Chapter II: Part I (2)

"Why, Paul!" May flashed a glance at him. She stared at the floor, and she was dying in the obscure impression of moonlight on trees near a park gate.

Paul came up to her and, with the surreptitious movement of a sulky child, pressed a hard kiss against her mouth.

Before she could respond to him he ran out, through the hall and down the stairs and into the street. He was terrified lest he should see Julia before he could leave the house. Anything but May! He didn't want May. Aunt Julia always coming close to him, touching him, laying her hand on his. He felt trapped in his loathing of her. Why was it he could never forget her!

It was growing dusk. On either side of the infinite street the houses were vague. The trees were like plumes of shadow waving above him. The stars in the sky, that yet glowed with the passing of the sun, were burning dust. He tried to think that he was mad. Beyond him under a street lamp he saw a dimly illumined figure--big buttocks wagging before him under a thin calico skirt. And the Negress passed out of sight.

By the time he reached home he was sick of himself, thoroughly dejected, perceiving the vileness of his own mind. He crept up the back stairs unseen, and in his small room lay face downward on his bed. He thought he ought to kill himself to keep from thinking things like that. Uncle Alph and his Aunt down in the dining room. He began to sob. God, all the rottenness in the world! If I did that it would be outright in the daytime. I wouldn't be ashamed. Naked bodies moved before him in a long line. They were ugly because he wanted to keep them out. Aunt Julia was there and even May. He would not see them, but they were ugly. Their ugliness was the horror that enveloped him. He knew their ugliness because it became a part of him without his having seen it.

There was something beautiful at last. It was nakedness that belonged to no one. Nakedness without a face. It took him. He was asleep. There were breasts in the darkness. He was afraid. He could not wake up. He was fear and he was afraid of himself. He was against naked breasts that held him, that he could not see.

* * * * *

May tip-toed down the dark stairs, her small hand sliding along the cold mysterious rail.

When she reached the lower hall she saw the door of the study open and Father sitting there with Bobby who was studying and very intent on the book he held upon his knees. There was a green lamp on the desk and a moth bumping against the shade and shattering its wings. The light, falling on Father's back, made the strands of hair twinkle on his drooped head, and his shoulders looked dusty in the black coat he wore. The study windows were open. Beyond Father was the dark yard. A square of the sky was like green silk. The moon, laid on it softly, was breathing light like a sea thing, glowing and dying.

When May had reassured herself of this unchanged world she tip-toed up to her room. She wanted to undress quickly so that she could be in bed and forget everything but Paul's unexpected kiss and the new cruel feel of his lips. Now that she was alone she wanted to forget about being ashamed. She had a curious, almost frightening, intimacy with her own sensations. She wanted to go on thinking of herself forever and ever.

* * * * *

Dudley's intuitions were capable of sensing what might be called the psychological essences of those about him. He never became aware of the elusive value of a personality without wishing to absorb it into himself so that it became a part of his own experience. He could not bear to lose his sense of identity with those from whom he had compelled such contacts. For this reason, though he despised his parents, he maintained toward them the attitude of a dutiful son.

It was the same with all the friends of other days. When he was attracted by some one Dudley initiated him into a devastating intimacy. The person, for a time, would yield to a flattering tyranny, but, in the end, would rebel against the inequality of possession. Dudley refuted all intellectual justifications of protest, and attributed the failure of his friendships to the emotional inadequacies of his disciples.

When women abandoned their sexual defenses to him, however, he found nothing left to achieve. They held a view of their relationships which made the subtler kinds of personal pride unnecessary to them. If they had received in life any spiritual disfigurements, they were only too ready to expose these where it would buy them a little pity through which they might insinuate themselves into another soul. Their spiritual instincts were as promiscuous as the physical expressions of embryo life. It was only as regarded their bodies that they showed anything like reserve. Even here it was more a matter of vanity than anything else, for in surrendering themselves in the flesh the thing they seemed most to fear was that once they were revealed they would not be sufficiently admired. It was irritating to feel that when they abandoned everything to a man they but attained to a subtler possession.

Not long before meeting Julia, Dudley passed through an experience in which he narrowly avoided matrimony. The girl had appeared to be peculiarly submissive to his influence; but at a time when his complacency had allowed him to feel most tender of her she had evaded him. If she had been less precipitate he would have married her. He was thankful for the circumstance which had saved him, and when he corresponded with her he called her "my dear sister," or "my very dear friend". Now that she had abandoned him he was more generous toward her than he had ever been. He knew that one could give one's self in an impersonal gesture. But it was very tricky to take from others. He wrote her that he must learn to function alone, that it was the artist's life. She could never explain to herself why it was that she resented so deeply his condemnation of his own weakness and his reiteration of his need of the isolation and suffering which would clarify his inner vision.

