Part 6

Mr. Tibbetts was saying that it was a great joy to have a new young member of the family. He said this several times. He seemed to be talking down to David: to be choosing emphatic, monosyllabic words: to be repeating his welcome for each bright button on his waistcoat. David knew that Mr. Tibbetts could have spoken better. He recalled now that this was his uncle’s lawyer, was a great lawyer, had his portrait occasionally in the papers.

“Duer tells me you are already friends. I am glad. He will help you downtown. You must help each other. I’ll tell you how. Have a race. See who can do the best work. Who can work hardest. That’s not a bad idea, eh? You two--having a race--spurring each other on to new efforts. Racing each other to the goal of hard and successful work. Do you understand what I mean? All life is a race. Ever thought of that? All life is a race. You two men must help each other in the spirit of friendly Competition....”

It was plain that Mr. Tibbetts loved this conception of his. He caressed it. He rubbed it up and down. He could not let it go. David, standing there, counted the buttons on his waistcoat.

Mrs. Deane spoke: “Why don’t you young people run along upstairs?”

Automatically, Lois, Miss Tibbetts and the two boys rose from their chairs. It was as if they were being thrust away by a sated creature. David could feel the swift rushing of the current of attention from him. The single eye was turned away: the single word knew him not. He was nothing.

He saw these men and women, sure, satisfied; he felt a certain cruelty in their assurance and in their satisfaction. He was closer to the girls. Muriel had not budged from her seat. In Duer was a certain mingling of movement and of motive. Duer was changing his status. Muriel had changed already. She had qualified and been absorbed. She was one of the possessors, one with this generation which had achieved. Duer was on the way. David saw something like a royal whim in the intensity of the brief interest of these elders. They had looked at him as possible food, as a possible new adhesion to their body. They had not remotely thought of him as a separate human being with heart and mind and soul of his own. In a way poignant, however vague, David felt this, felt further the meaning of their swift disposal after the appeasement of interest. Here, at last, he discerned a Group. He knew that in its elemental consciousness he must be either a good thing for its increase, or a bad thing altogether....

Upstairs another sudden shift in mood and stress.

Duer all at once was middle-aged and weightily silent. He looked on the two girls with a forebearing reticence. He had left a part of himself--a longing part--downstairs. A part of the group downstairs--the complacent part--he was trying sturdily to carry on.

Lois and his sister were hard to impress. Their bright indifference outshone his drab and manufactured ease. A certain sublime comfort lay beneath Duer’s manifest disapproval of their gayety. It said: “Time is with me. Wait until you are women, as I am a man. My way wins.”

Lois placed Miss Tibbetts before him with a ceremonial air.

“Fay is my _very best_ friend. So you two must be friends, too: for my sake.... Kiss!”

He obeyed joyously. He liked the spirit of this. He felt its unregeneracy. Already, though he knew it not, he was arrayed against the informing tide of this life about him. And when he was near a girl whom he liked, much of David’s inhibitions melted away.

Duer made his advance. He needed an ally against the flippancy of these girls, these girls about whom he would have said: “They know nothing about life: they know nothing about Business.”

“Well, how go things?” he swaggered, throwing up his head with a nonchalance that was belied by the keen worry of his eyes. “Satisfied with McGill?”

David retreated. “Sure,” he avoided an answer.

Duer knew that in such gatherings as now downstairs men must talk politics and business while the mentally segregated ladies discussed servants and dress. Duer had the passion of conforming. Life to him was an exclusive club to which he yearned to belong. Service was a means toward being voted in. He had all the fervor of a mediæval page grasping for spurs. But David was miserable in this intruding sense of fitness. He liked the anarchy of Lois more. He was curious about this girl whom Lois loved. He had nothing to say to Duer.

So the four joined a circle from which Duer spiritually retired. David did not know how to skate. Lois and Fay already lived the delight of teaching him. The Rink would be open soon. They argued the kind of skates he should buy.

“And if you fall,” said Lois forbiddingly.

“Oh, he will fall. Beginners always do.”

