Part 16

There seemed no affection at all: no fellowship. Even for themselves, these persons had no affection. Their egoism was a hard and desperate passion: fruit of some perennial resistance. David could not have reasoned out why this should be: how affection must die in a hot contest: how either it must die or it must share the intensity of the combating forces and turn to passion. The way of these men and women toward themselves had much the way of animals fiercely competing for food and for love. In a less bitter contest they could have played together: like children or like animals that are fed and tamed. Now they were playing at playing. David felt, in this, their wide distinction from animals. A whole array of impulses and thoughts muddied and distressed what might have been the clear flow of natural conflict. They were whipped up into a delirium of broken starts that in the end lacked all direction. Endlessly at work, in the upholstered room, under the gowns of silk and the starched bosoms, a scrimmage of cold desire. Some things each desired of the others: a body, ruin, disappearance, help.... David thought his impressions strange. Surely, he was mistaken, seeing nonsense?

No doubt, however, of what Constance Bardale was now about. He had no idea of her goal: it was plain she was testing him. As surely as if her capable hands had moved over his body, she took his measure.

He knew now what he was doing, with his parries. To defend himself was to accept her gage of battle. He was meeting Constance Bardale in the field she had chosen. This was precisely what he now no longer wanted to do. He became silent. And she who knew a way for his defensive was helpless against his retreat. Against his resistance, she could display her forces, but she was scattered and spent in the emptiness before her. David sat back in his chair, looking beyond, thinking, and gave her nothing.

Constance Bardale got up and left him. “Let him stay alone if that is really what he wants.” She thought in the falseness of a moment’s pique she had been moved to rescue him from a painful solitude among the chatter of others.

As she sat again, talking elsewhere, she had David in mind.

“What is it?” She recovered herself. “Is he a ninny or was he just bored? I don’t think he’s a ninny.” She had intelligence to know, at least, that he had not been frightened. There had been a calm in his sudden withdrawal which was the contrary of fear.

She took his hand at the door, and now when the invitation she had so unconventionally stressed would have been a mere matter of form, she kept silent.

“Good-night, Mr. Markand.”

“Good-night, Miss Bardale.”

He was very serious and far away. She had the wit to smile and turn to the others....

* * * * *

It was a crystal night of autumn. David and Tom could not think of taking a car.

David was sorely troubled. He was glad Tom made no effort to talk. A question from him would have thrown David into panic. It was about Tom he was troubled. And about himself.

“I am afraid. I am afraid to meet a woman flirting with me. I am a coward,” he muttered to himself. Constance Bardale had understood him better. She had glimpsed under his sudden tenacity of refusal to meet her, to meet even her eyes or her laughter, some deeper preoccupation which her profane self must not be allowed to enter. But David walked with a sense of discomfort--wide and profound--as if all life were a garment that fitted him ill. Tom was a mere most sensitive spot where the ungainly garment caught.

He had the sad conviction of Tom’s dishonesty from the fact that he went so well in that dishonest group: of Tom’s equal striving to overcome, to grasp, to possess, he could have no doubt. It was all very ugly to David. That did not matter. It mattered painfully that Tom should be ugly! Tom was his friend whom he loved: whose life he was entering more and more. Who was at fault that these constant doubts flared up against the passage?

Now he wanted to talk to Tom. Tom always took these doubts and talked them away. He wanted Tom to dispose of the night’s new accumulation.

Tom walked on. He seemed troubled also. This was a new thought lancing into David. His own misgivings were a shade less clear. Tom was troubled. Perhaps Tom had a grievance against him? If he did----

“What makes you so silent?” he asked, before he knew: reflexedly as one jumps from a danger and then looks to know what it is.

“Do you want to know?” Tom’s voice was hard. “I am going to tell you, David. Sometimes you make it anything but easy for me.... These were my friends. For my sake, you might have tried to be a little pleasant....”

“Wasn’t I pleasant, Tom?”

