Part 10

Already a force worked in him, digesting this dense life, making it a function of his own, making its subtle fumes a stimulant for the force making it a function. Tom’s mind groped, as he walked lightly, for an old-time hurt.... He had been badly cut in the wrist by a fall through a rocky road. For a month his cut wrist was bound close. When the bandage was off and the air let in, his wrist had seemed to possess a power of flight out of all proportion with his other wrist, with the remainder of his body. This had made for dissonance. It was as if only by good attention he held the soaring wrist in place. So now, his suddenly liberated will, as compared to all his body. Tom relaxed on the balls of his feet and had the adroitness to look about him. His field, this. In his two prematurely aged hands could he not toss this world? He felt power, he felt grace. His eyes gleamed. He laughed. Words, polished and caparisoned, flew from his mouth as if the Design fitting them to him were absolute, were mystic. Tom’s body was taut now. His mind had gathered in this reeling quality. But his body held to his will, as an artist sways to his violin. Meantime, still, the brittle density along whose imperceptible grain Tom flowed. Ladies with subtle ways of calling attention to their bosoms by suppressing them: their arms came angularly forth from the compressed and mysterious domain like spouts of energy--like escapes of self. So their arms, so their voices. At arm’s end a tea-cup: at voice’s end a word. Neither important. Sip tea, sip words. But the attention was engrossed in a deeper quaffing. These spouting shreds of self could be joined, could create a circuit, could release a current from heart to heart, from loin to loin. Tom felt this. He felt the suffused emotion of this splintering welter. He saw in the words, in the arms of ladies, sparks of invitation, fuses corruscating back to mute stores of combustible sensation. All of the afternoon seemed a disguisement, a limitless deferring of the reality of all the wills there massed. Tom wondered by what constant guard the fuses never burned to their full length, the explosives never went off: how they kept sheathed from this glitter of temptation. He perceived that the flames were cold and lightless. He perceived that the fires shot off into air: were free of substance: were in some careful way remote from the pent inflammables in every breast. And Tom had suddenly the vision of fireworks, blazing in a night above a score of hands that flashed white and calm in the broken darkness. Men and women displaying fire only outside themselves. Perhaps at the most, some inner rim of char.

He saw the goal of the grain-ward course he had been flowing. There was the hostess.

Her vibrancy was freer. She had space about her. In her true light at last, a certain glow that was warm, since this energy was not, as in the others, so instantly splintered off by the packed impingement. She was insulated but Tom could touch her. Her glow came forth: he found a glow of his own. He liked this Mrs. Laura Duffield.

He had the sense of her subduedness as of a charm weighty enough to sink in this pandemonium of flicker. He bowed to pick it up.

“I have fought my way through to you, Mrs. Duffield. Congratulate me.”

She held back her head; he saw the fading of her golden hair, the age of her throat, the indomitable blue of her eyes.

“This must be Mr. Rennard!”

She threw back her head still further, as if to send her laughter upward, and, boyishly, thrust out her hand. Taking it, Tom added to his vision the full ripe crowding of her breast--no longer firm to stand up alone--and the delicacy of her wrist.

She shunted him off almost at once: introducing him here and there, squandering the charm of her attention as one tosses showers of coin out of reach. He had no more of her.

But as Tom, having reached this goal of his progression, was now silted aimlessly away in wide, flat spurts of movement, he observed the crowd thrust together, into a unit, into a reason. It was so he carried it with him back into the hall, into the street. The crowd’s form turned crass as he seemed to understand the will that had brought it into being.... It was her house: she had created this turmoil. Why? Why, each Wednesday afternoon,--to make no mention of doubtless other times,--did this glowing woman need to congregate such spill of life, pack it into her rooms, feed it, coax it to place its stamp upon her? What joy could there be in what must largely stultify her individual world? Tom pondered. Was this greedy crowd somehow a vessel in which Mrs. Duffield poured herself? That it might carry her off? leave in the stir of her curtains, in the perfumed mist on her bibelots, a substitute for her own marks which should have quickened these? And if so, why?

