Chapter IV (1)

It was voluptuous for Tom Rennard after the trees and the birds to give himself once more into the bond of his profession. Through the free woods he walked in manacled anarchy: through the City’s thralldom he walked free. He plunged into work. He touched the tasks of the approaching season, knew it would be his best, measured his dominion above success and was glad like a bird perched on top of its cage. He prepared a brief for a case months away from trial: he played with the strategy of an appeal in a suit not yet argued. In the brash nights of the refilling City he sat in hotel lobbies and let his mind cut clear through the flaccid provincial crowds. He journeyed uptown to a baseball game: drank in the rawness of the joy of others in a ball swiftly caught and clouted: let his heart fill with the tang of the game’s intricate and lissome grace against the sprawling pleasure of the mindless. Once more New York, an atmosphere, lay, swirled, clouded and shone around him. Then he shut his desk, an early afternoon, and went to see his sister.

Her studio was unfashionable in location. It was the top floor of a crumbling red-brick house in the moiled middle East Side of the city. It was east of Murray Hill, west of Stuyvesant Square: the elevated trains snorted their cinders not far from her flowered window. Cornelia began to make money and her habitation blossomed. Persian shawls appeared in appropriate corners: new rash adventures in color out of Paris gladdened the white walls: slender vases came from exile in Chatham Square. Tom called the place his refuge from the city.

“Hello,” she said. “I am glad you came. I’m lazy this afternoon.” Tom folded his coat away in the little bedroom. It had the air of a cell. The white walls were bare, the white iron bed was narrow; a small pack of books stood in the corner of the floor.

“You take it easy,” he said, already at the task, “and I’ll prepare you some Turkish coffee. Have you any of that orange essence left?”

He was adept and he needed to ask no further questions.

They settled and sipped and talked. Cornelia was on the couch. Tom squatted on the floor. Both of them had lighted cigarettes.

“Well, what adventure?” she asked.

She looked more than the three years older that she was. She wore an unembroidered smock--a dull, muslin drab. Her feet were sandaled. Her hair was drawn tight back over her head, where it could not interfere with work. Her eyes were soft in the harsh angles of her face.

“I was on a vacation, Cornelia. You know that means that I took care nothing should happen to me.”

She laughed. “That efficient you’re not, dear boy.”

“Well, there was no semblance of adventure. I tramped and drank a lot of glorious milk and slept nine hours a night.”

“And----?”

“And swam and paddled.” Tom wagged his head with the catalogue.

“You met somebody interesting?”

He stopped. “How do you know?”

“You always do, don’t you? Who was it? The girl, at last?”

“No--not the girl. And you’re wrong. Really, I had a deliciously dull time.”

She did not press the matter.

“Daydon says I ought to move now I’ve won that prize. He says no one will visit a studio so near Third Avenue.”

“Are you going to?”

“I am not.”

“I am glad, Cornelia. Just because you have begun to have money is no reason for spending it all on rents.”

“That’s just what most New Yorkers do, is it not?”

They both laughed, and were silent.

“What you said has a lot of truth in it,” Tom spoke at last. And his sister knew he had pounced on her observation as a text. He was comfortable now. He had been just a bit uneasy, questioned about his trip. There was the sign of a release from nervousness in the brightening of his eyes and the slower puff of his cigarette--the way he curled up his legs, limbered his arms and began to talk. Cornelia watched him with a vague amusement and a subtle reservation. She would let him have his speech; then she would pin him back to his trip and the thing in it which made him nervous. In this mood she listened.

“Really,” he said, “the true inwardness of New York’s rising sky-line has been the passion of New Yorkers for high rents. Have you ever thought of that? What a handy substitute for other, remoter standards they have found in the price of housing? Of course the gullible talk of the fact that New York is a crowded island. They forget the miles of dilapidated and discarded masonry within hail of their stylish towers. Some day the historian will understand. He will say this: ‘Money was so deep their worship that they mis-prized all treasures of life which did not blatantly announce it. They left their walls empty of beauty, their larders empty of health, their houses empty of grace, in order to pay high rents to the lords of land. These fabulous sums were the pride and the decoration of their lives. The height of New York rentals and the high buildings that were their symbols became the chief expression of Metropolitan Art!’”

