Part 8

She was quick to understand and to redispose her forces. “Then you must permit me to lend you five dollars. There now. I’ll be offended if you don’t.” She dug in her bag and held out a bill. “Why should you discriminate against a fellow?”

David paused long enough to try to see with what he thought her generous eyes the foolish panic he was in. He gathered himself. They both laughed. He took the bill.

“It is good of you,” he said.

“And of you,” she answered.

She was silent and meek while the waiter took the order. He was gone. She began.

She talked methodically. She chose her specific subject and cribbed him in it. It was plain that Caroline Lord detested vagueness and abhorred disorder. No wide fields to roam and to be lost in. Miss Lord was managing this lunch. Before long she bored him.

In the emptiness of this, he could retreat a bit and see her.

She was a handsome woman. Her age was beyond David’s knowing. He would have called her new, rather than young. She was well-kept.

“I saw a play last night I am sure would have interested you. _The Blue Daisy_. Have you seen it?”

He said, No.

“Do you go to the theater much?”

He said, No, again.

Miss Lord followed her plan. She had a catalogue of non-essential subjects: art, politics, life:--the sort to be served at amicable luncheons. She had already done books.

“Why--it’s the story of two brothers. Let me see, what is their name? _Daysplaings--Gass-tong_ and _Rah-ool Daysplaings_. There’s the eldest who has a beautiful estate in Normandy. The young one is sort of a poet, a dreamer, you know--wanders about, mostly with his brother’s wife while----”

David knew he was going to hear the entire story. She was a handsome woman.

There were no curves in her face. Her chin was square and her mouth was straight. The poise of her forehead was straight and the look of her eyes was square.

“Well, you can imagine what happened then. But it didn’t. The idea was there. That is bad enough. The husband was quite right, I think....”

Miss Lord was a pattern of symmetry: a study in balance and rule.

Her body was not angular. She sat very straight in her chair. “Then, the curtain falls.” She was tall, and sitting she topped David. “The way it was acted had a good deal to do....” She came forward a little. Her hands were half shut and flanked her head. Her arms were two columns propping some splendid official building.

“Of course,” she was saying, “that sort of thing seems to be common in France. They’re a decadent race, you know. Clever, though!”

Yes: her body was indeed not angular like her face. Her arms were ample. David could see the suggestion of flesh bursting the plain white sleeves. Her bosom was voluptuously full. Were these not feminine curves, these suave rounded masses? He felt the solidity of Miss Lord more somehow than her sex. Sex is an aura, not a form. Women understand this best. But a certain lack puzzled David. It was strange for him to sit so close to this lovely woman and not feel her lovely: to see her flawless and be unwarmed.

“‘Oh,’ the Irishman pointed, ‘she’s an Irish bull.’”

He should have laughed at this joke. He was full of the pain of Lois. Suddenly, he was thinking of Lois.

“And what do you say,” it was the first question she had asked him in many minutes, “to Tammany’s victory! After three years of splendid reconstruction?”

It was part of Miss Lord’s program to discuss politics. Miss Lord was no “crank on women’s rights,” as she put it. That was too serious a view of the thing. Above all, or under all, she wanted you to know that she was a woman: she wanted you to treat her as a woman. But a strong, wise woman. One who could, unblushing, talk of adultery in a French play or of the degradation of a Tammany campaign.

“Why,” David answered, “I don’t know. I can’t understand. If all these things were true about Tammany Hall.... There must be something else behind it all: some _reason_ why Van Wyck was elected.”

Miss Lord smiled. This was his opinion: a fledging’s she could take with indulgence. She wanted no more of it. Now she could deliver her own. She started.

David was thinking of Lois. Little lovely Lois. Why must his mind fill so compellingly with Lois, when he lunched with Miss Lord?

“The thing is, you see, the people do not think. Catchwords and Sunday picnics win them over. Really, popular government----”

This woman. That girl. Could two creatures be more different? Why then the idea of a comparison. Did they have something, did they lack something in common?

