Part 7

The lamps of the restaurant façade fell over Tom and bathed him. He had the sudden pain of feeling himself a black spot in warm blaze. He moved aside to shadow. He stepped out, and grasped David’s hand.

A coachman stood at the corner beside his horse. Idly he flapped his arms--a habit caught from the cold winters--against the musty broadcloth of his coat. He saw the two young men in the light. Their profiles were sharp. An eager alert young man and a drowsy one, passive before him. A clear laugh and a muffled laugh that followed always. The coachman turned to his horse: “Well, young feller, have some oats?” He prodded his soft nose. The other two were gone.

Three houses stood far separate in the City. The house of the Deanes where the old world of David dissolved into a frantic chaos: the house of the Company in whose gathered fires his new world formed from the running welter: the house on whose top floor lived Thomas Rennard. These houses threw a vivid stirring like the glow of lamps. The spheres of their activity converged. As they burned and moved, a myriad other burnings rose and met them, intermingled and transfused them. A single light, drenching the City. It fell like an eye upon these two talking: it fell with the same singleness upon each spot where men and women were, where men and women loved. From each spot came a glow, from the myriad glows rose back again the transfusing fire, deeper than consciousness, more real than the separate lives which fueled it, as the glow of coal is deeper and more real than the black coal itself. But through the brightness was a vibrancy: and where David and Tom sat, had they been wise enough to follow its receding lines, their vision must have reached back to the three houses. From other spots the grain of the light traced back to other sources. From these sources forth again to farther ones.... To a white cottage in the Eastern village, to the leaning plains of Ohio. Thence again away to beneath the hearts of two dead women stirring there, quiet--still--once more outward--perhaps to find each other behind the sun. Close, there: and here at the chop-house table seeking to be close.

* * * * *

David and Tom, together, were not on Broadway but at Cornelia’s studio. The studio had swung to place under their feet; Broadway lurched on, the footing of others.

Cornelia had not mentioned again her wish to meet Tom’s new friend. It was not necessary. The relation between them was too intimate for that. Tom knew when she was thinking of this: Cornelia knew when Tom had understood her.

“Well, how was the dinner, brother?”

“Are you busy next Sunday afternoon?”

“No.”

“I told Markand you were anxious to meet him. He is in a state of perturbation I hope won’t interfere with his royal job of clerking.”

“Oh, I am glad. But--how was the dinner?”

“You are the first artist he will have met. I have told him about us. Cornelia, you must wear something brighter than that Russian thing. Will you? The sandals will do. Stockings under them, however. A little more air in the meshes of your hair. Yes? Why not that green silk blouse with the orange smocking. I want him to see you’re an artist in some outward visible sign.”

“And the work----?” Cornelia looked at her clays.

“I am afraid he is not quite up to these.”

“Oh, nonsense, Tom!” His sister turned on her couch, her favorite seat. She tucked a foot beneath her and laughed. “To hear you talk, one would think the boy was dull--or that my art was inscrutably profound.”

“He’s not dull. I was amazed last night....”

“At last, the dinner!”

“I was amazed at the bright muddle he’s in. I tell you, he’s inquiring and inquiring. It’s glorious! He told me the Spanish-Cuban question was not a mere matter of relief for the _reconcentrados_! ‘There’s something else beside Principle,’ he announced.”

“Whereupon, I am sure, you added: ‘The same’s true of the Monroe Doctrine.’”

“If I had, it would have shocked him. I did not. His new searching eye has not yet reached that sacrosanct past. I was in no mood to startle him, Cornelia. I felt different. I like David Markand. I respect him. What if he has the usual illusions? In his soul, they are no longer the smug knock-kneed lies I hate. They become true: at least, beautiful. My facts seem shoddy and ugly--and lying, in the warm glow of his faith.”

They were silent both. Tom did not often speak so tenderly.

“Wait and see,” he concluded.

“I see already,” said his sister.

So David came.

He was to leave at once after the Sunday dinner: push his way through the depleted Sabbath City: he was to ring the bell on the brass-plate marked _Rennard_, come up three dusty stairs and find them waiting through the door that made two worlds of the black hall and the bright room.

