Part 20

You were going to write to me first and you have not, and so I write to you, because I am thinking of you this evening, and that is the time to write, is it not? I have been thinking good things of you; it seems to me that your flavor has precipitated, and that I feel the form of you, as I never have this past short year. I find myself in consequence in an apologetic mood--and perhaps you will accept even that and not be repelled, since you have accepted so many moods of mine, and been dear about them, and filled me slowly--I am aware of it now--with a respect and an admiration and, yes, something deeper than these, of which my actions and my omissions were scarce able emissaries. You are away now, while I am in Chicago--silently away, since you have not even thought of me to write to me, and I find that I do not blame you at all: that I admire your taste and your silence, and that I shall look forward to whatever response this brings of your deigning with an eager gratefulness that surprises you no more than it does me. Tom chastened: Tom in full view at length of a loveliness that he sensed and went for, perhaps as one goes for the summit of a mountain: the moment one is upon the trail, all one’s energies are lost in climbing and fighting snags and underbrush and rocks, and the summit is beyond eye and soon out of thought: yet is it the less for _it_ that the unblazed trail is dared? You are a very rare person: you have given me so much of myself that I shall be happy of you, even if I continue in this mood of being mad at myself that I did not give more. And yet what more could I have given? Would you take more, David? It is true that I have an excuse. You found me in the flush that was really the sign of a true decomposition, a deep giving away of my nerves that might have been ruin in one less trained to fighting. Or that might have been nothing in one less addicted to work. You see, work-to-success seemed necessary to me. When I do no work, my mind gets me into trouble: I am a geyser of wastestuffs: if I cannot empty myself into work, I am likely to empty some one else in a perverse replica of play. You have seen that, David. I worked while I should have been in some happy clime watching the skies and bathing and walking and smoking pipes of peace (if only pipes did not make me sick): I worked while the day’s task used more than the night brought of strength. I neared bankruptcy, but being an American that did not bother me--and I put on brighter colors for the approaching doom. In the crisis of eight years of this, you found me, David----: and what a dour childhood of preparation before it! Endless, endless. Working for Cornelia, working for myself--working toward nothing. For I am in it still. I shall try to put off the day of bankruptcy until I am fifty or more: then liquidate by dying. But you caught me in the first cold experience of being weak and sick and unable to spend prodigally and not feel anything but bulging coffers in the morning: in the first terrible condition of knowing I must work, though work was vile, and that no other work was present for my hands. That, does it explain my sudden horridnesses, my fevers, my cruelties to us both--your word? I am not cruel, Davie, I am full of love. Oh! why won’t you--you and a few blessed others whom I need the knowledge of in this fearful gorgeous world--why won’t you _understand_? Can you not see me going out into the streets of New York--yes, even here in Chicago--full of love for the dull men and the stricken women, ready to give myself to them all, if only they would take me--take me a moment----: full of love for the magic of their flesh and the mystery of their life and the splendor of their anguish? Oh! David, I love so much more than there is in the world willing. I am a sea of love cluttered in a basin. And when I am cried a little welcome, I mess everything up in my attempt to fit to a mortal measure. I have spoken to you--we have even quarreled--about little children. Don’t you see why? Why I was enraged at the idea of your _speculating_ upon whether you wished a child or no? Identification. Suddenly, I am a child, and I do not care a damn about reason, I want only not to be left outside and unalive by my beloved. Often when I speak to a man or woman, Davie, something bleeds in my breast. And then I have headaches, and the wise doctor says: use ‘brakes’--do not give yourself so much--walk the streets _indifferently_. Easy, eh? _Indifferently!_ When all of life floods all my senses like a corybantic passion: a perpetual sea of infinite elements each of which is attached to my nerves and to my heart. I cannot help loving people, so I hate them. For they are not what I would have them be: they are deaf and they do not love me. And children--whose lives go before me out of my hands and my sight like the horizon and the skies--is it a wonder my hands are stretched after them and that I suffer at my impotence? But, Davie, I am not cruel. I love--and I cannot reach what I love. My hard-headed lawyer friends quip me, calling mystic my wandering thoughts--the best of them. But I am filled with a sense of dimensions, flaring and parabolic, and the world their sense is comfortable in, is a strand of what I feel and see: and the magic that draws me to the world is the fact that it careers in an element outside myself. There, perhaps, imprisoned in the flesh of a woman is the thing I love--and I am outside--oh, fatally outside. If I open that flesh I am laughed at by blood and death. Life--life, I seek it. For I see it: and it is maddening to be alive.

This is a funny letter, is it not? But you must understand, and never again call cruel the man whose eyes are forever full of the vision of loving, and whose body is a prison, a terribly real prison--and who knows that the world is a bewildering texture of abyss and reality, of filth and flowers. I shall go hunting, killing myself through life, David, simply because I am hungry. Do not forget that. I know the falsehood of the game. Do not forget that either. My real self, my mocking sense of life, my outrageous need of love, of love, of love--that will go silent to the grave, when the gods have had their laugh of it. For truly I am a little like a toyboat that the gods have placed upon the waters, and blown upon, that scuds its pretty maddening moment, steerless, useless, against the inevitable stop on the pool’s other side.