Dudley hinted to all the women he met that Art was his mistress and that he could not permit himself to approach them seriously without subjecting them to the injustice of this rivalry. The physical terrors of his childhood had aggravated his caution. His inward distress was terrible when he was obliged to reconcile his resistance to the world outside him with the ideal of the great artist which commanded him to abandon himself to all that came. His desire, even as regarded material things, was to hoard everything that contributed to the erection of a barrier between him and the ruthless struggle of men. He longed for commercial success, and he displayed an ostentatious indifference to the salableness of his work. He had a physical attachment for his possessions.

He hated gatherings of all sorts unless they were of friends who would respond to all he had to say and whom he might insidiously dominate. Yet he had encountered Julia first at the home of Mrs. Hurst, whose bourgeois pretensions to esthetic interest he despised. These heterogeneous assemblies gave him the cold impression of a mob. Anything which affected him and at the same time evaded him was unadmittedly alarming. He had not appeared at his best that night until he was able to lead Julia aside and talk to her alone. Then he became suddenly at ease. There was a slightly bitter humility about her confessions of ignorance that made him feel her potentially appreciative in a genuine sense.

Strangely enough the frankness of her self-depreciation disarmed him. He felt that he must search for a hidden pretension that would show her weak and allow him an approach. Wherever she displayed symptoms of confidence he confronted her with her dependence on illusion. He told himself that all that one individual owed another was the means to truth. Believing in the dignity of self-responsibility, he could not assume the burden of Julia's discouragement. He imagined her unhappy. If he helped her to see herself he was aiding her to attain the only ultimate values in life.

After he and Julia became lovers he was troubled not a little by the necessity for concealment, for he had told her so frequently that her relation to Laurence had been falsified by the accumulation of reserves.

* * * * *

Dudley had said so often that he considered Laurence a repressed and misunderstood man that Julia, with an antagonism which she did not confess to herself, asked her lover to dine at her home. Meeting Dudley as Laurence's wife again put her on the offensive regarding everything that concerned her house and the usual circumstances of her existence. She had never taken such care in composing a meal as she did for this occasion, and she spent half an hour arranging the flowers in a low bowl on the table.

When Dudley came he greeted Laurence with peculiar eagerness. Julia found it hard to forgive her lover for making himself ridiculous.

During dinner the guest led the talk which was exclusively between the two men. He insisted on discussing bacteriological subjects with Laurence. Laurence deferred politely to Dudley's ignorance.

The large room in which they sat was lighted by the candles at either end of the long table. The glow, like a bright shadow, was reflected in the dark woodwork and against the obscure walls. Through the tall open windows the wind brought the warm night in with a soft rush of blackness. Then the pale candle flames flattened into fans and the wax slipped with a hiss into the burnished holders.

Laurence was humped in his chair as usual, so that the rough collar of his coat rose up behind against his neck. Most of the time as he talked he stared straight before him; but occasionally he glanced with his small pained eyes into Dudley's engrossed and persistent face.

Julia saw with unusual clearness everything that Laurence said and did. She was possessively aware of his gestures, and when he spoke easily and fluently of his work she had a proprietary satisfaction in it, and was full of animosity toward Dudley's questioning.

She felt betrayed by Dudley, who approached Laurence by ignoring her mediumship. She could not bear the admission of Dudley's power to exclude her. They could only live in each other. She gave him life in her, but he obliterated her from himself, and so condemned her to a sort of death. And while she was dead he gave Laurence her life. She was dead and alone with her body that was so alive. She felt her breasts swelling loathsomely under her crisp green muslin dress, and her long hidden legs stretched horribly from the darkness of her hips. Her live body possessed her stupidly. If only he would take it from her! If only with one glance he would admit her to himself!

As they passed from the dining room Julia touched Laurence despairingly. He saw her worried smile. "You're warm, dear," she said. And she added, "I wonder how our children fared upstairs, eating alone in state." She wanted to compel Laurence into the atmosphere of domestic intimacies where her guest had no part.

"I wonder." He returned her smile abstractedly and spoke to Dudley again. "You know Weissman of Berlin--"

Julia looked unconsciously tragic and bit her lip. "Have you been able to arrange for your exhibition, Dudley?" she interrupted demandingly. Her voice was sharp.

