Part 5

In the conventional sense he understood nothing: in the sense in which life was a ruled open page for Muriel and her mother. But in the outlaw sense where these two were blind, he understood miraculously well. She could skip the roted things of the world in talk with him, dwell on the stirring and uncharted. They met in a sort of reticence about the obvious. Not deliberately, but because he could not otherwise have understood. Two persons speaking different tongues could live on elemental planes. They could convey and satisfy the sense of hunger, they could fight, they could make love. The difficulty might come when they attempted to dine together, to quarrel civilly, or to get married. Here, a common set of words was needed.

So between these two. Social engagements, family traditions, judgments of the technique and manner of existence she could not broach with him. She did not need to. Her school, her friends, her family webbed her in such subjects. The wider ranges that Muriel would have cut through as vague became their meeting place. They talked about life and beauty and the future. She was sixteen and David twenty. In these vast fields they were one fledgling age.

They were often alone together. The room on the third floor that faced the street was the living-room of the sisters. And Muriel was usually out: and the parents stayed in their own quarters below.

Dinner’s end was release. David sat there uncomfortable and Lois sat there indifferent. Mr. Deane had few words. He was weary at night. What energy he had poured into the business of eating. Mrs. Deane was voluble enough, but she needed no attentive ears and she had none. She talked: her husband ate: her daughters spoke low together: David made his shoulders narrow and occasionally straightened with a shock when his aunt’s eyes turned on him. The last sip of coffee meant the last moment at the table for the girls, whether their mother was in the middle of a sentence or their father was asking them a question. In this case, the question could be curtly answered in the process of exit.

“Come, David,” from Lois, “you’re finished, aren’t you?”

If at first David was reluctant to leave so suddenly, he learned that nothing different was expected of him. Mr. Deane lighted a cigar. Often he was left alone to smoke it. He sat, his body folded and heavy in his chair, his eyes folded and heavy behind smoke. Anne came and went, clearing the table. He was unperturbed. His soft mouth wreathed and pouted: occasionally he smacked his lips. He was the picture of attainment. In his empty gaze, in the lack-reflex slumber of his muscles, in the dim movements of the heavy smoke, there was a gross Buddhistic character. It was clear that attainment in his American faith tended not toward heaven, but toward a sort of flatulent Nirvana.

Meantime, Mrs. Deane was upstairs, under a lamp, reading a novel; and when her husband did not eventually shake himself, with a slow and sleepy evolution, to his club, he was in bed before she closed her book.

Often members of the plenteous family of Mrs. Deane came to dine. But the atmosphere of the table was ample enough to embrace them. There was the same dull air, charged with the vocal passion of Mrs. Deane and the sharp reserves of her two daughters. Only one sister--a Miss Dikes--could match the commanding Lauretta. They were profoundly sisters: when she was at table, the currents of air were shifted rather than changed. Always, Lois and David were willingly excused after dinner. And Muriel managed often to be out when her relatives were there. Her mother scolded and occasionally wept at this disloyalty in her child. But the child was already stronger than the mother. Muriel seldom quarreled back. She sneered and her eyes flashed: when she spoke, it told.

Upstairs David reached for a book.

“You have your homework to do, I s’pose?”

Lois smiled and nodded. “Oh, yes.... But I’m not going to do it.”

“You’ll not get your certificate if you don’t watch out.”

“And what good would it do me, if I did?... We’re going to talk.” She snatched his book.... “Unless, of course, you are more interested in _The Banking System of the United States_.”

“Lord, no!” David laughed.

They sat together on the broad, cushioned couch whose gay blue and dull gold were a telling contrast to the dull blue and bright gold of the mother’s room below.

“What are you going to do when you become rich?” she asked him.

He looked at her. She asked him this as once before he had said to her: “When are you going to get married?” She had answered: “I am not going to get married, perhaps.” He had laughed her denial away.

So now: “I am not going to get rich, perhaps.” And there was she, scoffing at him, holding back her head and saying: “Please, do be serious, David!”

He was. He began to think aloud.

“Not everybody gets rich.”