“I am so glad to see you!” Cornelia had him at once in hand. He looked very tall beside her sharp slightness. She took his hat and his coat.

“Do sit down.” David was anxious to look everywhere about him, to touch all these mysteries with the warmth of his eyes so that they might be cold and strange no longer. He did not quite dare. He kept looking near Cornelia: then, with still greater ease, toward Tom. In this his sensitivity was clear. A glance was an intimate gesture, a visit, to David. He could not comfortably look at what he did not already comfortably know.

“Tom has told me not half enough about you. Just enough,” she smiled, “to make me know it was not half enough.”

Tom apprehensively tested his new friend. His gladness at seeing David understand Cornelia released his worry into laughter.

“Oh,” said David, “it is just the same in my case with what Mr. Rennard has said about you.” He looked at the little cast between the windows and blushed: he folded his hands and looked at them.

Tom remained silent. There was no need of talking: and although he talked much it was deeply true that Tom talked only when he had need of talking. He was comfortable now. He lit a cigarette, and lay prone, propped by his arms, on the window-seat; he let the conversation of the two go over him and smoked.

“You know,” Cornelia said, “we are not New Yorkers either.”

David met her eyes. “Your brother told me about how you ran away.”

Cornelia was silent. What could she say to swell the room’s slow freedom?

“My case”--David went on--“I am so different. I always lived with my mother and then she died. And then my uncle took me--took me really in charge. That is why I came. I have never done anything because I wanted to, really--that I can remember. Except perhaps work in the bicycle shop. Mother wanted me to stay longer at school. But--” he looked at his hands again and stopped, then met Cornelia squarely with a smile, “the truth is mother said to me: ‘Do as you please, son.’ And--and I was bored by school. My best friend, Jay Leamy--he worked at Mr. Devitt’s also.”

“You never told me that,” said Tom.

“He didn’t stay my best friend. I guess that’s why. I guess I was a better friend than he.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Cornelia.

“Well--it was natural. He was ten years older than I. He got married. He got a better job at the Arms factory just outside Town. We didn’t see each other so much after that. He sort of lost interest.”

Cornelia laughed. “I think that’s a little hard!” She did not want this word. She was sure “hard” was an ultimate wrong word for David Markand. She was vague in her misgiving. “Probably, his wife and--he had children? Well, they must have left him far less time.”

“It is not a question of time, is friendship?” David asked.

“Well, left him far less----” Why did Cornelia find this difficult? “Less _emotion_ perhaps. I can understand that. With a wife and children.”

“It would not have made any difference with me,” said David simply.

Tom was leaning over. “Perhaps you don’t know what it means to have a wife and children.”

“I know what it ought to mean to have a friend.”

“Are you sure?” said Tom.

“After we had shared so many thoughts, don’t you see?”

“You must be capable of deep friendship,” Cornelia thought aloud.

Tom was somehow crossed by her remark. He lay back once more, brooding. The talk was easy now between the other two. So easy that even silence did not disquiet them. Tom seemed far away.

Out of a silence, David asked: “Is that sort of friendship rare?”

Cornelia, not knowing, did not answer.

“If it is rare,” said Tom, “there must be something wrong with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“The good things in the world are common. Sunlight: moonlight.”

“Mother and I were that sort of friends,” said David.

“I hope Tom and I are also,” laughed Cornelia.

David looked at her close. She was a woman who made beautiful things. That was her life. It seemed to David she was not so very different from many women he had known who were nothing but mothers. She was not pretty. It never occurred to David that she could be less than beautiful. So he accepted her.

A vague questioning flew through his mind like a scarf of cloud: Were things in the world that had different names so different after all? Artists and mothers, friends and mothers, sunlight and mothers.... The questioning faded.

It was good in this room.

Cornelia felt the trace of his mood on her flesh, found a warm pleasure in talk with this earnest boy whose mind could touch truth without the stiff proddings of the clever. It seemed to Cornelia that David was steadfastly strong like a tree.

