Part 22

“Korn, I _am_ glad to see you!” Tom reached over the table and greeted him. “How’s business?” He had nodded to David and Korn’s woman with a perfunctory politeness.

“Meet my dear friend, Mr. Korn,” he laughed. “Same profession as myself.” The three sat opposite Durthal and Tom and Lunn. Mrs. Phoebe Raymond was on one side of David. On the other sat Dounia Smith. All of them laughed, except David.

He looked at Korn. A big, athletic fellow, clad in somber serge. He had black hair and a significant nose.... Why had all of them laughed?

“I have never seen you here before, Mr. Markand,” said Phoebe Raymond.

“I--I come quite often.”

“Well, I don’t,” she looked full at him. “One gets so little time.” Her round face was pretty. But it was fat: its petite features were lost in flesh. Her bosom obtruded like a robin’s breast. David seemed to see, investing the round comeliness of her mouth and nose, layers of sloth and greed. A scaly dimness was already over the blue eyes. “I like small gatherings more, don’t you?” she confided. “One could get to _know_ a person then.” David had the sense that if he drank enough of the wine Mrs. Raymond would seem very pretty indeed.

He began to eat. Words pattered and burst about him. The food had an exotic charm. The air was full of heated eyes and bodies. Glances and edged remarks trembled like flung spears in the flesh of the women. David kept still and went on eating.

Phoebe Raymond tried to engage him in talk.

“My husband and I were in Maine at the time. Do you know New England, Mr. Markand?”

“Of course he knows it! Can’t you see it written all over him, Phoebe?” It was Tom drawing her away. “How dare you talk to my friend about your husband! Have you no sense of decency?”

The immediate half of the table was his. He played it like an instrument. His eyes were too bright and too hard, thought David. He had little to say to him. To Durthal and to Lunn, to the women on David’s side, to Hill even and Lagora, he had more to say than to David. Most of all to Korn. But he looked often at his friend--sharp glances while his attention swathed from right to left. David was enmeshed in his running comment: all Tom said seemed to run through him and knit him.

“It is hard not to be moral,” he said. “One is pushed so into good behavior.”

Jack Korn sat back smiling. He was a strong man. He was very quiet.

“What do you think of good behavior, Korn?” Tom asked him.

“It is as good a game as another.” He paused. “Surer.”

“But why should we want to be sure? Since we are already sure of death? Look at Dounia, there. She has never done a risky thing in her life. Run over her investments. Burton, Klein, La Soule--all good gold bonds. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, my dear. You remind me of Markand’s uptown relations.”

“And what are you crowing about?” Dounia retorted. “You’re as safe as an eel.”

“I have at least the good manners to be ashamed of it,” Tom laughed. “To hide it and even lie about it. I am gaining strength.”

He looked admiringly at Korn. “Here, old man, I drink to the logic--to the beauty of your life!” He held forth his wine glass.

Korn raised his to his eyes, nodded and sipped. Tom drained.

“Did you get that, Davie?” he said. “The contempt Korn showed in answering my toast? I do not blame him. I’ve never earned his respect. Think how he must despise _you_!”

Korn did not turn his head. Lunn grunted and smirked--in his plate. Dounia and Phoebe came to David’s rescue.

From Dounia: “I am sure Mr. Markand is br-raver, much b-raver than you!”

From Phoebe: “Jack, deny that you despise Mr. Markand.”

Tom drove ahead. “But I’ll earn your respect yet, Jack Korn. I may be earning it now....”

Christian Hill was nudging Miss Gross.

“He’s a wonder, is Rennard. You must get him. The other man, the one in the black suit, Madeline, _he_--he is----” Hill whispered in the young girl’s ear. Her fork clattered: her little eyes lost their dim cunning: became bright and large.

“Really?” she gasped. She gazed at Korn and was speechless. Her hand went to the old bead bag in her lap.