“Well, never you mind. We’ll pick you up. Won’t we, Fay? We’ll take care of you.”

She seemed almost tender. Then her hard giggle.

“No one shall laugh at you either,” Fay declared.

“No one except us,” said Lois.

The thought came to David that he would have preferred her saying: “No one except me.” But it was plain these two hunted together. David found it hard to understand their likeness.

“Children! Children! Come now. We’re going.” The voice of Mrs. Tibbetts strode through the house. Duer was the quickest to respond.

David and Lois were alone.

The brief packed hour had stirred the early world of David, had made it glow again. Their spirits had been high together. Now, somehow, they sat in gloom. They realized that in their lightness there had been combat. Looking at each other, they felt the burden of those below advancing heavily upon them.

“Why do you love Fay so much?”

“Because she’s a dear.” Lois was not on the defensive because of Fay. She had more intelligence than her answer. She deemed the question worthy of no better. She sought the solace of a different subject.

David kept silent, and looked at Lois and thought of Fay.

He saw Fay quite clearly. Fay was dark, regular of feature, beautiful even. Her face was hard. It had none of the free loveliness of sixteen years. It roused in David passion more nearly than affection, the need to dominate rather than to help. David saw her straight mouth, her veiled eyes, the squareness of her forehead: he tried to remember that she had laughed and joked with Lois, was delightful snubbing her solemn brother. Her lively brightness seemed strange to her immobile face.

“Besides, Lois is her chum, and look at Lois!” he argued with himself and he looked. He knew that her tenderness was like an early yellow violet. He set aside his first forbidding instinct about Fay. He forgot it, altogether....

In contemplation of each other, these two were like two worlds, each with its atmosphere and its teeming life and its fires, each with its intense exclusive consciousness, thrust suddenly close out of the silences of Space. They felt the indefeasible Past that summed their difference: its involute progression of separate thought and deed reaching from the mist of their beginnings. They were separate: Nothing was between them. Yet they were being drawn together.

When Lois came down to breakfast, David was gone. There was just time to kiss her father as he trudged back into the dining room, hatted and overcoated, smoking hard at the day’s first cigar. Mr. Deane’s true genius for system was at work even at half past eight. When he reached his train at Fiftieth Street, his cigar was done. It was a smaller cigar than he smoked later in the day.

“Well, good-by.” He stood in the doorway. Lois jumped from her chair and threw her arms about his neck and kissed him. She loved her father. It was somewhat a maternal love. She knew that he was rather the defensive and serviceable member of the household.

One day, she visited her father at his offices downtown. She walked a bit fastidiously through the murky sales-department on the ground floor where the bright yellow oak and the beveled glass and the shadows under long tables depressed her. She saw men moving about in shirt-sleeves: grimy boys that ambled in and out of doors whose jaws seemed busier with gum than their slack minds with business. They led her to a spiral iron stair through whose slatted steps she could see the bowed heads below of men at desks and women bent over papers. It had appeared to her first that this was a hostile world, she was frightened to have come upon it.

On the narrow steps, she gave way to a girl--not much older than herself in years--but very old as if she lived in a harder world than Lois, a world that wore one more away, that sapped the flower of cheeks and the laughter of eyes and parched the bloom of a girl’s hair. She noticed all this, stepping aside so that the girl might pass. She moved, apologetic, fearful, strangely ashamed. She saw the hard paper cylinders serving this girl as sleeves. In the lifeless golden hair she saw that a pencil was stuck. She felt guilt. But Lois had no power to plumb her impulse: it went. She was in her father’s private office and a new pride swiftly scurried away the mist of that strange encounter.

Here--she felt it at once--here her father was master! A new light by which to see him.

At home her mother ruled him. Muriel flouted him when he obtruded upon the most idle of her ways. He seemed glad, as of a privilege, to hold Lois on his knees, after Sunday breakfast, and spoil her with promises of trinkets, bribing for kisses and smiles. Also, at home he was weary, a depleted man. He had little ways of confessing his weakness and although Lois was not so analytic as to gauge them consciously, their accumulation brought its impress to her mind. He lost his temper. He bore treading on, was silent, then suddenly he lost his temper. He cried aloud about his power, that his will was final: _he_ was the head of the household: not Muriel, not Muriel--_he_. Lois felt the whisper against these over-protestations.