Tom jumped out of his smoky silence and brewed coffee. They threw cushions on the floor. They laughed a bit at David’s awkwardness at squatting. These shadows in the room were good. Tom came forward now. The ease of his revery and of his listening had distilled some new disquiet. He needed to get at David.

He would have said: “How little this boy knows himself! What passion lies behind this dream of friendship! What will the world do when he goes asking impossible treasures?” The thought gave him worry. He would have said: “The City will not make him. Thanks for that. But break him, break him, perhaps.” The fear made him urgent: David must be flexible with his terrible strength. His spoken words were: “I am reminded of a story----”

“There was a man.” Tom did not know what he was going to say. His head swam. He was suddenly tired and full of power. He wanted, not sleep, but dream---- “who loved his friend. This man loved his friend and a woman came into his life whom he loved also. He asked for her in marriage, she gave her promise. So he went to his friend and told him. And the friend cried: ‘Do not wed her. Remain with me!’ And the man said: ‘I love this woman but you are my friend. I remain with you.’ He dismissed the woman whom he loved.

“Now, thereafter, all was sorrow in the home of the man and his friend. One night as the man slept an angel came to him. The angel said: ‘Thou who art so loyal to thy friend, name a wish and it is granted.’ The man, half-unknown to himself, cried out: ‘Make a miracle! Make one my friend and my lover. Then I may be loyal and yet be happy.’ The angel smiled. ‘So it is already.’ The angel disappeared.”

Tom paused. A sudden discomfort came upon his face. He pushed back to his tale as to haven: “...at once the man awoke. He found himself in his bed. He remembered the angel’s visitation. He believed it. He ran to the sleeping chamber of his friend, expecting to behold a miracle. It was his friend, his unchanged friend who slept there. The man cursed and smote his breast. Then a great light came to him. He understood. He returned, both loyal and happy.”

David sat there.

This Cornelia understood. Tom was on one of his moody jaunts and away. She had sat there watching as a girl on a fence might watch a horseman gallop past in dust and hoof-thud. She recoiled as he swung in too near.

Tom laughed. “Come! You need some more coffee,” to David. “You are half asleep. I can’t get along without coffee. Can you? The world is so much a dream, one’s sense of fitness makes one go to sleep beholding it. I find I can do endless work, with endless cups of coffee. I wonder who invented coffee. A shame, isn’t it, that the true benefactors of the human race are nameless. The Gods tied Prometheus to a rock and set a vulture on him, for giving us fire. The other saviors of life they have made nameless.”

He skipped nimbly from parable to fun: from apostrophe to laughter. David found himself loving the mere exercise of following his new friend. It was like a cross-country run with an agile pathman. Over brook and rock he tried to leap with him. No time to look and to consider. The way was nothing, the leaping everything.

The story was forgotten. It was shivered away in the pelt of Tom’s succeeding words.

Cornelia was silent. She was pensive. She had stopped listening to Tom. When he went galloping like this, he was running away from something deep in himself. She knew. He would take this thing within him he needed to escape and toss it far and rush after it. Let him rush.

There was David laughing. Tom no longer needed to smoke cigarettes. David was glowing near his finger-tips.

Coffee was gone. Night had come up from the street like incense of incantation. It curled its way into the room, it subdued the flame of the room to a warm ash.

Tom lighted a lamp. No one spoke. A golden ray filtered about the table. It left them in shadows. David got up to leave.

“I was so happy to be here,” he said.

Cornelia clasped his hand deeply in her own. It was warm. She found it hard to speak. “Boy!” her heart sang to him. She managed to say: “You must come soon again.” ... “And again and again.” Her heart had the last word.

Tom took David down through the dark halls where gas-jets shivered like emprisoned birds. He was not happy with this last silence of Cornelia. It was as if she had said: “Why do you bring a guest here and then insult him and not let him even know that this is what you have done?”

His eyes were hot, the hand that took David’s was cold.

“Good-by,” he said, “I hope we are going to be--friends?”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed David....

