“I am not weeping for father,” said Tom. “I am weeping for ourselves.... So are you!”
Cornelia gave way. She also hid her face in order to give way. Tom, stroking her hand, looked beyond them: from the sun of his hurt into the dim world.
XIII
CORNELIA loved to sit by her open window and look out.
She had the need of seeing the City clear: a cold pattern. Her own mind was chaos and she saw no help to crystallize the swirling problems that consumed her. Like one who in great heat wins comfort from vision of cool waters, she thought of the City as a design, carefully plotted out.
It was not easy. Looking beyond her house, with the street swarming in her eyes and the battlemented roofs surging above her head, she was dim in revery. In the dimness, the City lost its geometric outlines. It veered in and out of her grasp like a delirious dream: its streets were parabolas, freighted with teeming particles of life which each had a centrifugal direction. It all was a frangent swarm, knotted, heaving upon itself, forever ashift. She saw it a monstrous replica of her own mind: there was no relief.
She struggled with it. She said to herself: “What is so regular as the streets of New York?” When she dispelled her inchoate vision, also there was pain. For now she had the sense of streets cut livid through human lives: each street was a sharp thrust and heaped about it mounds of desiccated bones.
At last Cornelia shut the City out. She sat in her little rocking chair with a candle glowing, and huddled upon herself as if her pains were a swinging swarm about her. With hidden eyes she came to a dim world of thought.
She had never needed to find the word for what she felt toward David. Often, she needed to say to herself in self-assertion: I am a woman. Her life brought doubt of that. Were women supposed, like her, to live alone and work, and have no home, and have no one to care for? Her instinct despaired often of the life she gave her body and her mind. In protest, sometimes it would speak: am I a woman? But here was a harmony so deep it required no voice outside itself: in what she felt toward David. Long since it was an atmosphere: a wide world she fed in or starved in: howsoever, lived and would died in. She did not say to herself: I am in the world. She did not speak to herself of her own self with David. Endlessly, now, she worried about him, asked herself how she could help him. Still more frequently, she asked herself how she could save him. And in her next question: Save him from what? she was already deep in her tangled problem. She was like one who lived at the edge of a dark forest: whithersoever she went, with a step there she was in it. Its tangled shadows were always at her side.
Cornelia could understand, could also not understand. She had the sense that David suffered: suffered with her brother. She had the instinct of some struggle hidden between them, and of danger for them both. She knew not what it was. So it was horrible: it was like the nocturnal stirring of unknown life in her forest. She knew it was not merely the worldliness of Tom, his efforts to make David worldly. She knew how eased she must have been to believe it was no worse. But touching upon this, the terror still prowled at large. She had no hold upon her terror.