Chapter XIV

David had long intended to see Cornelia. Tom reminded him more than once: reminded him perhaps a bit too often. There was a stubborn touch in David. Something within him seemed to resist his going, and even he knew moodily that the something was kin to Tom’s insistence. He had a way of sallying forth on a Sunday afternoon, resolved to walk an hour and then go to her place: and of forgetting. Until it was too late. He would say: “Next time I will not forget.” At last the “next time” came to be Thanksgiving.

He dined with the Deanes. He had no plans at all for after dinner. The dinner would be big, he lazy. If his uncle offered him a cigar and Lois was amiable, he might sit around all afternoon. He did not much care. But his uncle had his erratic ways: in and out of business, one never could tell about him. Doubtless the moody angles of Lois were due to her father. Sometimes he would treat him as a man:

“Have a cigar, sir?” David accepted and liked this. Moreover the effect of a cigar was always to make him heavy and sleepy: unfit either for walking or a visit: in no heroic mood for visiting a friend toward whom his sense of guilt made him uncomfortable.

Then again, his uncle would light his own cigar and forget him; perhaps even say:

“Well, children, I am going to take a nap.... Run along.” He napped on the dining-room sofa.

This happened on Thanksgiving.

Lois was somber. David knew that her engagement--it had never been more than a casual trial--was broken. Once more she was in the open field. And more cynical, more difficult than ever. She had been spiteful, it seemed to David, on this Feast of Thanksgiving. For the first time in a rare long stretch, he had almost preferred the flinty steadiness of her sister. Lois had nothing to say to him, to do with him. When she spoke, she managed an air of objective and disdainful interest that was worse than indifference. As if she were thinking: “What can this specimen possibly have to say?” After dinner, she struck out her hand and smiled formally into his face:

“Good-by, David: I have a date and it’s late. Can I drop you somewhere?”

He spurned her offer. He found himself out of the house, it was still snowing. He had a sentimental turn over the snow and his loneliness, his being turned out lonely into the snow.

He began to trudge and to enjoy the walk. He had had no cigar. He was clear-headed. The snow ceased, the air of the darkling City was soft like the touch of silk. He trudged for several hours. Five blocks from her house, the summons came to Cornelia.

He hated the Deanes that afternoon. It was an old track in his brain that led him now from them to Cornelia, as his old revolts had led him three years before. True, Mrs. Deane had said to him: “You can stay, dear, if you want and entertain _me_.” True, the thought came that this might have been more comfortable after all. He did not want to go home. Tom had a way of wreathing their room in smoke and cynical smiles on holidays. It was plain that the time had come to go as his feet now took him....

At the tea, nothing visible had occurred. Cornelia was behind her guests. Far away: pleasantly so, since if she held a rebuke for him it was far away also. There had been a girl with a sweet voice. He did not recall her face. He had come late, left early.

Now a note from Cornelia. She had scarcely seen him on Thanksgiving. She wanted to see him. Would he come the following Sunday to tea?

He was there, she was not alone. This was rather strange, thought David. Evidently she was not so anxious after all to see him really. He had exaggerated her feeling. Doubtless she did not care enough to have a rebuke for him. At least he could not detect it. It was a pleasant afternoon. With Cornelia was a girl--“my dear friend,” she called her--Miss Helen Daindrie. A very sweet girl, thought David. Rather distant.

“You funny person!” she said to him. “Why didn’t you offer to take Miss Daindrie home?”

“I thought I’d like to see you alone, for a minute.”

“Nonsense! You know you’d have preferred escorting her.”

“Well--is it right--at a casual tea--the first time you meet a person?”

“The first time! Why, David! You met Miss Daindrie on Thanksgiving.”

“Oh, did I?”

She was looking at him with a cloudy reserve on her eyes he could not understand. Why should she be offended, if he did not remember Miss Daindrie? Did Cornelia love her so much?

“Now, run along.” She almost put him out.

He thought her strangely cavalier and distant. He enjoyed her. For the first time, in long, he did not find Cornelia cloying. There had been none of the warm discomfort.

He was glad to come again. He was glad, now, in his supine state, when he was lifted in any way from his comfortless closeness with Tom.

It was a little party. Cornelia entertained quite often. She had always said, in the old days: “David, I do not invite you. What should you do with all these stupid people?--stupid and self-important. When I see you, David dear, I want _you_.”

Now, how different was Cornelia, how light and easy to get on with! David began to question, should he really want to see her alone, could he succeed? He came to just such a party of self-important people, nondescripts of whom he had met none before, with their endless chatter about remote, allusive topics, and wished to see none ever again. It was almost like meeting an old friend to find Miss Daindrie there. He reckoned that she and Cornelia must be fast friends. She was strange. Each time he met her she seemed to him so different he could not be sure he had met her before. He talked with her a great deal that evening.

Cornelia said: “There is only one person here you could possibly be interested in. Don’t mind being selfish, dear. Devote yourself to _her_. I’ll manage the others.”

He did. He scarcely spoke with Cornelia.

A pause of several ordinary weeks: a visit to the Magnum Institute.

“Would you like to see the great laboratories and the hospital?” Cornelia wrote him. “Doctor Westerling said I might come, and bring a friend.”

David escorted her. They went through a long, high room, cold and metallic and full of corrodent odors. It was painful to David. He felt that he was being cut by a very sharp steel blade, so that there was no pain, and yet it was painful Miss Daindrie was there in a white apron and a white stiff blouse. It seemed to David that the hard starched linen must cut into her softness. His teeth were a bit on edge, and he was afraid to look too close at the acids and the test-tubes full of evil germs and the smears of blood. The Doctor explained a culture of gelatine in which grew billions of organisms and over which Miss Daindrie pored as over a cradle. This brought nausea to David. He knew he was silly. “I would not want to be a doctor,” he whispered to Cornelia. He saw that she too was in pain in this chill temple of science.

What held him most was that Miss Daindrie had no eyes for him at all. She followed the white-aproned Doctor in rapt submission. And Doctor Westerling, David was sure, did not like him. He looked quizzically at David’s wandering attention.