David walked under swaying houses. They were aburst with broken flame. He walked among scattered men and women driven with unbelieving will and eyes unseeing toward these fires--toward fires that meant love to them and warmth. It was the evening before work: the breach in the dull circle of toil. Hearts were released. Blood surged in vain encouragement through the habit-hardened lives of the workers. Men and women were floods of longing torrenting the streets.... David walked under the spread wings of his own sweet mood. Life was full. Full of the play of voices and of bodies: full of adventure. Life was the mystery of finding....

* * * * *

No one else was at home, that evening. Anne brought early tea to Lois and to David.

“It is _our_ house to-night,” Lois was playful.

A strange exhilaration still sang and worked in him. He looked at the girl who had shared those sweltering nights: he looked at Lois flattering his new ease. It all seemed right to David. It was right that Anne had been there to take. He smiled on her masterfully. The girl was fearful lest the young Miss understand. But we can bring to our minds through intuition only such thoughts our minds have words for. The remote amour was an unthought-of, an impossible thing to Lois. Anne’s own senses, feeling this as they groped forward, again came to rest.

She waited on them with a sweet dignity. It was so plain she was a woman. A woman was a creature whose life was nourished by herself. A creature free of the world. David felt this, as they sat munching at table. It was the quiet serving girl who made him think of woman. With her blood she nurtured. In her womb, at her breast, with her hands, forever her own mute spirit giving men food. Woman was the true master of life: the sourceless god.

David looked at Lois. A faint chill went through him. It seemed to him that Lois was not quite woman. She was less herself, than this waiting servant. He felt her need of sustenance, her lack in this of godhood.

Anne helped her to cake. There she was cutting the cake, simply--sublimely? Lois was above the table like a flower. He thought of the strength of Anne’s abandon: of the wise strength of her withdrawal. Wisdom and strength--for him! Cornelia came also. She, too, was more woman. Already there was lodged the seed of dissolution in his heart for Lois, before the climax of his caring.

Upstairs, he went far toward it. Lois’ arm was about him, the air of her body stabbed his blood: he forgot his comparisons. He was quite sure he loved Lois. They sat so close together, and often she placed her cheek against his lips. He saw the fine tautness of her body hiding beneath the flimsy frock it wore. He desired her body. He desired to break its tautness.

“Is it wrong, Lois dear, to love one’s cousin? Because I love you very much.”

“It is extremely proper.”

A fire had been fanned in him that afternoon: fanned by Cornelia. It burned for Lois.

He viced her shoulders in his hands and looked at her, as one stiffens before a leap. His hands slipped upward to her head. The thrill of her skin and her flesh flowed through his hands like blood. He held her face. He wanted to tell her how he loved her. His own face came nearer, it was like a death and a birth: a frenzy of change.

She thrust her head downward, his mouth sank in the mesh of her hair behind her ear.

He was panting. “Why don’t you let me kiss you--as I _must_?”

Lois withdrew her body. Her mood was not changed.

“Don’t be silly, David. I can’t let you kiss me, that way.”

He was silent. He did not gainsay her. He wanted to hide his face. Something started up in his breast and beat against his breathing, hurt him.

Not the denial of the kiss. It was the sudden pierce of her insensitiveness. She had not cared to understand how he cared for her. And when he had longed for her mouth, her mood had not changed!

If only it had! If only she had been moved--though it was in denial.

He had at times believed he saw her little body stir with passion when he was near her. But so faintly, so containedly. Never a doubt of her control. Something she tasted in exquisite moderation and enjoyed. In her denial she was cool. It was as if her hunger for a closer kiss were a question answered in her catechism: one she knew all about: one she had learned the answer of by rote.

There she was smiling, chatting. She had already forgotten. He looked away and heard the mutterings of his pain that she could be smiling, chatting.

* * * * *

With dull head David went to his work.

He loved Lois and rebelled against his love. She gave him no ground on which to hate her. Always his love was watching, watching for a pause in which to whisper: “See? You do her injustice. She is not hard and flippant. She is young and unknowing. She does not feel a deeper love. How much sun can a bud hold in its tight petals?”

