 Part IV. CHAPTER V. Brookway was all he could have wished. As the door closed behind the porter, and he dropped into the wing chair by the fireplace, it seemed so at least. The quarters they had given him were on the top floor of a squat Norman tower, which served as a bridge between the dormitory and the commons. Directly under him was the boy's lounge and library, and below that the broad groined arch that opened from the inner quadrangle to the athletic field beyond. The room was almost square, large and high-ceilinged, with leaded casement windows on three sides. The bed, like some he had seen in Provence, was built into an alcove on the fourth side, and adjoining it was a shower. Everything, he sensed, had been prepared for his comfort, broad chairs, bookshelves, a small piano, soft rugs. It was all as he would have wished it, and he knew that here he would be happy, if only David, if only David. Life very soon settled into a pleasant and not too oppressive routine. His own duties were so dimly defined that he could decide them for himself. The boys, for the most part, were well behaved and to curt invariably amusing. Money meant so little to them, wealth was so much a matter of course. And yet they were not snobbish about it. He compared his own school at Barton with this, the girls mingling with the boys, the torn sweaters, the young and poorly prepared normal school teachers, the riotous games of pull-away, on the school ground worn bare by running feet, the shower, a trickling spray from a perforated pipe set into the dingy brick of the boys' toilet, for whose uncertain and miserly coolness the football team, curt, never among them, had raced noisily through the dusty back streets of Barton from the athletic field, and waited in naked and unruly turn. Their gear hung confusedly on hooks in a long dark closet close by, along with the janitor's brooms and dust-pans, the athletic field itself, two erratically-leaning goal-posts in a meadow, the recitation rooms with their scratched yellow seats and cracked blackboards, here the cool gothic building set in the hills, now yellowing with early frosts, the quadrangle green and quiet, the gym, the gleaming showers and lockers, the field with its tennis courts, its open pool, its running track and its trim equipment, the study rooms inviting and pleasant with book-lined walls, the masters from Oxford and Edinburgh from Amherst and Princeton. What would this have done to him, he wondered, during those worried, unhappy adolescent years. What was it doing to these boys? As he came to know them, he found two or three that were as he had been, a little lonely, a little afraid of their companions, and he understood and tried to make his understanding of bulwark against their loneliness. There were walks to take over the flaming hills, his feet scuffling through a surf of yellow and scarlet maple leaves, his body thrust through waves of burning sumac and laurel. There were long evenings alone in his great square room with books in the piano. There were impromptu tea-parties in his own room or those of some of the other masters, in waning afternoons with quiet scattering talk of many things. With none of the masters was he intimate, though all were agreeable enough company. One, Scott, a thin, swarthy Englishman, enormously tall, came often in the late afternoon, for a few minutes before dinner, begging Kurt to play Brahms, for whose music he had an intense passion. He would lounge by the fire, his briar pipe, seeming so much a part of his dark, thin face, that the slow ribbon of smoke issuing from it seemed an emanation of the man himself, a visual proof of an inner satisfaction. Scott taught algebra and geometry rather grumpily, and in his spare time read Russell and Whitehead, and translated Descartes. Ruskin wasn't it, he said one time, who called architecture frozen music, well, I call Brahms music incandescent mathematics, and he sucked moodily at his pipe, with soft popping noises of his lips, like the repeated uncorking of a tiny bottle. I'll put in a request for Brahms on some of the programs this winter, Kurt promised him. They're being arranged now, we'll have the Chamber Music Society for our opening concert. Get me a Brahms quartet, said Scott eerily, and I'll resign myself willingly to a year of pounding solid geometry into the heads of these young American plutocrats. Kurt found ample excuse for frequent weekend trips to New York in arranging these concerts, so it was not until late November that David first visited him in Brookway. He was, as Kurt had so eerily anticipated, delighted with the physical aspect of the place. The woods were brown now, and only here and there a touch of russet or copper that marked an oak, or green, the sombre cone of a pine. And Kurt's room seemed to him, and to Kurt, coming into it from the chilly gold of that November afternoon, the most perfect place imaginable. The fire was blazing on the grate, and the peace of it, the quiet of it, was to them both supremely satisfying. We needn't go out tonight, need we? asked David. Not unless you like, we'll have dinner in commons with the boys, and then we can do as we like. He held David to him. Oh! It's nice to have you here in this room. I've wanted it so long. Here, sit by the fire. I've some mail to look at. I'd like to look at it, too. Kurt laughed, still uncertain of me. Can't help it, let me see. Kurt dropped the few letters into David's lap, and he examined them one by one with mock thoroughness, lifting them to the light, pinching them between his fingers, holding them to his nose. Not a flutter in the lot, and lucky for you, too. Don't worry, David, there never is except those from you. Kurt scanned them hastily and tossed them one by one unopened to the desk. They can wait, except this, he said, tearing open the one remaining envelope. It's from the concert bureau, and I'm still green enough as an impresario to feel important whenever they write to me. He mumbled phrases of the letter as he read it. We submit tentative program, trust, satisfaction. He scanned the typewritten