Part 21

Marcia Duffield and King Van Ness were not yet engaged. A particular and naked problem. Tom feared the cynicism of the girl he had loved. “One thing, one thing alone can spoil this,” went his thoughts. “If she out of some mood abandoned her resistance. She might for spite, bravado, bitterness, what not? One such false gesture and Van Ness stops the hunt. He might possibly do an injury to himself: grow thoughtful for instance. But he’d never marry a girl that let him kiss her without a diamond ring.”

Laura Duffield held out her hand for his. “I am young yet. This is my only life. What am I doing with it?” Tom thought and clasped the hand of his friend and laughed--the lust of the Game, Van Ness, Stone and Company to be pried open, the delicious recalcitrance of Marcia to be tasted and crushed--and forgot.

“You are worrying about something? What is it?” At last he was conscious of Laura Duffield: his trivial words were over.

She was ageing. There was a drawn tightness about her eyes, a sag at her throat. It was a day on which she was not looking well. And looking well was coming to be an art, these years of life when art grows difficult. Debts. The incredible burden of holding up her head.

“Come and sit beside me, Tom.”

She was graceful. The couch was low. She sat ensconced in a corner, her outstretched arm hung in a flimsy sleeve, color of faded violet. Her skin like the sleeve was dim. Her eyes and the stones in her rings were bright.

“You are so quick to understand. I am going to tell you. I’m worrying about Marcia.”

“That won’t help us, you know.”

“Why can’t she make up her mind to love some one?”

Tom laughed. “What a lot of contradictions in a little sentence!”

“I don’t know--I don’t know what we may have to do.”

She seemed, after all, resigned. If Marcia could love no one, with her mind or without, let her stay single.

“She hasn’t accepted Van Ness yet?”

Laura Duffield shook her head.

Tom thought swiftly.

“Where is Marcia? Is she in? Tell her I am here?”

The mother arose and called the girl. Marcia came to the door, stood silent.

“Hello, Marcia. I came to see you, this evening. Not your Mamma.” He believed it. He wanted to be with her--all else was a pretext.

“Yes: and it’s lucky too,” Mrs. Duffield bustled to her desk. “I have a thousand letters to answer. Do be dears, and leave me alone.”

She was settled and her back was on them. She was looking better. Such confidence she had in Tom!

He followed Marcia. She went to the opposite corner of her room: near her cheval glass. She stood there. Tom closed the door, let his weight lean upon it, then seated himself in a broad arm-chair. Her whiteness was taut: her black hair and eyes were hot. A tremble swift and faint sang through her. She found she could not stop it. She moved and took up an ivory brush, she strove to let her trembling flow from her two hands to it. It was a very long time since Tom and she were alone.

“Marcia, please sit down.”

She complied at once: she flushed with anger that she had. Tom came and leaned over her. He looked obliquely at her great black eyes and the sharp perfection of her chin and the way of her white throat. He put his open hands on her hair, he turned her face upward toward him. He placed his dosed lips on her parted ones. His hands slipped down her face, her neck, her body. He stood away. She said:

“Why do you do that, Tom?”

“That is how I feel.”

“Don’t lie, Tom.”

“I am not lying, Marcia.”

Her eyes blazed up. It was a burst of bravery and challenge. They crumpled. She hid her head in her arms, she wept.

Tom put his hand firmly to the back of her head where the hair was caught away from the neck.

“Listen, Marcia, I am not lying. Listen, please, Marcia.”

She was silent, if she was still weeping. She did not raise her head.

Tom leaned and kissed her neck. The faint scent of her hair in his eyes.

Marcia straightened sudden. He met the attack of her gesture.

“Now listen, do you hear?”

She stayed balanced, looking at him straight: her eyes filled with an ironic hunger. So Tom wanted her. He began before she changed.

“You have never understood me, Marcia. I can’t blame you. I have never understood myself. I am honest with you. I have always been. Perhaps it was expecting too much, dear, that you should be able to stand that.... Marcia, I care for you now, as I did before, more than for any woman in the world.”

She dropped her eyes and began to finger the embroidery of her chair.

“I go through strange tides, Marcia. I cannot help that. Most men have hypocrisy to hide these ebbs. Most women have passiveness. I have neither. So I suffer.... Marcia,” he went on, “I do not want to lose you. But also I do not want to hurt you. Can’t I have you, without hurting you, Marcia! It was because I had not answered that question, that I forced myself away, forced myself cool.”