Talk like a comet drew to the head of Tom and Korn. They held it: they swung it: it was a dazzle of gyre to the jerk of their directions. At the farther end of the table, Signora Sanni came and went: sat imperturbable. She was a woman of more than forty. Disillusion was sweet in her firm, strong face. It was a preservative. It did not keep her pretty, it kept her content. Her features had set. It was as if they had thrown away their woman’s tricks of blandishment and surprise: as if they had sold their power to impassion at the price of passion itself. At her side were Lagora and Lettie Dew. These three alone were intact from the ebullient pull of the other end of the table. Lagora was incapable of an objective interest. He ate seriously, he spoke to Signora Sanni, he nagged Lettie. The eyes of Miss Dew wandered from their circuit between her plate and the ceiling, to David. For a moment, their gaze softened; something swam in her eyes, something stirred like a cloud’s rift in her mind. With a violent gust of smoke--for she smoked incessantly--she blew it away.

“But I maintain,” Tom said, “that the law makes the game all the more delicious. The more rules, the more brains to overturn them.”

Korn smiled and nodded: “Goethe put it--‘In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.’”

“What does that mean?” Tom was held up.

“Just about what you are saying,” replied Korn.

“Well, then, Goethe is right.” Every one laughed except David.

Tom raced: “I like obstacle races: I like hurdles. Society is made up simply of men who run flat, like you, dear Korn, or go in for steeple-chasing, like myself. Now, I have a friend--tell me, Korn, what do you think of this for manipulation ...?”

It was amazing, thought David, how little Korn said for one who held such sure attention.

“----with the girl married, he controls her life. Do you see? Of course he must pay his minimum--let us say his taxes--for that. But say what you want, love or no love, there’s always about the same ratio of satisfaction in a love affair. Eh, Dounia?” he baited her. “Come, Dounia, tell us for once. Down with the veils. Is there so much difference whether you love the man or not? I am convinced that woman’s pleasure is utterly subjective. Who gives it to her is of no consequence--unless she lets herself be imposed on by Society’s mandates, standards, sentimentalities. Won’t you enlighten us, Dounia?”

She looked at him with a defensive sharpness. How did he guess how women felt? how utterly subjective passion was--at least in her? Phoebe also stirred back in her chair. His arrows were scattering too near. How could he tell--he was peering mischievously at her--that she strove often to forget her man in order to be happy with him?

“You see, she won’t tell. These women who think that being dumb is being secret. As I was saying, he controls the lady. And she controls her husband. And since he is high in power in the world downtown, my friend controls that also. No prettier, no more outlawed game could be imagined. I maintain it is pretty enough, Korn, for your praise.”

Korn chuckled. Tom raced on.

David had the sense that in a circling way he was the goal of Tom. Tom threw out flaring lines, struck here, flung there, with himself as center of his operations.

He lost this sense. It was replaced by the poignant one that Tom ignored him. If anything remained of the earlier impression, merely that the avoidance was planned. Tom paid more heed to every one in the room! His attention was flattering and was canny. He baited Dounia, but Dounia could not bait him. Durthal and Lunn were subsidiary strings that reënforced his theme: and the women. He wove his complex music with the lives and thoughts of all those present. And when he noticed David, it was to prod him--to hurt him.

Then, still another sense. David began to feel himself separate from this noisy element he was immersed in. He put forth spiritual fingers to explore it. He drew his shredded findings in; he began to explore himself.

He felt a hazardous balance, swung safe from fall by an impalpable thread, between himself and this room: himself and Tom. Even the gaslights, naked and stiff and hot, were elements of Tom. He was on the other side and was alone. But there was a joy in the experience of separation. He was apart, impregnable. He could poise somewhat the laughter, the surge, the flection about him; arrive at himself.... Was he impregnable after all? Why, then, hurt?

... Wine soaked soft these men and women--these prisons of sense. Sense swirled unhindered upward, danced with spiraling cohesion beneath the gasjets....

The door pushed open again. A man, dull shouldered, with heavy head and tread and unlit eyes, came in and nodded and sat down at the end of the table beside Korn. With the door wide for a moment a strange world stood in the hall beside the room: a world, cool and hidden.

He was also an accustomed guest. He came with heavy breath as if each breath lifted a weight of flesh against some obstruction in his gullet. He nodded dully, with a brighter gaze alone for Tom.

“Too bad you weren’t here earlier,” said Tom. “The law needed your defense.”

“So?” he was dully aware. His eyes peered out, like a big dog’s, disturbed at feed.

“I think Officer Murphy might do well to ar-r-rest you all,” said Dounia.