He said to him: “You are not interested, I guess, in medicine--except when you have a stomach-ache?”

“No,” David answered seriously. “Isn’t that the one time when I should be interested?”

For a moment Doctor Westerling appeared to like him. His eyes widened, took David in as if with the help of a new light. He began nodding. “Why! You are right.” He laughed. Miss Daindrie came up.

“What contribution _did_ you make, Mr. Markand, to medical science?”

David was sure the Doctor stopped liking him at once.

Their meetings were casual but they were not infrequent. Miss Daindrie, he thought, must be a remarkable woman. For she was always affable to him; and always knew what he had said last time. Yet, her mind must be replete with significant affairs. How could he doubt through it all her strict inaccessibility?

One day, she said to him: “Why don’t you come and see me some evening, Mr. Markand?”--and laughed.

“Why do you laugh?”

“I almost feel you have vowed you would never ask of your own accord.”

She was full of assurance, and of a sweet timidity. It seemed to David she was so high above him she could fulfill whatever whim she wanted and lose not one jot of her stature. Such a whim, doubtless, was this.

“Oh, I should love to come.... I didn’t--I didn’t really----” he stopped. “Do you really want me to come, Miss Daindrie?”

She saw that he was serious. “Why should I ask you?”

That was convincing. “I don’t see,” he said, “what you could possibly find of interest in me.”

It was the beginning of the impulse he was always to have with her to speak out his mind.

She answered him seriously too.

“I want to find out, perhaps,” she said.

They were in a box at a theater. It was a special matinee of a comedy by Bernard Shaw: a strange new genius out of Ireland. Cornelia and Miss Daindrie had arranged the party.

“Shaw deserves to be supported,” Cornelia explained; even Tom had been willing to come.

She heard every word that passed between David and Miss Daindrie. Her neighbor in the Box was a young man she had never met before. He found her strangely distracted between the curtains. He said to her: “But after all, Miss Rennard, what are we to think of this man Shaw?” She answered, vigorously nodding: “Yes, indeed.” David was going to call? What a stubborn child he had been! A good sign, deeply. She believed she could see. Unknown to himself, he was struggling against Helen. He had an assured, comradeful way with women--the way of a boy: it was gone. A visit to a girl might mean nothing. After these resistances and the silence behind their questionings as they looked at each other, he might well ask why she wanted him to come. It was a bit disconcerting for the young man beside Cornelia.

When she was back in her room, Cornelia threw herself on her couch and cried. What a great Victory she had won!

David went about, filled with a new humility, a growing hatred of himself.

Nearly two years it was since he had seen in a street-car a small girl, and walked through a world suddenly shriveled. What after that? He too had shrunken and grown like the world, so that once more the world seemed right for him. Now another change. The world was gone altogether. None of its tortured standards near him any more to measure him and call what he was good. He stood naked in a sort of psychic space: he saw how soft, how idle, how small was his soul. It came to David how he hated himself, and how he was so full of this defeat upon him, that he could love no person and could have kind thoughts nowhere. All his senses were caught up in this tangle of himself. He felt he must grow far beyond the lowness where he now stood, to look with free eyes again upon another.

Tom was there, however. Tom was a part of himself--a part, then, of that he must detest. David called on Miss Daindrie. He went there and was silent. It seemed a place, wide like clear air, where he could look on himself. He had no sense of her.

He said to her: “Why do you ask me to come again? I am not amusing: I have nothing to give you.”

And she: “Come next week.... What night, next week, can you come?”

He did not understand.

But he was at a pass where even this element of not understanding could not much hold him. He was not interested in Miss Daindrie. He was rapt in a hateful inner spectacle. What he needed was calm and clarity and strength to look at himself. This he found, sitting in the room with her, and her few words glowing steadfast over his eyes like candles. So he came.

She invited him to dine.

When he entered the drawing-room he felt he was late and they were waiting for him. Doctor Westerling was there. A slight small man with a limp stepped forward from his chair and as David took his hand he liked him. Mr. Judson Daindrie. Mrs. Daindrie had a cordial smile. It was all strange to David--this warmth, this kindness. He could not understand it. He felt a cloud over the face of Conrad Westerling and the Doctor’s will dispersing it till it was gone. The struggle and stress of this he thought he could better understand. Mrs. Daindrie was saying to him:

“Won’t you take Helen down, Mr. Markand?”

And there was Westerling offering the precedence through the door to a Miss Sophie Laurence who seemed very heavy and stupid. All of these pretty ways were disconcerting since they hid something, David felt, and he knew not what.

He became part of the round table. Feeling himself a part and feeling Mrs. Daindrie at his left smile and be warm to him, David was eager to move himself away, just so he could truly see that he was part of this bright round table.

Miss Daindrie smiled at him, as at an accomplice.

“These are my family,” she seemed to tell him.

He was at ease. He was unafraid of silence. So was Miss Daindrie. He said to himself: “I am sitting here quietly silent, just like Miss Daindrie.”

“Well, Mr. Markand? I understand you are musical. You play the piano?” asked Mrs. Daindrie. Quite abruptly she put her inapposite questions.

“_Do_ have some more of the fish!”

“I imagine you feel quite like a New Yorker.”

She left him alone. All of them left him alone. He was of them all.

They tightened into a unit--they became a family--they discussed some family event or listened with a sort of mystic understanding to unleavened words from Miss Laurence whom they seemed fond of, as one is fond of one’s own foibles. In these gusts of attention away from him, David was comfortable. It seemed to him that Doctor Westerling was not.

There was a fragility about Mr. Daindrie. The skin was translucent and tight under the upstanding wave of his gray hair: the blue eyes were far in from the white tufts of his brow. His hands were very small. Even sitting there and taking the plate from the maid and thanking her, and listening with respect to the prattle of Miss Laurence, David felt that he was a little man who limped. Intelligent. Why did he have the sense of conflict between his intelligence and his gentility; the sense of his head bowing?

In another way Mrs. Daindrie was slight. She had a freckled smile and the puffs of her brown hair blew out the laughter of eyes. She was satisfied, it seemed to David, with the perpetual courtliness of her husband. Against their mood he felt Doctor Westerling veering stiffly. He wondered if this was why he felt this grain of resistance in them all against the doctor.