“What do you mean, Tom?”

He took a chair and brought it beside hers and seated himself. With a great calm he heard himself say:

“Marcia--will you marry me?”

“I should love to, Tom.”

“We could manage. I might even gradually start to pay off your Mamma’s debts. A little flat. Two weeks at the seashore. A cook....”

He spoke very seriously, with each item stroked the slender pearly hand he had taken.

Marcia withdrew it. “Don’t be a silly, Tom.”

He jumped up. He drew her after him: he held her close, kissed her throat.

“It is not impossible. I want you, Marcia.”

“You have had me.”

“I have never had you.” He thrust her away and walked to where she first had faced him. “You know I have never had you, Marcia. How can you--oh----!” He threw up his arms and stopped.

Marcia came closer. “Tom,” she said, “what do you really want of me?”

“Yourself....” He paused. “But without the sense that I am harming you. Yourself, without restraint.”

“Why did you leave me, Tom?”

“I’ll tell you. Despise me, if you will. I’ll tell you. Because I had a guilty conscience. Because I thought not alone of your future but of your mother. Because I seemed unable to be either your lover or your husband.”

She smiled.

“You’re not the sort of man one should marry.”

“Unfortunately I lack qualifications.” He put bitterness into his voice. She was sure--and glad--she had hurt him. “But civilized standards have nothing to do with love. I could love a woman, if only she were in a civilized way disposed of, so that we could afford the luxury.”

Marcia laughed and placed her hand back in his.

“Why have you never put things this way before?”

“Never put things this way before?” He was amazed. He burst out laughing. “Really, my dear, this is too ironic. I had given you up: I had given you a free hand to marry. I was prepared to lose you permanently rather than stand even temporarily in your way. But you did not marry. What did that mean? I didn’t know. How could I? But what should keep me from hoping? Any fool may do that. At least there was the circumstantial evidence that you had not married. That is why I came to-night, Marcia. I came to ask you to marry me. To plead with you. For the first time I was prepared to sacrifice you for my own desire--altogether. And now, when I am acting my most selfish self, for the first time you see the sacrificial mood that I was in before!”

She placed her arms about him.

“Strange contradictory dear.... You shall have me, dearest. Wait and see how soon. I think I never wanted you quite so much.”

“Marcia!”

“Don’t let your feelings blind you to reason, Tom. _Our_ feelings. You don’t want a wife. If I was rich--or you were--even then, would you want a wife? You want _me_. I you. Without alloy, dear. I’ll marry King.”

She smiled brightly.

“Do you know why I put it off? Because I thought it might mean real captivity. It must have, Tom--without you, there, to rescue me. Oh,” her face darkened, “I could not stand the thought of him without the antidote!” She was silent, brooding. Her eyes seemed full of the picture of her life with the dull rich man. It stifled her, blinded.

“I could not have stood it, Tom. I can now! Without you, it must have meant prison. Now, it means release--adventure. Yes!” She seemed to be emphasizing her resolve--bringing it clear before her eyes to see it. “You’ll see that I am game. I am almost happy.”

She sank down in her chair, and smiled at him; tears kept her from seeing how he smiled a bit wistfully away.

She needed to be silent. If for no other reason, for the tears.

She wanted to ask him simply: “Do you _love_ me, Tom? For Tom, if you did _love_ me....” She did not dare her question. She did not dare, even in her silence, to conclude it. She was afraid of his answer. Both for him and for her she was afraid. Both of his “yes” and his “no.” After all, her mind faded and veered, she had better marry King. It would be going on.

She was dry-eyed.

Tom took her hand and kissed it.

* * * * *

“What do I really mean by all these things I do?” When Tom was alone his question came often, came without answer. When he was with David, it hurt and these things he did were like ash in his mouth. But even the hurt was better than the reverberating silence. So Tom fled solitude.

But what of David? What did he want of David? Was he glad of him or bitterly, passionately sorry? Did he want him close or far away? His acts and moods, were they designed to hold or to repel him?