“Oh, you wouldn’t have him do that,” cried Hill, with a slightly trembling voice. “It is such fun breaking all the Commandments.”

“So long as glasses are not broken,” said Tom.

“How is work, Murphy,” asked Korn with a serious full face whose irony was far beyond the detective’s wit.

“Oh, slow ... _glp_. Ain’t much ... _glp_ ... doin’.” Murphy looked up and down the table, interested at last, lacking something. “Say, Flora,” his gross voice thrust out. “A little of the red?”

The gathering paused momentarily about the intrusion: swirled about it. He was a gap in its midst, a load on its vital spirit. His fleshly dullness must be smeared over with raillery and laughter. The crowd began to digest him. Murphy disappeared.

His heft, now dissolved, was an added strength in the room’s swelter.

Tom rode the wave of broken personalities and whipped it and steered it. Lagora forgot his duties toward Lettie and tried to make love to Flora. He flattered her. He owed her money. He thought it might be well not to have to pay for his dinners. Signora Sanni flicked off his words like flies. She was learning the unlikelihood of being paid. And Lettie Dew, released, allowed herself to gaze full and long at David who was back in the storm taking its breast, distinguishing no thing. Phoebe was moist and breathing hard. She was safe, however, beside Korn. Her sense of safety crowned with smugness her bibulous affection.

“I believe truly,” she said to David, “we should be going.” She had said this over and over. It gave her the excuse she somehow wanted for finishing each succeeding glass of wine. She spoke measuredly. She was passionately anxious to have David know she was more the lady than Dounia Smith or Flora.

Lettie leaned over and smiled at David. Very suddenly. David smiled back. Lettie scowled. David was hurt. As soon as he looked away, her eyes were once more on him.

Miss Gross, cool, unliquored, chuckled and took the varying scene; she wondered why Mr. Rennard evaded her diagnosis. She knew that later, Hill would try to kiss her. He would take her home in a cab for no other purpose. She was debating whether she wanted to be kissed by him, or no. It might be fun. He was a married man! There he was pendulous, at her side. He looked down more daring at her light-lashed corsage. How far dared he be mad--was Madeline worth madness? The price----: He was dismayed to find himself sobering under his question: deciding against it.

“Damn it!” He jumped to his feet and brandished his glass. “Let’s be--let’s be----” his voice died down: “----free souls, to-night.”

He found his seat limply. It was his tragedy to be sane. This Madeline Gross--pretty though she was--was not yet the creature for whom he expectantly and religiously waited: not yet the love for whom he was to abandon his wife and child, with whom he was to be lost in the sacrament of irreparable Folly. Not yet. Perhaps never! He was sober. He put a bottle to his lips and emptied it. It gave him a stomach-ache. He began to recall that Madeline lived far uptown, and that a cab would cost a considerable lot of money.

The night was mellow and soft. It grew smeared with the sweat of wear: hard with broken clusters of decay. It was over....

* * * * *

Tom and David walked homeward in silence.

David knew one thing, and it hurt: Tom had been showing off to the man called Korn. He had one question. At last he asked it:

“Who is Mr. Korn?”

Something quailed in Tom. He took his answer, flung it brutally against his quailing.

“Korn?” He was looking ahead, far ahead. “Korn--why, Korn is a pickpocket.”

There were no more words. They went down the hall of their home: each entered his room.

Tom closed the door.... It was very white and very quiet and clean. He sat on his bed. Resting his chin in his hands, he went on looking ahead, looking far ahead. Seeing nothing. The alarm-clock was obtrusive with its tick-tack-tick. The window was open from the top. A faint breeze made the white mesh curtains stir. Tom felt a soiled self sitting on the bed, felt soiled feet on the tidied floor. Tom felt a desecration.

He was up. He was almost like a somnambulist. He was in David’s room. They were looking at each other.

“I have done nothing. You fool, acting as if you were guilty!” he said to himself.

“Yes, Tom?” David did not understand the stillness.

Tom was in conflict. “Are you sure--are you sure you are not guilty?” Words cried to be spoken. He had none.

“Don’t be shocked, Davie,” he spoke at last. “One must meet all sorts----”

“I am not shocked. But it is strange. He seemed so intelligent a man.”

