Part 4

She took the glass. She bent down, her hair was a wonder over his eyes. A wonder, since her hair was hot and still it was good. He felt her moist lips on his chest.... There was the constant spirit of the house, the forbidding intrusion of knowing that he was a guest and she a servant, that this was evil.... Anne was gone.

No word at breakfast.... That night David found he was awaiting her and she came. His sheet was over him. He took the glass she offered and placed it on the chair; his arm drew her down till she sat beside him on the bed. He felt her body burning under her cool gown: all the world was distant, so that the house was distant too, and for once the Deanes were in the mountains.

“No, Mr. David....”

He laughed. He was scornful: the Deanes were in the mountains.

A hot black sea was the world, rolling away. His bed rolled upon it; only his bed was above the sea. It was haven. It was haven for him and his woman. He drew her down, and his mouth sought her lips, her neck. His mouth felt the wide loveliness of her body. It was distant still, there was a gown between them. The gown was wide as a world. Her body was growing great, until it was another sea that would cool him. It was a sea of fire, but the fire was white and would cool him. It was needful so.

She struggled.... Sudden she came of her own broken and sick will. Their wills were healing each other. She was willfuller now than he. She held his head in her arms, her flesh was all about him. Her gown was gone.

He found that she was lying beside him, crumpled: holding herself away. He found she was a little bruised woman with bruised little breasts and hair tangled, knotted in heat. He found he was moving away from her.

He found that the night was coming back. It was scornful and triumphant. It waved onward, and upon its bitter burning waves came the Deanes who were no longer in the mountains. There they were in the room. A vast febrile room. Filled with the City and its desolate shadows, filled with the Deanes. Huddling diminished in a corner a guest and a servant.

He spoke to her: “Anne.”

She answered: “Yes, Mr. David,” so he knew she knew this also.

At breakfast the sweet silence of restraint. A Puritan’s vow in the withdrawn eyes of each other.

But the heat did not stop: nor the wearing away of will and the rebellion of nerves. Anne came again. It had nothing to do with the wide remainder of their lives. It was somnambular. She was the soul of the heat--the gladness of it. So they got to be happy together and not to mind very much. They got to laughing and to forgetting. There were never many words. Breakfast was the break from a dream.

David deciphered her silence.

“I am wiser than you believe. I am wiser than you,” it said. “I am thankful for you. You need not worry. Oh, I am very thankful.”

All one week, Anne’s step on the threshold of his room was gone. David fumbled in bare feet along the tunneled hall. His flat palm felt her door. It was locked. The end--sweet end of unreplenishment.

No word further: no glance toward the past to open it once more....

* * * * *

They were really there--the Deanes! A cool, bright night with stars crushed above the crude wave of the city streets. They had traveled through that night and those stars for this city. They were there in the early morning.

They came in discussiveness and noise, as a luxurious gift comes wrapped in crackling paper. Once unbundled, they were rather silent. David sensed an unease and discomfort in their coming--a token of what happened in souls of their kind when they were taken even for a day from the rounds of their habits. David observed with what swift recuperation they merged into the imprint of their house; how their house seemed to sigh and settle with the recapture of its soul. Sudden, there was David, completely strange, dizzily away: with the memory of his amour an unbelievable, discreditable dream.

He watched Anne with the other servants that had come sink swiftly into the cloud of servience: lose her charm and her sex: dwindle in an instant to be an appendage of her mistresses, an inflection of the wishes of these reigning women. By the shock of this a sort of osmosis went on in David.

He found himself partly identified with Anne: had they not been one together?--and, so, diminished, humbled. Another part of him flung her off and merged with his cousins, his flesh and blood; become Anne’s remote and indifferent master.

He stood there awkward while the process shredded and dazed him. Between these warring halves of himself, he fell away from the sharp social trial of the moment--the need of fronting these women. His aunt took note of a vacancy about him.

“Well, David, it’s been a long time waiting to know you.” She added to herself: “He’s stupid.”