“... so far at least a failure.”

Their ideas _were_ one. Here was Miss Lord trying to conceal the impression that she earned her living: trying with might and main to be like Lois. An older, more settled, equally virginal Lois?

He half-closed his eyes. It did not matter. Such subtle things as eyes half-closed were beyond Miss Lord. Beyond Lois? He heard her voice. “The City had to pay ten cents a-piece for coat-hooks! A-piece! When you can buy them _anywhere_ retail for a nickel.” He heard her voice. It was so unlike her stalwart strapping body that he had not noticed it until now when his half-shut eyes saw less. Miss Lord’s voice was high, was girlish! It too had that ring which, though David knew no such rule, goes with an emotionally empty life. Wise, cool Miss Lord. Did she have really more of the wine of feeling than pampered Lois? Was she more alive, after all?

She was earning her living. While Lois lolled at teas, and waited for her début. Earning one’s bread--David knew what that meant, in the world. It meant the heights and the depths. It meant nobility. The man who earned his bread was a man: the man who did not was less than a woman.... Did it really mean these things?

He had earned his living since he was fifteen years old. For five years done this; for five years thought nothing about it, thought nothing about the world. That was strange. He had loafed three weeks near an idle lake and a world was born. Was earning one’s bread perhaps a trick of the hand, like placing the spokes in a wheel? What had the droning hours in the shop brought to him? Did he not go out into the breathing fields and watch his mind stir to expand? Until there had been three weeks of this and his mind had expanded. He liked work. Was it perhaps a trifle like a drug that one gets used to, that eases one off from the world? Here he was, juggling with steamship deliveries and tinkering accounts. Brainier work than welding handle-bars? Life could not be this. Perhaps this wise woman who earned her living did not know life after all.

At least, she did not know him. She had bored him: she was boring him now. David felt he knew her somewhat. He was not boring her....

“It has been such fun, Mr. Markand. After all, we can’t get along, can we, without fresh points of view? They mean success in business. Not plodding counts, you will find: always the fresh point of view....”

Her judgments were cleaner-cut than his. A rubber-stamp is dear. What lay, in truth, behind the patter of her phrases: “France is corrupt but clever.” “People vote according to picnics and catchwords.” “After all, there is something _clean_, something _big_ which America stands for, that no other country can rival”?

Lois also had her occupation. She received no salary for it: she was apprenticed to it still. She would get her place in the world, if she pursued it well. It too would mean money and ease and position. She too was going through a trick that was far from the free winds of living. Did not both these women belong to Deane and Company?

He loved Lois. He said to himself he loved her. This woman he did not love. So he saw her clearly. Let him swing this clear-seeing back into the dim place of his heart that hurt! It was impossible. He could not diminish Lois after all. The result of his effort was to dispose him more pleasantly toward Miss Lord. Here he was smiling at her with a new attention that a less wise woman might have been wise enough to mistrust....

He came away with a gnawing sense of doubt. He was heart-sick more deeply than ever. Miss Lord and his cousin were creatures of a single world. They performed different parts of a single service. Both of them were supposed to uphold the prestige of this system that made money and spent it: to submit to its standards of deed and thought, to further its dominions. For this, Miss Lord had her wages, Lois her keep.

_He too!_ He too had been taken in for service! For service rendered he too would receive the means of sustaining life. David had seen a coat-of-arms heralding a strange device on the façade of a great commercial building. It had puzzled him. He had forgotten it. Now he recalled it and understood it. He marveled at its telling word. It had said: “Spend me and defend me.”

A great fright was being born in David....

V

Tom Rennard and his sister stood under a house with a high straight stoop like a dozen alongside it. They looked up. Behind them their passing through Stuyvesant Square. The sky was very deep and warm on the moldering housetops, beyond the cool clouds. These skimmed their shadows across the Park’s shut green. They threw small puffs of gray on the gleaming creepers of the Church. They dropped to the squat red meeting-house of the Friends and lightened its brick with their dark. They went westering over the bleak dense City.