"Why, no--" Dudley glanced at her with pleasant interrogation. "You were saying--about Weissman?" He was naïve like a child unconscious of rudeness.

When they came to the staircase Laurence went on ahead because of the light. Dudley took Julia's arm, bare to the elbow. She shuddered away from him. She was observing his strut, the way he walked, his weight bearing on his heels. When the glow from the upper hall fell on them she saw his short arms held stiffly at his sides, the black down clinging on his wrists and the backs of his hands, the twinkle of his crisp reddish mustache that appeared artificially imposed on his small, almost womanish, face, and the thick black curls, soft and a little oily, that clung about his ill-formed head. She disliked even the careful carelessness of his dress.

But her loathing of him was after all only horror of herself. If he had given her a look of acceptance she would have become one with him. Then it would have been impossible to see him so separately. She wanted to explain the horror to him. If he had known her thoughts he could not have endured them, and he would have saved them both.

But he was separate and satisfied in himself. "Julia," he said in a low voice, "Laurence Farley is a remarkable person. There is something in the dignity of his reserve that puts us to shame. My God, what a tragedy he is! He interests me tremendously. I'm grateful to you for letting me know him."

Julia felt hateful that he presumed to tell her this. She had always spoken gratefully of Laurence. She had much pride in her pain in never finding excuses for herself.

"He isn't sophisticated in our sense," Dudley said, "but he makes me feel that there is something puerile and immature in both of us."

Julia said, in a hard voice, "I don't think I have ever failed in appreciation of Laurence." Suddenly she realized that both these men were strangers to her, that she loved and wanted only herself. Her despair was so complete that it relieved her, and she could scarcely hold back the tears.

* * * * *

Dudley wanted to despise Laurence. There was something in the personality of Julia's husband which defied contempt. If Laurence had displayed any crass desire for recognition Dudley would have passed him by with relief; but the artist wished to force all sensitive natures to admit that their secrets could not be hidden.

Laurence's regard for Julia was full of the condescension of maturity. He gave to her where it was impossible for him to take. Dudley had always despised her a little, and now the fact that her husband excluded her from his suffering was testimony of her inadequacy. Without admitting it to himself, Dudley was beginning to resist being associated with her. He reflected that it was grotesque to dream of finding understanding in such a struggling and incomplete nature. Julia was possessive. The heroic woman must rise above this instinct.

Her breasts were a little old, her body thin. He remembered the angularity of her hips, the too long line of her back. He saw her eyes uplifted to his with that pained, withheld look which annoyed him so much. Her skin was very white, but a little coarse. When she put her arms about him her hair, all disarranged, fell wild and heavy about her strained throat. He did not wish to admit that he had discovered his mistress to be less beautiful than, in the beginning, he had imagined her. He revolted against these obvious judgments of the senses. It was unpleasant to recall her so distinctly. He pitied her mental incompleteness which made it impossible to give her the purer values which he wanted to share with her.

Dudley congratulated himself on a curiously sensitive understanding of what Laurence had endured. To escape the unpleasant vision of Julia's body and the dumb gaze which fatigued him so much he concentrated all his reflections on his magnanimous sympathy for the man.

He felt that face to face with Julia he would never be able to explain to her what he perceived in regard to her husband, so he wrote her a letter about it. "Laurence Farley is our equal, Julia," he wrote. "We owe it to ourselves to treat him as such. Now that I have had the opportunity to observe and appreciate his rare qualities I know that the relation between you and me will never fulfil its deep promise while this lie exists between you and him. The truth will be hard, but he is big enough to bear it. He is a man who has suffered from the American environment, and has been warped and drawn away from his true self. If his scientific erudition had been fostered in an atmosphere which loved learning for its own sake, he would have been able to express himself. He has the ripe nature of a _savant_. I feel that meeting with you both has a rare meaning for me. We must all suffer in this thing. Perhaps he most, except that I must suffer alone. You and he are close--in spite of everything you are close. Closer perhaps than even you and I have been. But I must learn, Julia. I am struggling yet. I have farther to go than he has, in spite of my superior knowledge of certain things, of worlds of which he has never become cognizant. I have not yet learned as he has to rise above myself. In my slow way I shall do so. I shall learn, Julia, and you shall help me--you two people. I want him to be my friend. I respect him. I love you both. Oh, Julia, how deeply, deeply I have loved you."

When Dudley had dispatched this letter he found himself liberated from many obscure depressions that had been hampering his spirit. The important thing in Julia's life was her relation to Laurence. He, Dudley, would accept the fact that he was only an incident in her struggle to achieve herself.