Her second daughter, Lois, supplemented her aunt as one generation should another: “I think he’s dear”; she looked at him keenly, “but what’s bewildering him so?”

She came very close to him, and held out her hand. “I’m awfully glad to know you, David.” He took her hand so patiently, that she held up her lips, “We’re cousins,” she explained and she laughed.

With great seriousness, he kissed her and liked her.

Muriel, who was nineteen and three years older and wiser than Lois, watched the little challenge of acquaintance, smiled sourly, busied herself with her bags.

“Well,” she said, searching for her powder puff. “I suppose it has been frightfully hot?”

Mr. Deane had been quarreling with the coachman about the fare: his own carriage was not yet in service. He puffed into the room. David saw and at length realized how changed he was, in the true setting of his wife and daughters. He scarcely noticed David.

“Got everything?” he asked excitedly. “Nothing lost? My! it’s hot! That robber robbed me. Lauretta--you have the keys? I must run along. Where’s breakfast?” He mopped his brow, he paced; and David wondered whether the executive task of shipping his family to New York--or some obscure disturbance--was the thing too much for him.

David stood quietly apart. He unstrapped bags; untied boxes; stacked rugs and tennis rackets into obtrusive corners. They let him work for them, quite as they let Anne work. He found himself dwindling from them: he wondered why he minded performing these casual tasks. He found he did not care for this identity with Anne, although a part of him knew it existed only in himself. He looked at her--not even in her. She was very moist and humble and unattractive in her black skirt and her white apron tucked high in her corsage. He could not separate her body from that apron--chiefly from that attitude of serving. He wanted to say to himself “Well--she served me!” He wanted to be high-handed, cynical, indifferent. He managed to lose all sense of this toiling, nodding girl as one with the sweet woman he had held in his arms and held with all his body. There he was, scrutinizing Lois: her smart slimness; the perfect abandon of her body not to him but to her own position. His cousin wore a bright blue satin dress, simple and short and trim. Her corsage was caught up in white lace:--the scheme was near enough to the livery of Anne to make the difference crying. Her half-bare arms were white. Strangely white. David guessed what pains she must have been to so to keep them. She had taken off her hat; her golden hair fell daintily--unmoist, immaculate--upon her forehead, and in crisp ringlets down her neck. She had a tender smile that seemed to take one in and laugh one out. Her features were smiling, soft and round, and were yet tinged with an astute concern that contradicted their benevolence. The white-slippered feet and the white-stockinged legs were an increased offsetting flirt of humor to her serious brown eyes. The attentive quality in Lois was her grace, her tender aloofness, her sixteen years full of pride. David found himself quite willing to deny his amour with a servant.

Anne needed to come up to him and ask him:

“Will you be going downtown to-day, Mr. David? Or will you be here to lunch?”

“I’m going downtown,” he said sharply. He looked in her face and found the soft intimate sense of her offensive: a too cloying sweetness for his stomach. On the heels of his discovery a great remorse and disgust at himself. It drove him toward a demonstration of bravado: he needed almost to make clear to this searing presence of the Deanes that he owed Anne much, was more like Anne than like them, and was aware of it. This too was checked, left him dangling.

Lois caught him looking her through, and came over to where he worked at a stubborn bag: she said: “Let me help you, David.”

“No need,” he said with a tone studiedly similar to the one he had addressed to Anne. There was balm in that. It seemed, however, not to disturb Lois: and Anne was out of the room.

His cousin helped to the extent of loosing one strap. She sat on the gladstone and was suddenly languid, and forgot....

With Lois cornering his eye, David found he had the whole group in his mind. Mr. Deane was still at paces on the floor, calling for breakfast. David was amazed at his insignificance in this concise room. His wife paid him no attention. Twice she brushed against him, crossing the room: twice also she brushed against a bag. Her reactions were one. Muriel went up to him and said: “Father, let me have about twenty dollars more, will you?” Mr. Deane’s pacing slowed against this new ordinance. He stopped, snapped the bills from his wallet and handed them to his daughter. Muriel was at the moment looking over her shoulder, giving an order to Anne. She did not stop. Her eyes did not go with her receiving hand. Mr. Deane resumed his pacing. His wife said, half in the air: “In a moment, Anthony, we shall be able to spare Anne.” Lois, musing in her corner, suddenly flared forth: “Father, you are making me nervous with your walking like a lion in his cage!” But at once her face went soft, she forgot what she had said. Then her father had left the room, following the bright discovery that Anne had left before him.