“Did you stir yourself to be? Oh, of course, I know what’s in your mind. ‘This is easy for _Tom_. _He_ takes to all that frivol naturally.’ Well, I assure you, my dear friend, you are mistaken. I do nothing of the sort. But I have a sense of the world and of the need of living in it. That sense at times, fortunately for me, is greater than my sense of my own importance. Your sulks are nothing but conceit. Believe me! If I am distressed, it is because I am anxious. I want you to grow up. I take you to places where you meet mature and interesting people: people with minds. You might do me the honor of trusting my intentions: enough not to sit there as if I had taken you to a dime museum.”

“Tom---- I am sorry! I did the best I knew how.... Something made me melancholy--yes.”

This was all wrong, all wrong, David was thinking. Yet how could he right it? Tom had no real grievance against him. It was _he_ who had the grievance! Why did things always take this perverse turn? Why was he always in the wrong? This time he _was not_.... Tom spoke on. He too hated the superficial form that social intercourse seemed fatefully to take. But under it the play of minds, the approach of men and women to each other was good: justified the forms and the conversations. He was no creative genius to revolutionize society. When David had succeeded in finding a more satisfactory way for friends to share their thoughts, he would be happy. Until then....

“But Tom--why did you, why did you have to make up stories that aren’t so?”

It was difficult for David to ask this. All his being and courage were summoned to the effort. Why should he need his courage?

Tom walked quietly on. David felt his vibrance. Either he was in wrath or in pain. “_So that is it?_” Again he was silent.

At last: “David, my friend,” in a low still tone, utterly changed from before. “Davie, you make me worry for you. This is not a mere lack of a sense of humor. This is something deeper.”

He went on quietly. His words cut into David like curved knives. Silently, David resisted. But the points of attack were too many. Attack whirled about him....

David was always looking for faults in him, doubting his honor and his word. Why? Had he so little faith in his friend? Let David tell him, had he given him cause to believe the first ill thing about him vagrant in his mind? David shifted to answer. Tom was attacking elsewhere.... David had no sense of proportion. He seemed to take from his remarks nothing but sources for quarrel. Or was it unwilling rather than unable? David was sure he could here give satisfactory answer. He was perhaps too serious and dull: he took everything Tom said so deep to heart! No cause for anger, really. Tom had veered far.... Oh, this was no exception. There were many things. The truth was David thought only of himself: David was selfish.

“Why should you always sit in judgment on me? Supposing I began this trick with you of weighing your deeds and your words to see what direct pleasure they brought to _me_, as a miser might sift dirt to find the grains of gold? Do you really think I _couldn’t_?”

A list.... The other evening, when Tom had had a headache, David had gone around smoking and whistling. Did David recall the time Tom had brought _him_ his dinner? And the pique of David because Tom could not join him and Cornelia on some insignificant walk. As if Tom had broken a tryst. How David had his silences for a week, because of things like that. Did David perhaps remember how he had honored Tom’s desire to see him on his return from his vacation? honored it by dragging a dull outsider along for dinner. Let David think of himself wiring so to Tom. Perhaps he thought Tom’s silence meant he was not hurt that time when he broke their theater date because he had forgotten it was Lois’ birthday....

“But you said you could easily find some one else.”

“Yes, David. I am not like you. I was afraid, if I made it hard for you, I might spoil your evening. I put you at ease. The truth is, the tickets went to waste. Yes, both of them. I had set my mind on that evening belonging to us. Do you think I cared most about seeing Annie Russell? I did not choose to go with some one else, on the occasion when I had chosen to go with you. That night, if you want to know, I sat in the Library of the Bar Association and read law. It was not my sense of justice to spoil your evening which you had chosen to spend with your cousin Lois, because you had chosen to spoil mine.”

“You know that isn’t fair! You know I went to the Deanes, because I had to. Out of a sense of duty.”

“You have a sense of duty toward your frivolous cousins; none toward your friend. I admire your distinctions.”