Tom was at a pass where all these things were chaos. The clear facts of living were straws in a heaving sea: straws he reached for. He went brightly about his profession. It prospered. But it became more and more a thing to hide from David. And all such things were more and more to be hidden from himself. Marcia was engaged. He feared her marriage which he had manoeuvered, vaguely, as the time of a demand he could not face. Also he looked forward to her marriage: the senses of him: his blood and his wits as well. Marcia’s marriage must be a function of both.

He tried, close to David, to blot out his conflicts. He tried to realize that it was David himself who brought about the conflicts: and to pursue the rational conclusion that it was David who must be blotted out. His reasonings had the way of playing him into some dark dilemma. The forces driving him toward the constant agitation of his wits seemed all too clearly irrational and heart-sent. He could not isolate the verbs of his reason. If he did, he found them without subject, object--dead waifs of sound flecking a hollow mind. His reaching for the true drive within him left him a streak in imponderable Space, as if he had grasped a Comet. It was better to be confined to straws.

The schemings pertinent to Marcia, straws: the intricate work downtown, straws also: the being with friends, the satisfaction of his senses, straws again. The effect upon his mind--this passionate bestowal upon work he could not respect, upon pleasure he could not enjoy--was a slow desiccation. He was dry, cynical, erethic. He needed to rouse himself to heights of activation: his work called for no less. And the impulse rousing him was ever one he was cold to. A strain on his nerves. As in a man making himself drunk with drink he forces himself to swallow.

Needfully, since this vast disharmony gained on his life and since each part of it warred against the others, Tom came to bestow upon its various factors the quality of respite and escape. He needed a makeshift harmony in order to live. One instant of admitted anarchy in our minds means madness: in our bodies death. Since discord was there, it must be balanced with other discord. One group of his thoughts swelled, sagged out of place: he propped it into a semblance of poise with another hypertrophy. So discord propagates itself. Life went on.

David was there to cleanse him of the tastes of his worldly work, restore his self-respect, give him a vantage point against the scheming Tom of the day. His other friends--shallow, quick fellows ready to give what he asked and forward-coming, helpless women like Laura Duffield--were there to balance the reticence of David, ease his diseased hunger, throw him momentarily free of the strange dissatisfaction of his one satisfying friendship. The function of work was to sustain him, flush his energies until such time as he knew how he wanted to play. Marcia was compensation for that in him which could not look to David. David was compensation for that in him which was ashamed of Marcia. His hours with David and Cornelia were sleep in which he lived as he dreamed, won strength to face the waking: his hours of work were respite from the starved clamor of his dreams--a way of winning time from their insistence.

So his life stumbled and shook ahead. It held together. But it was textured of half-true, half-meeting elements. Its hazardous solution caused a continual ferment. The sign of ferment was his growing pain in a life stumbling, shaking ahead.

He walked down a Square with that lithe pacing stride of his. Half clenched fists swung at his side. There was a fairly constant strain in his eyes that lifted them in their sockets. With teeth tight set, he hummed a tune. Energy was forever thus escaping from him. When he did nothing, he fell at once into a state of preparedness for flight. He wanted to get away: get out. He could not. Life gripped him and he loved it. But much energy was born of this deep impulse to escape. He scattered it about. Much he applied--and applied to perfect the conditions of that very life from which his nerves rebelled. His vitality in talk, his speed of impressions, his plasticity of posture in the world grew from this energy. So that he shook along in a vicious circle. Much of his power to throw life into his work came from the secretions of his dissatisfaction with it: from the energy of his dissatisfaction. But life is full of such mechanical paradox. All of civilized life is such a one. Many a man succeeds in the conscious world because of the failure hidden in his heart.

Tom stopped. He was before a crumbling brownstone house: a rusting iron grille, a gate thrown out on useless hinges. A tiny plot of grass flanked the narrow walk. The soil was rocky: sediment of the City--cans, flakes of cloth, splint eyes of glass--choked the slim green. From the low stoop the house flared up, soft in decay.

Tom turned his back on the house. He looked North on the Square. In his eyes was a hunger for open places. His glance consumed the narrow breadth of the Park with its dapper walks and its trees. It broke impatient on the row of red-brick houses. It spent itself. Tom’s gaze narrowed. He turned and went up the stairs. They were dirty and dark--four flights. Odor of mildew and misspent lives seeped from brown plaster.