He laughed. Cornelia kept silent.

“The historian will finish in this tone: ‘Surely these were a foolish people, ripe for destruction.’”

“Give me another cigarette, Tom.” She was resolved not to help him along. Tom came to silence. He felt her mood.

“Well, what is it?” he asked.

“You had better look out, brother mine. You could easily get to be a typical New Yorker. I hate talk.”

“What I said wasn’t true?”

“Yes. But it was talk.”

“Oh, boo! Don’t be so serious.”

“Weren’t you?”

“Of course not. I was speaking the truth. Even, I was prophesying. To be serious at such a game is to risk being a fool.”

“Most of your talk, Tom, is a side-stepping of something in you you want to hide. I have noticed that.”

Cornelia was half up on her couch, facing him straight. Now, she was ready to pin him. “It’s a bad convenience, dear,” she went on, “putting up all these brittle outer observations when some one threatens to get under your skin. You do it so well.”

She smiled; Tom straightened his legs and met her gaze. He knew her direction. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said.

“Why? Just because you don’t?”

This was a true shot. He acknowledged it.

“Very well,” he spoke dryly. “There was a boy--a mere boy--up there. From New England. For some curious reason he upset me. I don’t like to talk about him. I do want to see him again. It’s all rather odd because he was really quite dull. We had damn little to say.”

In a flash Cornelia’s mood changed. Her perceptions had controlled her--the acute and angular and severe in her. Now she was seated toward him on the couch; it was as if dominion had passed over to her eyes that were large on her brother. She spoke tenderly:

“It’s not a girl yet, is it, Tom?”

“You know it never is. Girls can’t disturb me. I can master women. I am cool and sure before them. But so I was with this--this fellow. Yet it seems, as I look back--quite irrationally, mind you--it seems as if we had had a contest and he had won.” He paused.

“You probably _talked_ to him--flaming revolutionary talk.”

Tom shrugged.

“And he was shocked.”

“Precisely,” Tom burst in. “He was the shocked one--the dominated one, the silenced. Then, why this foolish desire to see him again and throw him on his back?”

“It has been troubling you?”

“I have imaginary conversations with him. I walk up and down Broadway with him, and say: ‘See! what a Gehenna this country’s greatest city is?’ I take him to theaters and gloat and declare ‘Trash, eh? They call it art in New York.’ Even at my office. I show him through my papers. ‘All chicanery,’ I announce. ‘That’s what you want to enter, is it?’ I shame myself before him.”

“Think it over, Tom,” Cornelia followed his silence. “You should be able to find out the thing that is troubling you.”

Tom sat a bit diminished on the floor. Sedulously he flicked the ash from his cigarette, each vestige of the ash; his fingers close to the hot, red tip. He looked up:

“This chap has something I lack and want: a sort of pure sincerity. He’ll go far--and be miserable as the devil.”

“Look out! Aren’t you the one who is afraid of misery?”

“True. I want him to give me the saving treasure. I want to give him the saving moderation. Then we could both be saved.”

Cornelia laughed. “What _are_ you talking about now?”

But Tom was very sober. “He is all wings. He has no eyes. He’ll dash himself against the sun. I am all eyes. I see everything. But where are my wings? I’ll freeze to death from far away, seeing the sun.”

He got up. He paced the room.

“Oh, this is nonsense. You are right. I liked him because he was a naïve, country lad. I was afraid I had hurt his innocence----”

“You are dying to kill it.”

Tom stopped and faced his sister. “That’s not quite fair, Cornelia. Not kill it. Steal some of it, perhaps.”

He was talked out of his mood. He was light-hearted and full of interest for a thousand things. It was a trifle after all.