“This is the number.”

They mounted the stoop.

Each had a hand on the iron rail that rusted under crumbling paint.

A piercing rumble lay in the Park. Jangle of horse-cars, stir and laughter of children, the dry gasp of life hot over the Park from four dense sides, as over a cool well. And the Square merging with these the distances it caught on its church-steeple: hoot of river craft, gashes of dull speed echoing into sharpness as an elevated train passed through muffled houses. All of it funneled down the narrow eastward street that fell from the Square to the River: rose above the shoulders of these two: flattened back against the reticence of brownstone walls.

“Not a bad house,” said Tom. “Relic of Knickerbocker glory. Some less brilliant Stuyvesant cousin may have lived in it once.” He pulled a bell-handle: its call pierced and lingered in the old mansion’s depths. The house stood unmoved like a ventriloquist.

He turned. The sun was aflame in the Eastern windows. He faced the Park. Slow swarms of men and women crawling and scattering like bugs. These drew away his thoughts from the house and Cornelia. She stood laughing at the ornamented vestibule: its florid crimson plaster.

“Strange, isn’t it?” she said. “When they tried to add beauty to their houses they made them hideous. Why is it?...”

Tom’s new partner, Gilbert Lomney, who was a cousin of the President of the Fidelity Bank, who was a nephew of the General Manager of a great Railroad System, who was among the loyal stags of Mrs. Astor’s balls, who was a fellow with no moral and no professional sense--he wondered how he was going to get along with him. He brought in business well enough. But Tom had misgivings. He thought about them now. Lomney’s most brilliant feature was his glasses: his best achievement was his neckties. His glasses had a way of catching the sun whenever there was any sun around. His neckties were striped and of three colors. Without his glasses, Lomney was dull. Without his neckties, he would be naked. His eyes were flat. His complexion was habitually gray. About his mouth were the heavy lines, the puffing pucker that denote a sluggish kinetic system. One thing, to be sure: Lomney’s head was long--what Tom knew to be a generous head. But he was not sure of the brows that seemed dissociate from his eyes. Well: this was his partner. That day there had been a rub in the office.

Lomney came in smiling in the morning.

“Rennard,” he said, “is there no way of getting out of this contract cheaper than by paying the indemnity?”

“Why doesn’t Murchison pay it? Good God! it’s scarcely a mutual document at that!”

“Well, if he has to, he’ll have less respect for us.”

Both of them knew that Murchison could afford to be fair: that Sampson could not afford to be cheated. But, “It’s not a question of that,” said Lomney, “It’s a question of how we are going to stand at 79 Broadway.”

“Let’s have all the facts--since the contract.” Tom easily devised a plan. He had taken it to Lomney, who rejoiced.

“Come out to lunch, oh, Daniel!” He flourished a silver-headed cane.

“No, I’ve an engagement.”

“Very well. Ta-ta. I’ll not be back to-day.”

Tom sulked at his lonely lunch. He did not mind the trick he had played for Lomney’s client. But the unctuous pleasure of his partner was an ill thing to accept. It made him clear away his desk that afternoon with a fresh disgust: and be improperly amiable to Ladd, their abject clerk: and smile at Lomney’s fizzle of a brief to be argued in the morning.

“Let him lose the damn motion, I’ll win it back on appeal for him. More glory, more money----” Standing on the stoop, Tom saw and added: “--More satisfaction in having Lomney lose.”

He went on, while his body waited: “Why should I be doing these clever things for the half benefit of Gilbert Lomney? Don’t I know? I have the brains, but he has the pull and the people. Face it, man, it’s the game.”

He knew he would have to. There was little use in being clever at the Law save one could sell one’s cleverness. There was little use in treasuring even in some mute corner of his soul the dream that ability, unorganized, was profitable. It could only spoil his humor: perhaps his chances. Some day, Lomney might find him lunching alone and think it queer. This above all must be avoided. Lomney had his Class’s phobia for queerness. He would not have trusted Solomon in an outlandish cut of vest.

