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- 5. Table of Contents Learning Go Programming Credits About the Author About the Reviewers www.PacktPub.com Why subscribe? Preface What this book covers What you need for this book Who this book is for Conventions Reader feedback Customer support Downloading the example code Downloading the color images of this book Errata Piracy Questions 1. A First Step in Go The Go programming language Playing with Go No IDE required Installing Go Source code examples Your first Go program Go in a nutshell Functions Packages The workspace Strongly typed Composite types The named type Methods and objects
- 6. Interfaces Concurrency and channels Memory management and safety Fast compilation Testing and code coverage Documentation An extensive library The Go Toolchain Summary 2. Go Language Essentials The Go source file Optional semicolon Multiple lines Go identifiers The blank identifier Muting package imports Muting unwanted function results Built-in identifiers Types Values Functions Go variables Variable declaration The zero-value Initialized declaration Omitting variable types Short variable declaration Restrictions for short variable declaration Variable scope and visibility Variable declaration block Go constants Constant literals Typed constants Untyped constants Assigning untyped constants Constant declaration block Constant enumeration
- 7. Overriding the default enumeration type Using iota in expressions Skipping enumerated values Go operators Arithmetic operators The increment and decrement operators Go assignment operators Bitwise operators Logical Operators Comparison operators Operator precedence Summary 3. Go Control Flow The if statement The if statement initialization Switch statements Using expression switches The fallthrough cases Expressionless switches Switch initializer Type switches The for statements For condition Infinite loop The traditional for statement The for range The break, continue, and goto statements The label identifier The break statement The continue statement The goto statement Summary 4. Data Types Go types Numeric types Unsigned integer types Signed integer types
- 8. Floating point types Complex number types Numeric literals Boolean type Rune and string types The rune The string Interpreted and raw string literals Pointers The pointer type The address operator The new() function Pointer indirection - accessing referenced values Type declaration Type conversion Summary 5. Functions in Go Go functions Function declaration The function type Variadic parameters Function result parameters Named result parameters Passing parameter values Achieving pass-by-reference Anonymous Functions and Closures Invoking anonymous function literals Closures Higher-order functions Error signaling and handling Signaling errors Error handling The error type Deferring function calls Using defer Function panic and recovery Function panic
- 9. Function panic recovery Summary 6. Go Packages and Programs The Go package Understanding the Go package The workspace Creating a workspace The import path Creating packages Declaring the package Multi-File packages Naming packages Use globally unique namespaces Add context to path Use short names Building packages Installing a package Package visibility Package member visibility Importing package Specifying package identifiers The dot identifier The blank identifier Package initialization Creating programs Accessing program arguments Building and installing programs Remote packages Summary 7. Composite Types The array type Array initialization Declaring named array types Using arrays Array length and capacity Array traversal Array as parameters
- 10. The slice type Slice initialization Slice representation Slicing Slicing a slice Slicing an array Slice expressions with capacity Making a slice Using slices Slices as parameters Length and capacity Appending to slices Copying slices Strings as slices The map type Map initialization Making Maps Using maps Map traversal Map functions Maps as parameters The struct type Accessing struct fields Struct initialization Declaring named struct types The anonymous field Promoted fields Structs as parameters Field tags Summary 8. Methods, Interfaces, and Objects Go methods Value and pointer receivers Objects in Go The struct as object Object composition Field and method promotion
- 11. The constructor function The interface type Implementing an interface Subtyping with Go interfaces Implementing multiple interfaces Interface embedding The empty interface type Type assertion Summary 9. Concurrency Goroutines The go statement Goroutine scheduling Channels The Channel type The send and receive operations Unbuffered channel Buffered channel Unidirectional channels Channel length and capacity Closing a channel Writing concurrent programs Synchronization Streaming data Using for…range to receive data Generator functions Selecting from multiple channels Channel timeout The sync package Synchronizing with mutex locks Synchronizing access to composite values Concurrency barriers with sync.WaitGroup Detecting race conditions Parallelism in Go Summary 10. Data IO in Go IO with readers and writers
- 12. The io.Reader interface Chaining readers The io.Writer interface Working with the io package Working with files Creating and opening files Function os.OpenFile Files writing and reading Standard input, output, and error Formatted IO with fmt Printing to io.Writer interfaces Printing to standard output Reading from io.Reader Reading from standard input Buffered IO Buffered writers and readers Scanning the buffer In-memory IO Encoding and decoding data Binary encoding with gob Encoding data as JSON Controlling JSON mapping with struct tags Custom encoding and decoding Summary 11. Writing Networked Services The net package Addressing The net.Conn Type Dialing a connection Listening for incoming connections Accepting client connections A TCP API server Connecting to the TCP server with telnet Connecting to the TCP server with Go The HTTP package The http.Client type Configuring the client
- 13. Handling client requests and responses A simple HTTP server The default server Routing requests with http.ServeMux The default ServeMux A JSON API server Testing the API server with cURL An API server client in Go A JavaScript API server client Summary 12. Code Testing The Go test tool Test file names Test organization Writing Go tests The test functions Running the tests Filtering executed tests Test logging Reporting failure Skipping tests Table-driven tests HTTP testing Testing HTTP server code Testing HTTP client code Test coverage The cover tool Code benchmark Running the benchmark Skipping test functions The benchmark report Adjusting N Comparative benchmarks Summary
- 15. Learning Go Programming Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: October 2016 Production reference: 1201016 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK. ISBN 978-1-78439-543-8
- 16. www.packtpub.com
- 17. Credits Authors Vladimir Vivien Copy Editor Safis Editing Reviewers Quintessence Anx Parth Desai Abhishek Kumar Chris Schaefer Project Coordinator Nidhi Joshi Commissioning Editor Akram Hussain Proofreader Safis Editing Acquisition Editor Manish Nainnani Indexer Aishwarya Gangawane Content Development Editor Aishwarya Pandere Graphics Disha Haria Technical Editor Production Coordinator
- 18. Mohita Vyas Nilesh Mohite
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- 20. critically at what she had committed: she tried to laugh. It was a very mad and incomprehensible design. It was nonsense. But she could not laugh at it. The colors were somehow lovely. Of course, color was not everything. All the little paintings were different, yet each of them in some mysterious way was a record of her broken nights. Each of them had come to being while her mind returned to some dim hinterland, and found her nights, and brought them back. Swathes of color passionate against a brooding background; spirals of flame in space: parabolas of red and gold and green dragging a fever across darkling worlds of black and gray. In all of them was a phantasmagoria of design Cornelia had no name for: but could not wholly reject. They were herself. The diary of her passionate anguish. No one would ever see them. Whom did they hurt? She had joyous rest in looking at them, in letting herself out among their distances. She promised herself that she would always laugh at them: when she felt a little stronger and her fight was won, she promised herself to leave them and return to her Art. A thought came sudden from the outer world. “Why,” she cried, standing up, “it’s Thanksgiving Day! No wonder Giulio did not come.” She put away the sheets of her confessional. “I must have a walk. Goodness! I nearly forgot. People are coming to tea!” She had marketing to do. The stores would still be open in the morning. She trudged through the bright pink snow: she said to herself: “I wonder if I am mad making these mad pictures. They are mad. They have no subjects or anything. Well, I don’t care. Supposing I am mad?...” The pink snow danced lazy through blue air. The City was a great beast snoring with snout on the ground. She pondered. “It sometimes seems to me things are not really half so clear and concise as we artists make them. I wonder if we would be more concise painting these misty moods....” She saw how fluent and filmy a thing was the snowing City. People passing were strokes of smudge across the snow. “They aren’t really like people at all—noses and limbs and thoughts!” But she was at her shop. She was buying chocolate éclairs: very clear things, these, with particular prices. Her inspiration melted in the sticky air.