So they played through the afternoon, they went arm in arm to dinner, they spent an hour in a terrace with liqueurs before them. They talked of her work and her triumphs and the quaint jealousies of artists. All this because it was his greatest pride. And several times Tom broke out in admiration of New York: in praise of her vast largesses. He was confident and proud. Cornelia smiled again--her angular, critical self....

Before her door he kissed her good-night.

“We’ve made a pretty good start, from Dahlton, Ohio, haven’t we, sister? Pretty good, pretty fair.”

She changed once more to the tender part of her nature: she ignored his mood.

“Good-night. And Tom--that country boy--bring him up some late afternoon?” Her eyes alone smiled. Tom startled, imperceptibly.

“Surely,” he hurried to say. “Surely ... if I see him.”

Nature cellared its profusion. The sap of life was sucked to the roots of things. As the year died, the house of the Deanes came to life.

Chests gave forth finery and color. Curtains were up, barring the archaic sun: dun colors were away from the florid chairs. The safe-vaults let go their silver plate and their gold, and from the hot-houses came flowers. Streets were chill, skies were mournful; in the narrow endless purlieus of the disinherited, of the nine-tenths, began the hunger for coal.... But it was summer in the City.

The position of David was straddling, but not too insecure. He was part of the Deane household. How goodly a part devolved on his own discretion. If he made himself liked, there was no comfortable share he might not win. He was part of the Deane Company--the Deane machine of subsistence. A small and trivial part with a distinction. This he did not feel until his fellow-menials later had ceased feeling it for him. In his low place there was always the seed of future sharing. He was the Boss’s nephew. In the low places of the others, there was always the seed of permanence. These were the Boss’s victims. The Boss would keep them victims if he could. He would have all the pretty terms of a century of special pleading to hallow his act. But surely the world was a smiling place for David Markand.

“My boy,” said Mr. Deane, “you are on probation. If you prove your worth, as you may well imagine, I will be glad. American enterprise is the home of the free, the contest of character and brains. The true man wins the prize. And of course, I don’t forget who you are: that you are the only child of my dear sister. Nor must you, my boy. I have no sons of my own.”

Uptown he was still somewhat the stranger. But he was the friend of Lois and he grew confident. They liked each other. Different dispensations from far separate sources had thrust them close. Now both of them stood together at the gate of the brilliant world Muriel went to evening after evening. They saw Muriel return, full of tokens of its splendor: full of weariness and hidden joy, full of pride and hidden knowledge. David meant to enter the gates with Lois. In the waiting it was natural that they talk, hold hands.

She would have said that she found him interesting. There was her own life, which in her mind lacked quality. It was an empty atmosphere occasionally pierced by suns and falling stars. The light of these was her sustenance and was rare. So Lois starved.

She would have said that he was easy to talk to.

In the conventional sense he understood nothing: in the sense in which life was a ruled open page for Muriel and her mother. But in the outlaw sense where these two were blind, he understood miraculously well. She could skip the roted things of the world in talk with him, dwell on the stirring and uncharted. They met in a sort of reticence about the obvious. Not deliberately, but because he could not otherwise have understood. Two persons speaking different tongues could live on elemental planes. They could convey and satisfy the sense of hunger, they could fight, they could make love. The difficulty might come when they attempted to dine together, to quarrel civilly, or to get married. Here, a common set of words was needed.

So between these two. Social engagements, family traditions, judgments of the technique and manner of existence she could not broach with him. She did not need to. Her school, her friends, her family webbed her in such subjects. The wider ranges that Muriel would have cut through as vague became their meeting place. They talked about life and beauty and the future. She was sixteen and David twenty. In these vast fields they were one fledgling age.

They were often alone together. The room on the third floor that faced the street was the living-room of the sisters. And Muriel was usually out: and the parents stayed in their own quarters below.