enclosure. Scarletty, Bach, Mozart, intermission, Brahms, for Scott, he thought, and smiled. Debussy, Goosens, Kurt Gray. What? he exclaimed. He read it again. On Greenfield Mountain, an American sweet, Kurt Gray. He rose instinctively. Something in his heart was like a beating of wings, a sudden fright commingled with a sudden joy. What's wrong? David asked anxiously. Nothing, look, look. He put the program into David's reaching hands, and sitting down at the piano began playing scales. As fast as his fingers could be driven, Kurt. Kurt stopped with a jangled dissonance and turned to David. Kurt, how, how perfectly swell. He never told me a thing about it. I didn't know. Truly I didn't. It's Korlov's doing, must be. He's plotted to have its first performance here. I'll be scared to death. Rats, David said, seizing him by the arms. Gee, I'm proud of you. Why do you even bother with me, Kurt? You're so, so damn talented. And I've never done a thing in my whole life to be proud of. Hush. Kurt freed his arms and clamped his hand over David's lips. Hush, you have, you will. You'll finish your book one of these days. David shook his head and struggled vainly to free his mouth, making muffled sounds of protest. No, went on, Kurt. I've got you, and you'll listen. You'll finish your book if I have to kidnap you and lock you up to do it, and it'll be good. And if no one ever likes it but me, it'll still be good, and I won't care a damn. He took his fingers away. You're a fool, Kurt, but such a precious fool. Dinner in the commons over, and the necessary introductions made. Kurt and David walked briskly across the quad to Kurt's tower room. The stars were cold and brilliant, and their heels clattered sharply on the frozen path. Child Roland to the dark tower came, quoted David. Was dinner an ordeal, Kurt asked. You were very quiet. They looked so young, so innocent. It made me seem terribly old and worldly. They climbed the dark, echoing stairs, and Kurt fumbled at the door a moment before it opened into the warm glow cast by the embers in the fireplace. I'll build up the fire a bit. We won't need a light, will we? No, no. David drew the wing-chair closer to the fire, and drawing a package of cigarettes from his pocket put one absently between his lips. He made a rye face. What's the matter? Scented. It's a box of dairies I picked up, his latest brainstorm. They don't fit here. Haven't you something less, less decadent? Sure, here. Kurt sat on the low stool by David's feet, and rested his arm across David's knees. So they make you feel old and worldly, he mused. I hope that meal dissipated any worries you've had about my conduct here. Oh, Kurt, of course. How silly. It's sacrilegious to think of it, almost isn't it? I suppose there are some of our sort in the lot, but they're so awfully young. Most of them look awfully normal and athletic and all the rest when you get them all together. Don't they? They smoked silently. Then Kurt went on. There's one youngster here, Clayton's his name. Perhaps you noticed him, sat at the end of our table. That's interesting. He's got a remarkable talent for the piano. Can be a really great performer if it all goes well, within and without. He's sixteen, very precocious, very suave and sophisticated in his manner and conversation. But underneath, just an uncertain, unhappy kid. His roommate's a little younger and a very handsome boy. Clayton got permission to use a practice room after hours from Dr. Leffington. I didn't know about it, and one evening I saw a faint light burning through the drawn curtains and went up to investigate. When I put the key in the door I heard a great scrambling. It turned out that Clayton had been drilling young green to dance, naked, to Clare de Lune. Green emerged from behind the screen finally, very red and very much unbuttoned. David, I felt like a monster. I don't know honestly who was the most embarrassed, the boys or I. I apologized and tried my best to put them at ease, but Clayton seemed so sullenly sure that I didn't understand and was laughing at him, and it was pretty hard. Thank the Lord I found them instead of Leffington or Scott or any of the rest. They might have been canned, I don't know. I had him both up to tea a week or so later, but it was pretty sad. I still don't know how they feel about it. That's rather a nice story, Kurt, said David quietly. It's so nearly a tragic story. Kurt laid his head against David's knee. When I was just past Clayton's age, not so many years ago, I used to think about myself as I was at sixteen, and swear that if I should ever come in contact with such a boy, I'd help him somehow to bridge that terrific loneliness and uncertainty. Now I wonder if I can, if anyone can. Those kids, they rebuff you somehow. They wear an armor that I can't pierce, and it seems so wrong that they should just stumble through those years we've all known and could help them understand, so fumbling, so afraid. Put that in your book, David. It belongs there. He sat looking seriously into the fire. David was too silent, but it was he who spoke first. I'd like to get that into my book, because it's genuine and beautiful. A dark boy, dancing naked, declared a loon. It's grease come to America. You felt it. We've all felt it. The savage vindictiveness the normal man has toward our sort. We're all to him, like the street corner fairy of Times Square, rouged, lisping, mincing. Those chaps too once had something in them too tender, and they went under. It's the army of us that doesn't quite go under that suffers though. The street walker doesn't, in his heyday at least, any more than the prostitute. He can be open in his tastes and obvious in his manner. But when the vaudeville comedian makes dirty cracks about him, he can laugh somehow. It's we who can't laugh that matter. He paused. Play something, Kurt. Kurt played. The room, safe for the irregular pulsing glow of the fire, was in darkness. He chose things he thought David would like, melodic and not too technical, for David's taste in music was untrained, but positive in its preferences. And