This had no effect on her. As his silence marked his words as her answer, she shook her head with a faint impatience.

“I know. But what’s that to do with us? You’re my cousin, aren’t you? You’re our sort. You’re in Daddie’s business.”

“What sort don’t get rich, Lois?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She looked at him as if he were stupid. “You ought to know, better than I. You see ’em all around you at Daddie’s business.”

She also had been set to thinking. “How are they different from us?” she asked. Then: “Father says they simply aren’t as clever. Most of them drink too much: and have packs of children: and don’t bathe very often. I guess it’s all these things.”

“It must be. But you can’t really see much difference. Of course, _you_. You’re different. You’re a--why, you’d die, you couldn’t have been born, anywhere else. But I work with five other chaps in the shipping office, and they’re just like me.”

Lois laughed. “What nonsense. They’re not! You’re much nicer.” She was giggling in foretaste of the wicked truth she was about to utter, “you’re--I’m sure you’re _much_, much cleaner.”

She was like a pricking rose under his face, laughing there on the couch. David resolved to be angry.

“That’s rotten of you, Lo. You’re no democrat.”

“Of course, I’m not. I’m a Republican.”

David, enjoying his indignation and unconsciously aware of the excuse it gave him, reached for her wrists.

“Don’t!” he commanded.

“You are!”

He pulled her to him, and put his arms around her waist. He said: “Stop making fun of people.” Then he kissed her.

Lois stopped laughing. She was very still. Her eyes glistened.

“Do you think, if you hadn’t been _nicer_, and _cleaner_ and everything, I’d let you _kiss_ me?” She jumped up and away.

He liked her intimacy. It flattered him. He did not wish to tell her of his work at Mr. Devitt’s, and how easily he might have stayed there long and forever. And she liked his reticence, feeling its power. She liked the veiled promise of pleasure and strength that he suffused from all of his big being. It frightened her.

She was seated as far away from him as she could manage. Her bare elbows were on her knees and her chin was cupped in her hands. The pressure upward faintly distorted her soft mouth: one corner was open and two teeth bit white and hard against the lip. Her throat tremored with her amusement; the rose mesh of her waist fell forward in suggestion of the warm swell of her girlish bosom. David believed that she was purring. He saw her teeth biting their hardness into the blush of her lips: he saw how smooth and round her arm was. He said:

“You let me kiss you because I’ve a right to.” He was aware of the retreat in his words. “...because we’re cousins.”

She merely lifted her face a bit, as if he were stirring away. “All right. We’re going to play now that we are _not_ cousins. We are just you and me, do you hear? So you mayn’t kiss me anymore.”

Already he was forward. The game started. The goal was implicit with them both. In a fortnight’s time, David had won his kiss. He was very sure that Lois was very lovely: he was almost sure that she did not return his kisses because he was unworthy....

* * * * *

David sat at his long table in the office, lost in a maze of figures which gave a different answer each time he questioned them. He was languidly certain the figures were laughing at him, held him in contempt. About him yellow pine, hard human bustle. He looked up through the mist of his discomfort; he saw above him a slender and sleek young man with a smile on thick lips.

“My name is Duer Tibbetts. You’re Markand, aren’t you?”

David was not sure whether to keep his seat. He was twisted in indecision.

“I am a cousin of your aunt, I work over there under Mr. Herding in the Cashier’s Office. I have just come back from two weeks in Virginia. I was told to look you up and make you feel at home.”

For the pause, he stood there a bit ill-at-ease himself.

“I’ll come round at noon, and we’ll go to lunch.” He was gone.

David had the sense, walking through the streets, of a young man marvelously sure and hard and clever for his years. He gave forth the slightest word as a pronouncement.

“The very hottest weather’s over,” he declared. “Greibeck’s is a great café. You must go there often. I discovered it last year, one day I was lunching with Mr. Farnam--H. L. Farnam of The Liberty Trust. Always go downstairs. There are women upstairs. Downstairs is the place for talking business.”