Tom pounced, with passion of relief.

“He is intelligent, Davie! That is life. You don’t know how life is lived in New York. There are no sharp distinctions, Davie, between criminals and honest men....” He stopped. That sounded wrong. He plunged in, to make it right. “--- What I mean is, the ways allowed by the law and the other ways--there are conventions, Davie. Now-adays, to get along, a young man must break in, must break in somehow. Strictly speaking, that is never quite a righteous----” He stopped again. David looked with gentle eyes: was Tom pleading, was Tom pleading for Korn or for another? Tom’s rage came sudden, a birth of weakness....

“Look here,” he attacked him, “what a prig you sometimes seem, man! What do you know about life? You who have always gone a greased path, sliding into fortune! Do you think all men have uncles to do the cheating and the robbing for them?”

David’s fists closed. He held himself.... By God, was Tom right?

Tom felt his victory. He was enraged still more. He struck again. “If we all had the fat lap of your aunt to coddle us, or the pure lips of your cousin to teach us love for nothing! Perhaps you think that any man who hasn’t some one else to lay the dirt for him had better stay under? A lot you know about life.”

“But Tom----”

“Look about you. I don’t apologize for Korn. He is what he is. He is the typical social being. Nakedly. The rest of us think we are the pretty names we are called by.”

He stopped. David was silent. A great fear ran through Tom.

“When you learn, David, to be a man, to give a little understanding--you may deserve the friend you have.”

Still David looked at him, looked beyond him, searched for a reason. Tom went out. It was as if the air that enveloped David sucked him backward.

Once more Tom was in his room. Its clear white calm was unbearable to him. He would be less harried in the dark. He shut off the gas. He flung himself upon his bed. He could not bear the darkness. He could not bear the light. Doubtless, next door, David was quietly taking off his clothes. Slow, slightly puzzled--unbearable David! Oh, he could murder! He jumped up. Something dim, something gray, something dirty and simple and soft: this was his need. He rushed down to the street....

* * * * *

Reaction.... Tom was contrite. He watched David sharply, aloofly even, then did some good thing for him. Some intimate thing none but a loving eye could have devised: and with a quiet tact. So there was David more bewildered than before. But not David alone. He understood no less than Tom. The storm of their relationship seemed moving toward no issue.

David was sick--a little sick.

“You shan’t go downtown, to-day, do you hear!” commanded Tom. “This is a busy day for me, but if you don’t give me your word you’ll stay home, I’ll stay home myself to make you.”

He went out and telephoned to David’s office. He came back with a doctor. Tonsillitis.

Tom nursed him. Mrs. Lario found there was really little she could do. David had an assortment of dainties to sip. “This won’t hurt your throat.” He had books. He had a splendid array of cushions architected for his back to prop him for reading.

Mrs. Deane came and found her nephew lying happy in the large front room.

“More sun,” Tom explained. “It was no job moving the bed.”

“It is wonderful, child, how Mr. Rennard nurses you. I would no more dream of interfering.... You do not appear to be very busy downtown, Mr. Rennard.”

Tom laughed. “Oh, no, Mrs. Deane. Nothing to do at all. But do not give me away.”

David understood.

“Supposing work does go to hell? It won’t. But supposing it did? Pooh!”

David could not forget such things.

Nor, in their light, could he forget Tom’s accusation that _he_ was selfish: that _he_ had no idea of service. This one rift there was in the harmony of Tom’s helping: a certain flavor of rebuke as he served, a certain stress and reminder. “Here is how _I_ serve my friend.” Yet David could not be sure. The rebuke he felt in Tom’s ministrations for his own lazy selfishness might altogether lie in his own guilty conscience. What did he ever do for Tom? So far as he could see, what did he ever do for any one at all? His life was a sliding down greased paths. Fortune or no fortune, what hold had he on the way? Lying there on his cushioned couch, he found himself wishing Tom had not come back so soon from work in order to see how he was. And wishing this, he felt his guilt the more....