- 21. Cornelia had no fingers to grasp these luminous moments fleeting across her. As she came back a little cavalcade of ragamuffins pranced and begged pennies. She gave each of them five cents. They danced and cavorted in the snow. Their faces were running with grease and paint. The boys wore women’s skirts tucked high under their armpits, feathers in vast broken derbies abandoned by their fathers. The girls were trim in trousers: their little buttocks pointed rakishly back under their flowing curls. “How like flowers they are, in the snow,” said Cornelia to herself. “And the great monster City with his snout snoring away. They’ll tickle him with their antics: he’ll shake himself and snarl and swallow them up.” The mood was thinning. Once more she was thinking of David and of the tea that was to be a torture. What did she want of friends? What did she have to give them? How, with no work and no joy in her heart, was she ever to pass through the countless hours of life?... A doctor would have said to Cornelia: “The trouble with you is, you do not eat enough.” Thus this day, when Cornelia was once more in her room, she was too tired to go out again to dine, too bored to cook a dinner for herself. “I’ll eat at tea,” she explained to her sense of unfitness. She brewed herself a cup of coffee. That was easy. She recalled her last Thanksgiving. She and Tom went together to the New Jersey heights above the Hudson River; they dined at a mushroom farm. What a jolly jaunt—only a year ago! The last, she thought, of her excursions with Tom. A silent rule they had had always to spend their holidays together—a rule unbroken for twelve years, broken now by the war between them that broke all things. She sat sipping her coffee, and wandered over the frozen hills where their feet had struck. They pitied David laughingly, that day. As so often on set occasions, he had been gobbled up by the Deanes. The conventional time, they found, for not counting on David was the conventional feast-day. She remembered what Tom said: “These families have so little imagination! They cannot even invite a chap to dinner except on a public holiday.” Cornelia thought now how good it would be to be embraced in some convention: however stiff it was it would be warm to be shut in tight. She
- 22. had been alone the Christmas of last year. She was not used to it. Christmas was coming again. She made herself a little mound of cushions on her couch and settled with a book. It was a silly novel some one had given her. There, uncut, was the package of books in the corner, which Tom had sent. Something kept her away from them. She was not sure what shafts Tom might thus unsheath and aim at her. She was not suspicious but indifferent. Her mind was torpid. They must be heavy books. She would have to work to understand them. The novel, on the contrary, did not make demands enough. It was the story of a Belle of Philadelphia, loyal to the Revolution during the British Occupation. It was very plain that the lovely American was to win valuable secrets of war from the vicious British officer who loved her: would give them after hazardous adventure to Washington’s aide-de-camp who was her true love and so help win the war. Sure enough, there she was galloping the dangerous country to Valley Forge. Cornelia’s mind wandered as she idly turned pages. She put down the book. Her mind was a weary woman stumbling with dead feet across the snow. She ached. The snow had stopped. A gentle pall came in from the muffled world. The elevated trains were a memory, life stirred like a larval city hidden from her eyes. She lay in a blue night, and the name of David fell across her night in livid snow. The name of David and the eyes of David and the thoughts of him, cutting her face and melting. Cornelia was on horseback, although she could not see her horse; she was hurrying to Valley Forge with an important secret. Her horse stumbled: he was forever turning, forever turning back. He was trying to carry her into the snare of the British officer. The officer was a short, slim man, he was Tom. Cornelia was lifted up. Her eyes seemed to peer through a viscous film and part it. She lay there prostrate, now, and conscious, neither asleep nor awake; she felt the weariness within her body and the great strain of how she lay, like a wrack upon her. She was tired, tired! Could she not sleep? Could she not have rest? Let her but stretch out and relax and fall away, deeper down where the hectic grays were black. She remained as she was. She felt that she was tied in a hard knot. She was caught in the vice of her nerves. She could not swing herself free: she could not hold herself fast. She lay there and suffered. Though she was half asleep, she could feel her energy fall away in her strain, and her thoughts bound and strike her like iron balls.
- 23. When it was time, she got up and prepared the tea things. The day was low and away. Where had it gone? It seemed to have left her behind. She had the haunted instinct of having been abandoned. Looking back on the day, it seemed a vivid thing, swift and heavy with laughter and paint-smudged children: it had rolled over her body and left her behind. She was bruised by its passage. Day of Thanksgiving!... And here about her now, where the Day had been, a void gray like her sleep: within it just such scant scatter of life—herself. Each little thing that stirred—a teacup against a saucer, the tick of the clock—had a thousand jagged echoes. The bell rang. It jangled against her nerves. Cornelia gripped herself. She had a sense of her head careening. The door opened. She went forward and smiled. A stately woman with a gentle face came in, behind her a little dapper man. She kissed Cornelia. Seeing Cornelia she stood on the threshold of some passionate understanding. But her husband broke the warming silence. He ran about the room and chattered. He was very gay. Cornelia smiled wanly at him. It was Sylvain Purze, maker of fashionable portraits: and his wife, maker of Sylvain Purze. They sat, the two women sheathed themselves up, so the little man should not be hurt with any truths. Mrs. Purze was a woman bathed in a sweet melancholy. Her fine features were a little vague under the dawn of her gold hair. “What a jolly place you have here, you know, Miss Rennard!” exclaimed Mr. Purze. “How I envy you your simplicity. Ah, me!” He sighed, thinking with satisfaction of his luxurious studio on Gramercy Park. “When you’re married——” he intimated treacherously. But his wife did not mind. She knew Cornelia’s opinion of her husband’s talk. She knew her own. The trouble was precisely that her husband had never given her the excuse to leave him. Cornelia’s mind was a twilight swept clear of the mists of the sun. Each nerve stood out alone, and took its toll of its surroundings. The bell jangled again.