Dinner’s end was release. David sat there uncomfortable and Lois sat there indifferent. Mr. Deane had few words. He was weary at night. What energy he had poured into the business of eating. Mrs. Deane was voluble enough, but she needed no attentive ears and she had none. She talked: her husband ate: her daughters spoke low together: David made his shoulders narrow and occasionally straightened with a shock when his aunt’s eyes turned on him. The last sip of coffee meant the last moment at the table for the girls, whether their mother was in the middle of a sentence or their father was asking them a question. In this case, the question could be curtly answered in the process of exit.

“Come, David,” from Lois, “you’re finished, aren’t you?”

If at first David was reluctant to leave so suddenly, he learned that nothing different was expected of him. Mr. Deane lighted a cigar. Often he was left alone to smoke it. He sat, his body folded and heavy in his chair, his eyes folded and heavy behind smoke. Anne came and went, clearing the table. He was unperturbed. His soft mouth wreathed and pouted: occasionally he smacked his lips. He was the picture of attainment. In his empty gaze, in the lack-reflex slumber of his muscles, in the dim movements of the heavy smoke, there was a gross Buddhistic character. It was clear that attainment in his American faith tended not toward heaven, but toward a sort of flatulent Nirvana.

Meantime, Mrs. Deane was upstairs, under a lamp, reading a novel; and when her husband did not eventually shake himself, with a slow and sleepy evolution, to his club, he was in bed before she closed her book.

Often members of the plenteous family of Mrs. Deane came to dine. But the atmosphere of the table was ample enough to embrace them. There was the same dull air, charged with the vocal passion of Mrs. Deane and the sharp reserves of her two daughters. Only one sister--a Miss Dikes--could match the commanding Lauretta. They were profoundly sisters: when she was at table, the currents of air were shifted rather than changed. Always, Lois and David were willingly excused after dinner. And Muriel managed often to be out when her relatives were there. Her mother scolded and occasionally wept at this disloyalty in her child. But the child was already stronger than the mother. Muriel seldom quarreled back. She sneered and her eyes flashed: when she spoke, it told.

Upstairs David reached for a book.

“You have your homework to do, I s’pose?”

Lois smiled and nodded. “Oh, yes.... But I’m not going to do it.”

“You’ll not get your certificate if you don’t watch out.”

“And what good would it do me, if I did?... We’re going to talk.” She snatched his book.... “Unless, of course, you are more interested in _The Banking System of the United States_.”

“Lord, no!” David laughed.

They sat together on the broad, cushioned couch whose gay blue and dull gold were a telling contrast to the dull blue and bright gold of the mother’s room below.

“What are you going to do when you become rich?” she asked him.

He looked at her. She asked him this as once before he had said to her: “When are you going to get married?” She had answered: “I am not going to get married, perhaps.” He had laughed her denial away.

So now: “I am not going to get rich, perhaps.” And there was she, scoffing at him, holding back her head and saying: “Please, do be serious, David!”

He was. He began to think aloud.

“Not everybody gets rich.”

This had no effect on her. As his silence marked his words as her answer, she shook her head with a faint impatience.

“I know. But what’s that to do with us? You’re my cousin, aren’t you? You’re our sort. You’re in Daddie’s business.”

“What sort don’t get rich, Lois?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She looked at him as if he were stupid. “You ought to know, better than I. You see ’em all around you at Daddie’s business.”

She also had been set to thinking. “How are they different from us?” she asked. Then: “Father says they simply aren’t as clever. Most of them drink too much: and have packs of children: and don’t bathe very often. I guess it’s all these things.”

“It must be. But you can’t really see much difference. Of course, _you_. You’re different. You’re a--why, you’d die, you couldn’t have been born, anywhere else. But I work with five other chaps in the shipping office, and they’re just like me.”

Lois laughed. “What nonsense. They’re not! You’re much nicer.” She was giggling in foretaste of the wicked truth she was about to utter, “you’re--I’m sure you’re _much_, much cleaner.”