Here was a party to which a not too well established youth had invited Muriel. The youth was calling for her in a carriage himself had hired.

“You aren’t going in that carriage,” said Mr. Deane.

Muriel was struck silent. She retreated before the sudden quiet of his authority. Slowly gathering herself, she matched him.

“And why not, please?” Her voice was compressed in her throat.

“Why not?” her father burst forth. “Because I don’t want you to. I don’t allow any young whippersnapper who wants, to take my daughter in a hired carriage. We have a carriage of our own, haven’t we? Isn’t it good enough? Send your young man a message to countermand his rig and you may go.”

Muriel stood there, swaying a bit, lowering on him.

“I’ll do no such thing. Make him think I’m a child who cant go out in any carriage but my Papa’s? The whole thing is too silly----”

“Very well. Then stay at home.”

Muriel broke into tears.

“I won’t,” she cried. “I’ll go. I never heard of such a thing. It’s stupid. What have you got all of a sudden against Alfred? Why should you ask me to insult him so? If he prefers to order his own cab....”

She stood there and wept and moved not at all, save for the stamping of her feet. Her father paced the room, far less contained.

“I have said what I meant.” Stopping short, he joined the issue. “And you will obey. So long as you are in my house, I am to be obeyed, do you hear? You ain’t married yet.”

He left the room. Muriel went to the dance in her father’s carriage. But Lois knew how clearly, in the light of the ensuing days, the victory was with her sister. Muriel kept aloof, frigid. She waged a perpetual _guerilla_ on her father. Soon he began to bribe and to cajole for a return to favor. He bought her an armlet she had several months ago expressed the wish for. He had said it was too expensive. “Out of the question.” He took her to theater with a strained gusto of good will and to supper after. He spoke to her with a nervous smile that exclaimed his suppliance. And Muriel accepted all, gave nothing. She wore his armlet and in no way acknowledged the life and feeling of the harried man who waited for thanks as for a reprieve. On his return each evening to his house, she managed some little way to hold him frozen in discomfort. On the occasion of another dance, he said:

“Muriel, my dear--I just wanted to know--are you using the carriage to-night, or is your escort taking care of that? I just wanted to know, you see--because if so, I might use Henry myself. There’s a conference I----”

“I have made no other arrangements.”

“Oh, well, that is all right, my dear. I can get a cab. I--I just wanted to know, you see....”

Having completely and ignominiously surrendered, he beamed at his daughter. Muriel smiled back.

Here: Lois was ensconced in a deep armchair of bronzed leather. She was examining her little feet that lay in a rich Turkish rug. A knock at the door.

“Come in,” said her father without looking up.

A young man, the symbol of subservience, stepped in.

He placed a group of papers before Mr. Deane, who did not look at him. He stepped back, threw up his head and waited.

Mr. Deane raced through the papers. He marked annotations. He grunted.

“You’ll have to see Mr. McGill about this”: the young man agilely stepped forward to ascertain which paper it was, and agilely subsided. “All right. Let Mr. Marton attend to the tax.”

He returned the papers to the young man, for the first time saw him.

“Here,” he smiled. “Why don’t you two greet each other?”

Duer Tibbetts moved jerkily forward and took his cousin’s hand. But the bondage of the room’s authority was strong on him. He seemed weighed down by this sense of special dispensation. Social talk was impossible in the august presence. He was soon gone.

Another five minutes of chat, another knock. This time a girl appeared with papers. The same subdued alertness, the same gingerly respect. Mr. Deane pressed a button. A boy bobbed in.

“Take Miss Deane to her carriage.” The boy fell back as if to flatten himself into the wall, while she passed him. Her father got up.

“Well, my dear. I am afraid I am too busy now”; in this splendid easy manner he dismissed her....

