It was a hilarious dinner. Actually. Tom helped it. The Farmer person had an aptitude for puns. He told them with a Carolina accent. Tom knew of him, that he wore a straggly ribbon for a tie—gray and brown—tucked like a shoe-string into the yellow edge of his collar. He knew also that the collar button showed—it was black bone—and an adam’s-apple: that the shirt bulged and was half stiff, and wrinkled. Tom knew no more because his eyes rose no higher and no lower. They remained at their horizontal tension.
He packed them off to an extravaganza. No, he could not join them. He simply could not. They would enjoy it without him. One did not go to the theater for company—as one went to dinner. They were gone at last.
Tom was home like a spent arrow. Down the turbulent avenue with the trains clamoring overhead. He took off his clothes. He was exhausted, as if he had run that day, not been carried, to New York. In a moment, he slept.
He woke early and lay in his bed and understood.
David did not know it: he had done this thing with a knowledge surer than knowing. That much was clear. If David had had a doubt as to the true trivial purpose of Tom’s telegram, if he had so much as said: “There may be something important” he must have given Tom the chance to tell him. It was plain, David had sensed the lack of a particular business, guessed the purely social nature of Tom’s wish: keen willing, without knowing, to avoid it.
Was it stupidity? Tom thought not. The stupid person would not have understood so much. He would have said: “There may be something important.” Or, feeling the true inwardness of Tom’s importunity, he must have been passive before it. Beneath David’s ingenuous behavior, there worked a deliberate negation. That much seemed certain. Part of his will’s function it had been to hide from David what it was all about, since his will was willing to cause Tom’s distress, and David conscious would not have been willing to cause it, David’s innocence a cloak over himself. But the detail of his meeting Farmer? Tom believed that in the wide world of occurrence the searching will could always find material for its act.
The important thing now was to slur over the affair. A great hurt, an inexplicable wound: a pin prick that somehow had touched his heart—one could not talk of such improbable things.
“Really, man, why do you insist on foisting such impossible persons on yourself and me?”
David squirmed. “I can’t say I like him either. But he seemed begging to come along.”