Far below in the side-street a heavy, slow-trotting horse clattered by. The motors were more and more hushed, even the hell of Broadway subdued. A different set of sounds came home to him, but he did not interpret for the present; their activity playing upon deeps of their own—a bridge swung open between them and his exterior thoughts....
Slowly all exterior matters slipped away—the mother and Davy and Bessie. The bridge between the surface and the deeps swung to, and he heard the sounds that had been thrilling his real being all the time as he sat by the window—the liner whistles that crossed Manhattan from the harbour, the deep-sea bayings which seemed to be calling him home.
7
Bellair must have rested well in a few hours, for he arose early, feeling very fit in and out. For years the man he had seen in the glass when he was alone, had aroused little or no curiosity; a sort of customary forbearance rather. The fact is, he had not looked close for years. This morning as he shaved, something new regarded him from the face, still deeply dark from the open boat. He called it a glint, but would have designated it as something that had to do with power in another. It was fixed—something earned and delivered.
Perhaps it was something she had seen.
This animated him. It had come from Fleury and the fasting, but most of all from contemplating her face and her nature. Was it the arousing of his own latent will? Was it because he was lifted above Lot & Company? What part of it had come from the anguish of separation? Truly a man must build something if he manages to live against the quickened beat of a hungry heart.
The face was very thin, too. He had felt that so often as he used the morning knife, but he saw it now. Thin and dark, and the boy gone altogether.... Bellair smiled. Lot & Company had tried to take the boy. Had they not failed, the man would never have come, but something craven in the place of the boy, something tied to its own death, its soul shielded from the light—a shield of coin-metals.
He shuddered, less at the narrowness of his own escape, than at New York whose business came up to him now through the open windows.... The shaving had dragged. He was not accustomed to study his own face. The very novelty of it had held him this time—and especially the thought of what she might have seen there. Suddenly he wanted something big to take back to her—a manhood of mind and an integrity of soul—something to match that superb freedom she had wrung from the world. A thousand times the different parts of her story had returned to his mind, always filling him with awe and wonder. She had come like one with a task, and set about it from a child, against all odds, putting all laws of men beneath—as if the task had been arranged before she came. He knew that the essence of this freedom was in the hearts of women everywhere, but she had made it manifest, dared all suffering for it. And yet with all the struggle behind her, the gentleness which he had come to know in her nature was one of the great revelations. It gave him a vision of the potential beauty of humanity; it made him understand that one must be powerful before one can be gentle; that one must master one’s self before one dare be free. All that he had was far too little to bring home to her. This morning he felt that nothing short of the impossible was worth going after.
A little later as he was leaving the room, the telephone rang. The operator said that a gentleman wanted to see him. On the lower floor, Bellair glanced into the eyes of a young man who wanted something; “glanced into” is somewhat inaccurate; rather his eyes glanced from the other’s, and took away a peculiar, indescribable interest. It was the look of a colt he had seen, a glitter of wildness and irresponsibility in a face that was handsome but not at its best.
Bellair had seen something of the expression in the faces of young men who had been fathered too much; those who had not met the masterful influence of denial, and had been allowed to lean too long. The face had everything to charm and to express beauty and reality with, but the inner lines of it were not formed; the judgments lacking, the personal needs too imperious. He had made the most of well-worn clothing, but appeared to feel keenly the poorness of it.