Waldo David Frank

“ Talk like a comet drew to the head of Tom and Korn. They held it: they swung it: it was a dazzle of gyre to the jerk of their directions. At the farther end of the table, Signora Sanni came and went: sat imperturbable. She was a woman of more than forty. Disillusion was sweet in her firm, strong face. It was a preservative. It did not keep her pretty, it kept her content. Her features had set. It was as if they had thrown away their woman’s tricks of blandishment and surprise: as if they had sold their power to impassion at the price of passion itself. At her side were Lagora and Lettie Dew. ”

“ What was New York against the love of his discovered home?
Tom began to wonder what irony had drawn him Eastward.
“The promise of life?” he whispered to himself, “the promise of life?”
His chair was toward the window, he spoke to his reflected face and the fleeing plains. A knoll of green flashed past with a stream curling and in the shadow a clustered farm: the remembered scent of clover and the warm sweetness of new green life were a cloud over his mind.
“I wonder, does the lure of death come always disguised as a fulfillment? Perhaps, when a man takes his life does he hope to achieve it? ”

“ The remote amour was an unthought-of, an impossible thing to Lois. Anne’s own senses, feeling this as they groped forward, again came to rest.
She waited on them with a sweet dignity. It was so plain she was a woman. A woman was a creature whose life was nourished by herself. A creature free of the world. David felt this, as they sat munching at table. It was the quiet serving girl who made him think of woman. With her blood she nurtured. In her womb, at her breast, with her hands, forever her own mute spirit giving men food. Woman was the true master of life: the sourceless god. ”

“ How could one be sure of a hand clasped at one’s side? Which were the fields and which the mountains and which the torrents? In their delirious tangle, where was the road?
Tom had poisoned him. Tom had lied to him. Tom led him into ugly places. Tom had a laughter that did not mean joy and tears that bespoke sorrow of a sort he could not give his heart to. A merry world. A horrible world! He needed to blot it out. It was so packed a frenzy of maze and quicksand, that, if he did not draw himself away, he must become a part of its frenzy—a mere whirling molecule in its tortuous falsehood. ”

“ Tom and David sat within miracle.
Tom’s voice was dark in the sunlight.
“This rare thing,” he said, “who can purchase the sun in the city? Not your saint, not your artist and lover! Only creatures like me who serve darkness. The Law that I serve lives in shadowy dusty places. Its priests are men too crafty and bent to be honest thieves. So I have the sun. And, David, I love the sun. I hate what I must do to earn it. I am a man who can keep his love only with gold that he gains by his love’s prostitution.” ”

“ Tom’s hold would fall away when once David turned and wanted to move toward Helen.
“Bless you!” her eyes said, “God bless you. And do as I want. And love him as he deserves.”
How very certain it all seemed to Cornelia! There sat Helen Daindrie, talking, smiling, frowning a little perhaps, and nothing had been said. Nothing had happened. Yet Cornelia was sure that this girl would win David’s love, and win him from Tom and save him.... Win him forever from herself.
So let it be. There was no bitterness in her heart. No hurt, it seemed. For all of her was the fullness of her hurt. ”

“ Marcia stood swaying with the need of burning. Would he not help? Then she would help herself. Delicious fool that he was!
He was perfume and flame: each pore of her was big with him.
Tom watched the firm, still whiteness of her self emerge from the lie of her clothes. No woman. She was a god. She was a pillar of purity and strength. No lascivious rondures and flauntings of flesh, no softnesses. A human form stripped to essential grace. An instrument of living, spare and direct like a command, flaying like a rod, swift like his passion. ”

“ It fell like an eye upon these two talking: it fell with the same singleness upon each spot where men and women were, where men and women loved. From each spot came a glow, from the myriad glows rose back again the transfusing fire, deeper than consciousness, more real than the separate lives which fueled it, as the glow of coal is deeper and more real than the black coal itself. But through the brightness was a vibrancy: and where David and Tom sat, had they been wise enough to follow its receding lines, their vision must have reached back to the three houses. ”

“ Tom looked at David again, and seemed to enter and know him. David was moving forward to the City as to a death he must pass through. The City was a cloud for them both ... though a different cloud ... whose blackness wreathed far over their afternoon. But David was distant from Thomas Rennard. David felt he might know this man and the City at a single moment: know them at once and together.
Sharp long shadows crouched across the aisle of the car. Heads and shoulders of men and women loomed from a common gloom that expressed their oneness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ David was there to cleanse him of the tastes of his worldly work, restore his self-respect, give him a vantage point against the scheming Tom of the day. His other friends—shallow, quick fellows ready to give what he asked and forward-coming, helpless women like Laura Duffield—were there to balance the reticence of David, ease his diseased hunger, throw him momentarily free of the strange dissatisfaction of his one satisfying friendship. The function of work was to sustain him, flush his energies until such time as he knew how he wanted to play. ”