- 24. A young girl came in, diffident, spring-like; before a tall dark man with head thrust stiffly back, so that he seemed to be leaning in the direction contrary to his coming. Cornelia greeted her with real pleasure. Cornelia’s sudden brightness was like a pitiful flower budding above strewn ashes. “Helen! I am so glad you thought of coming. And this is Doctor Westerling?” She shook his hand silently. “I have heard of you.” She was not interested really. She introduced them. “Miss Helen Daindrie....” She had expected the Purzes only. No one else would come. The little party caught from the hostess the sense of its completion. It threw out its arms and wove a comfortable net about itself. It settled down. The talk ran easy and subdued: a sluggish circulation within this temporary creature. Mr. Purze was suave with words. His wife had a poise that cradled all the room and gave the creature rest. Dr. Westerling was taciturn: but he was intense in listening. He was a pleasure to Mr. Purze. And Helen Daindrie sat there sweetly, neither talkative nor silent. Cornelia had no need to exert herself. The party would be an easy one. It would live and come to a good end. She found herself looking more and more at Miss Daindrie, drawn to her by a fascination bitter-sweet. She wondered why. She asked her senses. They were clear in their reports like bells. She was a little woman—half girl, not more than twenty-two. She was rather plump, but gently so and with grace. It was a quality, invisible like perfume, that came from her. Under her prettiness a sturdy note. She must be capable. Her eyes were a light blue: Cornelia saw them in the candles she had lighted: but her mouth was straight, long, even, and her chin had strength in its womanly rondure. Looking at her, Cornelia felt the great good health of this woman. Her career told something, but what Cornelia’s sharpened nerves now gave her told more in an instant. Miss Daindrie was a college graduate, and a student in medicine. She was going to employ her science not in practice but in expert work among the children and mothers of the City. This sounded serious almost to forbidding. But the girl, sitting quiet and drinking her tea with a sober head, as if this were a meal, not a convention, was different from her work. She was at once lovely with youth and indestructibly firm with a quaint mother-sense. Her stalwartness was about
- 25. her girlhood, protecting it, as her strong full body was about the dance of her eyes. Cornelia mused away.... She need not worry about her guests. Mr. Purze had aroused Doctor Westerling to talk. He was saying serious things about the advance of Science in America, as compared to Europe. He had spent four years in Paris, Vienna, Berlin. It was plain he knew. Whatever he said he knew. He had taken up Mr. Purze’s challenge, “We are children in art,” as one would take up a problem to be answered. “In America,” he said, “our art is Science.” Cornelia watched him detachedly. He was talking really to impress Miss Daindrie. There was a caress in his voice as he said Science. What did it mean to him, that had a body and soul? He loved Miss Daindrie. Did she love him? No. Would she? Cornelia leaned back in her chair. For the first time, she noticed the tilt of Miss Daindrie’s head on her lovely neck: the whimsical curve of the cheekbone and the clear, almost protrusive outline of the jaw. There must be something Irish about her. Her father—Judson Daindrie—he was Scotch.... Doubtless her mother. Also there was something romantic. A pinch of romance, like a pinch of explosive powder. She was steady: her thrust in life was sure and long. This was one reason why the assertive and uncertain Doctor loved her. But in order to set her off, that pinch of powder. Did the Jewish scholar, exact and intransigent, hold the needed spark? Cornelia thought not. How those blue eyes could gleam! Could they gleam for him? Of course, she pondered, she might marry him, unlighted. He must have a pounding, indefatigable way. Look at him driving his point into Mr. Purze who was really not so very concerned. Yes: she might marry him. If no one else touched off the powder. If she remained unaware of it. She might go unmellowed through life, unfertilized. Such things happened. It would be a pity.... The talk was animated now. The party bloomed to its fullest life. Miss Daindrie was curiously self-conscious about Dr. Westerling’s oration. She was teasing him. How steady she was, for one with a perfume so diffident and sweet! He did not like her jests. His mind sensed only dully what they meant: sharply what she meant behind them. For some reason, a rebuke. He bore it. He was used to battle, and to resistance. He was used to rebukes. But he was uneasy. The cruder lists of argument and quarrel were more to
- 26. his measure. It seemed to him that this Mr. Purze, if he was an artist, needed a lot of informing. “We have here a tendency,” he found the need of explaining his debate to Miss Daindrie, “——to misjudge America by overlooking what America excels in, and wishing in our hearts she were merely another Europe.” Mr. Purze was suddenly agreeing. He saved the Doctor from another teasing. He was nothing, if not a soother of self-important people. He was marvelously informed in the prerequisites of his art of portraiture. He knew who Westerling was. Not rich, but already an emerging figure at the great Magnum Institute. Great men sat for portraits. Westerling discoursed on the need of a new critical scientific standard in Art. Did not Mr. Purze agree? Oh, indeed. It was nonsense, was it not? to say that values in beauty could not be determined like any other element in a material solution. Painting was a chemical solution. Music and poetry were physical solutions: sound waves illustrative of certain documentary matter which of course was open to intellectual appraisal.... He was very interested in that. “I was invited sometime ago to a private recital of Lahlberg. You know —that Russian pianist. He played many of his own compositions. I asked him to state to me in scientific terms what his music meant: why, for instance, he used seconds and sevenths where Chopin employed thirds and fifths. He was quite dumb, I assure you. I needed no further proof of what I had already expected——” the Doctor had meant to say “suspected”—: “the man is a clever charlatan.” “But he plays so beautifully,” pleaded Mrs. Purze. “We cannot trust uneducated senses any more than we can uneducated people.” “No,” decided Cornelia in herself, “this is not what she wants.” She had been watching Helen Daindrie with a growing singleness of interest. She saw how the girl’s body faintly stiffened when the Doctor spoke. She was aware of the implied direction, of the source of the heat of his words: she was attentive, she was respectful and impressed. And yet, Cornelia felt a specific turning away in the young girl’s mind, a wavering of interest, almost a recoil and a revolt from this intellectual tribute. He did not really hold her. When she wandered, Cornelia saw her relax. Now, during
- 27. these last long words, suddenly Miss Daindrie turned and met Cornelia’s eyes. In them a twinkle of disdain, a gladness to be looking away. “Have you heard Lahlberg?” Cornelia asked her. Dr. Westerling still talked. “Yes.” “Do you care for him?” “I think he is very wonderful,” said Miss Daindrie. In her remark there was specific rebellion against what Dr. Westerling was saying. Cornelia noticed. It proved to her that there was danger after all of the Doctor’s winning.... Suddenly, she said to herself: “Why do I care?” She had been watching Miss Daindrie. Now, for the first time, she watched herself to know why she was watching. As she went groping, she understood. For a long time she had walked through a dark cave with a lantern, placing it against the dripping walls, seeking a certain thing.... Sudden, there was her lantern against it, what she sought!—and she recoiled, she withdrew her light, she did not want to see.... With her body strained and her nerves singing against the pull of her will, she lifted her light again, she forced herself to look. She felt it ... in her heart she could have no doubt of it.... Helen Daindrie was meant to make the rescue of David! How clear it was, terribly clear. The one way! She wondered by what painful blessing she had not seen before. She knew that she had seen and had not wanted to see it. It was too bitter, too cruel. Unfair! How could she stand this, who was willing to bear all things? This giving David into the arms of another woman? How could she be sure? How dared she? Reasons had tumbled upon her: knowing was blotted out. Now, what had been dim was clear: what had been so hard, seemed strangely natural and easy. She looked at Helen. She felt her presence. Never had she so felt a life before. Helen was lovely and girlish and strong. She would lead David the way of his dreams, the way of his young gods—they must be her gods also! She would lead him firmly. Her sense of right was clear like her blue eyes. Feeling her there, Cornelia loved Helen Daindrie. Her heart went out to her, her hands pleaded to embrace her. She seemed to hold her face in her
- 28. trembling hands and to look deep in Helen. Yes: she was lovely, for she was to be the beloved. She was sacred, for it was she who was chosen. 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. Her hurt was about her, surrounding her like air. Without it, she must have stifled. She wanted to get up and take Helen’s hand and kiss it. She was her David, looking at this woman. She wanted to kiss Helen’s eyes and tell them what it was they would soon see. She forgot the Doctor. She no longer saw him. So sure she was. She sat there, full of her vision. “Nothing has happened. They need never meet—unless you force it,” was a faint whisper she had no ears for. She must go on in this greater ecstasy than she had ever known. She must make her vision live. Who was she—Cornelia, or David? or was she this sweet fresh girl with the loyal eyes? A great faint ease moved through all her body, as if she were bleeding to death. She had no words to say to Helen, nor to herself. She longed only to touch her hair, kiss her eyes. David was to touch and to kiss them! Her nerves, that had been taut and clear in the drunkenness of fasting, slumbered now as if they had feasted. Her eyes were dim and saw no further thing. She was indeed swathed warm and happy, like one bleeding away and bathed in her own blood. But nothing happened. She had no further sense of the room save that it held her up: nor of the easy talk save that her knowledge of it let her float slumberously, in the sea of her blood. All her blood was outside her. It was no longer a beating surge within the pent walls of her soul. She was emptied of desire and of pain.