“Why, then, do they have him to dinner?”

“But why do they have me?”

He was a stranger, more so than Conrad Westerling. Yet, he was taking the soft patter of Miss Laurence less to heart. Could this possibly be of importance?

The door had opened.

“Come in, Hope.” Her mother spied her. “You may say good-night.”

A little girl stepped carefully through shadows that lay from the door to the bright table under its hood of electric lights. She dashed swiftly to her father and jumped into his lap. She hid her face.

“I said you might come in, Hope, to _say_ good-night.”

Hope faced about and smiled with a mischievous triumph. She had had at least this moment from her mother’s precept. Her father placed her firmly on her feet.

“This is my youngest,” Mrs. Daindrie explained to David. “I believe you have never seen her. Hope dear, don’t you want to say good evening to Mr. Markand?”

“Why am I so little surprised?” said David to himself. What was there growingly strange in this quiet night? “Does she remember me?” He felt the hollowness of nervous strain, as the little girl of the car came up to him, held out her hand.

“I know you already,” she announced quite clear and high.

“Oh, do you?” said Mrs. Daindrie.

“I know you also,” David spoke to Hope.

Their words caused no great interest. Doubtless, on one of the occasions when he had been there before they had met. In the lack of concern the two felt protection.

She took his hand, he looked into her eyes.

They were not quite so dimpled.

She tossed her head and withdrew her hand and left him.

David watched her giving the same hand to Doctor Westerling, watched her embrace her sister with a burst of fondness, watched her recoil from the clumsy hug of Miss Laurence. He tried to believe that what she had given to him was secret and different.

She was gone.

He felt at home in this strange house. He felt intimate deeply with this little girl, whom he had watched for a moment out of their wide lives in a public car. He accepted her in this house as he accepted physical laws of life. Miss Daindrie had ears where they should be and they heard what they should hear when he spoke words to her. So this warm home had the little girl whom he loved, had his comfort. He did not fathom how now his love for Hope was a quieter thing. He accepted--didn’t we?--miracle. So he thought. He had looked on the girl of the car with less intimacy after all. Intimacy was the denier of quiet? Words were the denier of knowing? Was he comfortable, intimate, what was he here in this relevant night? She led out of the room where he sat embraced with Miss Daindrie. Did she lead forth--him? Whither? Who was she after all?

Doctor Westerling had an uncomfortable smile or an abstract frown when he was quiet. Mrs. Daindrie remarked this. She found she could better leave David to himself. He did not mind. Wherever the talk was, and for whom, he listened pleasantly. She must pay attention to Doctor Westerling the more since she realized that her daughter did not seem to care if he was at ease or no. A strange unwonted character in Helen. There must be a reason for her willed indifference, at bottom flattering to the Doctor--he was there invited. Anything from Helen not properly pleasant was flattering. Mrs. Daindrie had respect for those who had the respect of her daughter.

She plied him with questions. She could not hold his interest. The words each of them called forth died out like a too short fuse. Mr. Daindrie looked about the table. He saw that Westerling was being bored by the questions of his wife. He took umbrage neither for her nor against him. He was a quiet man, accepting the world’s clashes.

“I suppose you are only waiting, Doctor,” he said, “to take up your practice as a specialist?”

“I never intend to practice,” Westerling replied. There was an emphatic note in his voice that brought silence over the table.

Helen looked at him, proudly. She knew the integrity of his mind. She knew her father’s would meet it and be pleased. Always she was saying to herself and to certain of her friends: “I have great respect for Doctor Westerling’s mind.”

“Oh?” questioned Mr. Daindrie.

“You see, sir,” Westerling went on, smiling with a new satisfaction that showed how exclusively his satisfaction dwelt in knowledge, in discussion, in release from the naked domain of emotion, “you see, when I graduated from Medical School eight years ago, and from the hospitals here and abroad, a strange revelation had come to me. I had lost faith absolutely in the practice of medicine.”

Mr. Daindrie was a good listener; a stern one. He bowed his head judicially. Westerling talked exclusively to him. But loudly. So that his consciousness of other ears must have gone to the volume of his voice. Perhaps, it occurred to David, he was trying within this little cozy table to address the world.

“It was a problem to face, let me assure you. Like one who graduates into the Priesthood, perhaps, and finds he no longer believes in the Divinity of Christ. Harder, much harder, I suppose--since in medicine the régime of study is terrific.”

He said these words coldly. He seemed to avoid a tone which might bring sympathy, conviction. He had no eye for the faint shadow over Mrs. Daindrie’s face, at his allusion to Christ.

“But how do you mean, you lost faith?” asked Mr. Daindrie.

“I had believed myself devoted to a science. I found that the present practice of medicine--the practice of medicine as it must be to-day in _lack_ of science--is an empiric fraternal order.”

Mrs. Daindrie gasped.

“I am convinced that most of the therapeutic practices which occupy so overwhelming a part of the work of the doctor must go. No; I don’t know to be replaced by what. But the principle of introducing specific drugs into the system to right specific maladies, right wrongs--I know it is false. Some day most of our medical practice will be regarded as medieval, quite as we look on the humors and the cuppings of the Sixteenth Century leeches.”

“But there is nothing known to take the place of these medicines?”

“Nothing established.”

“Then, until such time, must we not use what we have?”

“Doubtless we must, sir,” Westerling spoke with a certain condescension. “But I cannot devote my life to the application of guess work and patch work which, I am convinced, is altogether based on erroneous premises.”

“As sweeping as that ...?” Superlatives, absolutes, all tendencies toward violence brought out in Mr. Daindrie the deprecatory smile.

“Yes. The sole sound future of Medicine must rest on the discovery of principles beneath effects which we call physical and mental life; principles the pursuit of which will make the introduction of alien curative elements into our bodies simply absurd. I am referring not only to medicines but to vaccines, anti-toxins--surgical makeshifts. The true curative elements of life must be inherent in us. Somehow we have lost them. I am convinced the reason is that we have lost certain unconscious principles of behavior in which they are implicit. I am convinced that drugs are superstition.”