She was like a pricking rose under his face, laughing there on the couch. David resolved to be angry.

“That’s rotten of you, Lo. You’re no democrat.”

“Of course, I’m not. I’m a Republican.”

David, enjoying his indignation and unconsciously aware of the excuse it gave him, reached for her wrists.

“Don’t!” he commanded.

“You are!”

He pulled her to him, and put his arms around her waist. He said: “Stop making fun of people.” Then he kissed her.

Lois stopped laughing. She was very still. Her eyes glistened.

“Do you think, if you hadn’t been _nicer_, and _cleaner_ and everything, I’d let you _kiss_ me?” She jumped up and away.

He liked her intimacy. It flattered him. He did not wish to tell her of his work at Mr. Devitt’s, and how easily he might have stayed there long and forever. And she liked his reticence, feeling its power. She liked the veiled promise of pleasure and strength that he suffused from all of his big being. It frightened her.

She was seated as far away from him as she could manage. Her bare elbows were on her knees and her chin was cupped in her hands. The pressure upward faintly distorted her soft mouth: one corner was open and two teeth bit white and hard against the lip. Her throat tremored with her amusement; the rose mesh of her waist fell forward in suggestion of the warm swell of her girlish bosom. David believed that she was purring. He saw her teeth biting their hardness into the blush of her lips: he saw how smooth and round her arm was. He said:

“You let me kiss you because I’ve a right to.” He was aware of the retreat in his words. “...because we’re cousins.”

She merely lifted her face a bit, as if he were stirring away. “All right. We’re going to play now that we are _not_ cousins. We are just you and me, do you hear? So you mayn’t kiss me anymore.”

Already he was forward. The game started. The goal was implicit with them both. In a fortnight’s time, David had won his kiss. He was very sure that Lois was very lovely: he was almost sure that she did not return his kisses because he was unworthy....

* * * * *

David sat at his long table in the office, lost in a maze of figures which gave a different answer each time he questioned them. He was languidly certain the figures were laughing at him, held him in contempt. About him yellow pine, hard human bustle. He looked up through the mist of his discomfort; he saw above him a slender and sleek young man with a smile on thick lips.

“My name is Duer Tibbetts. You’re Markand, aren’t you?”

David was not sure whether to keep his seat. He was twisted in indecision.

“I am a cousin of your aunt, I work over there under Mr. Herding in the Cashier’s Office. I have just come back from two weeks in Virginia. I was told to look you up and make you feel at home.”

For the pause, he stood there a bit ill-at-ease himself.

“I’ll come round at noon, and we’ll go to lunch.” He was gone.

David had the sense, walking through the streets, of a young man marvelously sure and hard and clever for his years. He gave forth the slightest word as a pronouncement.

“The very hottest weather’s over,” he declared. “Greibeck’s is a great café. You must go there often. I discovered it last year, one day I was lunching with Mr. Farnam--H. L. Farnam of The Liberty Trust. Always go downstairs. There are women upstairs. Downstairs is the place for talking business.”

Duer Tibbetts thrust the long printed card under his nose and then told him what to eat. He ordered as if he were in a great hurry. He drank beer with his meat. “Don’t you want _anything_ to drink?” he asked as if unwilling to believe in any organic deficiency in his new friend. He called the waiter by his Christian name--but never looked at him.

“We must get to be friends,” he announced. “Don’t bother about the boys in your office. They’re not our sort. Stick to work.... Stick to work and stick to your uncle. He’s a prince--a prince,” he chanted with emotion.

“I’ve been here three years. Since I was sixteen. No college nonsense for me. I’m assistant cashier. You’ll find the old man is hard, but he is just. Yes, he is that. But he has his silent little ways of pushing you along.”

For the first time, he raised his eyes and David met them. He liked him better. So this Duer Tibbetts was to be his friend? As soon as he began again to talk with his eyes once more down, David examined him.