the evening slipped away with the familiar swiftness of time, pleasant and enjoyed. In an interval between two Chopin preludes, Kurt turned. You like all this, don't you? he asked. I love it. David replied simply, leaning back his head, and throwing his arms above it over the high chair back. The firelight, playing along his body, caught the fine curve of his throat and the underside of his chin. Kurt's eyes unaccountably filled with sudden tears as he turned again to the piano. The telephone rang with the shrillness that shattered the mood of the room, of the evening, as thoroughly as an earthquake might have done. They both started involuntarily, and Kurt, muttering damn, went to answer. Hello, yes, yes, this is Kurt Gray. What? Who's calling? Oh yes, I'll wait. He held his hand over the mouthpiece. That's funny. Bridgeport calling. Don't know a soul in Bridgeport. David sprang to his feet. Bridgeport, it's Dairy. Dairy? Kurt repeated, puzzled. Whatever's Dairy doing in Bridgeport? His latest friend is from there. Dairy says he's a Russian dancer. But why a Russian dancer should live in Bridgeport, I can't. Kurt warned, and turned again to the telephone. Hello? Oh, hello, Dairy. What's up? Your—your what? Well, what happened? What's the— David was beside him, whispering nervously. Is he hurt, Kurt? Is he hurt? Kurt silenced him with a shake of his head and whispered no. Yes, yes, I don't know just how we can make it, but we will somehow. We'll be there some time, as soon as we can. Don't worry. He hung up the receiver and turned to David, whose obvious anxiety, for some reason, he could not take time to explain, peaked him slightly. He was more blunt than he should have been. Dairy's in jail. Kurt, he's done something silly. I've been so hellishly afraid he would, and now, the first time I leave town, he gets arrested. How can we get there? He was walking up and down, feverishly. Kurt stopped him in the middle of the room, grasped him by the shoulders, and shook him slightly. See here, he said reprovingly. It's probably nothing serious. Snap out of it. You can't walk there. Let me think a minute. I know. I'll borrow the school station wagon. You wait here, and I'll run to Dr. Leffington's, and for heaven's sake, calm down. There was a hint of irritation in his voice. He ran across the dark quad, around the commons, to the headmaster's cottage. Dr. Leffington answered his ring. Kurt, a little breathless, explained. I have a friend visiting me for the weekend. He's just had a message from Bridgeport, has to go there at once, and I was wondering whether I might borrow the school station wagon. Why, of course, Gray. Wait, I'll get you the key. He started away, and then turned back abruptly. I have a better idea, he said, reaching in his pocket and attaching a key from a ring. Here, take my roadster. I shan't be using it tomorrow, and you'll be much more comfortable. He was insistent, and Kurt hurried back to David, whom he found pacing the floor like a caged animal. Again he felt a mild irritability at David's inquietude. Come, he said, I've got a car. Get into your coat and we'll go. The car purred through the sharp night air, its lights picking out the road far ahead, a winding tape in the dark. David, tense, urged Kurt to greater speed, conjecturing in a perfect ferment of nervousness as to the possible causes of Derry's arrest. Kurt sat silent, driving as fast as he dared. His mind was divided between a very real anxiety for Derry, and a steadily growing irritation that Derry should have been able so completely to supersede him in David's thought. The perfection, the quiet joy of their evening together, was destroyed irrevocably, and his annoyance made him taciturn, unsympathetic, and silent. They reached the police station little more than an hour after Derry's call. David started at once to spring from the car, but Kurt, reaching his arm across, held the door shut, and spoke quickly. David, listen to me, you're upset. Don't do anything that will make it worse for Derry. No, let me out. Promise? Oh yes, for heaven's sake. He wrenched the door open, and was halfway up the steps before Kurt could disentangle himself from the robe and get out of the car. You're not very reassuring, he said, as the door swung too behind them. Once inside, David was quiet, his face white and set. Kurt was glad he might ask the necessary questions. We want to see Derry grayling, he told the sergeant at the desk. The sergeant, a heavy jowled, floored man with a mouth that seemed much too small and childlike for his face, looked at them curiously. Yeah, friends of his, hey. Yes, he's here, I believe. Yeah, he's here, all right. Kurt watched David nervously, but David seemed frozen to icy silence. He's charged with what, asked Kurt, disliking the man's insinuating smirk and his pursed lips. A costan, you know, making a date for immoral purposes. Kurt controlled himself with an effort. From the way David's topcoat tightened across his shoulders, Kurt knew that his hands were clenched inside his pockets. It sounds serious. It is serious. The man seemed to delight in the affirmation. He called an officer. Get grayling, he said, and then, turning to Kurt. You two can wait in here. I'll give you five minutes. Kurt took David's arm and showed him into the small, bare room. If they do anything to Derry, I'll kill them. I swear I will. David's voice shook. His eyes and his white face were abysmal, black with hate. Derry came in with an officer who left at once, with the Kurt admonition to make it snappy. Derry's habitual bravura pose had deserted him treacherously at the first sign of trouble, and he looked like a frightened child. David darted at him and flung his arms about his neck. Don't, said Derry, don't please, and shook him off. What the devil have you been up to, Derry? Kurt asked him seriously. I came out on the bus. I was to meet Ivan, that's my friend, at eleven o'clock. I got in about nine, walked around till I was tired, and then went into a fifteen-cent movie to kill time. Took the first seat I found on the aisle. There was a man