The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

David watched Tom. Not consciously so much as because he nearly always saw him, when Tom was there to see. He felt a strange thing. Tom, the casual, easy Tom, was uneasy. He was fretted by some sharp discomfort. His eyes wandered, his feet tapped, he lighted a cigarette and threw it away. Fennido talked again. A great talker. Tom gathered the sharp points of his nerves together: he was once more composed but with a tension that had in it the power of some prefatory move: almost a charge. In the ensuing scatter of minds, Tom was busy gathering them together, gathering them to him. Ill-at-ease no longer. He was speaking....

He spoke for a while, wreathed in the comfortable silence of the others. David’s eyes, moved by an impulse he was not conscious of, wandered. They met the eyes of Marcia Duffield. He looked away, shocked by a current which had flowed momently between them. David knew Tom’s words held him unpleasantly; at times held him not at all. What was the interest in them, what their motive, beyond Tom’s wish to speak and to hold interest? David sensed this: sensed the rebuke he felt in this for Tom. As his eyes went back to the eyes of Marcia Duffield it came to him that she was feeling similar things with him. In the brief meeting of their eyes, it was as if they had discovered one another in themselves.

This was absurd and impossible! Marcia Duffield? David’s mind could not grasp this flashing intuition; it slipped leaving no conscious mark. He looked harder at the others in the unwitting need not to look again at her. Already, what he could carry with him of that strange momentary kinship across the room was reduced to the sense of bright, black, hard eyes, filled with a wistful question.

He was aware of King Van Ness: perhaps because that solid gentleman was always looking at Marcia. David knew who he was: Junior partner in Van Ness, Stone and Company—son of a great banker, doubtless a millionaire. Van Ness sat as if between two fascinations: the voluble one that was principally Tom, who at times caught him and sent him stiffer forward in his chair; the silent one, Marcia, who never looked at him, but the stirring of whose hands and mouth was at once reflected in his ways—like the image in a dull steel mirror. Van Ness was heavy and tall, not stout. His big bones and the heft of his arms and legs gave the impression of extraordinary weight. Their heaviness proceeded rather from his mood than their own heaviness. Van Ness was heavy, not because he was great in bulk, but because he was small in spirit. The unlit stretch of him was a sag and a pull downward because he lacked the lift of mental resilience. His head stated this. The forehead was large and bulging. The brown eyes opened wide and were far apart. The nose was long, straight, clumsily rather than strongly molded with unmoving nostrils. Van Ness wore a black mustache, a straight-cropt bristly brush: his mouth was small and unperturbed; his chin jutted forward with a counterfeit of power that was mere lack of curiosity, unresistance to the proprieties and manners birth had brought him. This was King Van Ness: supremely gentlemanly, supremely rich, supremely dull—impregnable. He stirred in the talk of Fennido and Tom as a heavy vessel creaks at anchor in a choppy sea....

David heard Tom again.

“We had it out, until seven o’clock that night. I came home exhausted.”

Tom glanced at David. Not long or sure enough to see him turn pale.

“But it can’t be! It’s a lie!” David said to himself. He remembered the evening Tom referred to. He had come home at six. Tom lay on the couch. In excellent spirits. They had gone to Brown’s Chop-House for dinner. And yet—David, as usual, had no positive proof. Perhaps a mere exaggeration, a mistake in the day. Why was he always so eager—so afraid—to catch Tom in a trivial falsehood?

Marcia was speaking to him. Van Ness had roused himself to a rare gust of words. Serious words, half-angry. The question of labor-unions. Marcia drew Tom aside.

David saw how her eyes were close on him and how her breast stirred faintly. He saw that Tom was watching only with his ears: his eyes wandered to the talking banker. In a pause, “You must have had your wits about you!” he threw in. He had heard every word.