Chapter XI

Constance Bardale had left early that Spring for Europe. David could not say that he really missed her. He had great pleasure in looking back upon the reality of them together: a certain satisfaction in the prospect of her return in the Fall. He was not prompted to wish to hasten that return. He did not know if this was missing her.

He was like the warming weather. He had his days of retrogression, even of chill, when his mood was overcast and moist. But there was ever the underlying progress into Summer. All of him seemed opening. All of him was turned toward some generous source of energy within that made him fresh and green. He was resilient with growth. The squandaries of the world had no effect on this deep calm of his state. He moved in rhythm and with no jarring upward. Even so does a flower, despite the crust and the stone it must push through. The observer might have deemed him motionless: a poor observer who could have said the same thing of the flower.

He had said good-by to Constance naturally enough. That was the most delightful thing about her. She compelled candor.

She moved among hat-boxes and deranged chairs draped with flowing garments.

“David, I hope you won’t be bored without me. Come. Good-by. You had better run along. You’ll only be in the way when aunt arrives.” She traveled with her aunt. “If you feel like it, write me.”

She kissed him swiftly on his lips--and even then, though in her one hand was a pair of shoes, in the other a pile of lingerie, and though her eyes were upon the door expecting her aunt to open, still there was passion in that moment. She was a wonderful woman: a true American in specialization. She had managed to pack her trunk and pack away her lover without placing passion in the bag or meticulousness on her lips.

David went satisfied, without a hint of her ingenuity in bringing this about.

And now his emotions were relieved of a fixed objective goal. They could waft outward, vaguely. David found delight in their vagueness.

It was the same, though less pointedly, with other dwellers in his life. Cornelia was always and largely removed. Unconsciously, David kept her and wanted her so. He saw her not more than once in a fortnight. He did not really see her then. He talked to her; looked at her; listened to the sounds of her voice which easily resolved into the accepted syllables of words. But he was deeply unaware of her. And sadly. Since she bled for this and was yet unwilling to shock her boy into a knowledge of his selfishness.

She knew she might have. Had she said: “David, you are far away. What is between us? David, look really into my words, look really into me. Don’t you see how I suffer when you remain outside?” David would have come to her indeed, like the half-tamed, clumsy cub he was, into her arms and begged for forgiveness. But that could not be. So Cornelia, also, was pleasantly removed for David. And this was good, since then he could read into the picture those details he liked: delete the others.

It was the same with Business. It was always so with Business when one so wanted it. David discovered that Business was more like a woman than he had discovered women: in its reticence, in its immediate response to his desire, either to be all taken up and quick with it, or to be left spiritually alone. He found as his moods veered and alternated, so followed what he could give to his affairs downtown. If he was full of energy to spill and full of fancies to weave, Business was a romantic game that grappled him and spent him. Mr. Barlow had taught him that. But if he was misty and gray and low, Business became a habit exercise that barely held his mind, unobtrusive and gray like his own forces. And without disaster. He could plunge into it, work upon it with every muscle of his body. Or he could hold aloof and run it with two disdainful fingers. He could thrust eyes upon it close, and have joy of its jungle of tropic passions, or poise it philosophically from afar, as a flat patch in his life where he grew his bread-and-butter. Now he was holding it endearingly aloof. It was an accommodating thing that used up just enough of his time and energy to leave him peaceful and ruminant at night.

Even Tom was away. He was gone West on business. David did not write. He made no effort to touch the actual departed friend. He dwelt with his own vision of Tom, unhampered now in his deep will to find it altogether perfect. For the nonce, this wearing struggle to hold it perfect was over. This Tom in his mind had no unfitting angles. Nor the Tom abstractly speaking to him from afar.

That morning, he had received a letter. It read:

_Greetings, dear friend_:

You were going to write to me first and you have not, and so I
write to you, because I am thinking of you this evening, and that
is the time to write, is it not? I have been thinking good things
of you; it seems to me that your flavor has precipitated, and that
I feel the form of you, as I never have this past short year. I
find myself in consequence in an apologetic mood--and perhaps you
will accept even that and not be repelled, since you have accepted
so many moods of mine, and been dear about them, and filled me
slowly--I am aware of it now--with a respect and an admiration and,
yes, something deeper than these, of which my actions and my
omissions were scarce able emissaries. You are away now, while I am
in Chicago--silently away, since you have not even thought of me to
write to me, and I find that I do not blame you at all: that I
admire your taste and your silence, and that I shall look forward
to whatever response this brings of your deigning with an eager
gratefulness that surprises you no more than it does me. Tom
chastened: Tom in full view at length of a loveliness that he
sensed and went for, perhaps as one goes for the summit of a
mountain: the moment one is upon the trail, all one’s energies are
lost in climbing and fighting snags and underbrush and rocks, and
the summit is beyond eye and soon out of thought: yet is it the
less for _it_ that the unblazed trail is dared? You are a very rare
person: you have given me so much of myself that I shall be happy
of you, even if I continue in this mood of being mad at myself that
I did not give more. And yet what more could I have given? Would
you take more, David? It is true that I have an excuse. You found
me in the flush that was really the sign of a true decomposition, a
deep giving away of my nerves that might have been ruin in one less
trained to fighting. Or that might have been nothing in one less
addicted to work. You see, work-to-success seemed necessary to me.
When I do no work, my mind gets me into trouble: I am a geyser of
wastestuffs: if I cannot empty myself into work, I am likely to
empty some one else in a perverse replica of play. You have seen
that, David. I worked while I should have been in some happy clime
watching the skies and bathing and walking and smoking pipes of
peace (if only pipes did not make me sick): I worked while the
day’s task used more than the night brought of strength. I neared
bankruptcy, but being an American that did not bother me--and I put
on brighter colors for the approaching doom. In the crisis of eight
years of this, you found me, David----: and what a dour childhood
of preparation before it! Endless, endless. Working for Cornelia,
working for myself--working toward nothing. For I am in it still. I
shall try to put off the day of bankruptcy until I am fifty or
more: then liquidate by dying. But you caught me in the first cold
experience of being weak and sick and unable to spend prodigally
and not feel anything but bulging coffers in the morning: in the
first terrible condition of knowing I must work, though work was
vile, and that no other work was present for my hands. That, does
it explain my sudden horridnesses, my fevers, my cruelties to us
both--your word? I am not cruel, Davie, I am full of love. Oh! why
won’t you--you and a few blessed others whom I need the knowledge
of in this fearful gorgeous world--why won’t you _understand_? Can
you not see me going out into the streets of New York--yes, even
here in Chicago--full of love for the dull men and the stricken
women, ready to give myself to them all, if only they would take
me--take me a moment----: full of love for the magic of their flesh
and the mystery of their life and the splendor of their anguish?
Oh! David, I love so much more than there is in the world willing.
I am a sea of love cluttered in a basin. And when I am cried a
little welcome, I mess everything up in my attempt to fit to a
mortal measure. I have spoken to you--we have even quarreled--about
little children. Don’t you see why? Why I was enraged at the idea
of your _speculating_ upon whether you wished a child or no?
Identification. Suddenly, I am a child, and I do not care a damn
about reason, I want only not to be left outside and unalive by my
beloved. Often when I speak to a man or woman, Davie, something
bleeds in my breast. And then I have headaches, and the wise doctor
says: use ‘brakes’--do not give yourself so much--walk the streets
_indifferently_. Easy, eh? _Indifferently!_ When all of life floods
all my senses like a corybantic passion: a perpetual sea of
infinite elements each of which is attached to my nerves and to my
heart. I cannot help loving people, so I hate them. For they are
not what I would have them be: they are deaf and they do not love
me. And children--whose lives go before me out of my hands and my
sight like the horizon and the skies--is it a wonder my hands are
stretched after them and that I suffer at my impotence? But, Davie,
I am not cruel. I love--and I cannot reach what I love. My
hard-headed lawyer friends quip me, calling mystic my wandering
thoughts--the best of them. But I am filled with a sense of
dimensions, flaring and parabolic, and the world their sense is
comfortable in, is a strand of what I feel and see: and the magic
that draws me to the world is the fact that it careers in an
element outside myself. There, perhaps, imprisoned in the flesh of
a woman is the thing I love--and I am outside--oh, fatally outside.
If I open that flesh I am laughed at by blood and death.
Life--life, I seek it. For I see it: and it is maddening to be
alive.

This is a funny letter, is it not? But you must understand, and
never again call cruel the man whose eyes are forever full of the
vision of loving, and whose body is a prison, a terribly real
prison--and who knows that the world is a bewildering texture of
abyss and reality, of filth and flowers. I shall go hunting,
killing myself through life, David, simply because I am hungry. Do
not forget that. I know the falsehood of the game. Do not forget
that either. My real self, my mocking sense of life, my outrageous
need of love, of love, of love--that will go silent to the grave,
when the gods have had their laugh of it. For truly I am a little
like a toyboat that the gods have placed upon the waters, and blown
upon, that scuds its pretty maddening moment, steerless, useless,
against the inevitable stop on the pool’s other side.

Write to me.

TOM.

David’s day was pitched by it still higher. His moving through the life of the City had a lyric lilt. Its meanest shred came to expression in the tune he hummed. Until Mr. Barlow said:

“Is that the one song you know?”

David stopped. His energy was only for the moment without outlet. He jumped up, and used it to propel his body.