next to me, but I didn't pay any attention till he started shoving me with his knee and whispering. I moved away as far as I could. He kept on whispering, the loud kind you can hear halfway across the theatre, or seem so anyway. I didn't see any place to move to. Wanted to know if I had a room where I lived, and to shut him up, I answered. Then he wanted to make a date. I said no. He kept asking me, so loud I was scared. People were looking. He asked if I'd meet him somewhere next night at ten. He insisted, and finally to keep him still, I said all right, I would. Then he flashed a light in my face and said, I'm looking for pansies like you. And took me out, it was awful. They put me in a big cell with twelve or fourteen men, tramps and bums and sneak thieves. One of them told me I might get three years. I didn't know what to do, so I asked him to let me call you. Oh, Jesus! Lowering his head he cried, with only the twitching of his shoulders to indicate his emotion. David again had his arms tightly around Derry, and this time Derry did not object. Oh, breathe David, how vile, how utterly goddamn rotten I could kill that man, kill him! Kurt stood by, worried and sick, a little hurt too. Look here, Derry. He said as reassuringly as he could. We can get you out somehow, there's bail or something, and they can't punish you when they hear the truth of it. Buck up, and we'll see what we can do. The door opened, the policeman's arm appeared, and a voice said, Times up! You shan't go! David's voice was hysterical. I won't let you go, the damn dirty bastards! The officer looked around the jam of the door in surprise. Kurt seized David tightly by the wrist. Shut up, you're only making things worse, and then to Derry, he said only. Run along, we'll fix it as soon as we can, just don't worry. David, as if surprised at Kurt's vehemence, stood dumbly gazing at the door as it closed on the prisoner. Kurt, overall his anxiety, was a little amused that he, the retiring one, should be giving orders to David, who in the old days had seemed so utterly self-sufficient in any emergency. Through his connection with Brookway School, Kurt found he could cash a check, which, while it almost entirely depleted his small account, was sufficient to procure bail bonds, and some time after midnight Derry was released. They all had coffee, and Kurt took a room at a hotel, where the three of them sat until daylight, alternately gloomy and raging. David's anger was personal and implicit. Derry had been insulted, and he should be revenged. Kurt's was more general and more philosophical. It was despicable that such a thing should be countenanced by the law, a trap, nothing less, and a vile and miserable trap at that. It was hard to conceive a man so degraded as to make such a traffic his nightly business. He yearned to spread abroad the injustice of it, as a zealot and a reformer. Derry, listening gratefully to their combined disapproval of the police, and the society that empowered them, fell asleep. The interval between this harrowing night and the hearing, which was set for the first week in December, was a trying one for them all. Kurt, back in Brookway, nursed a smoldering disgust for the whole thing, and such social philosophy as he possessed became misanthropic and bitter. And mixed with his vexation at the episode itself was the added vexation that try as he would, he could not put down at the abruptness with which it had broken the quiet understanding between himself and David, an understanding that had seemed so perfect and invulnerable. He wrote of his disappointment to David, trying painstakingly to set down in words exactly what he was feeling. David's answers were only reiterated assurances of his love, his faithfulness, and his increasing affection. I'm afraid, Kurt wrote at last, that underlying all this unhappiness in me, there is growing up a mean jealousy of Derry. It sounds appalling to say so, but I'm afraid it's true. I find myself wishing that the incident had happened to me, so that I might have been the one to profit by your solicitude and sympathy, which all proves, David dear, how much I care for you. And you're wrong, he continued, to impute any responsibility for what has happened to Derry, to yourself, to your absence. It's silly. It might have happened to me, or to you, or to any young fellow at all who chanced to fall into the dirty trap. I don't want you to be Derry's guardian. In other words, I want you to be mine and mine holy. Derry needs me, David's reply ran. He's so blundering, and I can't help feeling he'd never have gone this way but for me. Oh, hell! was Kurt's muttered comment. Didn't I know Derry first? And yet he recognized that there was some truth in David's statement. Derry was acquitted. It seemed unthinkable that he should not be, and yet the verdict was an unspeakable relief to them all. The lawyer Kurt had arranged for, let Derry tell his own story, which he did, to Kurt's joy and considerable surprise, simply and directly. There were five women in the jury box, and it was easy to see from the first that their sympathies were with him. Kurt longed to leap to his feet and denounce the officer responsible for Derry's arrest, to denounce the whole rotten system of espionage that made such things possible. He hoped the lawyer would, but he did so only by implication, and so mildly, that Kurt could have choked him. David too sat through the brief hearing tense and white. The restraint of regulation and courtroom etiquette seemed medieval and childish when there were so many bitter fine things to be shouted. Yet the case was won, and it was better, perhaps, to accept the rule, to compromise and win than to defy conventions and lose. One of Kurt's own fears, and David's, had been the prolongation of the trial, a prying into Derry's life in New York, a dragging into the case of their names, a scandal which would have been tragic for either of them. But the lawyer was shrewd, and they had secured an easy victory. The whole thing had cost them two weeks of anxiety, and Derry a debt of five hundred dollars to