“But bacilli--the trouble makers!” pleaded Mr. Daindrie.

“Harmless to the properly ordered organism. Immune to anything so isolated as the effect of drugs. We are subject to germ diseases, I am sure, because we are not masters of our independence of them. I am sure that some day it will seem as absurd to introduce drugs into our systems in order to kill bugs, as it would be now to say prayers in order to drive out devils.”

“But the devils don’t exist!”

“I’m not so sure of that. The instruments don’t exist--as they do for bacilli--for seeing devils.”

Mr. Daindrie was dazed by what seemed the man’s veering from pure science to superstition.

“You’re a bacteriologist!” exclaimed Miss Daindrie, sensing her father’s state.

“I am working to find out what disordered conditions of our tissues and organs give the bacteria their chance--the pernicious ones. Or rather what conditions develop the pernicious ones, for that is essentially what our bodies have done. I am interested in nothing else.”

Helen felt there was no answer: Doctor Westerling was interested in no answer. She kept silent.

“Well, we do need doctors,” contributed Mrs. Daindrie. “Fortunately, not all doctors refuse to help the world, like you, Doctor Westerling.”

A faint sneer crept over the young man’s features. It covered a hurt. David alone saw the hurt. Mr. Daindrie answered the sneer.

“Yes,” he said, “we must get on with the drugs, while you have yet to prove we can get on without them.”

“Don’t you believe in any of our curative or preventive service?” asked Helen Daindrie.

“Honestly, it is all nonsense.”

“All of it?” She was withdrawing. But Westerling had a truth and he must pursue it first.

“I am sure modern practice has done more harm than good. Operations clean up appendicitis. We know that. What we scarcely guess, is how many nervous systems, kinetic systems, circulatory systems are wrecked by successful operations.”

“I had always thought the American surgeons were great scientists.”

“They are great virtuosi,” declared Westerling.

“Yes, but----”

“----virtuosi should practice on pianos.”

He was very excited. He said no word of his own doubts. He said no word of his vast sacrifice which his unproved convictions had forced upon him. He could have become rich in the practice of medicine. No one knew this better than Conrad Westerling. No one more than this Jew of sensitive family and depleted means loved the luxury and the freedom of money. All his life he would labor at an insignificant salary because of the depth of his sense of service. A true poet of Science. But of all this he said no word. He could not. To one person he needed to say all this: the person he loved, to Helen. But until she said that she loved him, he could not even to her. The strategy of showing his better self, of gaining her allegiance to his cause in order to help win her, was beyond him. Speaking stridently and harshly now, it was his need of tenderness and his deep respect for the tenderness of Helen, that spoke.

The Daindries could not know this, could not quite conceal their shrinking from him. It was not a question of right, it was a matter of taste. A too passionate devotion to an ideal was an untoward display, it was out of place: quite as would be a too naked display of devotion to a woman. This stern stiff man was at work perhaps wiping away an entailed incubus upon the life of man, but he lacked amenity. Their nerves told them this. Their minds hinted that he had intellect and courage. But like all proper people, what their nerves ordered came first.

David had liked his words. They excited him. He had understood them less than Mr. Daindrie or than Helen. But he had visioned more. What came in to him was precisely the personal anguish, the personal immolation--though he could not configure them beneath his antagonizing words. He saw also Helen’s shrinking from the violence of those words: as if they laid hands on her, threatened to exclude all others and possess her. It seemed that Helen did not want to be possessed by truth. It must be something warmer, something smaller perhaps, that would possess her. So David felt the true content of Westerling’s words. They held a burden of great courage, a plea of love: these he was really offering to her: these she would not accept.

David walked a few blocks to the car with Westerling. He held out his hand.

“I like what you said at dinner, oh--so much, Doctor!”

He wanted to say far more.

“Do you?”

Westerling looked sourly, haughtily at him, as if David were trying to hurt him. With a stiff body too erect he shook David’s hand--dropped it with a gesture of completion.

“Good-night.”

So David could not go on.

But he went to Cornelia, to whom he knew he could speak.

“I don’t think,” he said, “I am going back ever again to see Miss Daindrie.”

Cornelia’s heart stopped its beat. “_I am glad_--I am--no, I can’t be glad.” Sense and will turmoiled against each other. David saw her sitting quiet there, looking at him. It was quite natural, he thought, that she could not understand. He had come to tell her. It came to him: “She must think it funny that I should tell her this. What can it matter to Cornelia?”

Cornelia, feeling he would go on and that for this he had come and that himself would tell her what to do, began to go deeper into his coming. He had sought her out: this was rare: for a rare incentive. He had sought her out because he needed to talk about Helen. To no one else could he talk. From no one else could he hope for the persuasion he wanted: to send him back to her. Here was a problem that hurt him. She could smoothe it. For this he had run to her. When she had done her part, he would leave her and go back to Helen, he would live and play once more....

“What is it, Davie?” she asked aloud. She was ready for her part.

“I am not--not good enough for her, Cornelia.”

Good enough to come to her when she could soothe him: not good enough for Helen.... “How do you know that, David?”

“Because I know some one who is.... Conrad Westerling is good enough for Helen. I admire him immensely. I know he loves her. I know it hurts him when I am there. I have seen that. Why should I hurt him, Cornelia?”

“But what about Helen Daindrie?”

“Why shouldn’t she love him? He is strong, and courageous. He has wonderful ideas. His whole life--I feel that--is nothing but his ideas. She _should_ love him.”

“Is there room for Helen in one so full of ideas?”

“He loves her, so there must be.”

“She does not love him, so perhaps there isn’t.”

Cornelia looked at him blushing.

“She does not love him, David. What is it to you? Can you make her love him, David, by staying away?”

David’s blush was crimson.

“I--I don’t mean that. N-no. I--I don’t know what I mean.”

He began pulling at his handkerchief with nervous fingers.

Cornelia steeled herself.... _Yes she could!_ She laughed at him.

“Why you funny person--you funny Quixotic David!” A pause. “Or are you merely awfully conceited? Answer me, then: how will your staying away help the lost cause of Doctor Westerling?”