Tom’s casual yet forever determined mind associated these impressions widely until he knew that such habits were a deep part of the City’s nature. He groped with his light.

“If I understand her, I hold her:--and all she holds. I’ll go again. I’ll see that this promiscuous call makes for a more intimate occasion.”

The occasion came. But already Tom had learned to like the gatherings he was pleased to call promiscuous. Their fumes curled into his nerves, made them willing for more. A hint of his new appetite in his condemnation to Cornelia.

“Business, my dear Sis: Business. And of the lowest degree of horridness.”

“I can see where it must help your connections.”

“Let us hope so! Lord!” Tom paced up and down before Cornelia’s latest cast. “If I don’t get something out of these parties I shall have bartered my soul for nothing.... Satan will have cheated me.”

“He never does,” answered Cornelia.

Tom looked up as if stung.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing extraordinary, Tom. I am convinced that folks who strike a bargain with the Devil do so, not for specific gain, but because they like his company.”

Tom glowed at her with a cold smile of admiration.

“Splendid!... What does it mean?”

Cornelia’s sharp shoulders shrugged.

“I suppose I like Mrs. Duffield’s parties?”

“I am sure of it,” she snapped. Then, quietly, like a mother to her son, “So stop protesting, like a dear man. Yes?”

It was true. Tom knew it, however, as well as his wise sister. She understood with a great clarity only a part of Tom. She did not know how, in these protestations, he pleaded against himself, not with her. There was a depth in Tom more cold to these mundane blandishments than the surface was warm to them. Tom’s conflict was deeper than the desire to conceal from himself and from his sister this worldliness which guided him about. It was a conflict rooted in his nature. There was a part of Tom that despised his conduct, hated his success, rose forever like a gaunt, uninvited guest to spoil his banquet. A ghost in Tom that was very much alive....

It was born perhaps near the hour of Tom’s birth in Dahlton. A very looming part of the world of Tom was this father whom his mother loved. His father was there. He needed to be taken. He needed to be taken as his mother took him. At the beginning, the bar between the mother and her child has no reality to the child. Mother and child are one to the child’s rapt omniscience. The tall, gray-faced man had nervous hard hands which were strong. Often his hands viced the woman’s arms till she screamed: they screwed her to a chair while his words lashed her: they turned her about to the door she was ordered to pass through. Then, in that dawn of the world, those hands left the mother who was cowed; they took the passionate sprawling flesh of Tom and thrust him to his crib, they turned him about so that Tom’s eyes gazed at a blank wall whose denial of sight was terror.

Mrs. Rennard loved Tom’s father. Her senses had mostly pain of him, but passion also. Since her senses loved him, they needed to love what her husband gave them. Tom, feeling in these dim passionate days the aching presence of his father upon his world--upon his mother and upon himself--the visitation of his cruelty upon them--took him as did his mother. He shared his mother’s sensuous satisfaction in abject pain. Like her he made joy of anguish: like her, molded himself to love and to depend upon this man as the pain-giver, since such was the form of his love, such the burden of his support. Mrs. Rennard loved her husband, her senses took him. Tom looked upon his father with his mother’s senses.

His mother died. Curtin Rennard went to the child. He lifted him in his arms.

“Thomas,” he said, “you are to be a motherless child. Your mother is dead. I want you to pray with me to God--to thank Him for the cruel thing that He has brought upon us.”

Tom repeated his father’s words as his father spoke them. “My mother is gone, I bless You and thank You, God. She is gone, and I am alone without a mother. God, I thank You. She is gone to join the Chosen in Your presence. God, I thank You. My mother is gone--perhaps--to be damned in Hell. God, I bless You and thank You.”

Curtin Rennard took the child high in his arms: gazed into his frightened eyes: seemed pleased thereat, for he embraced him. Tom was happy then. He did not miss his mother.