the lawyer and to Kurt. This lack of funds which Derry's trial left in its wake, and his own eagerness for a renewal of the bond with David, made the decision of his parents to go to Florida for the winter a happy one for Kurt. His father had been in poor health for over a year, and he had at last yielded to Mrs. Gray's entreaties, and agreed to leave the store in charge of Jeff for two or three months and drive south. It would be his first vacation in many years. Mrs. Gray was elated, though she regretted the fact that they would not all be together for the holidays in Barton as in former years. She suggested tentatively that Kurt come to St. Petersburg instead, but he pleaded the distance and the expense, and promptly arranged with David to spend his vacation with him in New York. Derry and Chloe had decided to go to Michigan for Christmas, so he would have David really to himself, a thing he coveted ardently. With Derry a thousand miles away, the old footing between them was resumed without embarrassment, assurances and avowals, loving and being loved. After indulgence, indulgence craved so fiercely, reveled in with such ecstatic and pagan joy, came sometimes questionings, tired, listless, wanting only sodden sleep and a cessation of all feeling in the dark anesthesia of slumber. Was this his destiny? Was this his high, bright goal? Work was forgotten, unthinkable. His mind could not capture the fleeting ideas that drifted into it, could not sustain them, could not, through sheer heavy inertia, weave them into a whole. He wondered at those two certainties which were, he knew, the most important in his life, the certainty of his joy and artistic accomplishment, and the certainty of this passion for David. Was the one stifling the other, could it? Was there no compromise? Was he, after all, so weak? Or was the thing itself, at fault, love, this love, was it, in essence, different from the love that the world applauded, more ravenous, more insatiable? Artists married and married happily, with no sacrifice of their art. And this relationship with David, what was it but marriage? How, save in one thing, did it differ? Yet that one thing, his logic told him, might be the cause of his unrest. He longed at such times, his limbs, his mind, dropping slowly into the well of sleep, for respite from this gnawing desire that could not be satisfied. Sleep, sleep. And yet, to thwart this love, to blanket it with resolves and prohibitions and remonstrances, was it wrong? Was it right, beautiful, ugly? The question, the ever-recurring question. Its freedom slavery, its slavery, perhaps a key to new and free unsuspected beauty. Why was he afraid of bonds? Why were all young people everywhere? Youth, finding restraint-prudential, pedestrian, a little mean, shuns compromise as unworthy and uninspired. It flames and insists. And yet, is it not, this compromise, in its admission of the lovely and the vile, the pure and the sordid, achieving a synthesis, a sublimation into a new and pulsing reality, an end to be desired? Hush, hush, dear. It was David's voice in his ear, David's hand against his breast. You jumped so, you were mumbling in your sleep, you frightened me. And David's arm crept around him, an answer to all questions. Two days before Christmas, with David gone to his afternoon work, Kirk called Tony. When he was recognized, Tony's voice came beating over the wire in his best Barrymore manner. Where the hell have you been? I've been trying to get you for four days, wired your damn school, did everything but call the state police. What's the excitement? The Duchess is sold. What? Sure, that is, if you'll okay the deal. When can I see you? Where the devil are you? We can fix it up this afternoon, still, if you say so. I'm at—I'm in the village, Kirk replied, remembering Philadelphia. I can come up town right away, if you like. Meet you in front of the library in half an hour, okay? Okay, agreed, Kurt, and started to hang up when Tony added in a drawing-affected voice. I'll be wearing a blue shirt and reading a copy of The New Yorker. I'm blonde and very handsome. Fool, said Kurt, laughing, and letting the receiver fall. The whole thing was incredible, leaping out of forgetfulness this way, like an unpredictable golly-wog from a box. He went to the rendezvous with the singing impatience that made the subway an encumbrance and the teeming sidewalks a plot to slacken him. End of Part Four, Chapter Five. Part Four, Chapter Six, of Better Angel by Richard Meeker. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Better Angel by Richard Meeker. Part Four, Chapter Six. With $500 in the Brookway Bank, as his half of the advanced royalties on the Duchess decides, with this first orchestral suite in the repertory of the Chamber Music Society, with David more surely his than ever before, the post-holiday weeks were redolent with a quiet satisfaction that was quite a new experience. The smoothness of life, the absence of any cause for worry, was lulling and pleasant. The concert had been for him a local triumph. He sat in his room on the afternoon, following the first performance of his suite, in the small concert hall of the school, smoking and looking out across the hills, gently salted with white, through a deepening amethyst air, flecked with drifting snowflakes. He had been congratulated by everyone, it seemed, and the Leffingtons had given an informal reception for him and the ensemble at their own house at the end of the evening when the concert was over. His position at Brookway was sure, he knew, and in the quiet sweep of these hills, the strong dignity of these gray walls and the calm beauty of the life around him, he sensed a deep and peaceful harmony to his own heart's tranquil singing. He let his mind go drifting down a dim vista of perfect days, days in which David could figure, too, making the round complete and holy good. There was a timid knock at the door. Kurt started and called, Come in. The door opened, but so dark had the room become, that Kurt, his eyes still accustomed to the dimming, but still faintly luminous