He seemed engrossed in his own words. He paid them out, as if they were coin. He talked with a certain muscular emphasis of his lips, a periodic pointing of his left forefinger. His forefinger always was detached from the others. The rest of him remained immobile. A gold chain fell straight from his lapel to his coat pocket. His hair was so blond that near the temples and behind the ears it imperceptibly faded into the color of his skin. His fingers were wider at the tips than at their base. His voice was high pitched, coarse-grained, mostly a monotone.... David met his eyes and liked him again.

Tibbetts’ gaze clinched his firmly; almost too fixedly: as if his eyes lacked the pain of encounter. They were lashless blue. Tibbetts had the soft eyes of a boy, the shallow eyes of a man who has not ventured where the boy’s eyes yearned.

David turned his own deep uncertain gaze on him: in the retreat of his glance and the veil of warmth that suffused from the contact it was altogether clear which was in truth the older of these two. But neither David felt this, nor Duer Tibbetts, steadfast and staring. What came from their encounter was David’s sense of respect and wonderment for Duer Tibbetts, and Duer Tibbetts’ thrill of respect and wonderment for himself. To this end he talked. A gentleman can boast only before an equal. And Tibbetts was a gentleman, if for no other reason because he felt the quality of David.

“A smart chap. You know: the sort who get on in the end,” he reported to his father. The young protégé and the powerful attorney of Deane and Company discussed the new arrival. They said many things. The paramount detail that this was the nephew of Mr. Deane, they had no words for: but this was what they were keenly thinking. The suppressed thought came out in the rhythmic beat of Mr. Tibbetts’ thumb against the desk, in the over-emphasis of his son when he said such common words as these: “I like him. He is slow, but what is slowness? You never can tell what’s underneath. The fact that he don’t know much now shows merely that he has lived in a little town. Lots of good stuff has come from little towns.”

Now, he talked lavishly and with diligence to impress David who sat passive, trying to learn, telling himself that he was learning. He talked of projects and profits, of Mr. Deane’s subtle aggressiveness and of the Company’s prosperity. He spoke of the great law-suit which his father had won for the firm from the Feddlesby people. He spoke of a swinging figure that had gone from Deane and Company to help elect McKinley.

“Measure it with our payroll, if you want to _feel_ how much it was to give.” He did not divulge the payroll. He said, “We” when he meant David and himself; “We” when he meant the Company; “We” when he meant America. There was a deep philosophy in this confusion. But David was still far from grappling with it, and Tibbetts did not dwell in the sphere of definition and reflection.

“Yes, sir,” he pointed and flushed with his prophecy. “We’ll be in Cuba in less than a year. Don’t you forget it. We’ve got to kick the Spaniards out and go in ourselves. Then, we’ll earn enough from our dormant Las Daciendas plantations to buy up every relic factory in Key West. It’s a coup that’s certain.”

All this puzzled David. He was not sure whether the “We” who must kick Spain out of the West Indies was the payroll of Deane and Company: or whether the “We” that was to grow subsequently rich in Las Daciendas was the citizenry of America. It was all a bewilderment of lines.

The weeks of his residence in New York he had been sedulously reading the papers that came daily to his uncle’s house. He knew that America’s interest in Cuba was a humane one grudgingly forced on her. Her wrath at Spain and her forming resolution to have Spain “out from her back yard” were due to her Christian worry for starving natives. The impulse of brotherhood was quite clear in the papers. Yet the effect upon Business seemed equally clear in the mind of Duer Tibbetts. Brought together in David’s mind, these two clarities precipitated fog.

He went away, respecting the more this young man who saw the light while he walked in darkness.

Relief of Cuban sufferers and relief of ravaged tobacco plantations: America’s crusade for love and a great Company’s contribution to the coffers of the Republican Party: the free lists of business and the advantage of being a nephew--it was too much for David’s untrained mind. For David needed to “conform.” And David needed to admire.

