie, talking, smiling, frowning a little perhaps, and nothing had been said. Nothing had happened. Yet Cornelia was sure that this girl would win David’s love, and win him from Tom and save him.... Win him forever from herself.

So let it be. There was no bitterness in her heart. No hurt, it seemed. For all of her was the fullness of her hurt. Her hurt was about her, surrounding her like air. Without it, she must have stifled.

She wanted to get up and take Helen’s hand and kiss it. She was her David, looking at this woman. She wanted to kiss Helen’s eyes and tell them what it was they would soon see. She forgot the Doctor. She no longer saw him. So sure she was.

She sat there, full of her vision. “Nothing has happened. They need never meet--unless you force it,” was a faint whisper she had no ears for. She must go on in this greater ecstasy than she had ever known. She must make her vision live. Who was she--Cornelia, or David? or was she this sweet fresh girl with the loyal eyes? A great faint ease moved through all her body, as if she were bleeding to death.

She had no words to say to Helen, nor to herself. She longed only to touch her hair, kiss her eyes. David was to touch and to kiss them! Her nerves, that had been taut and clear in the drunkenness of fasting, slumbered now as if they had feasted. Her eyes were dim and saw no further thing. She was indeed swathed warm and happy, like one bleeding away and bathed in her own blood.

But nothing happened. She had no further sense of the room save that it held her up: nor of the easy talk save that her knowledge of it let her float slumberously, in the sea of her blood.

All her blood was outside her. It was no longer a beating surge within the pent walls of her soul. She was emptied of desire and of pain.

She felt that something was to happen: there would come some proof to her vision. She would look upon it sweetly as upon her death.

She awaited her death. She was smiling.

The bell rang. The door opened. David came in....