- 29. She felt that something was to happen: there would come some proof to her vision. She would look upon it sweetly as upon her death. She awaited her death. She was smiling. The bell rang. The door opened. David came in....
- 30. D XIV AVID had long intended to see Cornelia. Tom reminded him more than once: reminded him perhaps a bit too often. There was a stubborn touch in David. Something within him seemed to resist his going, and even he knew moodily that the something was kin to Tom’s insistence. He had a way of sallying forth on a Sunday afternoon, resolved to walk an hour and then go to her place: and of forgetting. Until it was too late. He would say: “Next time I will not forget.” At last the “next time” came to be Thanksgiving. He dined with the Deanes. He had no plans at all for after dinner. The dinner would be big, he lazy. If his uncle offered him a cigar and Lois was amiable, he might sit around all afternoon. He did not much care. But his uncle had his erratic ways: in and out of business, one never could tell about him. Doubtless the moody angles of Lois were due to her father. Sometimes he would treat him as a man: “Have a cigar, sir?” David accepted and liked this. Moreover the effect of a cigar was always to make him heavy and sleepy: unfit either for walking or a visit: in no heroic mood for visiting a friend toward whom his sense of guilt made him uncomfortable. Then again, his uncle would light his own cigar and forget him; perhaps even say: “Well, children, I am going to take a nap.... Run along.” He napped on the dining-room sofa. This happened on Thanksgiving. Lois was somber. David knew that her engagement—it had never been more than a casual trial—was broken. Once more she was in the open field. And more cynical, more difficult than ever. She had been spiteful, it seemed to David, on this Feast of Thanksgiving. For the first time in a rare long stretch, he had almost preferred the flinty steadiness of her sister. Lois had nothing to say to him, to do with him. When she spoke, she managed an air of objective and disdainful interest that was worse than indifference. As if she were thinking: “What can this specimen possibly have to say?” After dinner, she struck out her hand and smiled formally into his face:
- 31. “Good-by, David: I have a date and it’s late. Can I drop you somewhere?” He spurned her offer. He found himself out of the house, it was still snowing. He had a sentimental turn over the snow and his loneliness, his being turned out lonely into the snow. He began to trudge and to enjoy the walk. He had had no cigar. He was clear-headed. The snow ceased, the air of the darkling City was soft like the touch of silk. He trudged for several hours. Five blocks from her house, the summons came to Cornelia. He hated the Deanes that afternoon. It was an old track in his brain that led him now from them to Cornelia, as his old revolts had led him three years before. True, Mrs. Deane had said to him: “You can stay, dear, if you want and entertain me.” True, the thought came that this might have been more comfortable after all. He did not want to go home. Tom had a way of wreathing their room in smoke and cynical smiles on holidays. It was plain that the time had come to go as his feet now took him.... At the tea, nothing visible had occurred. Cornelia was behind her guests. Far away: pleasantly so, since if she held a rebuke for him it was far away also. There had been a girl with a sweet voice. He did not recall her face. He had come late, left early. Now a note from Cornelia. She had scarcely seen him on Thanksgiving. She wanted to see him. Would he come the following Sunday to tea? He was there, she was not alone. This was rather strange, thought David. Evidently she was not so anxious after all to see him really. He had exaggerated her feeling. Doubtless she did not care enough to have a rebuke for him. At least he could not detect it. It was a pleasant afternoon. With Cornelia was a girl—“my dear friend,” she called her—Miss Helen Daindrie. A very sweet girl, thought David. Rather distant. “You funny person!” she said to him. “Why didn’t you offer to take Miss Daindrie home?” “I thought I’d like to see you alone, for a minute.” “Nonsense! You know you’d have preferred escorting her.” “Well—is it right—at a casual tea—the first time you meet a person?” “The first time! Why, David! You met Miss Daindrie on Thanksgiving.” “Oh, did I?”
- 32. She was looking at him with a cloudy reserve on her eyes he could not understand. Why should she be offended, if he did not remember Miss Daindrie? Did Cornelia love her so much? “Now, run along.” She almost put him out. He thought her strangely cavalier and distant. He enjoyed her. For the first time, in long, he did not find Cornelia cloying. There had been none of the warm discomfort. He was glad to come again. He was glad, now, in his supine state, when he was lifted in any way from his comfortless closeness with Tom. It was a little party. Cornelia entertained quite often. She had always said, in the old days: “David, I do not invite you. What should you do with all these stupid people?—stupid and self-important. When I see you, David dear, I want you.” Now, how different was Cornelia, how light and easy to get on with! David began to question, should he really want to see her alone, could he succeed? He came to just such a party of self-important people, nondescripts of whom he had met none before, with their endless chatter about remote, allusive topics, and wished to see none ever again. It was almost like meeting an old friend to find Miss Daindrie there. He reckoned that she and Cornelia must be fast friends. She was strange. Each time he met her she seemed to him so different he could not be sure he had met her before. He talked with her a great deal that evening. Cornelia said: “There is only one person here you could possibly be interested in. Don’t mind being selfish, dear. Devote yourself to her. I’ll manage the others.” He did. He scarcely spoke with Cornelia. A pause of several ordinary weeks: a visit to the Magnum Institute. “Would you like to see the great laboratories and the hospital?” Cornelia wrote him. “Doctor Westerling said I might come, and bring a friend.” David escorted her. They went through a long, high room, cold and metallic and full of corrodent odors. It was painful to David. He felt that he was being cut by a very sharp steel blade, so that there was no pain, and yet it was painful Miss Daindrie was there in a white apron and a white stiff blouse. It seemed to David that the hard starched linen must cut into her softness. His teeth were a bit on edge, and he was afraid to look too close at
- 33. the acids and the test-tubes full of evil germs and the smears of blood. The Doctor explained a culture of gelatine in which grew billions of organisms and over which Miss Daindrie pored as over a cradle. This brought nausea to David. He knew he was silly. “I would not want to be a doctor,” he whispered to Cornelia. He saw that she too was in pain in this chill temple of science. What held him most was that Miss Daindrie had no eyes for him at all. She followed the white-aproned Doctor in rapt submission. And Doctor Westerling, David was sure, did not like him. He looked quizzically at David’s wandering attention. He said to him: “You are not interested, I guess, in medicine—except when you have a stomach-ache?” “No,” David answered seriously. “Isn’t that the one time when I should be interested?” For a moment Doctor Westerling appeared to like him. His eyes widened, took David in as if with the help of a new light. He began nodding. “Why! You are right.” He laughed. Miss Daindrie came up. “What contribution did you make, Mr. Markand, to medical science?” David was sure the Doctor stopped liking him at once. Their meetings were casual but they were not infrequent. Miss Daindrie, he thought, must be a remarkable woman. For she was always affable to him; and always knew what he had said last time. Yet, her mind must be replete with significant affairs. How could he doubt through it all her strict inaccessibility? One day, she said to him: “Why don’t you come and see me some evening, Mr. Markand?”—and laughed. “Why do you laugh?” “I almost feel you have vowed you would never ask of your own accord.” She was full of assurance, and of a sweet timidity. It seemed to David she was so high above him she could fulfill whatever whim she wanted and lose not one jot of her stature. Such a whim, doubtless, was this. “Oh, I should love to come.... I didn’t—I didn’t really——” he stopped. “Do you really want me to come, Miss Daindrie?” She saw that he was serious. “Why should I ask you?”