David felt it was time to be off for downtown. He went to his aunt.

“Good-by.”

“I hope, David, you don’t squander your money at those expensive lunch places.”

David said he did not. He did not add he was afraid of them. He went to Lois.

“Good-by.”

“Good-by,” she smiled. “Come back soon.”

He went to Muriel. She looked up surprised.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Good-by.”

And the revelation came to David. These four persons were not a group: in no true sense were they a group. The families that he had known were strictly groups.... Even his own, though in his father’s days the rhyme of it was pain. Some single rhythm, some common color composed them. Here were four persons. Their spirits had nothing to do one with another. He was quite sure their spirits were not aware one of another. They spent one man’s money: they obeyed one woman’s orders: they lived at the behest of a sort of mutual complacency together, sharing the pleasures that were in need of union for support. But they were not united. David felt it, touching their fingers, as he said:

“Good-by.”

It gave him a strange, even a sick feeling: as if he had seen a man devouring his own hands.

IV

It was voluptuous for Tom Rennard after the trees and the birds to give himself once more into the bond of his profession. Through the free woods he walked in manacled anarchy: through the City’s thralldom he walked free. He plunged into work. He touched the tasks of the approaching season, knew it would be his best, measured his dominion above success and was glad like a bird perched on top of its cage. He prepared a brief for a case months away from trial: he played with the strategy of an appeal in a suit not yet argued. In the brash nights of the refilling City he sat in hotel lobbies and let his mind cut clear through the flaccid provincial crowds. He journeyed uptown to a baseball game: drank in the rawness of the joy of others in a ball swiftly caught and clouted: let his heart fill with the tang of the game’s intricate and lissome grace against the sprawling pleasure of the mindless. Once more New York, an atmosphere, lay, swirled, clouded and shone around him. Then he shut his desk, an early afternoon, and went to see his sister.

Her studio was unfashionable in location. It was the top floor of a crumbling red-brick house in the moiled middle East Side of the city. It was east of Murray Hill, west of Stuyvesant Square: the elevated trains snorted their cinders not far from her flowered window. Cornelia began to make money and her habitation blossomed. Persian shawls appeared in appropriate corners: new rash adventures in color out of Paris gladdened the white walls: slender vases came from exile in Chatham Square. Tom called the place his refuge from the city.

“Hello,” she said. “I am glad you came. I’m lazy this afternoon.” Tom folded his coat away in the little bedroom. It had the air of a cell. The white walls were bare, the white iron bed was narrow; a small pack of books stood in the corner of the floor.

“You take it easy,” he said, already at the task, “and I’ll prepare you some Turkish coffee. Have you any of that orange essence left?”

He was adept and he needed to ask no further questions.

They settled and sipped and talked. Cornelia was on the couch. Tom squatted on the floor. Both of them had lighted cigarettes.

“Well, what adventure?” she asked.

She looked more than the three years older that she was. She wore an unembroidered smock--a dull, muslin drab. Her feet were sandaled. Her hair was drawn tight back over her head, where it could not interfere with work. Her eyes were soft in the harsh angles of her face.

“I was on a vacation, Cornelia. You know that means that I took care nothing should happen to me.”

She laughed. “That efficient you’re not, dear boy.”

“Well, there was no semblance of adventure. I tramped and drank a lot of glorious milk and slept nine hours a night.”

“And----?”

“And swam and paddled.” Tom wagged his head with the catalogue.

“You met somebody interesting?”

He stopped. “How do you know?”

“You always do, don’t you? Who was it? The girl, at last?”

“No--not the girl. And you’re wrong. Really, I had a deliciously dull time.”