It was a Sunday afternoon. The room where David sat, the room of his talks with Lois, lay in the languor of a refracted sun. It faced north. David could see the full rays beat in the flaming brick and the warm brown-stone of across the street, be absorbed. Here was a low vibrancy--strayed residues of sunlight that had lost their incandescence. The room had its compensation. Lois’ gay hand was over it. The couch had a dappled welcome in its cushions: “outrageous” her mother called them. A strip of Japanese brocade laughed on the wall: and Lois’ desk, with its bright brass knobs and its jolly fluted legs, hinted the tempo of the occasional letters and the desultory homework of its owner.

David had emerged from Sunday dinner. Rather feebly he wrestled with a Sunday paper. He was alone with it and it was winning. The article was discursive and plethoric. It dealt with Tammany Hall and the imminent Municipal Election. The City had just become the Greater City. Manhattan had swallowed Brooklyn and Staten Island. Once more it served as the shining symbol of the age: for it had gone through a merger, and it was superlative in size. Now, Tammany was attempting to recapture the swollen booty. It was, according to the writer, hopeless. “Richard Croker is back from Ireland and his horse races. But he will find only a ruin and a name where stood the corrupt organization that netted him his millions.” Later: “Mayor Strong is beloved of the rank and file of the people. Under him, under such of his competent servants as Street Commissioner Colonel Waring, the people have learned the blessings of a Reform Administration. They will never go back to Tammany. They have had high wages and clean streets, better conditions in their tenements, less disease and a low death-rate. They have understood. Tammany means misery and vice: Tammany means the seduction of their daughters into the gutters of sin: Tammany means all that crime and corruption mean. Leave it to the people of the Greater City to choose a successor or an undoer of our Reform Administration.”

This was all clear. But the general terms of the article bewildered David. Why, in the face of the obvious conclusion, this note of frenzied worry, of desperate pleading? The people surely could be left to choose between happiness and squalor, between life and death. And why these paid announcements of the Tammany candidates--these arguments in their favor alongside indictments which made it probable to David that Tammany would poll no single vote? The article was full of contradictions of the sort that had twisted this last month of his life into a question-mark. Mr. Croker, breathlessly returned from England, found his Tammany a ruin and a dream: yet “efforts will be made to elect the Citizen’s Union ticket such as have never been attempted in the century-old fight against Tammany, the City’s incubus.” The people had enjoyed three years of almost paradisal amelioration; yet “it must not be believed that Tammany’s old tricks of getting the people--appealing to their hearts and stomachs--have been forgotten.” Mayor Strong was the idol of the poor; yet “the old cry of corporate control and a ‘rich men’s ticket’ has been raised.” The puzzles spread out into the past. The article concluded with a brief historic sketch of this Tammany-monster that in ways so foul brooded upon the people. “The study of Tammany makes it clear,” one sentence went, “that it can never be reformed. The Tiger can not change his stripes. Tammany means and has ever meant a single, evil thing.” Yet, to David’s dumb amazement!--several of the old crusaders who had ousted Tweed and killed Tammany in the “sixties” were a year later officers in Tammany Hall! Here was a great Reform Governor and Presidential nominee--in Tammany Hall; and the present presiding financial genius of the City’s projected Subway system. While there, in a corner of that very page, heading a committee of social knights who had pledged body and bank to hold Tammany at bay was the man--yes, the very same name of the man--who had been Tweed’s lawyer, who had _defended_ Tweed when he was caught rifling the City.

David sat struggling with all this as well as the spirit of Sunday dinner permitted him to do so. In his town, he had heard disparagements of Tammany. He had always confounded it with the National Democratic Party. He remembered how they had heckled Jo Cleary, the machinist in the shop who was a Democrat.

“Well, what if Tammany _is_ Democratic? Do you think your bunch of silk-stocking Republicans is any better? They’re both of ’em crooks. Here’s the difference. If you are broke, you kin get ten dollars through the front door of Tammany: and you kin get a boot through the back door of the other Party.”