- 34. That was convincing. “I don’t see,” he said, “what you could possibly find of interest in me.” It was the beginning of the impulse he was always to have with her to speak out his mind. She answered him seriously too. “I want to find out, perhaps,” she said. They were in a box at a theater. It was a special matinee of a comedy by Bernard Shaw: a strange new genius out of Ireland. Cornelia and Miss Daindrie had arranged the party. “Shaw deserves to be supported,” Cornelia explained; even Tom had been willing to come. She heard every word that passed between David and Miss Daindrie. Her neighbor in the Box was a young man she had never met before. He found her strangely distracted between the curtains. He said to her: “But after all, Miss Rennard, what are we to think of this man Shaw?” She answered, vigorously nodding: “Yes, indeed.” David was going to call? What a stubborn child he had been! A good sign, deeply. She believed she could see. Unknown to himself, he was struggling against Helen. He had an assured, comradeful way with women—the way of a boy: it was gone. A visit to a girl might mean nothing. After these resistances and the silence behind their questionings as they looked at each other, he might well ask why she wanted him to come. It was a bit disconcerting for the young man beside Cornelia. When she was back in her room, Cornelia threw herself on her couch and cried. What a great Victory she had won! David went about, filled with a new humility, a growing hatred of himself. Nearly two years it was since he had seen in a street-car a small girl, and walked through a world suddenly shriveled. What after that? He too had shrunken and grown like the world, so that once more the world seemed right for him. Now another change. The world was gone altogether. None of its tortured standards near him any more to measure him and call what he was good. He stood naked in a sort of psychic space: he saw how soft, how idle, how small was his soul. It came to David how he hated himself, and how he was so full of this defeat upon him, that he could love no person and could have kind thoughts nowhere. All his senses were caught up in this
- 35. tangle of himself. He felt he must grow far beyond the lowness where he now stood, to look with free eyes again upon another. Tom was there, however. Tom was a part of himself—a part, then, of that he must detest. David called on Miss Daindrie. He went there and was silent. It seemed a place, wide like clear air, where he could look on himself. He had no sense of her. He said to her: “Why do you ask me to come again? I am not amusing: I have nothing to give you.” And she: “Come next week.... What night, next week, can you come?” He did not understand. But he was at a pass where even this element of not understanding could not much hold him. He was not interested in Miss Daindrie. He was rapt in a hateful inner spectacle. What he needed was calm and clarity and strength to look at himself. This he found, sitting in the room with her, and her few words glowing steadfast over his eyes like candles. So he came. She invited him to dine. When he entered the drawing-room he felt he was late and they were waiting for him. Doctor Westerling was there. A slight small man with a limp stepped forward from his chair and as David took his hand he liked him. Mr. Judson Daindrie. Mrs. Daindrie had a cordial smile. It was all strange to David—this warmth, this kindness. He could not understand it. He felt a cloud over the face of Conrad Westerling and the Doctor’s will dispersing it till it was gone. The struggle and stress of this he thought he could better understand. Mrs. Daindrie was saying to him: “Won’t you take Helen down, Mr. Markand?” And there was Westerling offering the precedence through the door to a Miss Sophie Laurence who seemed very heavy and stupid. All of these pretty ways were disconcerting since they hid something, David felt, and he knew not what. He became part of the round table. Feeling himself a part and feeling Mrs. Daindrie at his left smile and be warm to him, David was eager to move himself away, just so he could truly see that he was part of this bright round table. Miss Daindrie smiled at him, as at an accomplice. “These are my family,” she seemed to tell him.
- 36. He was at ease. He was unafraid of silence. So was Miss Daindrie. He said to himself: “I am sitting here quietly silent, just like Miss Daindrie.” “Well, Mr. Markand? I understand you are musical. You play the piano?” asked Mrs. Daindrie. Quite abruptly she put her inapposite questions. “Do have some more of the fish!” “I imagine you feel quite like a New Yorker.” She left him alone. All of them left him alone. He was of them all. They tightened into a unit—they became a family—they discussed some family event or listened with a sort of mystic understanding to unleavened words from Miss Laurence whom they seemed fond of, as one is fond of one’s own foibles. In these gusts of attention away from him, David was comfortable. It seemed to him that Doctor Westerling was not. There was a fragility about Mr. Daindrie. The skin was translucent and tight under the upstanding wave of his gray hair: the blue eyes were far in from the white tufts of his brow. His hands were very small. Even sitting there and taking the plate from the maid and thanking her, and listening with respect to the prattle of Miss Laurence, David felt that he was a little man who limped. Intelligent. Why did he have the sense of conflict between his intelligence and his gentility; the sense of his head bowing? In another way Mrs. Daindrie was slight. She had a freckled smile and the puffs of her brown hair blew out the laughter of eyes. She was satisfied, it seemed to David, with the perpetual courtliness of her husband. Against their mood he felt Doctor Westerling veering stiffly. He wondered if this was why he felt this grain of resistance in them all against the doctor. “Why, then, do they have him to dinner?” “But why do they have me?” He was a stranger, more so than Conrad Westerling. Yet, he was taking the soft patter of Miss Laurence less to heart. Could this possibly be of importance? The door had opened. “Come in, Hope.” Her mother spied her. “You may say good-night.” A little girl stepped carefully through shadows that lay from the door to the bright table under its hood of electric lights. She dashed swiftly to her father and jumped into his lap. She hid her face. “I said you might come in, Hope, to say good-night.”