“But, Tom, they would all have been insulted!”

“Whether I was insulted had no importance....”

So it went. David was inexorably and forever in the wrong.

“Your cousins, your uncle, your aunt. I am to judge you care more for them than for me. They mean more to you. Doubtless their ideas, also.”

He flayed David’s smugness: his cowardice: his failure to grow up. David’s sentiment was perfunctory: his sensibilities were dull: he had no recognition of what was going on in the minds and hearts of those who should have been dear to him. Loving meant taking. Tom flung him dolorously down to a level with that cousin whose company he had preferred and loyalty to whom, as against Tom, he had elected. David followed by the side of his tormentor, as by the side of fate....

Near where they lived was a little Square. It lay blue beneath the green haze of the lamplights. It was timid there under the sweep of the City. The buildings and the high flare of movement over the night made it deep like a well. Tom and David paced round it. Their steps were harsh to David as if in dissonance to the Square’s sweet reticence. They knew they must have this out ere they passed through the door.

A dull weight was on David. The crystal night was black and through the blackness pain flashed like lightning. All this was within him. About all this was he, numb and unable to feel himself. He knew the dark by the lightning.

It was not the sense of wrong that made him suffer. It was the impediment to that sense. Had he been able to are noble and I am unworthy, it would have been easeful and sweet. He had great longing to do just this. It was the something hindering him that hurt.

Why was it? He had no answer to Tom. One by one, his objections had disappeared as he voiced them--his objections to Tom. Was it perhaps that he was proud and vain--not big enough to avow his faults? Oh, if it was but that! And then, the hateful alternative that blocked his emotions. For was it, perhaps, that he had not really voiced his objections?... that all of these words were far from the true misgivings?

David did not know. He knew that at that moment he yearned to be fully convinced, to be convinced that he was fully wrong. He needed to force himself. His mind told him Tom was right. His heart willed Tom be right. Let Tom be sincere and the perfect friend: let him be the lacker! His mind argued, his heart sang for this sweeter way. They forced him through the forms of acquiescence.... Something neither mind nor heart could not, would not submit: waved frantic and helpless against all the world. This, the bleak hurt in David.

The battle was manifestly over.

They stood in the hall of their flat.

Tom was smiling. Tom suffered also. In his smile, as he put forth his hand, was a plea for forgiveness.

In that gesture, Tom spoke his deepest truth. He had been indeed on the defensive. Attacking David, he had fought for himself: fought for his place in the heart of his friend: fought to cover from David and from himself the flinching part of him which shrilled and manoeuvered for attention, plotted for power. With his soul sick in revolt. David’s rebuke was the rebuke and call of his own nature. Since David embodied this, Tom needed him, needed him to love him: also, since David embodied this, Tom needed to destroy him.

In the silence of the hall, the true Tom spoke. As if he had said: “I have said nothing. You are my better self, my deeper self. Stay near to me. Forgive me.”

David saw his gesture. He understood that it was sincere. He could not read its context. He needed no more than that it was sincere.

A sweet flood suddenly was over him: the certainty for which he had thirsted.

With both hands he took the hand of Tom. He held it close. His eyes were full of tears. It was David who spoke: “Forgive me!”

* * * * *

In the morning, David awoke full of weariness.

Tom bounded bright from his bed.

At breakfast he was loquacious. He teased Mrs. Lario. He had long spells of laughter over his attempts at Italian.

The heavy woman waited on them silently and let his pleasantries rebound from her like rubber balls. She was devoted to her “wonderful Mr. Rennard.”

“Let us get David to speak Italian,” he said. “David is altogether too provincial.” He threw out the terms he had picked up as if he were pelting David with them. David stirred languidly. He was full of sleep.

“Well, I’m off.” Tom jumped up, before David had finished. “Have a case to-day before Justice Bayne. Wish me luck, Davie. The problem is to keep the old fellow awake. Otherwise I’ve no chance. If he sleeps, I lose.”