window, could not tell who had entered. Who is it? he asked, turning inquiringly in his chair. It's Clayton, Ford Clayton. May I come in a minute? Why, of course you may. Kurt rose and stepped toward him, feeling his way about the table. Here, I'll make a light. No, please don't, sir. Just let me sit here on the floor by the window. All right, if you like. Kurt wondered at this visit, for since the time he had blundered upon the boy and his friend in the practice room, weeks before, Clayton had been aloof and embarrassed in his presence. Kurt had tried his hardest to overcome the boy's diffidence, but he had met only with a polite but final reticence that was as effective as a wall between them. It had made Clayton's lessons difficult for him to teach, and was proving, he feared, a barrier to the boy's progress. Kurt knew instinctively now that Clayton desired this sea of dusk as a shield to cover his timidity. Maybe I shouldn't have come over, said Clayton, sinking cross-legged to the floor. His face, thrust forward eagerly, was a study in shadows. A faint luminosity of the winter dusk, cutting across it strangely, gave it a look almost sculptural. Nonsense, why not? asked Kurt. But I wanted to tell you about your music last night, he hurried on. It was awfully beautiful, and he halted, lowering his head quickly, ashamed of the awkwardness of his praise. Thanks, said Kurt. Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. Oh, I did like it. It was like these hills somehow. I liked it. He ended, lamely. He's about to run away, thought Kurt, and ventured suddenly to say what he had been thinking. I've hardly seen you, Ford, since the night I stumbled on you in young green in the practice room. The boy's arms he knew stiffened against the floor in protest against this uncovering of the past. I felt rotten about that, Ford. He went on quietly. I knew I interrupted something that meant a great deal to you, and I regretted so strongly. I hope you've forgiven me. It was all right, the boy mumbled. You're afraid I don't understand, but I do. You're like I was, a good deal, he went on. Set apart from the rest of the fellows here because of your taste. They're a healthy happy lot of young animals, but thoughtless. Ford. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his hands gesturing pale at the almost dark room. There's a thing in some of us that makes us lonely and unhappy often, but there's always a compensation if we seek it out, in ourselves maybe, or in one or two of our friendships. Yours and Donald's might be like that. Your music and your love of all beautiful things is another. Maybe a more certain one, I don't know. He felt silent. The boy said nothing. His face was barely visible now, but Kurt made no move to light the lamp at his side. This quiet, this darkness might go on forever. There was nothing more to say. In a strong dark flood, the sense of the destiny of this boy swept over him, the destiny of all such boys everywhere, their heritage of desire and shame, of uncertainty, of deception, of hypocrisy, and of tumultuous joy and burning regret, of friends without friendship, of concealing the truth and revealing the lie, and ultimately, what? Would such a one be better off never to know, never to recognize his inversion for what it was, but to live lonely and apart in an incomprehensible and unfriendly world? No, no. Whatever happened ultimately, whatever advancing years might bring, knowledge was necessary. There would be moments of flame which perhaps in the end would recompense one for the hours of dust and ashes and gaunt bitterness. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Fear, fear. He shook himself. It was as though these conjecturings were to be sloughed off like a snake's dry skin, yet he knew it was not so. These fragments have I shored against my ruin. He rose slowly and felt his way, hands extended, to the piano. Here's the thing I've been working on, he said, to the motionless boy whom he could no longer see. No one's heard it. His fingers, seeking and finding in darkness, as certainly as in light, the smooth, cool keys, in finding them and compelling them to sound forth his own design, the patterns of his own dream, seemed to touch a certainty that could never be questioned. And he played as though the piano were a suddenly revealed saviour. Here, here in these slight tinkling sounds, pulsing off into silence, was a language without equivocation or deceit. He finished, but his fingers clung to the keys as if loathed to let them go. There was no sound from the boy by the window. Had he gone then? Kurt turned, unwilling to break the spell of the moment, and turned on the light behind him. Clayton sat where he first placed himself when he came into the room. His hand was across his eyes, shielding them from the intruding light. He rose awkwardly. I liked, he began. Oh, never mind, put in Kurt. Tell me later. You'll have to be running now. It's nearly time for dinner. You'll come again, won't you? Anytime you like. Oh, yes, sir. Clayton edged to the door. His hand was in his sidecoat pocket. As if the movement cost him a tremendous wrench of the will, he pulled out a small package and thrust it toward Kurt. Here, he said, I got this during the holidays, and I thought, I thought maybe you'd like it. He put the package into Kurt's hand and was gone. Kurt regarded it curiously as he undid the wrappings. He found within a small bronze figure, scarcely six inches high, the figure of a boy. He turned to the light and exclaimed softly. It was an exquisite replica of Donatello's David. David. He sat it in the pool of light on his desk, the pert sweet figure. It might be David, his own David, standing pleased and nonchalant regarding him. He turned it round and round, a strange tightness in his throat, odd at the unaccountable workings of things, at the curious pertinence of this gift. Life ached in him. Dressing for dinner, dinner too seemed too utterly mundane. His plans for a quiet weekend at Brookway were suddenly distasteful and engulfed in a vast, intense longing for David. The