Write to me.

TOM.

David’s day was pitched by it still higher. His moving through the life of the City had a lyric lilt. Its meanest shred came to expression in the tune he hummed. Until Mr. Barlow said:

“Is that the one song you know?”

David stopped. His energy was only for the moment without outlet. He jumped up, and used it to propel his body.

“I don’t feel a bit like working, this afternoon.”

“There you are, thinking of this as work! Can’t you get cured of that, David?”

The young man stopped at the desk of his Chief who had become his friend. He was pensive. He put one hand on the blotter and looked beyond the labyrinth of papers.

“How differently you and my uncle look at business! He prides himself that it is the most serious and laborious work in the world.”

“That is his play,” Mr. Barlow twinkled. Then they laughed together.

“You see,” he went on, leaning back in his swivel-chair and blowing the first fragrant puff of his new cigar into David’s eyes, “you see, my boy, your uncle is a romantic figure. That is why he takes business so realistically. I am a new generation: oh yes I am, despite my age! I am a realist: a man who sees exactly what there is to see: that is why I take business romantically.”

David thought this a bit topsy-turvy. But he had no way out; he started figuring Mr. Barlow’s words. Mr. Barlow kept blowing fragrant puffs up toward his face.

“That,” he went on, “is the reason why your uncle is so much more successful than I am.” His soft red lips curled cheerfully and he sent a mighty wreath of smoke as salutation against David’s nose.

David pondered. His uncle, who saw too little of the world even to understand the slightest of its parts, was by his ignorance able to take Business as the whole, throw all of himself upon it, and be rich. Mr. Barlow understood the pattern of life’s parts, was able to make a pleasant game of that portion of it where he found himself. And he earned an excellent living, even if he was not rich.

“You are happier than my uncle.”

At once, Mr. Barlow was pensive.

“Happiness is the biggest fraud of all, David. Have no dealings with it. If it tries to make terms with you, cut it dead.”

David noticed a peculiar trait. When Mr. Barlow’s face was in repose, as now, there was a sweet sadness upon it. But he could change this. It was as if he were aware of David looking at his sadness. His quick clear eyes began to twinkle as if this were in itself a joke.

“We must not compare happiness. That’s all nonsense.”

“What then is serious?”

“What is serious?” He leaned back and took David in. “It is serious that you should leave this office this very moment and go meandering as your fancy prompts. Go!... Get along.”

David ran for his hat.

“Well, that is for my happiness, is it not?”

“It is not! It is for your health.” Mr. Barlow looked very stern.

David hesitated at the door. He came back to Mr. Barlow’s side and once more, this time timidly, put his outstretched fingers on the blotter.

“You know how much I appreciate you, don’t you, Mr. Barlow?”

Mr. Barlow took up a letter, screwed his glasses grimacingly to his nose, and began to read.

“David,” as his head moved swiftly from side to side in pursuit of the words, “you are wasting your free afternoon.”

Now David was not wasting it. In his pocket was the letter of Tom. In his head was the cheer of Mr. Barlow. Before him and above him swarmed the amazing City....

* * * * *

He was on a street full of department stores. Women of all ages hurried past him, talking, ceaselessly talking. In their hands were the signs of the battle they loved to wage: packages, purses: in their eyes the promise of further conquest. David felt that he was in a strange, not hostile land. He was tolerated here, because he was not noticed. He stepped into a long, dense building. Endless counters packed with women led away in the bustle and gloom. Voices were not so high as the press of feet and the surge of skirts. Stiff men stood above the buffeting hordes like monstrous curios in their white linen and their flaring somber coats. Gaslamps tremored under the oppressed ceiling as if they stood guard against an invasion from below. It seemed that the frangent feminine commotion would swell, rise and sweep them out. David was stifled already. There was no room for him, there was no room even for air to breathe. He was in the street again. Here the flood had interstices of day: the day broke with its blue gleam upon the ranks of the women: splintered, but entered in and spread a living lightness through their heavy marches. Here one could see, not a mass alone, sweeping the street, but individual women with faces and eyes. Here even one saw pretty women.

David had not known how many pretty ones there were. It was bewildering, this extravagance of nature. The street was of stone and brick, it reared its jagged way through the world, loaded with the metallic cut of cars, flanked by the sibilance of uneven roofage and façades and the clamor of advertisements; it fell swift into smallness beyond a Square. Here it was arrogant, it domineered with its wide high skirts of stone and its bonnets turreting aloft--the shuttle of feet like a leather lathe beneath. And yet, immersed in it, David found that it was soaked in charm and that it drew his senses. For he had picked out the presence of women: women that had lips and warm bodies and whose arms could hold children. At once these were the street and were greater than the street. In their domain he was walking.

He was not wasting his free afternoon. This was health indeed. It was health to feel this pour of a thousand homes upon him: all of these homes’ secret tenderness and passion. It was health to shake his head at the hard buildings, and know them worsted by women!...