He stood in the doorway, his eyes flashed, and laughed.

“You ought to see him, Davie, when he falls asleep on the Bench! He gets deeper and lower--in his swivel chair. His legs are always crossed. As he slides down, the upper leg grates in such a way on the other as to lift its trouser gradually up. Down goes Bayne: up goes the trouser. Till the leg is bare, and the garter visible. There is the Scale of Justice for you. Ha-ha!” He was gone.

As he raced to his elevated train, the last evening raced with him. He was going to his Office--to the law--into the world.

“When Marcia marries Van Ness she must make me a wedge into his law business. I must absolutely manage that! Lomney and Rennard, of counsel for Van Ness, Stone and Company. Gad, what a _coup_!”

He had no thought of David. He had no thought of himself, save as the instrument of his own progress....

X

So the days and the nights: the weeks and the months. Tom direct toward his several goals; David involute and hesitant, sinking, it seemed to him, forever deeper from mastery of self and from some vague light he yearned for. Each of his revolts from Tom had the same ending: found him contrite and dedicated to his own unworthiness. David did what his friend wanted. Even to the extent that when he was with Cornelia he came away disillusioned. He patronized Cornelia. He evolved a superficial concord with his relatives and their friends that left him free and fitted Tom’s measure of the way to handle such useful, lower factors in one’s life. He went with Tom’s friends when Tom took him along. His work downtown was satisfactory. He was industrious, tactful, busy. He was not happy.

“Perhaps,” he said to himself, “perhaps I do not give myself enough to all these things.”

He looked at his life and was amazed to find how little he did, even how little he went out, of his own accord.

Yet, his uncle said to him: “My boy, I am delighted with you. Do you know what you have? You have imagination. I am beginning to realize already on my investment of you. Come up, can you, this evening? Aunt Lauretta has asked the whole lot of Tibbetts.”

He saw Cornelia with fair frequence. She never asked him to come: and yet how happy she was when he was there! She disturbed him not at all. She let him go his way. She came seldom to their flat. But she was getting somber, it seemed to David. Older as well. The glow of her great eyes had been a virtue in her homeliness. If they faded, she would be ugly. Sometimes David thought that they were fading.

“Don’t forget,” Tom said, “Cornelia is past thirty.”

But aside from these rather bleak activities, David found himself empty. He had no way of making joy and sharpness from his world’s encounters.

When he reflected, he was inclined to blame his dullness. “I am stupid!” he thumped himself with. And he reflected more. He decided to change. He did not know in this very decision the kernel of what he sought. Having resolved to change, he was changed already.

Perhaps it was the new year blossoming. It had been an unusually severe winter. All winters in New York are unusually severe, and most summers. New Yorkers have no memory for their chief source of conversation: a fact that serves to keep it green. But now came occasional mild days colored blue like the sky, keyed low like the clouds that dawdled over the City. The great town was no longer an imprisoned foe underneath the air. It went forth and the air and the town joined forces. David walked the streets with his coat flung wide so the breeze could seek him out and thaw those crannies of himself that had been frigid and asleep.

He made several excursions to the country--alone. They proved abortive. He found it painful to reach the drowsy earth with his drowsy mind. And yet the earth’s call was dear, now that the buds stood hard on the hard wood. He could not respond. He could not keep from trying to respond. A strain.

There were dinners and theater-parties with Caroline Lord. But one day David found in himself the courage to decide that he detested her. That this strapping, full-blown woman should take the airs of a secluded virgin was ill enough: but that, with all her experience of life, she should display a virgin’s judgments was unbearable. Was Miss Lord perhaps trying to impress him with her endless thrumming on respectability, her hymned pæans to the moral outlook? Why should she care so much for the standards of wealth, who was forever insisting that her family had been penniless but of high social value? Either this woman was ashamed of her own intelligence and enterprise or else she thought David would like to deem her so. David was not sure. Soon he did not care. Her vigorous solicitude for the manners and customs which she assumed were _theirs_ had an offensive note. It made David silent and reserved. It left the field to Miss Lord. So that the efficient lady preened herself and spread herself and paying no true attention to her friend had no idea of her effect upon him.