Coming this late afternoon to see his friend, Tom found the check on his tangents of mood abominably hard. He must take Lomney to his bosom and cherish him: as a man should another who was to multiply his power....

Waiting made them pensive, forgetful. The doors of the vestibule sucked suddenly in. Cornelia and Tom gathered themselves with an alacrity determined by their recovery from its opposite. A woman was there. Her bare arms were folded: a gray apron spread across her body like a sooty mist over a fertile field.

As they stepped in they left the day. They entered another time. In the transition they were quick to both. It was September and hot. Beyond the bricks and the pavements, Indian Summer made the world glad. Trees waved in their new bright colors like flowers sprung up over night: earth was a-dance with insects, was leaping drunk from sharp liquors: air trilled with seeds for the next Spring. In New York heat was empty. Tom and Cornelia thought this. David also.

He sat upstairs in his room, looking over the Square.

Tom and Cornelia were out of the day and into the hall. About them the odor of endless passions, innumerable steps: the acerb sad odor of the lodging house. More lasting and more real it was than the lives of the creatures who came and who went. Here in this breath of the dark halls, their one permanence.

David had but recently moved in. The room was still somewhat strange to him: it was hard to rest in it, to rest asleep in it. Being with it stirred his nerves. The need of repose sent him to sitting in the Park. Also, he was still weary in the change from his vacation spent in the mountains with the Deanes. The first days of return had been dense ringing blows on the slumber of his nerves that were once more glad--glad as never before--in the free welcome of the woods. This was gone--gone echoing as David refitted to the City.

He was pensive, waiting for his friends to see his new room and take him to dinner.

He sat with his elbows on the base of the open window and was glad when the breeze touched his face. Also he was a little irritated when it fingered upward and threw his hair in his eyes. He had to move his hand to move his hair. Unwelcome. His mood was the immobile one in which the Past alone may move. The wind was the stir of the outer world, the world in which was his future and from whose moving he was momently apart.

It had been hard to leave the comfortable Deanes because they were so good to him and made him welcome and made him feel that he was theirs. It was a little easier to go, because of Lois. She held him suffering near to her, with her lips turned away. But the real reason of his going was a hidden spring that David could not name. He knew vaguely his going had to do with this same comfort which made his going hard. One quality held him, drove him. There was much to ponder in this, since, had he but known it, there was much of David in this. He needed to move on.

He found reasons for his impulse, worthy reasons that his aunt and uncle were the first to admire.

One morning in the mountains, sudden, he listened to his words: “Aunt and Uncle,” he said, “don’t you think I will be training better for an independent life if I learn to do without your dear hospitality?”

A ponderous sentence. It emptied David whose native tongue was rounded, poetic, simple. He stood ponderous and awkward like it, above his uncle.

Mr. Deane was in white flannels and a blazer coat that was almost unheard-of in America and had come blushing from London. It was red and yellow and purple: striped it was and flaring in front so as to leave way for the hospitable stomach. Mr. Deane sat curling his legs and peacefully tasting his cigar. One difference in Mr. Deane on a vacation was his less unnerved way with his cigars. In the City he chewed them, in the country he smoked them. Mr. Deane was altogether a more delightful and more generous person. His little blue eyes looked larger as if they were more alive: his cheeks hung less heavy: his sparse hair was less awry. In particular, his voice was different, what he said. It came in less hectic bursts, less flurries of sudden release. His voice was almost an easy monotone. He could speak more on a single subject without wandering or strutting away. He could find more subjects on which to speak. In the City any family discussion left him somehow outside, though he himself had started it. His eyes stared away, he retired, he became abstracted. Soon he was forgotten. He sat there at the table, chewing his cigar, glassily looking inward. His brow furrowed moistly, his cheek-jowls had pleats like an old dog’s.... But this Mr. Deane was alert and full of jests. Each afternoon, he trudged forth with Lois and David, grunting along a tree-swooned road to a distant woody place where he might ply them with candies and tea. He appeared in the morning, a racket in hand:

“Well, young man, are you ready to be beaten?”