“ Marcia, I care for you now, as I did before, more than for any woman in the world.”
She dropped her eyes and began to finger the embroidery of her chair.
“I go through strange tides, Marcia. I cannot help that. Most men have hypocrisy to hide these ebbs. Most women have passiveness. I have neither. So I suffer.... Marcia,” he went on, “I do not want to lose you. But also I do not want to hurt you. Can’t I have you, without hurting you, Marcia! It was because I had not answered that question, that I forced myself away, forced myself cool.”
“What do you mean, Tom?” ”

“ His love of Cornelia was at once a way-station for his self-freeing will and a substitute for the parental yokes from which he needed freedom.
Directly through her, indirectly against his father, Tom grew in love with imagery, with color, with the Symbol—the artist in Tom grew. From his passionate seeking of the outer world, there rose his power of success in society and in law. For the world loves the lavish spender of himself: it will run to the largess of his ruin as wolves to their meat. ”

“ Mother and child are one to the child’s rapt omniscience. The tall, gray-faced man had nervous hard hands which were strong. Often his hands viced the woman’s arms till she screamed: they screwed her to a chair while his words lashed her: they turned her about to the door she was ordered to pass through. Then, in that dawn of the world, those hands left the mother who was cowed; they took the passionate sprawling flesh of Tom and thrust him to his crib, they turned him about so that Tom’s eyes gazed at a blank wall whose denial of sight was terror.
Mrs. Rennard loved Tom’s father. ”

“ This passion of talk was a new element to David. He sensed its kinship with the play of the clouds which he knew. His mother had been silent. In Mr. Devitt’s shop where he worked, the boys spoke when there was need. He had heard girls chatter chiefly from a distance. He dwelt on two planes. Part of him moved beyond the hotel porch. It shared the drowse of nature, it was drenched in the warm rain. The trees were subdued and satisfied. They were like women after words of love, they were like women glowing while love worked on them. ”

“ He was that sort: the sort who wanders blithely through an enchanted forest where great black trunks of trees stand under a green sea of murmur like protective stanchions and who picks up an acorn, finds it to be a golden apple, eats it with neither indigestion nor surprise. The whirling petulance of American life, its oneness with the tempo and technique of the dream, was very near and very sweet to David.
There was then a true immersement of David in this world. And in this fact a danger. Nothing is so rebellious as reality. No man who does not first move with the world can change it. ”

“ We are what we are, not what we do. Our deeds, if anything, are what we have thrust from us. If I have done much, I am the emptier.”
“Are you not always living and being anew?”
“I am engulfed in a vicious world whose viciousness I know. I am false, David. I play dirty games, dirty tricks. I do my share of the betraying of the world, before I get my share of the thirty pieces of gold. You do not know. I have open eyes. I betray, loving loyalty: I do dark work, loving the sun.”
Tom was up from his chair. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He was proving they were no reasons. “But we are friends, Davie. Oh, do you not feel there is no one I love like you? Not my sister, Davie! No one. Everything I would throw away to help you. My work, my ambitions—what makes them bearable, David, except your friendship? Can’t you understand....”
There was something wrong. Under the precision of Tom’s words, something wrong. Above the clouded stretch of Tom’s emotions, something wrong. Something wrong. The reasons! For God’s sake, the reasons!
David began to stammer: “You tell Lunn and Durthal you are their friend. To me you run them down. ”

“ It seemed to Cornelia that David was steadfastly strong like a tree.
Tom jumped out of his smoky silence and brewed coffee. They threw cushions on the floor. They laughed a bit at David’s awkwardness at squatting. These shadows in the room were good. Tom came forward now. The ease of his revery and of his listening had distilled some new disquiet. He needed to get at David.
He would have said: “How little this boy knows himself! What passion lies behind this dream of friendship! What will the world do when he goes asking impossible treasures?” The thought gave him worry. ”

“ Men and women in a railroad car—serried, determined; pointed the train, flung it against the city. David sat next the window. He saw the world fly past as if afraid and offended. The green comfort of meadows was too sweet for the sharp earnestness of the travelers. They had no will for the shadow of trees and the cool ambiance of little rivers. Their mood was a straight hard hot track of steel along which they flung: their mood cut through smile of fields, slumber of towns. Their minds hurled the train....
Tom and David sat together swathed in the pensiveness of travel. ”

“ He was soon surfeited with chances, and from surfeit comes disillusion.
To be alone in the City requires a technique that only the child born in the City or the genius may possess. On all sides of Tom were people ready to be amused, ready to use him, ready to use him up. No bright young man without the taint of an uncomfortable message need go to waste in New York. Each clever little thing he does or says will echo, until, if he does not take care, he may be deafened by its rebounding clamor. ”