She was not different. She sought him out. She allowed him no escape. One day, she said:

“Why don’t you kiss me any more?”

David took her hand and kissed that, tenderly, hopelessly. Lois laughed. She thought he was teasing her. She fell in with his little game.

Work was already a tune David knew by heart. Fortunately, since his head was dull. The year approached its scintillant climax. And David’s head was dull and his heart was heavy.

One bitter cold day he stepped out for his lunch.

When he could he lunched alone. It was a problem of avoiding Duer Tibbetts whom he emphatically did not like, but who went on blandly liking David. It surprised David how little his own attitude and his inner mood affected his relations with that blossoming gentleman of affairs. It was almost as if, in the reality of their business and family connections, so slight a thing as personal taste must fade away, did not count. He had often lunched with other boys in the office--the sort who Duer said were not “their sort.” He liked them, until he began in this very approach to have discomfort in their friendship. Since the bursting of his wound with Lois he sought to be alone. He was equally surprised by the sensitive response of these others. They felt his aloofness in the office: they honored it. They were different indeed from Duer.

He walked toward the cluttered food-pen where the waitresses sweated visibly at the arm-pits. Here lunch cost him only twenty cents. The place was at least clean, and the food good. The eggs for instance, and the butter--details that meant much for David. He sat huddled at a long porcelain board. From whirling waitresses in white the dishes fell with clamorous approximation near his place. In the rear was an endless catatonic beat of crockery and voices. The whole place roared like the shatter of a mighty loom that wove the calls of women into the brittle shower of china, the glint of knives into the shuffle of feet. David sat and took his food and held his big arms tight to his body. The fresh air as he left gave him the cumulated picture.

This day he heard a clear voice at his side speak his name in the cold street.

He turned: there was Miss Lord.

Caroline Lord held a higher place in Deane and Company than any other woman. These were days before the spread of advertising agents. Miss Lord was in charge of the correspondence department. She had a little office of her own, and a male assistant and a stenographer. She was known as a remarkable woman.

“How do you do, Mr. Markand?” She had evidently overtaken David and now they were walking together.

He saw her casually in and out of the long packed room where David fumbled figures and papers. She was a remote business detail of this still strange world. One day, Tibbetts dragged him into her little office and introduced him. He remembered the way she sat on her desk and chatted cannily and bit at a pencil. The smile of her white teeth was beyond the reach of David’s comfort. He was glad to get away.

Here she was being affable again.

“I presume you were going to lunch, Mr. Markand?”

He noticed that she kept step with him. She was a big and capable woman.

“Y--yes,” he admitted.

“Do you like your work? Perhaps you are tired at night. Am I right? Oh, never worry about that. When you get used--more used to it, it will take less out of you.”

They had passed his eating place. What should he do? He began cursing himself. It was so wide in him that he did not want to invite her to lunch. In her, that this was precisely what she expected. He was a reed before her silent pressure. There she was talking, as if they had an hour to be together.

“We were up on the Palisades last Sunday. You must really have some of your friends take you----” David fumbled in his pocket. His fare downtown that morning had broken his last dollar. He had a way of not keeping much of his money with him. It seemed a risky thing to do in a wild City. His pocket held ninety-five cents! Lunch for two at a decent restaurant was a catastrophe that simply could not be! She was trudging along: subtly pushing him toward Broadway. The lunch-places of the rich were near.

“Doubtless you have a lunch engagement ...?”

“No. But....” He stopped, she stopped. He blushed and she smiled.

“No? Well then, we might have a bite together.”

Why could he never lie? How he despised himself!

“I--I can’t, Miss Lord. I have only ninety-five cents.”

He felt naked before her. A lady should blush and go away when one stood naked before her. There was Miss Lord laughing: swinging her weight back joyously on one heel the better to observe him.

“Oh, isn’t it always a joke when we find ourselves short? I understand so well. Won’t you be _my_ guest, Mr. Markand?”

She tilted her head back. David noticed how small her bonnet was above the mass of her hair. “You know,” she went on, “it was really my invitation after all.”

“Oh--I--no--I.” Her light mood was an added weight.