Duer Tibbetts thrust the long printed card under his nose and then told him what to eat. He ordered as if he were in a great hurry. He drank beer with his meat. “Don’t you want _anything_ to drink?” he asked as if unwilling to believe in any organic deficiency in his new friend. He called the waiter by his Christian name--but never looked at him.

“We must get to be friends,” he announced. “Don’t bother about the boys in your office. They’re not our sort. Stick to work.... Stick to work and stick to your uncle. He’s a prince--a prince,” he chanted with emotion.

“I’ve been here three years. Since I was sixteen. No college nonsense for me. I’m assistant cashier. You’ll find the old man is hard, but he is just. Yes, he is that. But he has his silent little ways of pushing you along.”

For the first time, he raised his eyes and David met them. He liked him better. So this Duer Tibbetts was to be his friend? As soon as he began again to talk with his eyes once more down, David examined him.

He seemed engrossed in his own words. He paid them out, as if they were coin. He talked with a certain muscular emphasis of his lips, a periodic pointing of his left forefinger. His forefinger always was detached from the others. The rest of him remained immobile. A gold chain fell straight from his lapel to his coat pocket. His hair was so blond that near the temples and behind the ears it imperceptibly faded into the color of his skin. His fingers were wider at the tips than at their base. His voice was high pitched, coarse-grained, mostly a monotone.... David met his eyes and liked him again.

Tibbetts’ gaze clinched his firmly; almost too fixedly: as if his eyes lacked the pain of encounter. They were lashless blue. Tibbetts had the soft eyes of a boy, the shallow eyes of a man who has not ventured where the boy’s eyes yearned.

David turned his own deep uncertain gaze on him: in the retreat of his glance and the veil of warmth that suffused from the contact it was altogether clear which was in truth the older of these two. But neither David felt this, nor Duer Tibbetts, steadfast and staring. What came from their encounter was David’s sense of respect and wonderment for Duer Tibbetts, and Duer Tibbetts’ thrill of respect and wonderment for himself. To this end he talked. A gentleman can boast only before an equal. And Tibbetts was a gentleman, if for no other reason because he felt the quality of David.

“A smart chap. You know: the sort who get on in the end,” he reported to his father. The young protégé and the powerful attorney of Deane and Company discussed the new arrival. They said many things. The paramount detail that this was the nephew of Mr. Deane, they had no words for: but this was what they were keenly thinking. The suppressed thought came out in the rhythmic beat of Mr. Tibbetts’ thumb against the desk, in the over-emphasis of his son when he said such common words as these: “I like him. He is slow, but what is slowness? You never can tell what’s underneath. The fact that he don’t know much now shows merely that he has lived in a little town. Lots of good stuff has come from little towns.”

Now, he talked lavishly and with diligence to impress David who sat passive, trying to learn, telling himself that he was learning. He talked of projects and profits, of Mr. Deane’s subtle aggressiveness and of the Company’s prosperity. He spoke of the great law-suit which his father had won for the firm from the Feddlesby people. He spoke of a swinging figure that had gone from Deane and Company to help elect McKinley.

“Measure it with our payroll, if you want to _feel_ how much it was to give.” He did not divulge the payroll. He said, “We” when he meant David and himself; “We” when he meant the Company; “We” when he meant America. There was a deep philosophy in this confusion. But David was still far from grappling with it, and Tibbetts did not dwell in the sphere of definition and reflection.

“Yes, sir,” he pointed and flushed with his prophecy. “We’ll be in Cuba in less than a year. Don’t you forget it. We’ve got to kick the Spaniards out and go in ourselves. Then, we’ll earn enough from our dormant Las Daciendas plantations to buy up every relic factory in Key West. It’s a coup that’s certain.”

All this puzzled David. He was not sure whether the “We” who must kick Spain out of the West Indies was the payroll of Deane and Company: or whether the “We” that was to grow subsequently rich in Las Daciendas was the citizenry of America. It was all a bewilderment of lines.