Tom laughed when he told him about her. David found that there was no difficulty in speaking to Tom about Miss Lord.

“But why should you expect something better of her?” Tom asked him.

“Well, she _is_ capable----”

“Bosh, my dear man. Look at her straight. The only strength she has, I am convinced, is the strength of Deane and Company--a strength she sucks.” Tom had met her once. Since then, he had skillfully avoided all David’s efforts to make him join them some night at dinner. “Now tell me frankly can you imagine that lady, with her advertised virginity, her mincing mind and her stiff sense of right and wrong, careering in open battle? Don’t you see that she is something only in her position? Her substance comes from the fields whose produce she helps distribute at a profit.”

“She seems to be forever bowing to judgments like those of Aunt Lauretta.”

“Of course, since she gets her keep from the same place.”

David had many evenings alone. He found he liked them. He had never been included in more than a tithe of the whirling activities of Tom who, now, had added politics to his program. Tom was a member of Tammany Hall.

“The young men are profiting by the folly of the reformers,” was the way Tom put it. “They have learnt, Davie dear, as I hope you shall learn also, generally speaking, that you can’t win a fight without joining with your enemy. We have done with kid-glove pats at corruption. We are going to clean up the undesirable elements of the Democratic Party by first entering their stronghold. That is why we are going into Tammany.”

David had never managed to believe in the monopolized purity of the Republican Party, although his uncle had spent some breath upon him to that purpose. Largely, he was indifferent and neutral. He had a sense of guilt in his organic ignorance about such vital matters. He asked:

“Is your partner, Mr. Lomney, also in Tammany?”

“Lord no!” Tom exclaimed.

And there it was--the incomprehensible that was forever cropping out! Why, in view of what Tom had just assured him about Tammany Hall, this protest of denial regarding Mr. Lomney?

“Lomney is a Democrat,” Tom went on. “A Gold-democrat, of course. But he has no party affiliations of a direct sort.”

“What other sort are there, Tom?”

“There are the really important sort,” Tom smiled. “We are vitally concerned in certain franchise concessions: traction and gas and the like. See?”

“Is that the reason Mr. Lomney must not belong to Tammany Hall?”

“That is the reason, rather, why I should,” Tom paused. “We are in where we should be, and out where we should be. Understand?”

Emphatically, David did not. All he could make of this party business was that it was a kind of game. The nation’s money-boxes had highly veneered and colored surfaces. The Republican was more polished, the Democratic had more color. If one said, “I believe in the blue and gold design” did one mean, “I get into the coffers by the side that is painted blue and gold?” David had these little speculations and was properly ashamed of them. He knew they were the sure consequence of his being unable to understand.

When he dined alone he was least troubled. There was a Hungarian restaurant he particularly liked because of the delicious thick soups and the beer and the caressing music. He went there often and ate perhaps more than he should, and sat about drinking his beer very soberly and slowly, puffing at the superb English pipe Cornelia had given him for his birthday. It had an amber stem and the one flaw in the delight of smoking was that he needed to be careful not to bite it through.

On this evening, as usual, he was not alone at his table. At this sort of place, where a sumptuous meal cost forty cents, one could expect no more than one’s own seat at the board. Mostly, men came and bowed stiffly for permission to sit down and were no sooner seated than they forgot him altogether in their torrents of strange words. Now came a man with his lady. David listened to them through the meal with an interest that might conceivably have flagged had he been able to understand the Magyar tongue. But the complete veil over their words made watching their faces and their gestures, noting the gait of their voices, a sort of game. It sharpened their personalities as these revealed them, and as the community of language must have dulled them. David took delight trying to break up the endless turgid flow into words and sentences. Mostly, he had delight in watching the woman.