He never missed her. All his will was fixed on the pain-dealing, passionate parent. His rival--his rival-self--his mother was no more there. He was more free to love, to suffer, to rebel, now that the great sick lover, the great sufferer, the unsucceeding rebel with her wide skirts and her clear wan forehead was gone from their world.

A deep and subtle relationship grew between the tremorous child and the thwarting, thwarted, powerful man, his father.

A relationship unmeasured and un-named in the peripheral vicissitudes of their ages and their minds. An eye unchecked by surfaces and the color of habit, drawn to the womb of life, must have found Tom’s love for his father in those days deeply atune with the love of his father’s wife who was dead: must have seen the bereaved love of Curtin Rennard astir for a new replenishment in all his children.

So deep a dream could not grow unchallenged in one as quick with reality as Tom. He rebelled. His nature munitioned itself for rebellion.

There was Cornelia. She saved herself from her father by making into an ideal her dim devotion to her mother. Tom took her as ally. Cornelia imaged her saving devotion in maternal deeds, she imaged it in clay. Her mother was sanctuary from the common danger. In Tom grew great love for his protecting sister: above all tense self-abandonment to his father’s greatest rival, the real world. Here lay freedom for Tom! His blood knew that the hidden love must scorch and shrivel in the sun. He courted the sun. He was in perpetual revolt against his father’s hold on his emotions: against his father’s closeted ideals: against the source of his father’s hold, his own deep identity with his mother.

Hence, Tom’s distrust of women, his devotion to Cornelia, the frenzied scatter of his forces in objective life. During Tom’s boyhood, he was almost a woman in his attitude toward women: in each of them he fought his mother, fought her betrayal of him--as of herself--to his dominant father. His love of Cornelia was at once a way-station for his self-freeing will and a substitute for the parental yokes from which he needed freedom.

Directly through her, indirectly against his father, Tom grew in love with imagery, with color, with the Symbol--the artist in Tom grew. From his passionate seeking of the outer world, there rose his power of success in society and in law. For the world loves the lavish spender of himself: it will run to the largess of his ruin as wolves to their meat.

Yet as Tom saw his practice swell, saw the doors behind which stood butlers open to him, the silent music of his blood went on. All these talents and emotions were reactions. Behind them stood the Image of a man--hating art, hating social intercourse, hating life,--of a man beckoning Tom back to an ecstatic, fabular peace. For that man’s hatreds also were reactions ... behind them....

All that ancient lure was now resistance to the life Tom flung himself upon, even as all this life was his resistance to that hidden lure. He would consecrate his talent, he would build him his church, Success. But his mind ran against it, weakened the rock on which he builded. Cornelia was knowing. Here were depths beyond her vision. She saw chiefly the young man so soaked in his Puritan upbringing that he was loath to face the joys he had of his worldly undertakings: a very usual hypocrisy and of no importance, but one she hated since she was full of it also.

“I don’t see,” she said, “why you should be ashamed of enjoying Mrs. Duffield’s parties. Heaven knows we had lonely enough years, here, first.”

“You go with artists--with intelligent people. You have too much kindness to imagine how dull the rich and the successful are.”

“Nonsense! Their success speaks continual wise words. Their gold is brilliant.”

So they swayed back and forth, these two. They were equals. They had never become rivals--before David.

* * * * *

Laura Duffield invited her new friend to dine.

“Come early,” she said, “I want you to meet my son, before he goes to his usual party.”

He entered the drawing-room: a young girl and a young man were there.

“Farge and Marcia, this is Mr. Rennard.”

Their polite greeting was sauced in an expectant languor and a very harmless resentment. It was as if they were resigned to a bad habit of their mother.

Marcia, looking at Tom’s trimly rhythmic body, thought: “It is lucky Mamma is getting a divorce and must behave.”

Farge was too dull to syllogize but he twinged with a sort of envy and almost pondered out: “_My_ friends are not freakish enough for Ma.”