This transfiguration of her father into a man of power was a sharp new knowledge. But in the more persuasive color of her home, its lines grew faint. It soon withdrew into the limbo of things remote, scarce real, hence scarce remembered. It had little application to her world uptown. In consequence, it had no effect.

Lois left school in time for lunch. It was to be her last year at school. The lunches would go on.

Seated at the wide round table with Muriel and her mother, she instinctively inquired into her own future freedom: and in this mood studied them. She studied their dress; she studied their activities. She absorbed their judgments and their pleasures.

She was sixteen. A spirit of gayety and candor danced in her heart. But she had no knowledge to build a mansion for it: to train and cherish it: to give it weapons wherewith to confront the world. It was dancing, this unblemished spirit, dancing itself to death. For it was daughter of the sun, and it breathed no fresh air: it had been born careless and frail and all about it walls of convention: it was starved and forced to feed upon itself.

“I promised to go and have tea with poor Mrs. Dent.”

“Since when,” asked Muriel, “is Mrs. Dent ‘poor’?”

“Don’t you remember she has just lost her husband?”

“Oh, yes.” Muriel remembers.

Her mother goes on. “Do you think, dear, you can drop me there on your way to the Selby’s?”

“I don’t really see how I’ll have time, Mamma. I must take a rest after lunch. I promised to call for Aline King.”

“Can’t Aline get there without you?”

“I promised her, Mamma.”

Mrs. Deane will take the street-car. She does not like to squander money on cabs.

“You haven’t forgotten that you are going shopping with me, to-morrow morning. You promised me.”

“I saw just the loveliest hat, just to-day, Mamma, at Bertrande’s. I am having it sent home to you. I’m sure it will suit you. Then, we needn’t go shopping. I must write to Clarice sometime. I thought I’d sleep late to-morrow and write before lunch. She is getting a divorce, you know.”

Lois knew already the inwardness of marriage. There was much talk of this at the luncheon table. She had the right contempt for the girls who married unmoneyed men for love: for the men who risked their future--their finances--in alliance with unmoneyed girls: and for the novels she read where love was extolled and the sentimental match defended. These books were--well--for reading. Novels and stories were indulgences like red and emerald peppermints after dessert. They lied.

And Lois knew already the inwardness of friendship. Muriel and her mother had friends. They kissed them and flattered them and entertained them. At the luncheon table they discussed them. No one but was a tissue of deceptions, of selfishness, of deceit. Their morals were largely obstacles they were forever dodging. They flirted--with fops or fools. They angled--for goldfish. They were miserable at home. One was none too anxious to have children. One was none too faithful to her husband. All of them were none too good at all.

Immediately after lunch, Florence was to call for Muriel and take her for a walk. Florence was violently trying to win the King boy whose father had nearly a million. But it was hopeless because Mabel--mutual friend--had told Muriel all about it and _she_ was secretly engaged to Clifford King. Oh, Aline wouldn’t know! Clifford was bored by Aline. Muriel and Mabel had had a good laugh over Florence--poor child--such antics.

“She really loves him, you know.” Muriel smiles complacently. This is an interesting if somewhat superfluous detail in her wish to wed him. Mrs. Deane nods, mildly concerned.

Later: “Hello, Florence dearest. I was so afraid you’d be late....”

Indeed, Lois knew already the inwardness of life. Life was, in the patriarchal term, a “business proposition.” Out of the arcana of the past her intellect could summon the picture of a free land peopled by striving men and women. This land was America. Its freedom meant the opportunity of all “to get along”: to become rich. Men achieved this in business, women in marriage. The sublime distinction of America was that no castes interfered with business, and no classes with marriage.... Sharply there emerged from this hallowed field one man and one woman. The man was her father. He had grown rich by being quick and clever. The woman was her mother. She had grown rich by being sensible, by seizing her chance. Romance in their lives was a hidden function, if it existed at all. It was bound up with the mysteries of birth and sex. These things took care of themselves.