chimes across the quad shook out a deep preliminary clanging. Six o'clock. There was still a train for New York at six fifty. He could make it if he hurried. Ten minutes later he was striding down the dark road to the station, his heels ringing on the frozen ground. His mind sang with the crisp stars, and through it, like a suddenly remembered, a suddenly emergent theme of music, ran an idea he had fondled secretly, tentatively for weeks, never allowing it until now in the sudden strange elation to break through to the surface, into the realm of practical conjecturing we call planning. But planning he was now, his mind leaping forward swiftly, like a spring-fresh-it newly released. To share the idea with David was now his whole thought. In the train the rumble of the wheels was a counterpoint to this new and whirling melody. It would be the test they had both wanted, and thanks to the duchess, it now seemed within the realm of the possible. There were, he knew, many places in the vicinity of Brookway, abandoned farms that could be bought cheaply. He would buy one. Together, when summer came, he and David would repair and restore the house, furnish it as they chose. With David's help it would be easy. Then, by fall, they could establish themselves there together for a year, perhaps forever. Kurt felt sufficiently secure in his position at the school to believe that no objection would be raised to his living outside the school precincts. Some of the other masters did. David could write his book. He could continue teaching and writing. There might even be a new collaboration. Into a hundred variations the theme evolved itself, and from it grew a hundred themes new and divergent. To share this fervid dream with David, this was all his thought. It was nearly twelve before he reached David's door. He rapped, but there was no reply. He found the latch key David had given him, inserted it in the lock, and went inside. It was dark and quiet. David, he called, David. He fumbled along the wall to the lamp and lighted it. The room was in considerable confusion. David's clothing was flung about on the floor. Bureau drawers were open. Disappointment and peek mingled in Kurt's mind. Why should David be away to night of all nights? He peered into the half-open wardrobe. David's evening clothes were gone. Kurt moved about the room mechanically picking up the scattered clothing and setting things to rights. On the table lay a small white envelope from which protruded a folded note. Kurt examined it, and a sudden wave of fear swept over him. He opened it nervously. David, it read, meet me at the Empire Theatre at 8.30. After the show, we shall go to my apartment. Important, I shall expect you. Ozzy. Kurt swayed a moment, his eyes closed, his fingers pressing whitely against the tabletop, sickening at the irony of this thing. David, David, how could he have done this thing, his vows, his promises? He had deemed it all so perfect, so sure and augury of peace and happiness, and now it was smashed like a fragile wine glass. He paced the floor dry-eyed and miserable, catching at each turn with a certain perverse satisfaction, a glimpse of his white face in the mirror. He sat on the bed, rigid and sick. The ideal so carefully rebuilt, so seemingly certain, was chaos. Who was right then? He could see Tony, smiling cynically, and hear his voice saying, Don't be a fool, Kurt. Take your pleasure and then forget it, and there'll be no regrets. He could see Chloe, aggrieved, and hear her saying, This proves me right, doesn't it, Kurt, dear? There's nothing in your sort of love to build on. Come to me, come to me. David untrue, David with Ozzy. David in, he knew not what disgusting melange. It was sickening. And what was to be done now? If he waited here, David would return eventually. And as ill as he was, from the shock of David's philandering, he knew in the heaviness of his heart that David returned, with even the most tenuous of explanations, would reduce him to tears and to an apologetic abeyance of all his suspicions and jealousy. He did not want that. He wanted David to know himself, found out, and to suffer from the knowledge as he was suffering now. He was a fool. There might be a hundred explanations of David's absence, beside this note from Ozzy. There might even be legitimate reasons for such a note. Yet he knew, almost with nausea, that his excuses, excuses so pathetically sought for, were pallid and unlikely in the face of circumstance. He envisioned himself doing heroic things as he sat in this quiet room. He framed braggart notes, reproachful notes, notes cynical, notes sad, notes nostalgic and tender, notes bitter and despairing, to be left for David's perusal. I have gone to Tony, but he didn't want Tony. I have gone to Chloe, but Chloe seemed less than ever desirable. The lover in him, the aggressor, was lost in passivity, in a flooding desire to be loved by David, by David. He lay down on the bed, David's dress shirt clutched to him, and sobbed hysterically. For a long time he cried, his body shaken by sobs. Then in a swift revulsion he saw himself duped, saw David swearing eternal faithfulness reverting behind his back to the old wanton and foresworn ways. Hard as it would be, he should be punished. Kurt went to the littered table, seeking a blank piece of paper. There was none. He seized Ozzie's note, reversed it, and wrote hastily. I hope to see you. If you have any explanation, write me at Brookway. Kurt. It was nearly three o'clock, he noticed, as he crossed the quad Sunday afternoon. The stone towers stood staunch against the sky, very blue and very cold. The sun came down on the snow-covered earth, with a brilliance that belied its lack of heat, its hard whiteness seeming the very source of cold, false gold, false gold. The fire in his room was laid, and he shivered as he lighted it. A telegram was on the table. It would be from David, and it would explain, but perversely, he avoided it. He wanted, here in the privacy of his own room, to take the inventory of his emotions, that had been impossible on the interminable trip