Yet he was disconcerted by the premonition that her interpretation of what he had done would not be his. He was in furtive terror of being made ridiculous.

* * * * *

Through the tall, open windows of the dining room, Julia, seated with some mending, could see the dull line of the roofs in the next street, and the dreary sky shadowed with soiled milky-looking clouds. The grass in the back yard was a bright dead green. It had grown tall. Flurries of moist acrid wind swept across it, and it bent all at once with a long, undulant motion that was like voluptuous despair. The table cloth rose heavily and fell in a spent gesture against the legs under it. Julia's black muslin dress beat gently about her ankles.

Then the wind passed. The grass blades were fixed and still. In the silent room the ticking of a small clock on a _secrétaire_ sounded labored and blatant. The odor of the cake that Nellie was baking filled the warm air.

Julia heard the postman's whistle and Nellie's heavy step in the hall. Julia thought of Nellie, of the old woman's sureness and silence--a lean old savage woman of many lovers. In all the years that the old Negress had been there she had never showed the need of a confidant. Her children had abandoned her and she had no tie with any human creature save the old man whom she supported who came sometimes to do odd chores.

Julia wondered what had poisoned the white race and given it the need of sanction from some outside source. She wanted a justification of herself, but did not know from what quarter she should demand it.

Nellie entered with a letter and Julia, recognizing the handwriting at once, left it on the table without opening it. As long as the letter lay on the table unknown she controlled its contents.

She turned her back to it and watched the branches of the elm tree, which were stirring again, heavily and ceaselessly, against the fence. Her needle pricked her finger and a rust-colored stain spread in the bit of lace which she was mending. The sun burst through the clouds and the room was filled with the shadowless glare, and with moist intense heat.

Julia suddenly took up the letter and tore it open with a nervous jerk. She dropped her needle. Where it fell on the polished floor it made a tinkling sound like a falling splinter of glass.

She did not question or analyze Dudley's statement of his mood. All she knew was that he was flinging her away from him into herself. There was something composed and final about the letter. When she reread it, it overcame her with helplessness. The lie she had lived in had burdened her, and she could not justify her resentment of the suggestion that she tell the truth.

* * * * *

Later in the day Dudley called Julia on the telephone. He wanted to arrange a meeting with her. He refused to admit to himself that the strained note he observed in her voice caused him uneasiness. He had to prove to himself his complete conviction of the righteousness of what he demanded of her. He suggested a walk in the park, and Julia experienced a resentful pang of exultance because she imagined that he was not strong enough to have her come to his rooms. She contemplated, as a means of defiance, taking him too much at his word.

* * * * *

White clouds filled with gray-brown stains flowed over the hidden sky. Here and there the clouds broke and the aperture dilated until it disclosed the deep angry blue behind it. In the center of the park the lake, cold and lustrous like congealing oil, swelled heavily in the wind, but now and again lapsed with the weight of a profound inertia. The trees, with tossing limbs, had the same oppressed and resisting look as they swung toward the water above their dying reflections.

Julia, seated on a bench away from the path, waited for Dudley to come. When she saw him far off all of her rose against him. She could not hate him enough. She subsided into herself like the cold lustrous water drawn toward its own depths. She felt bitter and shriveled by desperation. She was unhappy because she could not, at this moment, love herself.

Dudley was disconcerted by his own excitement as he approached her. There was something spiritually _gauche_ in the exaggerated simplicity of his manner. He knew that his affectionate smile was an attempt to disarm her, and that his combative and questioning eyes showed his uneasiness. It was hard for him to forgive her when she made him feel absurd like this. A guilty sensation overpowered him. He considered the emotion unwarranted, attributed it to her suggestion, and held it against her as a grudge. At this instant he could allow her no equality so he made himself feel kind. "Dear!" He took her cold fingers in his moist plump hand. Their unresponsiveness pained him. He dropped them and went on smiling at her interrogatively. "I had to talk to you," he said at last. His voice was subdued. His smile disappeared. He recognized that he was depressed and wounded.

Julia wanted to ask him what he expected her to do with her life after she had told Laurence everything, and it was no longer possible for them to live in the same house. She had greeted Dudley. Now her mouth took a sarcastic twist and she found herself unable to speak. She stared straight at the lake, which was beginning to twinkle with cold lights under the gray luminous sky. She shivered when Dudley seated himself beside her.