- 37. Hope faced about and smiled with a mischievous triumph. She had had at least this moment from her mother’s precept. Her father placed her firmly on her feet. “This is my youngest,” Mrs. Daindrie explained to David. “I believe you have never seen her. Hope dear, don’t you want to say good evening to Mr. Markand?” “Why am I so little surprised?” said David to himself. What was there growingly strange in this quiet night? “Does she remember me?” He felt the hollowness of nervous strain, as the little girl of the car came up to him, held out her hand. “I know you already,” she announced quite clear and high. “Oh, do you?” said Mrs. Daindrie. “I know you also,” David spoke to Hope. Their words caused no great interest. Doubtless, on one of the occasions when he had been there before they had met. In the lack of concern the two felt protection. She took his hand, he looked into her eyes. They were not quite so dimpled. She tossed her head and withdrew her hand and left him. David watched her giving the same hand to Doctor Westerling, watched her embrace her sister with a burst of fondness, watched her recoil from the clumsy hug of Miss Laurence. He tried to believe that what she had given to him was secret and different. She was gone. He felt at home in this strange house. He felt intimate deeply with this little girl, whom he had watched for a moment out of their wide lives in a public car. He accepted her in this house as he accepted physical laws of life. Miss Daindrie had ears where they should be and they heard what they should hear when he spoke words to her. So this warm home had the little girl whom he loved, had his comfort. He did not fathom how now his love for Hope was a quieter thing. He accepted—didn’t we?—miracle. So he thought. He had looked on the girl of the car with less intimacy after all. Intimacy was the denier of quiet? Words were the denier of knowing? Was he comfortable, intimate, what was he here in this relevant night? She led
- 38. out of the room where he sat embraced with Miss Daindrie. Did she lead forth—him? Whither? Who was she after all? Doctor Westerling had an uncomfortable smile or an abstract frown when he was quiet. Mrs. Daindrie remarked this. She found she could better leave David to himself. He did not mind. Wherever the talk was, and for whom, he listened pleasantly. She must pay attention to Doctor Westerling the more since she realized that her daughter did not seem to care if he was at ease or no. A strange unwonted character in Helen. There must be a reason for her willed indifference, at bottom flattering to the Doctor—he was there invited. Anything from Helen not properly pleasant was flattering. Mrs. Daindrie had respect for those who had the respect of her daughter. She plied him with questions. She could not hold his interest. The words each of them called forth died out like a too short fuse. Mr. Daindrie looked about the table. He saw that Westerling was being bored by the questions of his wife. He took umbrage neither for her nor against him. He was a quiet man, accepting the world’s clashes. “I suppose you are only waiting, Doctor,” he said, “to take up your practice as a specialist?” “I never intend to practice,” Westerling replied. There was an emphatic note in his voice that brought silence over the table. Helen looked at him, proudly. She knew the integrity of his mind. She knew her father’s would meet it and be pleased. Always she was saying to herself and to certain of her friends: “I have great respect for Doctor Westerling’s mind.” “Oh?” questioned Mr. Daindrie. “You see, sir,” Westerling went on, smiling with a new satisfaction that showed how exclusively his satisfaction dwelt in knowledge, in discussion, in release from the naked domain of emotion, “you see, when I graduated from Medical School eight years ago, and from the hospitals here and abroad, a strange revelation had come to me. I had lost faith absolutely in the practice of medicine.” Mr. Daindrie was a good listener; a stern one. He bowed his head judicially. Westerling talked exclusively to him. But loudly. So that his consciousness of other ears must have gone to the volume of his voice.
- 39. Perhaps, it occurred to David, he was trying within this little cozy table to address the world. “It was a problem to face, let me assure you. Like one who graduates into the Priesthood, perhaps, and finds he no longer believes in the Divinity of Christ. Harder, much harder, I suppose—since in medicine the régime of study is terrific.” He said these words coldly. He seemed to avoid a tone which might bring sympathy, conviction. He had no eye for the faint shadow over Mrs. Daindrie’s face, at his allusion to Christ. “But how do you mean, you lost faith?” asked Mr. Daindrie. “I had believed myself devoted to a science. I found that the present practice of medicine—the practice of medicine as it must be to-day in lack of science—is an empiric fraternal order.” Mrs. Daindrie gasped. “I am convinced that most of the therapeutic practices which occupy so overwhelming a part of the work of the doctor must go. No; I don’t know to be replaced by what. But the principle of introducing specific drugs into the system to right specific maladies, right wrongs—I know it is false. Some day most of our medical practice will be regarded as medieval, quite as we look on the humors and the cuppings of the Sixteenth Century leeches.” “But there is nothing known to take the place of these medicines?” “Nothing established.” “Then, until such time, must we not use what we have?” “Doubtless we must, sir,” Westerling spoke with a certain condescension. “But I cannot devote my life to the application of guess work and patch work which, I am convinced, is altogether based on erroneous premises.” “As sweeping as that ...?” Superlatives, absolutes, all tendencies toward violence brought out in Mr. Daindrie the deprecatory smile. “Yes. The sole sound future of Medicine must rest on the discovery of principles beneath effects which we call physical and mental life; principles the pursuit of which will make the introduction of alien curative elements into our bodies simply absurd. I am referring not only to medicines but to vaccines, anti-toxins—surgical makeshifts. The true curative elements of life must be inherent in us. Somehow we have lost them. I am convinced
- 40. the reason is that we have lost certain unconscious principles of behavior in which they are implicit. I am convinced that drugs are superstition.” “But bacilli—the trouble makers!” pleaded Mr. Daindrie. “Harmless to the properly ordered organism. Immune to anything so isolated as the effect of drugs. We are subject to germ diseases, I am sure, because we are not masters of our independence of them. I am sure that some day it will seem as absurd to introduce drugs into our systems in order to kill bugs, as it would be now to say prayers in order to drive out devils.” “But the devils don’t exist!” “I’m not so sure of that. The instruments don’t exist—as they do for bacilli—for seeing devils.” Mr. Daindrie was dazed by what seemed the man’s veering from pure science to superstition. “You’re a bacteriologist!” exclaimed Miss Daindrie, sensing her father’s state. “I am working to find out what disordered conditions of our tissues and organs give the bacteria their chance—the pernicious ones. Or rather what conditions develop the pernicious ones, for that is essentially what our bodies have done. I am interested in nothing else.” Helen felt there was no answer: Doctor Westerling was interested in no answer. She kept silent. “Well, we do need doctors,” contributed Mrs. Daindrie. “Fortunately, not all doctors refuse to help the world, like you, Doctor Westerling.” A faint sneer crept over the young man’s features. It covered a hurt. David alone saw the hurt. Mr. Daindrie answered the sneer. “Yes,” he said, “we must get on with the drugs, while you have yet to prove we can get on without them.” “Don’t you believe in any of our curative or preventive service?” asked Helen Daindrie. “Honestly, it is all nonsense.” “All of it?” She was withdrawing. But Westerling had a truth and he must pursue it first. “I am sure modern practice has done more harm than good. Operations clean up appendicitis. We know that. What we scarcely guess, is how many