The important thing for Lois, since she was a woman, lay in the need of being sensible. Lois knew what this meant. She knew as well the proportional insignificance of her own girlish impulses. Lois loved to play, loved to be loyal to a friend, would have loved to love a man. But these were part of her childhood, and childhood was a special state. Its needs were indulgences one must outgrow. Childhood was of the same dim category as art and stories. It wasn’t true. It was “make-believe.” It lied. Muriel had already cast it aside like her short dresses. Lois was aware she was carrying it a bit too far and too long. She was sixteen and in ankle skirts and her braids were already gathered on her head. She deemed herself brave and a trifle foolish to be so frolicsome at sixteen. She was unswervingly confident of knowing how to change at the needed moment. Meanwhile, she felt herself slightly inferior in the things that held her and in the moods she loved. The rule of life was to harden the present into a mold for the future. Yet Lois could not resist pouring herself still into immediate and short-lived moments: giving herself to emotions that must have no future. The gay spirit still danced fast. Inexorably, from without, the things she learned bore inward, seeped downward, stifled the things she had merely always felt. Her acquired consciousness was a slow acid mist that would eat away the stir and laughter of her birth. The gay spirit danced fast, though it was dancing to death.

All this was Lois. All this was drawing, with her and in her, near to David. With David the stalwart muteness of the years that inclosed him with his mother: the sting and the song of his father: the drowsy stir of the Town not yet awakened, not yet awakened to its death in the crash of the industrial Age.

Two little teeming worlds, spying each other, craving each other across the Nothing....

* * * * *

David and Thomas Rennard had agreed on an evening by letter. They were going to dine together, and then to theater. Tom waited in the lights of a Broadway chop-house.

He would not know the man he met: this he knew. He stood quite still and gauged the crowds. The heavy strokes of their passing fell against his measured life. They separated him as he stood there from the thoughts and fruits of his growing. Tom stood graceful and free as few men do. His weight was equal on both feet: his arms were unpropped: his back curved subtly in rhythm with his head. Only in the faint peer of his eyes was there defect. Tom was nearsighted. He did not admit this. He wore no glasses, despite the advice of doctors. His best friends had no inkling that when he recognized them, distant, on the street, it was not by sight of their features but by knowledge of the accents of their walk.

The crowds flayed him with dull black strokes and Tom was separate from his first months in the City. He twined this with thoughts of David. It was different of course. David must have found a ready welcome in the house of his uncle. Tom knew of Anthony Deane: his name was that of a big-hearted, well-liked merchant. Tom had come with no reception, no one to remake and to keep him. He thought of a stone fallen in a wind-shattered sea, how it sank with no slightest added tremor of wave and no sign from the swinging heavens. He knew what the City had done upon him. The terracing steel had rivetted his eyes and writhed him. The clamor of this world had soon enticed him from the call of his old thoughts. Old dreams were outrun by the faëry of the City.

He stood naked there, and emptied among millions. Cornelia was distant with her cold hand in his. But he was more alive than he had been. He knew this, because his nudity was not stark. It was encased in a great trembling. It was cold with a great hunger for warmth. A fire of will stirred in him: darted from him out and became vision among the millions. He had seen. He saw that these millions also were naked and forlorn from themselves. No one was at home in the City: no one was himself in the City! Tom had found himself smiling, known himself strong. He was naked no longer. _He was clothed in the knowledge of the nakedness of others_.... At once he had looked at his hands and found money. He prospered. But Tom knew that this light from within himself which played about among the darkness of men and brought him the strength of knowledge could not go forth from him and stay in him as well. When it was away, outside, doing his work Success, he was unlit himself.

Would he find David still shivering in his new nakedness? Tom remembered the distinction between them.

“No,” he said aloud: “he’ll be thinking there’s darkness and confusion all about, in the blinding blare of his own light. And blaming it all on himself.”

He winced, suddenly finding it cold. The dark pupils of his eyes distended, the mouth drew downward over the lower lip, the skin was taut on his cheek-bones. Then a recovering spark in his eyes illumed their warm particles of bistre, the defiant smile of his mouth pointed upward.