“I don’t feel a bit like working, this afternoon.”

“There you are, thinking of this as work! Can’t you get cured of that, David?”

The young man stopped at the desk of his Chief who had become his friend. He was pensive. He put one hand on the blotter and looked beyond the labyrinth of papers.

“How differently you and my uncle look at business! He prides himself that it is the most serious and laborious work in the world.”

“That is his play,” Mr. Barlow twinkled. Then they laughed together.

“You see,” he went on, leaning back in his swivel-chair and blowing the first fragrant puff of his new cigar into David’s eyes, “you see, my boy, your uncle is a romantic figure. That is why he takes business so realistically. I am a new generation: oh yes I am, despite my age! I am a realist: a man who sees exactly what there is to see: that is why I take business romantically.”

David thought this a bit topsy-turvy. But he had no way out; he started figuring Mr. Barlow’s words. Mr. Barlow kept blowing fragrant puffs up toward his face.

“That,” he went on, “is the reason why your uncle is so much more successful than I am.” His soft red lips curled cheerfully and he sent a mighty wreath of smoke as salutation against David’s nose.

David pondered. His uncle, who saw too little of the world even to understand the slightest of its parts, was by his ignorance able to take Business as the whole, throw all of himself upon it, and be rich. Mr. Barlow understood the pattern of life’s parts, was able to make a pleasant game of that portion of it where he found himself. And he earned an excellent living, even if he was not rich.

“You are happier than my uncle.”

At once, Mr. Barlow was pensive.

“Happiness is the biggest fraud of all, David. Have no dealings with it. If it tries to make terms with you, cut it dead.”

David noticed a peculiar trait. When Mr. Barlow’s face was in repose, as now, there was a sweet sadness upon it. But he could change this. It was as if he were aware of David looking at his sadness. His quick clear eyes began to twinkle as if this were in itself a joke.

“We must not compare happiness. That’s all nonsense.”

“What then is serious?”

“What is serious?” He leaned back and took David in. “It is serious that you should leave this office this very moment and go meandering as your fancy prompts. Go!... Get along.”

David ran for his hat.

“Well, that is for my happiness, is it not?”

“It is not! It is for your health.” Mr. Barlow looked very stern.

David hesitated at the door. He came back to Mr. Barlow’s side and once more, this time timidly, put his outstretched fingers on the blotter.

“You know how much I appreciate you, don’t you, Mr. Barlow?”

Mr. Barlow took up a letter, screwed his glasses grimacingly to his nose, and began to read.

“David,” as his head moved swiftly from side to side in pursuit of the words, “you are wasting your free afternoon.”

Now David was not wasting it. In his pocket was the letter of Tom. In his head was the cheer of Mr. Barlow. Before him and above him swarmed the amazing City....

* * * * *

He was on a street full of department stores. Women of all ages hurried past him, talking, ceaselessly talking. In their hands were the signs of the battle they loved to wage: packages, purses: in their eyes the promise of further conquest. David felt that he was in a strange, not hostile land. He was tolerated here, because he was not noticed. He stepped into a long, dense building. Endless counters packed with women led away in the bustle and gloom. Voices were not so high as the press of feet and the surge of skirts. Stiff men stood above the buffeting hordes like monstrous curios in their white linen and their flaring somber coats. Gaslamps tremored under the oppressed ceiling as if they stood guard against an invasion from below. It seemed that the frangent feminine commotion would swell, rise and sweep them out. David was stifled already. There was no room for him, there was no room even for air to breathe. He was in the street again. Here the flood had interstices of day: the day broke with its blue gleam upon the ranks of the women: splintered, but entered in and spread a living lightness through their heavy marches. Here one could see, not a mass alone, sweeping the street, but individual women with faces and eyes. Here even one saw pretty women.

David had not known how many pretty ones there were. It was bewildering, this extravagance of nature. The street was of stone and brick, it reared its jagged way through the world, loaded with the metallic cut of cars, flanked by the sibilance of uneven roofage and façades and the clamor of advertisements; it fell swift into smallness beyond a Square. Here it was arrogant, it domineered with its wide high skirts of stone and its bonnets turreting aloft--the shuttle of feet like a leather lathe beneath. And yet, immersed in it, David found that it was soaked in charm and that it drew his senses. For he had picked out the presence of women: women that had lips and warm bodies and whose arms could hold children. At once these were the street and were greater than the street. In their domain he was walking.

He was not wasting his free afternoon. This was health indeed. It was health to feel this pour of a thousand homes upon him: all of these homes’ secret tenderness and passion. It was health to shake his head at the hard buildings, and know them worsted by women!...

But tiring. David boarded a car.