She did not press the matter.

“Daydon says I ought to move now I’ve won that prize. He says no one will visit a studio so near Third Avenue.”

“Are you going to?”

“I am not.”

“I am glad, Cornelia. Just because you have begun to have money is no reason for spending it all on rents.”

“That’s just what most New Yorkers do, is it not?”

They both laughed, and were silent.

“What you said has a lot of truth in it,” Tom spoke at last. And his sister knew he had pounced on her observation as a text. He was comfortable now. He had been just a bit uneasy, questioned about his trip. There was the sign of a release from nervousness in the brightening of his eyes and the slower puff of his cigarette--the way he curled up his legs, limbered his arms and began to talk. Cornelia watched him with a vague amusement and a subtle reservation. She would let him have his speech; then she would pin him back to his trip and the thing in it which made him nervous. In this mood she listened.

“Really,” he said, “the true inwardness of New York’s rising sky-line has been the passion of New Yorkers for high rents. Have you ever thought of that? What a handy substitute for other, remoter standards they have found in the price of housing? Of course the gullible talk of the fact that New York is a crowded island. They forget the miles of dilapidated and discarded masonry within hail of their stylish towers. Some day the historian will understand. He will say this: ‘Money was so deep their worship that they mis-prized all treasures of life which did not blatantly announce it. They left their walls empty of beauty, their larders empty of health, their houses empty of grace, in order to pay high rents to the lords of land. These fabulous sums were the pride and the decoration of their lives. The height of New York rentals and the high buildings that were their symbols became the chief expression of Metropolitan Art!’”

He laughed. Cornelia kept silent.

“The historian will finish in this tone: ‘Surely these were a foolish people, ripe for destruction.’”

“Give me another cigarette, Tom.” She was resolved not to help him along. Tom came to silence. He felt her mood.

“Well, what is it?” he asked.

“You had better look out, brother mine. You could easily get to be a typical New Yorker. I hate talk.”

“What I said wasn’t true?”

“Yes. But it was talk.”

“Oh, boo! Don’t be so serious.”

“Weren’t you?”

“Of course not. I was speaking the truth. Even, I was prophesying. To be serious at such a game is to risk being a fool.”

“Most of your talk, Tom, is a side-stepping of something in you you want to hide. I have noticed that.”

Cornelia was half up on her couch, facing him straight. Now, she was ready to pin him. “It’s a bad convenience, dear,” she went on, “putting up all these brittle outer observations when some one threatens to get under your skin. You do it so well.”

She smiled; Tom straightened his legs and met her gaze. He knew her direction. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said.

“Why? Just because you don’t?”

This was a true shot. He acknowledged it.

“Very well,” he spoke dryly. “There was a boy--a mere boy--up there. From New England. For some curious reason he upset me. I don’t like to talk about him. I do want to see him again. It’s all rather odd because he was really quite dull. We had damn little to say.”

In a flash Cornelia’s mood changed. Her perceptions had controlled her--the acute and angular and severe in her. Now she was seated toward him on the couch; it was as if dominion had passed over to her eyes that were large on her brother. She spoke tenderly:

“It’s not a girl yet, is it, Tom?”

“You know it never is. Girls can’t disturb me. I can master women. I am cool and sure before them. But so I was with this--this fellow. Yet it seems, as I look back--quite irrationally, mind you--it seems as if we had had a contest and he had won.” He paused.

“You probably _talked_ to him--flaming revolutionary talk.”

Tom shrugged.

“And he was shocked.”

“Precisely,” Tom burst in. “He was the shocked one--the dominated one, the silenced. Then, why this foolish desire to see him again and throw him on his back?”

“It has been troubling you?”

“I have imaginary conversations with him. I walk up and down Broadway with him, and say: ‘See! what a Gehenna this country’s greatest city is?’ I take him to theaters and gloat and declare ‘Trash, eh? They call it art in New York.’ Even at my office. I show him through my papers. ‘All chicanery,’ I announce. ‘That’s what you want to enter, is it?’ I shame myself before him.”