And since David was a beginner at tennis, his uncle whipped him. He twisted his body into intricate designs, he served a high slow ball, surged forward with racket _en couche_ like a spear or _en garde_ like a shield. He laughed when Lois laughed from her bench, was happy in his 6-4 victory over David--far more happy, it seemed to David, than any business success had made him in the City.

The brief time her father was with her in the country, Lois escaped her friends. The pair played and chatted together: occasionally, she read him a story from one of the magazines or faced him over a card-table. And these activities, in which David joined on his own brief sojourn from work, went on without the interest, almost without the notice of Muriel and Mrs. Deane.

Summer to them meant merely a transfer from the City of the business and paraphernalia of City life. “A change of air” was what they said, and what they actually meant. They were sure to go where the greatest number of their friends went also. Such activities and such relations as the summer brought of itself they disqualified before the more serious continuance of City social life. Of course Lois could not be spared: but she was far less tolerant with the free toss of the greenland and the glint of a lake to formulate her appetite for somewhat else. There seemed less excuse for her dapper friends and the conventions of pleasure, under the stars and out in the open breezes. Lois could not know that these enhanced her feeling for herself: that it was against this feeling the world so painfully grated.

The indifference of Muriel and Mrs. Deane was a delicious pretext for defiance. Not the least charm for Mr. Deane’s spirited revival was this half-sheepish, half-crude flaunting of revolt into the proper faces of his wife and daughter. It was as if he said: “I have my own way of taking a vacation. You think it foolish. Doubtless it is. But it _is_ a vacation.”

Now, in this climax of ease and pleasure, something spiteful had to commence to stir in David, to spoil it all. Something that came with a new burst of feeling for Lois, with a new glow of comfort in this family that was so glad to have him.

There was no doubt of that. His aunt’s note of a year ago had invited him to the house “until you find a comfortable and proper place for yourself in the City.” By Spring he knew that they had put aside all thoughts of his leaving, and that his uncle had no doubts of his being able to “do” downtown.

The Spanish war burst, half frolic, half business, upon the country. In February the battleship “Maine” went down in Havana harbor. In March, the Inquiry Commission backed the voices of papers and politicians shrilling for war, by its dubious decision that an outside mine had done the damage. Congress turned its trick of political revolution. President McKinley was swept from the saddle. His reservations were set at naught: his reluctances were negated to weakness. In April came the call for volunteers.

The crisis caught David in a tender mood. Stirrings of doubt concerning business and politics had died. This energy was being poured as fuel into the flame of Lois. As his energy bubbled up, there it went. There grew indifference for other things--for all things. Something in the casual technique of Lois kept the flame from spreading: sealed it in a tight place where it danced by itself, rather merrily than tragically: smartingly rather than to a sear. David went on with his affairs.

His weekly salary had been raised five dollars. He left off going to food-pens for luncheon. The spirit of earning more made him careless about spending. He came to find Miss Lord less noxious and took to asking her to an occasional meal. He went to theater, read novels, liked his Aunt Lauretta. He tried to keep clear of Lois: but after all the pleasure of her company was far more real than the pain. He saw the Rennards frequently: but their apart opinions stayed apart, they did not merge with him. His emotions and his nerves were a blind swirl within a rigid life.

Now, the call for volunteers. He was young and strong. Was it not his move to answer? He did not want to go. He was comfortable in his new indifference. Doubtless, the Cubans were not comfortable. But they were very far away.

He brought his problem to Tom. He did not know what he wanted of his question.

“Lord, man! Don’t be a fool.”

David had never seen his friend so moved, so angry, so tenderly savage. Tom jumped from his seat and paced the room. His hands were fists.

“David,” he stopped before him and spoke with a hot restraint, “I am ashamed of you. Why the Devil should _you_ want to go to War?”

David was sprawling in a wide Morris chair. He curled up a little under this onslaught like a furry caterpillar.

“Who is to go, if unmarried fellows like myself are not?”