David bit his lip, turned pale, looked at his twitching fingers.

“I am a fool, am I not, Cornelia?”

“You must go on, seeing Helen. Your staying away _now_ would be offensive. What right have you to fight another man’s battle against Helen? Don’t you see how presumptuous it all is? She knows best what she wants, David darling, not only of Doctor Westerling, but of you also.”

“Westerling is a noble man who has worked and done things.”

“You will do things also. I won’t let you slight yourself. That’s slighting your friends. If you are good enough for me--and for Helen also?----” she found something near the playful smile she wanted, “must you not be good for something?”

“Cornelia, I don’t understand her wanting ever to see me.”

He was very mute and very timid, looking at his hands.

“And who are you to judge? What do you know of Doctor Westerling and of yourself? Live, David--spread out like a tree. Then we shall all know what you are.”

David got up.

“There!” She came up to him close. She took his head in her two hands. “Are you convinced?” He shook his head and her hands moved with it....

Since her plan had been found and she knew that it was working, there was peace in Cornelia. Her way with David was the way of a mother. She knew how this birth and this life had rended her: what it had cost her in blood and anguish. So is the mother peaceful, knowing this, with her unknowing child.

She took her toll of him, like a mother also. She held his cheeks with her hands and she drew him down and kissed him.

“And you see, don’t you, why you can’t stop so suddenly from going to see her? What would she think? The offense and the pain--yes, David, the pain, if you stayed away?”

He went back to Helen Daindrie. He went again and again. Cornelia had settled and given him what he desired. There was reason no longer for seeing Cornelia.

Spending his quiet evenings with Helen, he did not see the Doctor. He forgot him, he was ashamed, as Cornelia had cleverly made him, of the conceited presumption that he could help his cause by staying away. He came, therefore, feeling nothing but peace: wanting the right to feel no other thing. For in peace, he came to himself. And what he sought above all else was this. Coming to Helen and sitting there beside her, it was easier, somehow.

But it was easier most of all to look at Tom, and know he hated him, and know that they must part....

* * * * *

They had gone on living together. The silence about them, holding them in, was stiff and frozen.

David went no longer to Flora’s. He wandered about the City, seeing nothing, until his legs ached, and then he went to bed. He found that he needed more sleep than he had needed in years. There was a constant weighing soreness in his body. His head was heavy. His thoughts pushed through some clotted substance in his mind with a swerving pain. Often his eyes ached: often his food did not agree with him. Yet he was hungry. He needed great sleep, great food. After sleep, he was heavy, after food he was often sick with heartburn. He was like a pregnant woman. He went about loaded and diminished. His thoughts delineated no true objective world. What came with any sharpness into the mist of his mind, he hated. Thus Tom. What soothed his dwelling in these mists he courted. Thus Helen Daindrie.

His sleep also was strange. It was dreamless. When he closed his eyes he dropped, almost at once, into a profound close pit whose blackness held him moveless. When he woke, it was some force, far down where he had been, that had spewed him up: his brow aching and his body churned with a great dizzy distance.

He attended to work. There was always enough mental energy for that. In fact his work was his savior. It took him out of himself: but not upon some shattering objective world, shrunken and tortured and congested like that by which he had once measured himself and found that he was good. It took him out of himself into an easy world of conventions and abstractions: where figures had the relief of ineluctable laws, where there were fixed commodities like tobacco and freight-rates, where men were sure machines of buying and selling, where values and credit could be determined. A sweet, imagined, malleable world, the world of Business, in which each day for a few hours, David took refuge. Another such world he now rediscovered and frequented. He had greatly neglected his violin. Always he had played without consistency, and now be did not play at all. It must have been painful and intrusive to make music of one’s own, so David let the dust gather on his instrument and the strings break. It was different with the world of the music of others. David began to go to concerts: chiefly orchestral concerts. He did not care for the virtuosi, he detested Opera. The symphony of eighty upraised voices, marvelously artificial, essenced and controlled, swung him at once into a distant land. These worlds of the violins and horns and ’celli were also concise and constrained. Their ecstasy was a comfortable unit, as compared with the vast vagueness of a City street. In a way far more grandiose, music was a release, like business, for David.

With violent wrenching of his nerves, he forced himself to look at his dear friend.... This after all was Tom whom he had loved, who had found him at his advent into the life of the City and into life itself. This was that friend who had opened his mind, loosed his tongue, made him not too bitterly mourn his mother. This was Tom who, when he was ill, had nursed him and he had been so sure had loved him, whom now with straining nerves he tried to see, clear through a strange hot haze about them.

Tom sat there reading. No: he was not reading. His head was bowed over the book, but his eyes were away. He was very graceful, there in his rocking chair, with a leg thrown over the other knee and the gentle line of his sharp shoulders drooping down to his chin. Tom. His best friend! David looked on him with a great love. What a clear clean face he had. David knew that the thinning hair so faint above his high square brow was soft like silk. That his eyes, if he saw them now, would be dim with a moisture he could not let be tears. And the old gnarled hands: the hands of one who struggled stintlessly and was master. What was there wrong in Tom? Sitting across the room they had once chosen with such joy together--“the Sun is there! Davie, think of that rare god, the Sun: he will visit us each morning and stay all day”--was it not hard for him to look on the years that intervened and that were somehow wrong? Why? Why was not life the simple thing it had appeared? They had gone singing a song together: it was not right that it should end in tears.

But now there was new strength in David; a new vantage point he seemed mystically to have gained, where he could clamber up and look about him. Often he had gone so far. Beating with regretful wings against a perverse reality that prisoned him no less. No less. Now, it was less indeed. If he came again to the conclusion at whose brink he had stood so often, now he could follow it. No bar between him and what he decided to do. If Tom was false and a false friend, he would step over the brink!

Gracefully Tom sat there. And it was sure in David that if ever he had loved, this was the loved one. There had been women whom he had embraced, close of kin who had housed him. This was a mere comrade, a mere fellow-man: his hand-clasp was strongest of all. But also there was life. How little he knew of life! What a sweet hedged delirium was music, what a close cabin his affairs downtown. Tom had taught him life. Life of a sort Tom gave him now, as had his mother. What if he must be born again, away, as once from her?