- 41. nervous systems, kinetic systems, circulatory systems are wrecked by successful operations.” “I had always thought the American surgeons were great scientists.” “They are great virtuosi,” declared Westerling. “Yes, but——” “——virtuosi should practice on pianos.” He was very excited. He said no word of his own doubts. He said no word of his vast sacrifice which his unproved convictions had forced upon him. He could have become rich in the practice of medicine. No one knew this better than Conrad Westerling. No one more than this Jew of sensitive family and depleted means loved the luxury and the freedom of money. All his life he would labor at an insignificant salary because of the depth of his sense of service. A true poet of Science. But of all this he said no word. He could not. To one person he needed to say all this: the person he loved, to Helen. But until she said that she loved him, he could not even to her. The strategy of showing his better self, of gaining her allegiance to his cause in order to help win her, was beyond him. Speaking stridently and harshly now, it was his need of tenderness and his deep respect for the tenderness of Helen, that spoke. The Daindries could not know this, could not quite conceal their shrinking from him. It was not a question of right, it was a matter of taste. A too passionate devotion to an ideal was an untoward display, it was out of place: quite as would be a too naked display of devotion to a woman. This stern stiff man was at work perhaps wiping away an entailed incubus upon the life of man, but he lacked amenity. Their nerves told them this. Their minds hinted that he had intellect and courage. But like all proper people, what their nerves ordered came first. David had liked his words. They excited him. He had understood them less than Mr. Daindrie or than Helen. But he had visioned more. What came in to him was precisely the personal anguish, the personal immolation— though he could not configure them beneath his antagonizing words. He saw also Helen’s shrinking from the violence of those words: as if they laid hands on her, threatened to exclude all others and possess her. It seemed that Helen did not want to be possessed by truth. It must be something warmer, something smaller perhaps, that would possess her. So David felt the true content of Westerling’s words. They held a burden of great courage,
- 42. a plea of love: these he was really offering to her: these she would not accept. David walked a few blocks to the car with Westerling. He held out his hand. “I like what you said at dinner, oh—so much, Doctor!” He wanted to say far more. “Do you?” Westerling looked sourly, haughtily at him, as if David were trying to hurt him. With a stiff body too erect he shook David’s hand—dropped it with a gesture of completion. “Good-night.” So David could not go on. But he went to Cornelia, to whom he knew he could speak. “I don’t think,” he said, “I am going back ever again to see Miss Daindrie.” Cornelia’s heart stopped its beat. “I am glad—I am—no, I can’t be glad.” Sense and will turmoiled against each other. David saw her sitting quiet there, looking at him. It was quite natural, he thought, that she could not understand. He had come to tell her. It came to him: “She must think it funny that I should tell her this. What can it matter to Cornelia?” Cornelia, feeling he would go on and that for this he had come and that himself would tell her what to do, began to go deeper into his coming. He had sought her out: this was rare: for a rare incentive. He had sought her out because he needed to talk about Helen. To no one else could he talk. From no one else could he hope for the persuasion he wanted: to send him back to her. Here was a problem that hurt him. She could smoothe it. For this he had run to her. When she had done her part, he would leave her and go back to Helen, he would live and play once more.... “What is it, Davie?” she asked aloud. She was ready for her part. “I am not—not good enough for her, Cornelia.” Good enough to come to her when she could soothe him: not good enough for Helen.... “How do you know that, David?” “Because I know some one who is.... Conrad Westerling is good enough for Helen. I admire him immensely. I know he loves her. I know it hurts
- 43. him when I am there. I have seen that. Why should I hurt him, Cornelia?” “But what about Helen Daindrie?” “Why shouldn’t she love him? He is strong, and courageous. He has wonderful ideas. His whole life—I feel that—is nothing but his ideas. She should love him.” “Is there room for Helen in one so full of ideas?” “He loves her, so there must be.” “She does not love him, so perhaps there isn’t.” Cornelia looked at him blushing. “She does not love him, David. What is it to you? Can you make her love him, David, by staying away?” David’s blush was crimson. “I—I don’t mean that. N-no. I—I don’t know what I mean.” He began pulling at his handkerchief with nervous fingers. Cornelia steeled herself.... Yes she could! She laughed at him. “Why you funny person—you funny Quixotic David!” A pause. “Or are you merely awfully conceited? Answer me, then: how will your staying away help the lost cause of Doctor Westerling?” David bit his lip, turned pale, looked at his twitching fingers. “I am a fool, am I not, Cornelia?” “You must go on, seeing Helen. Your staying away now would be offensive. What right have you to fight another man’s battle against Helen? Don’t you see how presumptuous it all is? She knows best what she wants, David darling, not only of Doctor Westerling, but of you also.” “Westerling is a noble man who has worked and done things.” “You will do things also. I won’t let you slight yourself. That’s slighting your friends. If you are good enough for me—and for Helen also?——” she found something near the playful smile she wanted, “must you not be good for something?” “Cornelia, I don’t understand her wanting ever to see me.” He was very mute and very timid, looking at his hands. “And who are you to judge? What do you know of Doctor Westerling and of yourself? Live, David—spread out like a tree. Then we shall all know what you are.”
- 44. David got up. “There!” She came up to him close. She took his head in her two hands. “Are you convinced?” He shook his head and her hands moved with it.... Since her plan had been found and she knew that it was working, there was peace in Cornelia. Her way with David was the way of a mother. She knew how this birth and this life had rended her: what it had cost her in blood and anguish. So is the mother peaceful, knowing this, with her unknowing child. She took her toll of him, like a mother also. She held his cheeks with her hands and she drew him down and kissed him. “And you see, don’t you, why you can’t stop so suddenly from going to see her? What would she think? The offense and the pain—yes, David, the pain, if you stayed away?” He went back to Helen Daindrie. He went again and again. Cornelia had settled and given him what he desired. There was reason no longer for seeing Cornelia. Spending his quiet evenings with Helen, he did not see the Doctor. He forgot him, he was ashamed, as Cornelia had cleverly made him, of the conceited presumption that he could help his cause by staying away. He came, therefore, feeling nothing but peace: wanting the right to feel no other thing. For in peace, he came to himself. And what he sought above all else was this. Coming to Helen and sitting there beside her, it was easier, somehow. But it was easier most of all to look at Tom, and know he hated him, and know that they must part.... They had gone on living together. The silence about them, holding them in, was stiff and frozen. David went no longer to Flora’s. He wandered about the City, seeing nothing, until his legs ached, and then he went to bed. He found that he needed more sleep than he had needed in years. There was a constant weighing soreness in his body. His head was heavy. His thoughts pushed through some clotted substance in his mind with a swerving pain. Often his eyes ached: often his food did not agree with him. Yet he was hungry. He needed great sleep, great food. After sleep, he was heavy, after food he was