Tom was seated and Mrs. Duffield was already in full talk.

He found it hard, listening to her, to take in these two. As she talked, she insisted on holding his eyes. It was as if she talked for no greater purpose. Marcia and Farge sat on a lounge just outside his range. They were looking at him. Farge smoked a cigarette; he had offered none to Tom. Marcia leaned far back, her legs were outstretched straight; she threw one ankle over the other. Mrs. Duffield made good the deficiency of her son. She never smoked, but she had full provisions for her friends. Tom felt how from ankle to neck this girl was firm and spare and full of a voluptuous relaxation. Only her eyes were taut, perhaps from poising him. She did not listen to her mother’s words. She hummed a tune very faintly: her upward foot marked time.

She got up. She jerked her shoulders, as if the gown that clung to them were an obtrusion. Perhaps the obtrusion was elsewhere in the room. “It must be late, Farge?”

The boy gave a limp hand: Marcia nodded sharply. Tom felt that Farge had not wanted to shake hands, and that Marcia would not have minded. He noticed that this girl was built very like a boy: and that Farge with his pudgy rondured body and pink cheeks was rather like a girl. Alone with Mrs. Duffield he found that he had been attracted by her daughter.

He was not sorry. This charm upon him made it easier to be charming. He told an anecdote of that day in court: he had been in court seventeen days before, but instinct made him say “to-day.” Talking, it came to him how far more naïve and fresh this oldening, troubled mother was than her young daughter. Tom did not understand this. He felt it would not have been safe to tell white lies to Marcia. He wondered why the strange weariness and slackness of the girl came to him as pleasure.

“Why, Mrs. Duffield, is the younger generation prematurely old?”

She laughed with her liquid laughter. She did not guess beneath his question.

“Why? Do you mean yourself? You are not prematurely old. Oh, I am sure not. You are mature. You have been forced so early to play a man’s part in the world.”

“That can’t be it. I see it most in young folk that do not work at all.”

“Well, not working at all is the part of the very old.”

“I am still not satisfied. I almost think that the shrewd parents of Competitive America have learned to palm off their own weariness on their children. Just like them it would be: a trick of the trade.”

“It is nothing but sophistication, dear Mr. Rennard. We old folks have the naïveté of savages. Our children are civilized. That is all.” She examined him. “Does this weariness repel you?”

Tom watched sharply without heightening the look of his eyes. She had no idea whence had come his thoughts.

“No,” he ventured. “That is proof, I suppose, that I am touched myself? It attracts me rather. Of course, not weariness alone.”

Mrs. Duffield was weary: endlessly weary. Often she flung herself to bed with a horror of the needs of her toilet. Often she awoke in the morning with the demands of getting up a mountain in her path. She took Tom’s words to herself. She would not have to grimace her weariness away. It would be pleasure to be with him.

Soon they were friends. When he came in to her, she thrust out an arm in greeting, and did not budge from her lounge.

“Make yourself nice and at home; or I’ll have to get up and do it for you. I’m so comfy!”

Her weariness went before her admission of it with him. He stood over her; she was aware that his eyes could see within the negligent folds of her flimsy housegown. What did it matter? They were friends. Once she said:

“Make believe this is an evening dress. Then the décolleté won’t shock you.”

“Then also, it won’t interest me,” said Tom.

She needed to know everything about him: that she might help him.

“I’ve made up my mind on that!”

She told him of herself more and more: more and more easily. She told herself that she could not otherwise gain his confidence: and she needed that really to help him, really to be “friends.” In truth she craved his help, she was glad to purchase it with whatever aid her place and her connections might afford.

“It is hard to speak of such things,” she said, half sitting up on her lounge, with a bare arm falling straight toward the floor. At once it was easy. The ease of her lying there before him and the glow of his eyes taking her in were a lubricant to her words. She could never have spoken so at first in a tailor-made suit. She would have laughed with the freedom of sincere denial at a friend who ventured to link the exhibition of her soul with the exhibition of her body.