The weeks of his residence in New York he had been sedulously reading the papers that came daily to his uncle’s house. He knew that America’s interest in Cuba was a humane one grudgingly forced on her. Her wrath at Spain and her forming resolution to have Spain “out from her back yard” were due to her Christian worry for starving natives. The impulse of brotherhood was quite clear in the papers. Yet the effect upon Business seemed equally clear in the mind of Duer Tibbetts. Brought together in David’s mind, these two clarities precipitated fog.

He went away, respecting the more this young man who saw the light while he walked in darkness.

Relief of Cuban sufferers and relief of ravaged tobacco plantations: America’s crusade for love and a great Company’s contribution to the coffers of the Republican Party: the free lists of business and the advantage of being a nephew--it was too much for David’s untrained mind. For David needed to “conform.” And David needed to admire.

It was a Sunday afternoon. The room where David sat, the room of his talks with Lois, lay in the languor of a refracted sun. It faced north. David could see the full rays beat in the flaming brick and the warm brown-stone of across the street, be absorbed. Here was a low vibrancy--strayed residues of sunlight that had lost their incandescence. The room had its compensation. Lois’ gay hand was over it. The couch had a dappled welcome in its cushions: “outrageous” her mother called them. A strip of Japanese brocade laughed on the wall: and Lois’ desk, with its bright brass knobs and its jolly fluted legs, hinted the tempo of the occasional letters and the desultory homework of its owner.

David had emerged from Sunday dinner. Rather feebly he wrestled with a Sunday paper. He was alone with it and it was winning. The article was discursive and plethoric. It dealt with Tammany Hall and the imminent Municipal Election. The City had just become the Greater City. Manhattan had swallowed Brooklyn and Staten Island. Once more it served as the shining symbol of the age: for it had gone through a merger, and it was superlative in size. Now, Tammany was attempting to recapture the swollen booty. It was, according to the writer, hopeless. “Richard Croker is back from Ireland and his horse races. But he will find only a ruin and a name where stood the corrupt organization that netted him his millions.” Later: “Mayor Strong is beloved of the rank and file of the people. Under him, under such of his competent servants as Street Commissioner Colonel Waring, the people have learned the blessings of a Reform Administration. They will never go back to Tammany. They have had high wages and clean streets, better conditions in their tenements, less disease and a low death-rate. They have understood. Tammany means misery and vice: Tammany means the seduction of their daughters into the gutters of sin: Tammany means all that crime and corruption mean. Leave it to the people of the Greater City to choose a successor or an undoer of our Reform Administration.”

This was all clear. But the general terms of the article bewildered David. Why, in the face of the obvious conclusion, this note of frenzied worry, of desperate pleading? The people surely could be left to choose between happiness and squalor, between life and death. And why these paid announcements of the Tammany candidates--these arguments in their favor alongside indictments which made it probable to David that Tammany would poll no single vote? The article was full of contradictions of the sort that had twisted this last month of his life into a question-mark. Mr. Croker, breathlessly returned from England, found his Tammany a ruin and a dream: yet “efforts will be made to elect the Citizen’s Union ticket such as have never been attempted in the century-old fight against Tammany, the City’s incubus.” The people had enjoyed three years of almost paradisal amelioration; yet “it must not be believed that Tammany’s old tricks of getting the people--appealing to their hearts and stomachs--have been forgotten.” Mayor Strong was the idol of the poor; yet “the old cry of corporate control and a ‘rich men’s ticket’ has been raised.” The puzzles spread out into the past. The article concluded with a brief historic sketch of this Tammany-monster that in ways so foul brooded upon the people. “The study of Tammany makes it clear,” one sentence went, “that it can never be reformed. The Tiger can not change his stripes. Tammany means and has ever meant a single, evil thing.” Yet, to David’s dumb amazement!--several of the old crusaders who had ousted Tweed and killed Tammany in the “sixties” were a year later officers in Tammany Hall! Here was a great Reform Governor and Presidential nominee--in Tammany Hall; and the present presiding financial genius of the City’s projected Subway system. While there, in a corner of that very page, heading a committee of social knights who had pledged body and bank to hold Tammany at bay was the man--yes, the very same name of the man--who had been Tweed’s lawyer, who had _defended_ Tweed when he was caught rifling the City.