He had lived in a sweet dream. One walked along a road. At times, it was garlanded in fields: at times it rose between jagged heights, or dropped beside the spume and the roar of waters. A road, clear and straight, and one could walk it. Here he had met Tom. They had joined hands. They would walk the road together. The steady road. The fleeting dream wherein he walked.... For here was no such road at all! How could one be sure of a hand clasped at one’s side? Which were the fields and which the mountains and which the torrents? In their delirious tangle, where was the road?

Tom had poisoned him. Tom had lied to him. Tom led him into ugly places. Tom had a laughter that did not mean joy and tears that bespoke sorrow of a sort he could not give his heart to. A merry world. A horrible world! He needed to blot it out. It was so packed a frenzy of maze and quicksand, that, if he did not draw himself away, he must become a part of its frenzy--a mere whirling molecule in its tortuous falsehood.

Let Tom go his own way! Let him be!

David found what he was doing. There was his place of vantage to which he could swing, and there was he, clambering up to it. He was leaving Tom behind.

They had a talk.

Tom looked silently and long at David. He was very sweet and like the Tom David would never have left, in his silence. Then he said:

“David, I hope that whatever you do, you will not marry a good and beautiful woman.”

He seemed very tired to David. The old fire was there, but it was moveless under a cloud that would not break.

David had no thought of marrying any one. No plan was farther from his consciousness. He smiled rather confidently, therefore. He was interested.

“Why?”

“Because, if you marry that sort, it will be almost impossible for you to break away.”

“Why, Tom, if one married should one want to break away?”

“Marriage has this, dreadful about it, David. It is life for a woman to be married, death for a man.”

“How is that possible? If it is good for one---- What a discord you make of the world!”

Tom laughed. The fire parted the cloud.

“What is the world but just such unending discord? Look at the world. Is it a sweet harmonious place? The one harmony it knows is an infinite texture of just such deathless conflicts, of just such tragic sacrifice of individual lives to its cruel rhythms.”

David was silent. Tom, the barer of life, was once more before him. He felt that Tom might well be true in his words. He had not altogether left the road of his Dream.

Tom went on. He had been silent and distant. He had made, for a long time, no advances to David. He had left him alone. Now in the silence of David, he saw his old art upon him, caught the flare of that past when he had taught and given and David had received. He had no power against this haunting past which he loved. He went forward to recapture it. Blindly he went like an insect toward a fire.

“David,” he spoke with an incomprehensible passion that shriveled his face, “David, I would rather see you married to a whore--than to a woman who is beautiful and strong.”

Already he was afraid, burned perhaps. He swerved away. “...Though it broke your heart, it would be less dangerous. You would escape. Comfort and happiness alone, you will be helpless against.”

He stopped. He looked at David. He saw how different this was which had happened after his words, from what had always happened. David was calm. He was away. Tom had lost him....

* * * * *

David went on with his visits to Helen Daindrie.

He found he was telling her all the little things that filled his days and nights--the little nothings.

“I don’t know where I walked,” he said. “It was very noisy, I know. But it all seemed so quiet. There was a silence in the men and women.... It seemed as if there was a silence in them, and they were scurrying about so fast to get away from it.... But the silence clung.”

“You spend very little time at home.”

“Yes,” he said, shaking his head.

“Don’t you care to read?”

“I don’t seem to, now.”

“Why, David?”

“I do not want to be at home. When I am home, I go to bed. Even if it is only nine o’clock.”

And then there was a pause.

“You do not seem,” she said, “to be very fond of the company of your friend.”

He shook his head again, looked away. It was not needful, long. Again, he saw her.

He was very easeful and relaxed. He made no effort to talk or to conceal, when he was with her. She was a sweet impersonal presence. It was good of her to let him come so often. He had no sense within his vision of himself in the world, of her who was a woman beside him.

One time, after a great quiet, she said:

“Why, since these things are so, do you not live alone?”

Her words were part of the quiet. They did not break it. They were very calm and very quiet indeed. So they entered into David.

He had not answered her. Often he sat so, still, and when he spoke it was upon some other theme. She never spoke these words again....

It was Spring....

David got up very early from his bed, he went into their large room, it slumbered restlessly there, he looked out of the window.

A great mist was before his eyes. A great mist lay in the street. He could not see the street and the opposite houses. It was a great white mist, warm and rolling away: the mist of morning. He looked toward the east. There, dim in the white, were the trees of the little Square. Above them he saw the Sun, a gleam, swathed in the vapors.

He went back to bed and to sleep.

When he awoke, he was rested. He was very warm under his sheet; he had perspired. Under his flesh he was cool and rested as he had not been in a long time.

He returned to the large room and looked once more out of the window.

The Sun was a naked flame jeweling the sky. The trees of the little Park were shrill with green and the moisture sang on them like tinkling glass.

Tom came in. David said to him:

“Tom, I think I want to go away and live alone.”

Tom was haggard in the sunlight. His eyes were hot and rimmed in shadows.

He nodded. “Of course, Davie,” he said. “Go now, if you want to. I shall be glad to keep the place.”

The two friends looked at each other. David wanted to take Tom’s hand: he wanted to cry. Tom stood there, stiff, graceless for once, and did not help him....

Thus easy it had come like leaves on the tree in Spring; like Sun out of the mists of dawn. David thought very little about it.

He went on going to see Helen. He took his trunk and his books and his violin and moved them into an ample furnished room on the West Side. He was to have a bathroom of his own. He would be comfortably fitted out.

On the last day, he held out his hand. He said:

“My trunk will be called for to-day, Tom. I have taken a room.” He gave Tom the address which he had written on a piece of paper.

Tom took it between his thumb and finger. “Thank you, David.” He had not looked at it.

Mrs. Lario came in, behind a large tray that held their breakfast. Quickly she set the table. She laid a newspaper, longitudinally folded, beside each plate. She left. Tom and David sat down to their last breakfast.