David recalled that there had been silence after this reply. He was in no mood for thinking it all out. He knew only that Jo Cleary had straight sharp eyes and that he had always trusted him, found reason, in more immediate matters, to believe him. Cleary was full of strangeness. He wanted Ireland to be independent: he got drunk with telling regularity, each Saturday night. When he was drunk, he was jolly. He would sing pathetic minor songs of suffering with laughter in his voice and wild flourishing arms.

“D’ye see?” he’d shout, “This is how we keeps ’em down. ‘Down, down, with the pigs, ha, ha!’”

When he was sober, Cleary was morose and a good workman. David knew enough to feel the pathos in his drunken jollity. It was a thing, unlike all these about him, he instinctively understood. It was a thing, among others, that made him mark Cleary’s sober words and give them credence.

So David stirred against the Sunday paper. He was glad, when Lois stood there in the door to take him away from the vice of thinking.

“There’s some people downstairs, David, just dying to meet you. Will you come?”

While he looked up at her, she was still. She felt the flattery of his warm eyes. She was slender and sweet, with her bent body leaning against the jamb. She seemed to David a glowing creature, a product so desirable that the world which brought her forth must be perfect also. And Lois saw him, clouding in his chair, trying to rouse himself to the business below: she liked the brash vividness of his clumsy body, the naïve confession in his face of all that spoke in his heart. She half realized that this freshness did not grow in the sheltered rooms of the City: she regretted it.

David followed her downstairs.

He felt as he stepped in that they were looking at him and that they must have stopped abrupt from talking of him. It was as if one voice had spoken and were now cut off. Yet David had heard no word.

He was being introduced. He saw that his business friend, Duer Tibbetts, was in the group. He gathered that these were his parents and his sister. They and the Deanes were all knit together. He was outside. He had the sense of an aperture, laboriously open, slowly sucking him in. He felt himself resisting.

There were words; he answered enough he presumed. Mr. Tibbetts told him that his uncle was already hopeful of his success; Mrs. Tibbetts invited him to dinner. The young girl was beside Lois. They were faintly apart: a mere quarter-note out of harmony. This introduced a tremor into the heavy rhythm of the room. David liked it. Instinctively, he moved toward the two girls. In the dissonance of their atmosphere he found himself: the group receded into its individual components.

He observed in Mr. Tibbetts an air of aloofness, of studied condescension that was half nature and half inspired by David. Duer imitated him, he saw now that Duer always imitated his father: he was a depleted pattern of Mr. Tibbetts. Mrs. Tibbetts talked most easily. “I am Cousin Laura,” she announced with a confidence that showed how fully her habit was command, “and this is Cousin John.” She was a very thin lady with a bobbing adam’s-apple. She was clad in glimmering blue satin and her feet were slippered not so slenderly as to conceal their astounding inharmonious width. David saw the height of her cheekbones and the scooped boniness between her nose and her mouth. She was a type familiar to him in New England.

In all the families he had yet come to know, the women were spokesmen. The men burst on occasion from brooding silence into cantankerous volubility. David was not surprised when Mr. Tibbetts began a speech.

It was different, however. It came from between thin lips. It left the broad complacent countenance unmoved. It had none of the weight and breadth and clarity of this man’s wide open collar and of his wide white vest. It seemed very little to come forth from so voluminous a frock-coat. Mr. Tibbetts talked; David could not altogether keep his eyes from the cylindrical cuffs and the crinkly patent-leather shoes. These seemed the proper focus of attention, as in other cases the speaker’s eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upstairs another sudden shift in mood and stress.

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

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

Lois placed Miss Tibbetts before him with a ceremonial air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And if you fall,” said Lois forbiddingly.

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

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

She seemed almost tender. Then her hard giggle.

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

“No one except us,” said Lois.

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

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

David and Lois were alone.

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

“Why do you love Fay so much?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Very well. Then stay at home.”

Muriel broke into tears.

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

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

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

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

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

“I have made no other arrangements.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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