* * * * *

It was through Laura Duffield that Tom came to his real establishment in practice. Gilbert Lomney was her cousin. For him, Laura was a brilliant woman who somehow had managed also to be good. He had great admiration for her, not a little fear. It was by her strategy that “Lomney and Rennard” was brought about.

The City had welcomed its own stuff in Tom and Cornelia. The City had come from the same sort of place. At the beginning, Tom felt this not at all. He was frightened by the City. He did not understand when its heights bent down and touched him. Each suppliant before New York goes through the same amaze as the unfriendly Town proves lewdly hospitable. Few dare to admit her wantonness since the avowal would take from the measure of their prowess. In the early bewilderment of being taken-in, of finding a naked mistress in place of a shrouded goddess, the critical faculties are struck to sleep.

The years of the preparing of success in Tom were like the growth of love in their delirious simplicity, the sort of wild progression that one finds best revealed in mathematics. A true tumescence. Tom found some one who liked his humor and his freedom. He introduced him to a strategic hostess. There was opened a breach in the trenched City. There was more than one of these amiable friends. Each multiplied opportunity at a geometric rate. Tom was soon in a position to choose, and from choice comes judgment. He was soon surfeited with chances, and from surfeit comes disillusion.

To be alone in the City requires a technique that only the child born in the City or the genius may possess. On all sides of Tom were people ready to be amused, ready to use him, ready to use him up. No bright young man without the taint of an uncomfortable message need go to waste in New York. Each clever little thing he does or says will echo, until, if he does not take care, he may be deafened by its rebounding clamor. He may drop like a pebble, he may sink straight to the oblivious bottom of the lake: but not before myriad wreathings forth have made him the hour’s center of a rippling world. If he step forward, he will step on some one’s heels, and that some one’s friends will, for this chance beneficence, cherish and advertise him. If he step back, the same thing will occur. If he stand still, he will obstruct the one behind him who is moving forward, and this too will net him a sincere appreciation. He must be a genius or a willful man to escape acceptance by the City.

Tom Rennard was neither. He found that the man in whose law-offices he learned far better than in law-school appreciated him and, when he was admitted to the Bar, sent him work. He found, arguing a trivial motion, that he was eyed with interest by nonchalant attorneys as he stepped back to the counsel-table. He found that his brain could be sold if at first he were willing to sell it cheap. Lawyers too busy drumming business thought they were exploiting Tom when they employed him to be of counsel in some tort case and let him do the work. Several dull fellows with gratuitous patronage stuck to him regularly until they found themselves with fees in their pockets and with their sinecures entailed. Tom had a way of making a Judge smile that the men of the Bar respected as they would not, in a lifetime, respect Justice. He was quick to see that the able counsel acts, before the Bench, not as a lawyer but as a man: that the tricks of erudition and the flourishes of oratory gleaned from law-school had best be packed away. His average Judge was a shrewd politician who, above all, must not be made to feel his juridic ignorance. What he required from counsel was a mirror in which he might see his power reflected: and his power consisted not at all in judicial learning--display of that was an embarrassment--but in a canny sense of men and use of means. Tom talked to the Bench, man to man, asking-man to man-who-hath, with a candor most attorneys needed twenty years to strip to. His attitude brought reward. Judges leaned comfortably back and talked things over with him. When he reappeared before them, he was remembered.

“But do you think, Mr. Rennard, that this point is pertinent?”

“Yes, your Honor, I do. And I am sure if you will just recall to mind the case of Larson versus Mann--the question is one that has long interested me and I looked it up----”

Who was this Mr. Rennard? this young and unknown Mr. Rennard who had a way of warming the air of a court-room to his own purposes? The question was asked: the questioners answered it. They gave him respect before he had clients: they gave him the beginnings of repute at a time when he had nothing else. Hating and fearing each other, they wanted Rennard on their side.