Usually, they read their papers. It helped to stem the arid draught of their silence. Now, they placed their papers unread away. Tom looked at David. He made no effort to speak. His temple was pulsing. David was trying to eat. He looked at his food. He leaned back in his chair, and also his thoughts seemed to incline away. He said to himself: “I must be natural. What am I doing?” He found that he could not eat his breakfast. He had a swallow of water, a spoonful of oatmeal. He could taste what he had eaten. It seemed to be still in his mouth. He raised his head and looked at Tom.

For an instant they saw each other.

A terror came upon David, a great pain. He could not bear this. Was this not his friend whom he was leaving? For whatever reason, to whatever end, this was Tom, and he loved him, and he was cutting an artery that throbbed with blood. He could not linger. He felt himself being swept toward a sort of precipice. He was afraid. It was as if he held in his hands some precious life, and he and it were being entranced toward the brink. Every vein in his head beat hard against his going: cried for his moving.

He got up. He was trembling. Tom smiled no longer. There was a passion in his eyes, as if this getting up of David were some fatal execution he had awaited and steeled himself to meet. His face was bloodless.

“Good-by, Tom,” David put out his hand.

Tom took it. He held it limply. Then he pressed it hard.

“Good-by, Boy,” he said....

Helen Daindrie had a friend, “my young friend” she called her with just a touch of condescension, a girl who had studied the violin abroad with the greatest masters and who was once more in New York. She was to make her official bow in the Fall. Helen Daindrie asked a few of her friends to come and hear her.

“I have invited Cornelia,” she said to David. “Will you call for her and bring her?”

David had not seen Cornelia more than twice in the past three months. He had not seen her once of his own initiative. When she asked him to come, he obeyed. He always would. Despite himself, he had the feeling for her that a young man might have for a maiden aunt: he was deeply, even ideally fond of her, but she seemed to live in another world, there was no way of contact nor of expression for his fondness.

Since he was living alone, he had not seen her at all.

She greeted him, when he came, as usual, cordially, with no hint of the empty months without him. Her eyes no longer searched him with hot, comfortless inquiries. It was as if she had done everything she could to be acceptable to David. She was quite ready.

“Just a minute, while I throw on my cloak. It’s very warm, isn’t it? It isn’t going to rain?”

“I don’t think so. It’s a glorious night.”

“A glorious night? Do you think we have time to walk a little?”

He watched her finally settling her hair before the mirror. She was “dressed-up” in a slim white gown. She was ugly. Her head outweighed her body: it gave her a gaunt and naked look in her white dress. The yellow skin of her face broke the paltry shimmer of her gown into green and gray.

“I’m afraid,” said David, “we might be late if we walked.”

“Very well.” She came up to him and smiled. “Come.” She opened the door.

“Well, Davie, tell me how have you been?”

It was hard for him to speak. It was impossible for him to smile as he wished to. Cornelia seemed inadequate to his young hunger. He was angry at himself for this. He owed her better. He was not a very good and loyal friend, he supposed. Tom was right in what he said, however wrong in what he was. He walked beside Cornelia to the car, through the sweet May night: and in order to hold himself beside her and take her arm at the crossing, he needed to forget her....

* * * * *

On the top floor of the house of the Daindries was a wide quiet room which Helen had fitted out for her own. Its easy spaces were conserved and rounded by the uncluttered furniture. Nothing was large and ponderous to defeat them. Two lamps stood wide away on little tables. Their low light brought out the warm dark stroke of the couch and absorbed the rugs. The gray walls had a retreating texture.

The guests sat very hushed and hidden in the shadows and the music. A tall girl swayed by the piano: she was raw-boned and gaunt above the light of the lamp. Her docked hair flung away from the sheer strong forehead. She played with a restraint that burned: it was her restraint that she flung circling and lowering from her sharp shoulders down upon the hidden guests.

The guests sat, suddenly tamed, suddenly cowed. They were the world to David--a motley mass made one by the dark and the music, that would rise up again and be a tearing thing against his life. Now they were breathing hard; something had shut them up in their own narrow breasts.

The girl stepped toward them, away from the piano. The piano was silent. He who had sat at it and followed her mood, who had trailed like a wake in a muffled sea upon her passage was now withdrawn. The girl stood like one naked above the room. The music she had played and the guests lay trammeled spirits at her feet. She moved and stepped upon them. She lifted her violin to play alone. It was Bach she was playing.

She was a sharp high figure cutting the dark room. Her violin was a hard creature that sobbed and was soft. She and her violin and the huddled life of the world within the room were the music that was Bach.

As she played she moved. She moved up and down: she was very free with her sweeping arm and her long legs walking as she played. From her freedom came an uttered Law and fell upon them all.

They were struck by the clear strokes of her playing and her walking up and down: they were showered in the fire of this molten music....

David recaptured himself. He seemed to be sitting in a black pool of life. All of the lives of these about him were one: they were melted together. They had no being apart, they had no light. They were a black pool, stirless. Now he felt somewhere still a glow: under the black hush and above the strokes of the music. His senses went seeking a glow that he felt somewhere still.

He sat on a couch. Next him a woman: next her a man. The music flooded and beat and these had no life against it. They were a dim base on which the music dwelt. Still he knew that this glow he felt was real and was near. It was a presence to him. His eyes wandered to find it.

Against the music and himself and the room, his eyes went, seeking the magic more real than the music whereby he might come to life. They found!

She was sitting far back at the other end of the couch: she was lost in the black pool of the room as no one else, so that he could not see her. Yet David knew her, glowing alone, and knew what precious thing this was which he had found in the world. Once more, and as never before, it came to him, that he had never known her: that he had never seen her. She was hidden there with her true magic, in a false real world, and he could not know her now, nor see her. But he knew that he wanted to know her, and that he wanted to see her.

He sat with a new quiet holding him tenderly. The girl played on. A passionate fantasy flooded forth from the round mouth of the violin. It rocked the room. It tore at these submerged ones living there and shredded them in its measured frenzy. But David was quiet and sure. The world was a mad wild place for this moment dominioned: the music lashing it was also wild and was sunless, it was a river buried under rocks of the earth and making them tremble. The glow he had found was a warm place where he would dwell.

