The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

She told him of herself more and more: more and more easily. She told herself that she could not otherwise gain his confidence: and she needed that really to help him, really to be “friends.” In truth she craved his help, she was glad to purchase it with whatever aid her place and her connections might afford.

“It is hard to speak of such things,” she said, half sitting up on her lounge, with a bare arm falling straight toward the floor. At once it was easy. The ease of her lying there before him and the glow of his eyes taking her in were a lubricant to her words. She could never have spoken so at first in a tailor-made suit. She would have laughed with the freedom of sincere denial at a friend who ventured to link the exhibition of her soul with the exhibition of her body.

It was through Laura Duffield that Tom came to his real establishment in practice. Gilbert Lomney was her cousin. For him, Laura was a brilliant woman who somehow had managed also to be good. He had great admiration for her, not a little fear. It was by her strategy that “Lomney and Rennard” was brought about.

The City had welcomed its own stuff in Tom and Cornelia. The City had come from the same sort of place. At the beginning, Tom felt this not at all. He was frightened by the City. He did not understand when its heights bent down and touched him. Each suppliant before New York goes through the same amaze as the unfriendly Town proves lewdly hospitable. Few dare to admit her wantonness since the avowal would take from the measure of their prowess. In the early bewilderment of being taken-in, of finding a naked mistress in place of a shrouded goddess, the critical faculties are struck to sleep.

The years of the preparing of success in Tom were like the growth of love in their delirious simplicity, the sort of wild progression that one finds best revealed in mathematics. A true tumescence. Tom found some one who liked his humor and his freedom. He introduced him to a strategic hostess. There was opened a breach in the trenched City. There was more than one of these amiable friends. Each multiplied opportunity at a geometric rate. Tom was soon in a position to choose, and from choice comes judgment. 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. He may drop like a pebble, he may sink straight to the oblivious bottom of the lake: but not before myriad wreathings forth have made him the hour’s center of a rippling world. If he step forward, he will step on some one’s heels, and that some one’s friends will, for this chance beneficence, cherish and advertise him. If he step back, the same thing will occur. If he stand still, he will obstruct the one behind him who is moving forward, and this too will net him a sincere appreciation. He must be a genius or a willful man to escape acceptance by the City.

Tom Rennard was neither. He found that the man in whose law-offices he learned far better than in law-school appreciated him and, when he was admitted to the Bar, sent him work. He found, arguing a trivial motion, that he was eyed with interest by nonchalant attorneys as he stepped back to the counsel-table. He found that his brain could be sold if at first he were willing to sell it cheap. Lawyers too busy drumming business thought they were exploiting Tom when they employed him to be of counsel in some tort case and let him do the work. Several dull fellows with gratuitous patronage stuck to him regularly until they found themselves with fees in their pockets and with their sinecures entailed. Tom had a way of making a Judge smile that the men of the Bar respected as they would not, in a lifetime, respect Justice. He was quick to see that the able counsel acts, before the Bench, not as a lawyer but as a man: that the tricks of erudition and the flourishes of oratory gleaned from law-school had best be packed away. His average Judge was a shrewd politician who, above all, must not be made to feel his juridic ignorance. What he required from counsel was a mirror in which he might see his power reflected: and his power consisted not at all in judicial learning—display of that was an embarrassment—but in a canny sense of men and use of means. Tom talked to the Bench, man to man, asking-man to man-who-hath, with a candor most attorneys needed twenty years to strip to. His attitude brought reward. Judges leaned comfortably back and talked things over with him. When he reappeared before them, he was remembered.

“But do you think, Mr. Rennard, that this point is pertinent?”

“Yes, your Honor, I do. And I am sure if you will just recall to mind the case of Larson versus Mann—the question is one that has long interested me and I looked it up——”

Who was this Mr. Rennard? this young and unknown Mr. Rennard who had a way of warming the air of a court-room to his own purposes? The question was asked: the questioners answered it. They gave him respect before he had clients: they gave him the beginnings of repute at a time when he had nothing else. Hating and fearing each other, they wanted Rennard on their side.