David sat struggling with all this as well as the spirit of Sunday dinner permitted him to do so. In his town, he had heard disparagements of Tammany. He had always confounded it with the National Democratic Party. He remembered how they had heckled Jo Cleary, the machinist in the shop who was a Democrat.

“Well, what if Tammany _is_ Democratic? Do you think your bunch of silk-stocking Republicans is any better? They’re both of ’em crooks. Here’s the difference. If you are broke, you kin get ten dollars through the front door of Tammany: and you kin get a boot through the back door of the other Party.”

David recalled that there had been silence after this reply. He was in no mood for thinking it all out. He knew only that Jo Cleary had straight sharp eyes and that he had always trusted him, found reason, in more immediate matters, to believe him. Cleary was full of strangeness. He wanted Ireland to be independent: he got drunk with telling regularity, each Saturday night. When he was drunk, he was jolly. He would sing pathetic minor songs of suffering with laughter in his voice and wild flourishing arms.

“D’ye see?” he’d shout, “This is how we keeps ’em down. ‘Down, down, with the pigs, ha, ha!’”

When he was sober, Cleary was morose and a good workman. David knew enough to feel the pathos in his drunken jollity. It was a thing, unlike all these about him, he instinctively understood. It was a thing, among others, that made him mark Cleary’s sober words and give them credence.

So David stirred against the Sunday paper. He was glad, when Lois stood there in the door to take him away from the vice of thinking.

“There’s some people downstairs, David, just dying to meet you. Will you come?”

While he looked up at her, she was still. She felt the flattery of his warm eyes. She was slender and sweet, with her bent body leaning against the jamb. She seemed to David a glowing creature, a product so desirable that the world which brought her forth must be perfect also. And Lois saw him, clouding in his chair, trying to rouse himself to the business below: she liked the brash vividness of his clumsy body, the naïve confession in his face of all that spoke in his heart. She half realized that this freshness did not grow in the sheltered rooms of the City: she regretted it.

David followed her downstairs.

He felt as he stepped in that they were looking at him and that they must have stopped abrupt from talking of him. It was as if one voice had spoken and were now cut off. Yet David had heard no word.

He was being introduced. He saw that his business friend, Duer Tibbetts, was in the group. He gathered that these were his parents and his sister. They and the Deanes were all knit together. He was outside. He had the sense of an aperture, laboriously open, slowly sucking him in. He felt himself resisting.

There were words; he answered enough he presumed. Mr. Tibbetts told him that his uncle was already hopeful of his success; Mrs. Tibbetts invited him to dinner. The young girl was beside Lois. They were faintly apart: a mere quarter-note out of harmony. This introduced a tremor into the heavy rhythm of the room. David liked it. Instinctively, he moved toward the two girls. In the dissonance of their atmosphere he found himself: the group receded into its individual components.

He observed in Mr. Tibbetts an air of aloofness, of studied condescension that was half nature and half inspired by David. Duer imitated him, he saw now that Duer always imitated his father: he was a depleted pattern of Mr. Tibbetts. Mrs. Tibbetts talked most easily. “I am Cousin Laura,” she announced with a confidence that showed how fully her habit was command, “and this is Cousin John.” She was a very thin lady with a bobbing adam’s-apple. She was clad in glimmering blue satin and her feet were slippered not so slenderly as to conceal their astounding inharmonious width. David saw the height of her cheekbones and the scooped boniness between her nose and her mouth. She was a type familiar to him in New England.

In all the families he had yet come to know, the women were spokesmen. The men burst on occasion from brooding silence into cantankerous volubility. David was not surprised when Mr. Tibbetts began a speech.

It was different, however. It came from between thin lips. It left the broad complacent countenance unmoved. It had none of the weight and breadth and clarity of this man’s wide open collar and of his wide white vest. It seemed very little to come forth from so voluminous a frock-coat. Mr. Tibbetts talked; David could not altogether keep his eyes from the cylindrical cuffs and the crinkly patent-leather shoes. These seemed the proper focus of attention, as in other cases the speaker’s eyes.