The girl had stopped, she was leaning over her violin, she was packing it away.

The guests moved slow and uncertain, like the maimed creatures they were. Their voices were splinters of their broken selves.

They began to leave.

Cornelia stood near the door. She was looking for David. She saw him.

She saw that he did not want to escort her home. Very dimly his conscience was stirring in his mind. If she disappeared, his conscience would go also. It would leave no trace.

She was very shrunk and pitiful in the long swell of the music. She knew he must not see her another moment. His conscience might win and he might take her home: he would never forgive her. She saw a new world in his eyes, turning his eyes from hers.

She slipped out.

And all the guests were gone.

There was no one in the room save David and this Helen he did not know. She stood there, straight and small in the center of the room. She looked at him.

He came to her. Everything he did was slow. He had a sense of an eternity in which he was about to step. The passions of his life seemed shivered fragments beside the steadfast vastness of this moment.

She was near him now. He had her warm pervasion all about him. He put his arms around her waist. Her arms were stiff at her side. As she leaned faintly back from the pressure of his hands, her face turned upward. So he drew her in, until her mouth was his....

* * * * *

Cornelia was home. Straight she went into her little bedroom and lit the gas. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was pale, but a dim flush flowered her cheeks. Her eyes were wide and deep with a dry passion. She looked at herself; aloud she said:

“This is I. This is Cornelia Rennard.” Her voice ceased, she went on speaking. “I am beautiful. For one time, I am beautiful. If he could see me now----” It was so. It was a pity he could not see her now.

She turned away, she took off her dress. Carefully she smoothed out its folds: she placed it away. She had a housegown of warm quilted silk-brocade--it was brown. She put it on. She fastened it tight about her and made the belt sure about her waist with a knot.

She went to her desk and sat down.

She took a calendar date-book and laid it before her. There was an engagement inscribed for the following Sunday. The rest of the days were blank. She began to write.

“_Sunday_: prepare sketch for the Trenton fountain. Evening, Purzes for dinner. _Tuesday_: ask Mr. Bailey about Philadelphia. _Friday_: Jack and Clara to tea.”

She filled ten days with her mental notes of engagements. When she had done so much, suddenly she grasped the book in her two hands as if to tear it. Her hands stopped in suspense. Her face turned upward.

“It has to be,” she said, once more aloud. “It is a lie.... What is a lie?” She was smiling. “Cornelia----” she tenderly spoke, almost maternally to herself, “when one does a thing, do it well.”

She laid the date-book open at the center of the desk.

With a swift thrust she opened the drawers. She closed them. No. There was nothing there to be concealed.

She was up. She smiled; once more she took a pencil and turned the pages of the book to a day two weeks away. She wrote:

“Ask David to dinner.”

Then, she straightened and crossed the room.

A batch of painted sheets were in her arms. Her water-colors, her incomprehensible confessions. She laid them forth on the table, looked long at them. They were very lovely, these delirious designs, these flauntings of form and color. Color rose in them to form, form faded and died away to the realms of color. But she looked at them and shook her head. They meant nothing to her.

“What nonsense,” she breathed.

Then: “Perhaps some of my statues may live. That first bronze----”

She swept the sketches back into her arms, she thrust them into the hearth. It was cold and black. In a moment it blazed. But the sheets burned slowly, imperfectly. The fire went out. She had to scatter them and work upon them and light them several times with many matches before they were ash.

At last it was done. Stubborn confessional!

She laughed at the daubed papers that had not wanted to die.

She turned out the light and went once more into the bedroom. She opened the window wide.

The balmy night swept over her head into the room. Street slumbered. Brutal lines of the street seemed broken into curves: its hard stillness rose now and swayed, fell murmuring beyond her eyes.

Cornelia leaned heavy on her arms. She could feel the weight of her body against her elbows. This was the night and this was the world. The one world she had ever known: the one night also.

Why had all of it been? She saw herself. She must have been above and beyond herself; she saw herself from the back. She was leaning there, a slender girl, out of the window. She was a narrow form, swathed in warm brown silk-brocade, with a neck that was a little too long for such slight shoulders. And her elbows ached. And the window framing her led into the world. It was a round place: it went twirling about in interminable ether. It flung near blazing monsters like the Sun, that also were lost in the black, blind spaces so that their conflagrations were sparks flecking the universal slumber. Upon this twirling ball was life. Everywhere she looked, was life. One spot of earth was a city of creation, one drop of water was a multitudinous welter. Here, somehow, she. She could look beyond herself and the window and the gyring City. She could see the world and the stars and the Sun lost like specks in the universal slumber.

This was her yearning. Let her sleep! She was tired. Let her be one with slumber beyond creation. Out of slumber creation had come, creation which was a scum of eggs on a black flower. Let her brush it away. Let her brush it clean.

What she yearned was a thing more sure and real than world. Her eyes went out from behind where she stood yearning, passed the world in a flash. So small it was. Passed the stars that were dim above houses. The black Nothing was All. The stirrings of suns were flecks upon glow of black spaces.

She leaned there and yearned, and argued; she could not move.

She sobbed dryly.

She stayed there long. Then, in dim eyes, she left the window, she threw herself upon the bed.

She fell asleep.

She awoke.

It was very dark. About her was nothing. About her was no obstruction. She was aware of her breathing as of an intruder. She rose from her bed. All of the weight was within, all of the clutter was within, all of the pain was within. She moved outside herself with a vast, sweet freedom, for outside her was nothing.

She went to the window and jumped out.

* * * * *

How long David had held Helen in his embrace, he did not know. It was almost like sleep: measureless. Now waking from her arms, he felt her there like a world in which he dwelt.

She was drawing herself away. She took his hand.

“You must go, now, Dear,” she said. “It is late, you know.”

She smiled up into his serious dazed face.

“You will come to-morrow to dinner, will you not?...” Still he said nothing. He was looking beyond her.

“I am so eager to have my family really know you.”

_1917-1918._

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

they paddling=> they paddled {pg 10}

short shift of him=> short shrift of him {pg 167}

paused momently=> paused momentarily {pg 287}

It has esstranged=> It has estranged {pg 305}