- 45. often sick with heartburn. He was like a pregnant woman. He went about loaded and diminished. His thoughts delineated no true objective world. What came with any sharpness into the mist of his mind, he hated. Thus Tom. What soothed his dwelling in these mists he courted. Thus Helen Daindrie. His sleep also was strange. It was dreamless. When he closed his eyes he dropped, almost at once, into a profound close pit whose blackness held him moveless. When he woke, it was some force, far down where he had been, that had spewed him up: his brow aching and his body churned with a great dizzy distance. He attended to work. There was always enough mental energy for that. In fact his work was his savior. It took him out of himself: but not upon some shattering objective world, shrunken and tortured and congested like that by which he had once measured himself and found that he was good. It took him out of himself into an easy world of conventions and abstractions: where figures had the relief of ineluctable laws, where there were fixed commodities like tobacco and freight-rates, where men were sure machines of buying and selling, where values and credit could be determined. A sweet, imagined, malleable world, the world of Business, in which each day for a few hours, David took refuge. Another such world he now rediscovered and frequented. He had greatly neglected his violin. Always he had played without consistency, and now be did not play at all. It must have been painful and intrusive to make music of one’s own, so David let the dust gather on his instrument and the strings break. It was different with the world of the music of others. David began to go to concerts: chiefly orchestral concerts. He did not care for the virtuosi, he detested Opera. The symphony of eighty upraised voices, marvelously artificial, essenced and controlled, swung him at once into a distant land. These worlds of the violins and horns and ’celli were also concise and constrained. Their ecstasy was a comfortable unit, as compared with the vast vagueness of a City street. In a way far more grandiose, music was a release, like business, for David. With violent wrenching of his nerves, he forced himself to look at his dear friend.... This after all was Tom whom he had loved, who had found him at his advent into the life of the City and into life itself. This was that friend who had opened his mind, loosed his tongue, made him not too bitterly mourn his mother. This was Tom who, when he was ill, had nursed
- 46. him and he had been so sure had loved him, whom now with straining nerves he tried to see, clear through a strange hot haze about them. Tom sat there reading. No: he was not reading. His head was bowed over the book, but his eyes were away. He was very graceful, there in his rocking chair, with a leg thrown over the other knee and the gentle line of his sharp shoulders drooping down to his chin. Tom. His best friend! David looked on him with a great love. What a clear clean face he had. David knew that the thinning hair so faint above his high square brow was soft like silk. That his eyes, if he saw them now, would be dim with a moisture he could not let be tears. And the old gnarled hands: the hands of one who struggled stintlessly and was master. What was there wrong in Tom? Sitting across the room they had once chosen with such joy together—“the Sun is there! Davie, think of that rare god, the Sun: he will visit us each morning and stay all day”—was it not hard for him to look on the years that intervened and that were somehow wrong? Why? Why was not life the simple thing it had appeared? They had gone singing a song together: it was not right that it should end in tears. But now there was new strength in David; a new vantage point he seemed mystically to have gained, where he could clamber up and look about him. Often he had gone so far. Beating with regretful wings against a perverse reality that prisoned him no less. No less. Now, it was less indeed. If he came again to the conclusion at whose brink he had stood so often, now he could follow it. No bar between him and what he decided to do. If Tom was false and a false friend, he would step over the brink! Gracefully Tom sat there. And it was sure in David that if ever he had loved, this was the loved one. There had been women whom he had embraced, close of kin who had housed him. This was a mere comrade, a mere fellow-man: his hand-clasp was strongest of all. But also there was life. How little he knew of life! What a sweet hedged delirium was music, what a close cabin his affairs downtown. Tom had taught him life. Life of a sort Tom gave him now, as had his mother. What if he must be born again, away, as once from her? He had lived in a sweet dream. One walked along a road. At times, it was garlanded in fields: at times it rose between jagged heights, or dropped beside the spume and the roar of waters. A road, clear and straight, and one could walk it. Here he had met Tom. They had joined hands. They would
- 47. walk the road together. The steady road. The fleeting dream wherein he walked.... For here was no such road at all! 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. Let Tom go his own way! Let him be! David found what he was doing. There was his place of vantage to which he could swing, and there was he, clambering up to it. He was leaving Tom behind. They had a talk. Tom looked silently and long at David. He was very sweet and like the Tom David would never have left, in his silence. Then he said: “David, I hope that whatever you do, you will not marry a good and beautiful woman.” He seemed very tired to David. The old fire was there, but it was moveless under a cloud that would not break. David had no thought of marrying any one. No plan was farther from his consciousness. He smiled rather confidently, therefore. He was interested. “Why?” “Because, if you marry that sort, it will be almost impossible for you to break away.” “Why, Tom, if one married should one want to break away?” “Marriage has this, dreadful about it, David. It is life for a woman to be married, death for a man.” “How is that possible? If it is good for one—— What a discord you make of the world!” Tom laughed. The fire parted the cloud. “What is the world but just such unending discord? Look at the world. Is it a sweet harmonious place? The one harmony it knows is an infinite
- 48. texture of just such deathless conflicts, of just such tragic sacrifice of individual lives to its cruel rhythms.” David was silent. Tom, the barer of life, was once more before him. He felt that Tom might well be true in his words. He had not altogether left the road of his Dream. Tom went on. He had been silent and distant. He had made, for a long time, no advances to David. He had left him alone. Now in the silence of David, he saw his old art upon him, caught the flare of that past when he had taught and given and David had received. He had no power against this haunting past which he loved. He went forward to recapture it. Blindly he went like an insect toward a fire. “David,” he spoke with an incomprehensible passion that shriveled his face, “David, I would rather see you married to a whore—than to a woman who is beautiful and strong.” Already he was afraid, burned perhaps. He swerved away. “...Though it broke your heart, it would be less dangerous. You would escape. Comfort and happiness alone, you will be helpless against.” He stopped. He looked at David. He saw how different this was which had happened after his words, from what had always happened. David was calm. He was away. Tom had lost him.... David went on with his visits to Helen Daindrie. He found he was telling her all the little things that filled his days and nights—the little nothings. “I don’t know where I walked,” he said. “It was very noisy, I know. But it all seemed so quiet. There was a silence in the men and women.... It seemed as if there was a silence in them, and they were scurrying about so fast to get away from it.... But the silence clung.” “You spend very little time at home.” “Yes,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t you care to read?” “I don’t seem to, now.” “Why, David?”
- 49. “I do not want to be at home. When I am home, I go to bed. Even if it is only nine o’clock.” And then there was a pause. “You do not seem,” she said, “to be very fond of the company of your friend.” He shook his head again, looked away. It was not needful, long. Again, he saw her. He was very easeful and relaxed. He made no effort to talk or to conceal, when he was with her. She was a sweet impersonal presence. It was good of her to let him come so often. He had no sense within his vision of himself in the world, of her who was a woman beside him. One time, after a great quiet, she said: “Why, since these things are so, do you not live alone?” Her words were part of the quiet. They did not break it. They were very calm and very quiet indeed. So they entered into David. He had not answered her. Often he sat so, still, and when he spoke it was upon some other theme. She never spoke these words again.... It was Spring.... David got up very early from his bed, he went into their large room, it slumbered restlessly there, he looked out of the window. A great mist was before his eyes. A great mist lay in the street. He could not see the street and the opposite houses. It was a great white mist, warm and rolling away: the mist of morning. He looked toward the east. There, dim in the white, were the trees of the little Square. Above them he saw the Sun, a gleam, swathed in the vapors. He went back to bed and to sleep. When he awoke, he was rested. He was very warm under his sheet; he had perspired. Under his flesh he was cool and rested as he had not been in a long time. He returned to the large room and looked once more out of the window. The Sun was a naked flame jeweling the sky. The trees of the little Park were shrill with green and the moisture sang on them like tinkling glass. Tom came in. David said to him: “Tom, I think I want to go away and live alone.”