Before he could tell her what was in him, he had to harden himself. "I'm suffering deeply, Julia. You are suffering. I see it. It is only the little person who doesn't suffer. Why do you resent me? Life is always making patterns. It has thrown us three--you and me, and your husband--into a design--a relationship to each other. No matter what happens we ought to be glad. We may come to mean terrific things to each other, Julia--all three of us. This is a new experience. We mustn't be afraid of it." When he noted her set profile he felt querulous toward her, but he controlled himself and tried to take her hand again. If she had protested in argument he might have talked to her about the strong soul's right to truth, and made clearer to himself what, in the darkness of his own spirit, he had to confess was still a little vague.

Julia glanced at him. Her gaze was steady and bewildered. "Of course I owe it to Laurence. I want to talk to Laurence. I would have done this of my own free will. I loathe the lie I've been living!" She spoke coldly and vehemently. Tears came into her eyes and she averted her face.

Dudley was silent a moment. He twisted his mustache and one of his small bright eyes squinted nervously. He could not bear the pride of her mouth. At the moment all pride seemed ugly to him. It was impossible to call further attention to his pain in the contemplation of renouncing her while she continued to maintain, almost vindictively, it appeared, her readiness to abandon herself to him.

"I can't put what I feel into words, Julia, but it is something very beautiful and deep. Come, sister, you're not angry with me?" Again he took her stiff hand in his. She was humiliating him and he would not forget it.

Julia wished that she could hurt him in a way which would make it impossible for him to talk to her so kindly. She did not understand why the recognition of his absurdity made her suffer so much.

Dudley had been floundering inwardly through the attempt to avoid facing the ridiculous. Watching the harsh bitter line of her lips, he noticed the pulse that swelled and fluttered in her throat. The sight of her pain, for which he was responsible, made him feel all at once very sure and complete. He accepted no burden from it, for he told himself it was a part of her awakening to detached and perfect understanding. He was grateful to himself that he had an ideal notion of what she might be that held him cruelly and steadily against all that she was. He felt voluptuously intimate with her emotions. He could not hurt her enough. He tried to shut out the recollection of her beautiful gaunt body in its almost tragic nakedness. "I don't expect you to understand me completely yet, Julia. One's vision is so warped and tortured by one's desire. All our terminology of good and bad we use in such a limited personal sense. We have to get away from that before we can even begin to function spiritually--to be spiritually at rest. I feel that there are clouds between us, Julia, but behind them is the great sun of your understanding. I believe in that. Say something to me!"

Julia withdrew her hand. "What can I say to you? I am in the habit of viewing problems very concretely. Let me go. I must go." She stood up, smiling at him desperately.

He wanted to destroy the smile behind which she was trying to hide, and to explain to her that the torture he caused her was the price of his very nearness. It had been almost a pleasure for him to feel her hand twitch with repugnance. It was sad that she comprehended so little of his nature. Yet he was sensible of the helplessness of hatred. Knowing that she hated him, for the first time he ceased to fear her and could give himself to uncalculated reactions toward her. He thought that if she were to remain his mistress in a conventional relation he could not love her like this. The artist was, after all, he told himself, like the priest, the mediator between the life of mankind and its mystical source.

But Julia moved away without looking at him. He watched her pass along the edge of the lake, where threads of light as fine as hairs were drawn hot and trembling across the colorless water.

Dudley continued to feel embarrassment in his own soul, for he could not clearly explain to himself the impulses which were governing his acts. He decided that only through his art would he be able to justify all that he was when, at the moment of giving Julia back to herself, he was conscious of possessing her most intensely. He was at his ease only in the midst of powerful abstractions. There was something elephantine about his nature that prevented him from being simple or casual in his moods. If he ever indulged in expressions that were light or commonplace he was suspicious of his own appearance. He was startled sometimes when he had to admit the maliciousness of his reactions toward the smaller souls around him. If he laughed in a gay group his laughter sounded awkward and strained. Perhaps it was because of his small effeminate stature that he felt it necessary to hurt people before he could command their respect.

At this moment the conviction of his power filled him with an intoxication of gentleness. He felt that he enveloped Laurence and Julia as if in the same embrace. That he was beginning to have a peculiar affection for Laurence proved to him the significance of his own unique spirit. Realizing completely that neither Julia nor her husband could approach his understanding, he loved them for their inferiority. As he walked along the path toward the blank glare where the sun was setting among black branches, he noticed a terrier puppy rolling in the polished grass, and had for it something of the same emotion. He loved everything in relation to which he found himself in a position of advantage. Approaching thus he believed he could preserve a philosophic detachment while perceiving what Spinoza called "the objective essence of things."