The car gave a lurch. The movement split the car’s inhabitants into two separate groups: they who smiled and they who grumbled. David was smiling. Clumsily he righted himself, he found that he did not wish to change the position of his eyes. They were looking at a little girl, who had been smiling also. But now, the two were serious looking at each other.

She was a little girl riding beside her governess. She had great black eyes. The gleaming iris almost crowded out the white. She had brows that were high and thin and arched and between her brows and her eyes the flesh was dimpled.

She tilted her head backward and smiled at him.

David gripped his seat with his two hands, and smiled at her.

She was beside an opaque cutting thing that was a woman and was a governess. Thick glasses tied to a black string that ended in a hideous enameled clasp on a white starched waist. Eyes shiny and convex like the glasses. Nose pointed down, mouth cutting in, chin pushing upward. And beside her a loveliness that came across the car and that he held now far from the car and the street, in his silence.

It came to David softly that he loved this little girl. She smiled at him, as if she thanked him and were glad. Could he put his love in a smile and give it to her?

She stirred in her seat. She tossed out her legs, first one, then the other. She threw herself back so that her legs thrust out, she met him fully and beamed on him.

She was unafraid, beyond all he had ever known. What could he give her, and do, to show her his love?

He had his eyes and his smile. To give her his life with. He put words into his look at her: till his eyes had tears of their fullness. He said to her so:

“Little girl with the gray fur bonnet and the gray fur coat and the laughing soul, I love you. I have never seen you before. I shall never see you again. I shall always see you----”

She was smiling so clear! What did she know? What did she not know, perhaps? Pain stopped the words of his eyes. He got up. He passed her. Why could he not touch her, why could he not come and play with her where she lived? A little girl!

He stood in the street and the car groaned past him. She was kneeling on her seat and her face pressed against the window. She was motionless, gazing into him with serious lovely eyes while the car swung her away into the trackless future.

David’s lips moved: “Good-by. I do not understand.... Do you?...”

She was gone.

Many things were gone.

David, walking the dim sunless City, walked as through himself. And as he went he missed the lights that an hour before, of their own cheer, had lit the corridors of his being and made him all, all of the City, so glad a habitation. He missed these things, he learned how many they were.

He did not think of the strange little girl. She had been fleckless beautiful. She had been more than that in the miracle of her spell upon him. For this he groped. In his mind was the vision of her budding life, sweet, ineffably sweet like an unopened rose in the dew of the dawn. She had left a wound in his heart--the stab of her vision--from which now his blood seemed unstintingly to flow.

He thought of himself alone. Sudden all his proud contentment was away. Not clouded, this time, as it had been so often. Away. It was gone surely, like the little girl.

His contentment. What then had it been? The parts of it that were no more he could piece together into a memory of his contentment.

It had been a haze covering the way of his feet, blinding his eyes, wrapping him in darkness. He saw now. He saw that his feet had carried him a way different from the haze of his contentment.

He thought of his emptiness. He seemed to recognize it, now, as if it had long been there. The absence of Tom and Constance--was this the absence of two great parts of his emptiness permitting him at last to know them--since their absence was in a measure their negation, the first timorous return from an emptiness that filled him to a fullness that he lacked? He could not go in very far. His mind was strangely cramped with pain. He knew much, however. He knew he did not love Constance and that there is no substitute for love. He knew he did not fully respect his dearest friend and that for this there was no solace. Most of all he knew his life was sterile: despite its blandishments and its colors, its devouring of hours, it lacked something he needed. Something he needed as he might thirst for water in a land that held everything else.

Sterile work: sterile friendship: sterile embraces. It was not so simple as this, but here was the germ that desiccated him, turned his impulses from action, deflected life from living. _He did not live._ Thence came that he did not risk, that he went safe, that he won materials and pleasures. To what end since he did not live? He compromised with love, he compromised with dreams. That was the technique of his succeeding: to cheat his body into love-affairs, his mind into business, his loyalties into friendship. To what end since he did not live? And if the miracle was, that life lay in the risk rather than in succeeding, in love rather than in the love-affair, in the dream rather than in any fact?

Oh, he could not understand. He did not know what to do. If his ways were wrong, his relations false, how could he change them? He dragged through a morass, not knowing.

Now suddenly, his clear thoughts held within them, as if in an embrace, the little girl. He saw the resilience of that fresh young life: its pride, its firmness. He saw how it must stoop and bend and _give_, if it would avoid the pains that waited it growing into the world. If it would win ease, it must lose--lose all that made it lovely! Lose its fine fresh sweetness. David pondered on this. Would that election satisfy him? Would it be well to see that loveliness gray away in price for the escape from pain? He heard his answer clear. At all costs the bravery of youth, the firm coolness of which her flesh was symbol--at cost of any pain, of all defeat!

A deceiving gladness came to David: a gratitude that he was still somewhat like that little girl.... Had they not smiled at each other?