“Supposing work does go to hell? It won’t. But supposing it did? Pooh!”
David could not forget such things.
Nor, in their light, could he forget Tom’s accusation that he was selfish: that he had no idea of service. This one rift there was in the harmony of Tom’s helping: a certain flavor of rebuke as he served, a certain stress and reminder. “Here is how I serve my friend.” Yet David could not be sure. The rebuke he felt in Tom’s ministrations for his own lazy selfishness might altogether lie in his own guilty conscience. What did he ever do for Tom? So far as he could see, what did he ever do for any one at all? His life was a sliding down greased paths. Fortune or no fortune, what hold had he on the way? Lying there on his cushioned couch, he found himself wishing Tom had not come back so soon from work in order to see how he was. And wishing this, he felt his guilt the more....
In flashes, like blaze in an empty sky, the emptiness of David came to him and filled him and gave him great hurt. Whither indeed was he going, and where was he? If Tom was querulous, irritable, weak, if Tom scoffed at his relatives, refused to be serious about his friends and would hear no word of his loves, what was David to complain? His relations were nothing to Tom: he knew too well what earthy ones they were. Had David respect for his own brief amours? Was there one of his relationships with man or woman that was noble, that lifted him up? Was there one, who worked for him and served him, as Tom did? Tom was faulty. Yes. But David was a monster in that he seemed to partake neither of the virtue nor of the sin of man. He was a trimmer. He was clamped down in some chill Limbo. Knowledge came to him, even now, of his idle and empty ways, like lightning in a lazy summer night: flashing and gone, muttering afar, doing no work upon him.
He was a spiritually sprawling creature. He had no coördination. If his heart was touched, how did his mind respond? If his mind, where was the response in deed? It seemed to David that what he did wore away the energy of his mind, dullened his heart: and what he felt and thought became impediments to those acts which his living called for. He was a loose-bound bundle of life, rolling down a chute....
In the fall, Constance Bardale telephoned to him.
“I am back. When can you come to see me?”
It was always hard for David to meet a sudden situation on the wire. He needed a face and a warm smile to talk to. He was afraid he had been dull in greeting Constance. For so long a time he had not thought of her at all!
“Then, I’ll expect you Saturday to tea.”
She had not suggested an evening. The choice of the formal hour meant nothing to David.