“Think it over, Tom,” Cornelia followed his silence. “You should be able to find out the thing that is troubling you.”

Tom sat a bit diminished on the floor. Sedulously he flicked the ash from his cigarette, each vestige of the ash; his fingers close to the hot, red tip. He looked up:

“This chap has something I lack and want: a sort of pure sincerity. He’ll go far--and be miserable as the devil.”

“Look out! Aren’t you the one who is afraid of misery?”

“True. I want him to give me the saving treasure. I want to give him the saving moderation. Then we could both be saved.”

Cornelia laughed. “What _are_ you talking about now?”

But Tom was very sober. “He is all wings. He has no eyes. He’ll dash himself against the sun. I am all eyes. I see everything. But where are my wings? I’ll freeze to death from far away, seeing the sun.”

He got up. He paced the room.

“Oh, this is nonsense. You are right. I liked him because he was a naïve, country lad. I was afraid I had hurt his innocence----”

“You are dying to kill it.”

Tom stopped and faced his sister. “That’s not quite fair, Cornelia. Not kill it. Steal some of it, perhaps.”

He was talked out of his mood. He was light-hearted and full of interest for a thousand things. It was a trifle after all.

So they played through the afternoon, they went arm in arm to dinner, they spent an hour in a terrace with liqueurs before them. They talked of her work and her triumphs and the quaint jealousies of artists. All this because it was his greatest pride. And several times Tom broke out in admiration of New York: in praise of her vast largesses. He was confident and proud. Cornelia smiled again--her angular, critical self....

Before her door he kissed her good-night.

“We’ve made a pretty good start, from Dahlton, Ohio, haven’t we, sister? Pretty good, pretty fair.”

She changed once more to the tender part of her nature: she ignored his mood.

“Good-night. And Tom--that country boy--bring him up some late afternoon?” Her eyes alone smiled. Tom startled, imperceptibly.

“Surely,” he hurried to say. “Surely ... if I see him.”

Nature cellared its profusion. The sap of life was sucked to the roots of things. As the year died, the house of the Deanes came to life.

Chests gave forth finery and color. Curtains were up, barring the archaic sun: dun colors were away from the florid chairs. The safe-vaults let go their silver plate and their gold, and from the hot-houses came flowers. Streets were chill, skies were mournful; in the narrow endless purlieus of the disinherited, of the nine-tenths, began the hunger for coal.... But it was summer in the City.

The position of David was straddling, but not too insecure. He was part of the Deane household. How goodly a part devolved on his own discretion. If he made himself liked, there was no comfortable share he might not win. He was part of the Deane Company--the Deane machine of subsistence. A small and trivial part with a distinction. This he did not feel until his fellow-menials later had ceased feeling it for him. In his low place there was always the seed of future sharing. He was the Boss’s nephew. In the low places of the others, there was always the seed of permanence. These were the Boss’s victims. The Boss would keep them victims if he could. He would have all the pretty terms of a century of special pleading to hallow his act. But surely the world was a smiling place for David Markand.

“My boy,” said Mr. Deane, “you are on probation. If you prove your worth, as you may well imagine, I will be glad. American enterprise is the home of the free, the contest of character and brains. The true man wins the prize. And of course, I don’t forget who you are: that you are the only child of my dear sister. Nor must you, my boy. I have no sons of my own.”

Uptown he was still somewhat the stranger. But he was the friend of Lois and he grew confident. They liked each other. Different dispensations from far separate sources had thrust them close. Now both of them stood together at the gate of the brilliant world Muriel went to evening after evening. They saw Muriel return, full of tokens of its splendor: full of weariness and hidden joy, full of pride and hidden knowledge. David meant to enter the gates with Lois. In the waiting it was natural that they talk, hold hands.

She would have said that she found him interesting. There was her own life, which in her mind lacked quality. It was an empty atmosphere occasionally pierced by suns and falling stars. The light of these was her sustenance and was rare. So Lois starved.

She would have said that he was easy to talk to.