But tiring. David boarded a car.

The car gave a lurch. The movement split the car’s inhabitants into two separate groups: they who smiled and they who grumbled. David was smiling. Clumsily he righted himself, he found that he did not wish to change the position of his eyes. They were looking at a little girl, who had been smiling also. But now, the two were serious looking at each other.

She was a little girl riding beside her governess. She had great black eyes. The gleaming iris almost crowded out the white. She had brows that were high and thin and arched and between her brows and her eyes the flesh was dimpled.

She tilted her head backward and smiled at him.

David gripped his seat with his two hands, and smiled at her.

She was beside an opaque cutting thing that was a woman and was a governess. Thick glasses tied to a black string that ended in a hideous enameled clasp on a white starched waist. Eyes shiny and convex like the glasses. Nose pointed down, mouth cutting in, chin pushing upward. And beside her a loveliness that came across the car and that he held now far from the car and the street, in his silence.

It came to David softly that he loved this little girl. She smiled at him, as if she thanked him and were glad. Could he put his love in a smile and give it to her?

She stirred in her seat. She tossed out her legs, first one, then the other. She threw herself back so that her legs thrust out, she met him fully and beamed on him.

She was unafraid, beyond all he had ever known. What could he give her, and do, to show her his love?

He had his eyes and his smile. To give her his life with. He put words into his look at her: till his eyes had tears of their fullness. He said to her so:

“Little girl with the gray fur bonnet and the gray fur coat and the laughing soul, I love you. I have never seen you before. I shall never see you again. I shall always see you----”

She was smiling so clear! What did she know? What did she not know, perhaps? Pain stopped the words of his eyes. He got up. He passed her. Why could he not touch her, why could he not come and play with her where she lived? A little girl!

He stood in the street and the car groaned past him. She was kneeling on her seat and her face pressed against the window. She was motionless, gazing into him with serious lovely eyes while the car swung her away into the trackless future.

David’s lips moved: “Good-by. I do not understand.... Do you?...”

She was gone.

Many things were gone.

David, walking the dim sunless City, walked as through himself. And as he went he missed the lights that an hour before, of their own cheer, had lit the corridors of his being and made him all, all of the City, so glad a habitation. He missed these things, he learned how many they were.

He did not think of the strange little girl. She had been fleckless beautiful. She had been more than that in the miracle of her spell upon him. For this he groped. In his mind was the vision of her budding life, sweet, ineffably sweet like an unopened rose in the dew of the dawn. She had left a wound in his heart--the stab of her vision--from which now his blood seemed unstintingly to flow.

He thought of himself alone. Sudden all his proud contentment was away. Not clouded, this time, as it had been so often. Away. It was gone surely, like the little girl.

His contentment. What then had it been? The parts of it that were no more he could piece together into a memory of his contentment.

It had been a haze covering the way of his feet, blinding his eyes, wrapping him in darkness. He saw now. He saw that his feet had carried him a way different from the haze of his contentment.

He thought of his emptiness. He seemed to recognize it, now, as if it had long been there. The absence of Tom and Constance--was this the absence of two great parts of his emptiness permitting him at last to know them--since their absence was in a measure their negation, the first timorous return from an emptiness that filled him to a fullness that he lacked? He could not go in very far. His mind was strangely cramped with pain. He knew much, however. He knew he did not love Constance and that there is no substitute for love. He knew he did not fully respect his dearest friend and that for this there was no solace. Most of all he knew his life was sterile: despite its blandishments and its colors, its devouring of hours, it lacked something he needed. Something he needed as he might thirst for water in a land that held everything else.

Sterile work: sterile friendship: sterile embraces. It was not so simple as this, but here was the germ that desiccated him, turned his impulses from action, deflected life from living. _He did not live._ Thence came that he did not risk, that he went safe, that he won materials and pleasures. To what end since he did not live? He compromised with love, he compromised with dreams. That was the technique of his succeeding: to cheat his body into love-affairs, his mind into business, his loyalties into friendship. To what end since he did not live? And if the miracle was, that life lay in the risk rather than in succeeding, in love rather than in the love-affair, in the dream rather than in any fact?

Oh, he could not understand. He did not know what to do. If his ways were wrong, his relations false, how could he change them? He dragged through a morass, not knowing.

Now suddenly, his clear thoughts held within them, as if in an embrace, the little girl. He saw the resilience of that fresh young life: its pride, its firmness. He saw how it must stoop and bend and _give_, if it would avoid the pains that waited it growing into the world. If it would win ease, it must lose--lose all that made it lovely! Lose its fine fresh sweetness. David pondered on this. Would that election satisfy him? Would it be well to see that loveliness gray away in price for the escape from pain? He heard his answer clear. At all costs the bravery of youth, the firm coolness of which her flesh was symbol--at cost of any pain, of all defeat!

A deceiving gladness came to David: a gratitude that he was still somewhat like that little girl.... Had they not smiled at each other?

XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom began to wonder what irony had drawn him Eastward.

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

* * * * *

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