He struck his fist on the door. Behind him was a hall painted the color of stale chocolate. In the center of the fly-blown ceiling a sudden cupola, picked out in glass--green, yellow, blue. Sky came through dim and soiled.

A young stout fellow opened the door and gave a cry of pleasure: let Tom in.

“Hello, Rennard! Flora. Florissima! Company’s complete.”

Tom pressed Lars Durthal’s hand. “Hello, Lars,” he passed him.

A long narrow table spread in the square small room. The heavy mantel was ribald with knick-knacks of varicolored glass, purchased in useless shapes at Coney Island and Asbury Park. Their gayety, adance in the boxed mirrors of the yellow wood, seemed irrelevant above the table, with its high unlabelled bottles of red wine, its mounds of Italian bread, its platters of cervelat, tomatoes, sardelles. The table’s order was disturbed by its broken wreath of guests.

Most of the diners lounged already in their chairs. Between laughter and smoke they sent their eyes lazily toward the kitchen. They had begun with their wine.

“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” a slender fellow spoke, upon whose long neck poised a head remarkably round and small; within his face with its fat sanguine cheeks the eyes and mouth and nose took up an inconspicuous space.

“Good evening, Marquese.” Lagora was a nobleman: a dealer in marble according to his one report, in Italian oils and spices according to his other. A clever, shifty, cloudy fellow with hands like a girl’s.

Tom sat down with an air of temporariness beside him.

“Well, Dounia--comment ça va?” He leaned and placed a finger on the cheek of the woman across the table. Dounia Smith put down her glass. “I’ve no cigarettes.”

Tom placed a box in her expectant hand. They were enormous hands: gaunt, naked, acquisitive, with a wrinkle about the finger-joints that was sinister against the smooth calm of her wrists. Behind her hands, Dounia Smith rose diminished. She was tall, handsomely cut: her hair swept black and low over her temples: her eyes had a gray slant that offset the thin lips, the sharp tilt of her chin. When she lighted her cigarette she showed all of her teeth. They were white. But as the gaunt huge hand came near her face, the rest of Dounia Smith went into eclipse.

A man came up, neatly and drably dressed, with a red tie that flared against the pale primness of his face.

“Glad you’re here, Rennard. Business particularly boring, to-day. Fun particularly needed, to-night.”

This was Christian Hill--sedate, rebellious--a man of business who craved intoxicants of life. All his sentences sounded like telegrams. All his money, too sanely earned in a broker’s office, was at the disposal of his search for madness. He looked on Tom as his ideal. He would have sold his wife into slavery for a lust sufficiently great to make him commit the folly.

“I want to introduce you,” he beckoned toward a girl that had sat yonder beside him. “Madeline--this is Mr. Rennard--Miss Gross.”

She came sidling. She was richly clad, very blond, very powdered. Beneath the simper of blue eyes, the hot curl of placid lips and the ringlets of blond hair teasing her tiny ear, Tom saw that she was Jewish.

He took her tiny hand, gloved in fawn-colored kid.

“It is nice to have you here, Miss Gross. I hope our rough manners won’t shock you.”

She propelled herself a little nearer.

“Oh, please do, Mr. Rennard!”

“You want to be shocked, Miss Gross?”

Hill intervened. “But you can’t, Rennard. You don’t know my little Madeline.”

The little Madeline simpered and tapped her escort’s mouth with the back of her gloved hand.

“How do you know, Christian? Just because _you_ couldn’t.” Bending her body back, she threw her head back also. She gazed at Tom through the lashes of her half-shut eyes.

Durthal came up.

“Your place is there, old man. Between Lunn and me.”

“Good evening, Flora. Say, you have room for Markand? I made him promise he’d be here.”

A thick-set woman, with face incredibly composed and large bare arms crossed over the gray width of her dress, nodded to Tom and to the others.

“Good evening, Flora.” “Hello, Flora,” the greetings came. Flora did not budge from her place in the kitchen door. Hill dragged Miss Gross through the scatter of chairs.

“Oh, Signora Sanni,” he said, “I want to introduce my friend.”

Flora Sanni wiped her right hand slowly, methodically on her apron.

“Buena sera, Signorina.” She took the gloved hand, dropped it, turned about. Her eyes were steel. She had taken longer to wipe her hands on her apron.