In flashes, like blaze in an empty sky, the emptiness of David came to him and filled him and gave him great hurt. Whither indeed was he going, and where was he? If Tom was querulous, irritable, weak, if Tom scoffed at his relatives, refused to be serious about his friends and would hear no word of his loves, what was David to complain? His relations were nothing to Tom: he knew too well what earthy ones they were. Had David respect for his own brief amours? Was there one of his relationships with man or woman that was noble, that lifted him up? Was there one, who worked for him and served him, as Tom did? Tom was faulty. Yes. But David was a monster in that he seemed to partake neither of the virtue nor of the sin of man. He was a trimmer. He was clamped down in some chill Limbo. Knowledge came to him, even now, of his idle and empty ways, like lightning in a lazy summer night: flashing and gone, muttering afar, doing no work upon him.

He was a spiritually sprawling creature. He had no coördination. If his heart was touched, how did his mind respond? If his mind, where was the response in deed? It seemed to David that what he did wore away the energy of his mind, dullened his heart: and what he felt and thought became impediments to those acts which his living called for. He was a loose-bound bundle of life, rolling down a chute....

In the fall, Constance Bardale telephoned to him.

“I am back. When can you come to see me?”

It was always hard for David to meet a sudden situation on the wire. He needed a face and a warm smile to talk to. He was afraid he had been dull in greeting Constance. For so long a time he had not thought of her at all!

“Then, I’ll expect you Saturday to tea.”

She had not suggested an evening. The choice of the formal hour meant nothing to David.

“I must make her know--somehow I must make her know I can’t go on.”

David said this to himself, going to see her. He did not recall that he had failed to write since the apparition of the little girl in the car. The poignancy of that vision was faded. But it had left its mark. In its loveliness it had blighted certain ugly things in his heart: disappeared. The condition whence sprang the ugly things was still in David. He was not cured. He was merely bitterly aware that he was not well.

Constance Bardale appeared different. Her new Paris gown was strange and stiff and be did not like it. She was far away within it. Even her voice had the apartness of alien adventures.

She took his hand swiftly and manoeuvered him into a chair.

“It is good to find you so flourishing. What _do_ you get out of New York air to make you flower so! I thought of you particularly in a little Normandy town where we stopped with friends. A Napoleonic Baron--very plebeian that, for France. There was a gardener--of the château--who had the one true aristocracy. A big brusk fellow. How he adored his flowers and his vegetables! He reminded me of the way you are sometimes.”

David thought how hard it was going to be to break the news of his resolve to Constance. It dawned on him now that it might be unnecessary. Of a sudden, “She has decided for me!” he announced, amazed, to himself.

He looked at her. Once more she meant discovery. For months, now, she had been far from his senses, but his mind had thought her close. Now his mind knew her far away, and his senses clamored.

They were at a point far anterior to their first warm meeting. No hint of intimacy: no hint that it had ever been: no credible sign that it could ever be. She talked fluently, her words and gestures took on for David the nature of a sinuous veil, a blank blue of smiling nugatories behind which the woman he had known retreated.

Apart from her now as he had never been, he wanted the warmth of her nearness. His resolution to break off was a dim thing. He could not understand it. He sat there and had forgotten it. This helped not at all. Her way with him was beyond the mutability of a resolve. It seemed a natural condition.

It was as if she had looked on him never closer before. She was a lady with all the aloofness of her sex: not one to let him fling off her clothes, let him lie beside her. The hope was monstrous of what once, without hope, had been fact. It was over....

In his chagrin he could not find the comfort even of supposing that she had sensed his decision and simply gone before him. He could not lave his hurt in the thought that his long silence, with her in Europe, was perhaps an introduction she had understood to her own course. He was like a child: so aware of his own grievance, and of the sanctity of his mood, he had no knowledge of hers. Like a child he came away, routed, fascinated, fingering over and nursing his several hurts.

But, looking back, what humiliated David most was not these bruises to his pride--was rather the dispatch with which he had recovered from them. Neither the revelation of the little girl had held him, nor the shaming lesson at the hands of Constance: neither inspiration nor defeat. He had a slow pervading sense of his unchastened nature....

He dined with Caroline Lord. No rare occurrence; but this time Constance was no more, and for the first time Miss Lord said:

“Let’s try to amuse _ourselves_ for a change. What do you say? Don’t you think it’s a confession of no resources to be always going to the theaters? You have never been to my apartment. Come and see _me_, to-night.”