Tom moved in Durthal’s power toward the nearer end of the table.

A young girl shut the door.

“Here you are,” muttered Lagora.

She nodded timidly to her neighbors--maliciously to Dounia Smith, a defensive malice--and sat down beside the Marquese. He drew close his chair. The two began muttering together. Lagora leaned forward. The girl bent back from the thrust of his mood and his body. She was a frail creature--a tissue of harried nerves with great black teeming eyes. Her hand tapped on the plate. She lit a cigarette, inhaled a great gust, emptied Lagora’s wine glass and then blew out the smoke. Her body was draped in a short tight smock of blue hung from her shoulders. Her tiny breasts stood up in it quite clear. Lagora’s brows worked up and down. Her big eyes sharpened and cut him. He looked at her twitching shoulders.

“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” she cried as she passed him. She threw up a diminutive hand. Her breasts bobbed.

“How are you, Lettie?” Tom, taking her hand, had the sense of Lagora smiling with snakish eyes. He passed on.

A lumbering boy got up, nodding and saying no word.

“Well, Darby?” Tom sat down. “I’ve not seen you in a week.”

“A long time,” synchronously growled the other. Tom heard him and laughed.

“And the painting?”

Tom and Darby Lunn were lost together in talk. From the table’s farther end Durthal saw them together. The laugh of Dounia Smith, the shrill sneer of Lettie tossing her heels, the mutter of Lagora were a wave, gathering, crumpling upon the calm of Signora Sanni. Durthal extricated himself from Hill and Miss Gross. He headed through the disserried chairs. Stretched arms reached for wine and tastes of antipasto. The evening splintered and swirled. Food would draw it together.

Durthal stood over Tom.

“Here, old man. Change over. You sit between us.”

Finding his seat, he also had the sense of haven beneath the spray and scatter of the room.

Of the three, Tom was the only one whose voice carried beyond them: laughing. Dounia Smith eyed him with a tilt of her head. A finger, like a talon, flecked her cigarette. Her brows were thin and straight like the stroke of a sharp pencil on hard paper.

Flora Sanni stood above the table, with a vast white bowl of _minestrone_. The crowd coalesced.

The table narrowed. The chandelier, relic of fluted brass and drooping crystal, took on the tawdry tone of office and gave its light, self-consciously, heatedly, like an old servant, too laden with memory and years to want to work for so crass a gathering. The carved clock ticked: a clatter of plates drew down bent necks, beading foreheads. Sharp streakings of sound ribboned the table: swathed it: covered it with a warm liquidity. Then the whipped undertone of selves seeped up again, lapped over the inorganic sound, deluged it, drowned it in angular surge of assertions.

The door gave a knock that was heard at last....

David had followed upstairs a pair who were held to slowness by the constant claim of the woman that she was too weary to go another step.

“Come along, Phoebe!” The man had a high straight back. He wore a soft collar that bared his neck. David observed that it was wiry and clean. The hairs were clipped high from it. David had time to observe. Whenever the pair came to a rest, he rested behind them. Something impeded his passing. Timidity in part. The disclosing thereby that he had overheard them, that they were moving too slowly. His own scarce unconscious resistance to mounting those stairs at all. He hated the place. But he had no reason to give to Tom. And Tom took offense at his not wishing to come.

“Why, dear man. Don’t you like Flora? I think Flora is splendid. Such poise! Or is the place too noisy for you. David? Davie, you must get accustomed to dirt!”

A vehemence in Tom that silenced David. Doubtless this was life, and life no thing to shrink from.

“But I do like Flora!” He could not add that he felt that Flora did not like him: did not seem to like any one who came there: nor the feeling that if she had known him different and uncomfortable, perhaps she would have liked him.

“Well, then!” said Tom.

The stout lady was sighing. “Why we ever come here, Jack! These stairs!”

“You know it is lots of fun, Phoebe. Go along now. You like it as well as I.” He spoke immaculate English, and urged her with a slap on her rump.

“Well, the people----”

“----the food?” he chuckled. “The mysterious bottom of Signora Sanni’s pot. One more hoist, old lady. Th--th--ere! Where else, pray, can one meet such a delightful assortment of bulls?”

“Don’t call them bulls, Jack Korn! Call them detectives.”

“Here we are, dear.”

David and they entered together.