back from New York. David's words, however reassuring, could only be a complicating wedge now. The other must be settled first. He drew a bench close to the fire, warming his hands and arranging the sticks to encourage the small licking flames. That he had come off badly as Chloe's lover was primarily obvious to him. Yet mingled with the chagrin, this thought occasioned, in the part of his pride, which was masculine and conventional, was a sense of relief, a sense of the sorry satisfaction one feels when his own predictions, unhappy as they may be, are perfectly fulfilled. For it had turned out precisely as he had known it would, from the time the possibility first occurred to him. He had gone to Chloe, not from desire, but solely in peak, in mortification, at his wounded disappointment over David's defection. His wave of bitterness had, he realized now, carried him through the first difficult stages of the brief liaison. What had taken him on to its consummation in the small hotel room, when that first flare of hurt and anger had begun to subside, he did not know. In this quiet room, the whole thing seemed a fiction, credible enough if it were an episode from a novel or a motion picture. But that he should have been one of the actors in it was unthinkable. And yet, somehow, he had been swept through it by a strength not his own. Like a motion picture the events of last night came to him now, in flickers as fitful as those of the eager fire there on the bricks of the hearth, the hotel register, F. Gray and wife, Columbus, Ohio. Yes, with bath please, the mounting elevator, a tumble rolling him to his own particular guillotine, Chloe's face, the departure of the bellboy, leaving them alone together in the small room in the early hours of the morning, a severing of human contact which, meaning nothing in itself, seemed as significant as doom. Nervous eyes and fingers, bravado, trembling, Chloe's breasts and curving body, not David, not David, a willed and artificial passion that, to them both, was pathetic, flames that for all his fanning and hers would not burn, flames that Chloe, seizing upon him avidly, pretended with a futile pretense where flames indeed, and not the tissue paper wavings of a theatrical fireplace, whose humiliation was greater, his or Chloe's, he could not say. She had stood her disappointment without a word of reproach or contempt. She had done her best to deceive him into the thought that he was the lover she had longed for him to be, but that he was not, that this was the end for them as well as the beginning, she could not help but recognize. Her pretense was a little wistful and, at the same time, a little self-conscious. There would be, at least, no more uncertainty of that sort. Chloe was wrong, and Tony. Who was left to be right? Proust? No, David, David. The telegram would tell, maybe. He turned in his chair and reached for it. His hand, fumbling for the envelope, upset something which clattered to the floor. He stooped and felt for it under the chair. It was the David. He held it upright in the palm of his hand, facing the window. Behind it, the distilled yellow light of the winter afternoon, thin and fine and lucent as honey, threw the tiny figure into tender silhouette. Kurt set it on the deep ledge of the window, and kneeling turned it slowly about, smiling at the impertinent angle of the hat, the slim arm holding the broad sword, as a boy might hold a baseball bat, the attenuated thigh, the round knee joints, the slight swell of the belly, the small round buttocks. He turned, almost with reluctance to the telegram, please trust me, it said, can explain everything, arriving Brookway 947 tonight, David. Kurt let the yellow square of paper slip to the floor, and a calmness flooded over him that he had never, he thought, known before. Kurt and David, you and I, it's got to be. Tonight David would be here with him in this room, and the plan he had for the future, the house, the books, the music, the quiet, the whole precious dream he would share with David. The certainty of his love for David, of David's love for him, was as absolute and as right, and as restful as this pale and now fading light of the march afternoon. From the shelf nearby he took a book of poems he had bought in New York, opening it at random, leaned forward, and tilted the book to the dimming light. Heracles and the preliminary fleece, he read, and as he crashed through the bush and chaining vine, damning them all and shouting out for Highless, for Highless, and suddenly, unaccountably, he was a little boy again, and back in the ugly oak chair beside the front window in the house at home, straining his eyes over the tanglewood tails or bullfinch or gaily. Highless, the pale boy, dropped slowly through a world of wavering green, like a slow-motion picture on a screen, unreal, white, haloed with the alloy, water made of his metallic hair, a floating sea frond, gold in vertigree, to the cool dim and pendulous langer, he had only seen in those perverse dreams were perfectest bodies by his narrow bed, wove a white ravishment in his sleeping head. Across the page fell the shadow of the David, reversed and distorted. He closed the book quietly and lay back in the chair, smiling in content. The gears commingled and integrated in an enchantment he was unwilling to break, this poet somewhere understanding, Heracles and his Highless, David and his Jonathan, Kurt and his David, Clayton and his Dancing Disciple. Strange that so suddenly, from such a swirl and seething, life should smooth to the calm of a summer pool, a pool so pregnant with quiet strength that all the fears and distrusts sank into it and out of sight, strength here against laughter and derision, strength here for the spectral years ahead, strength and joy and strength, a knock at the door. Come, said Kurt, an almost-added mother, it was Herbert the porter with a bundle of firewood, bless me, Mr. Gray, didn't see you at all in the dark there, sir. Reading in this light, you'll strain your eyes, sir, better let me put on the lights. Kurt smiled in the darkness. All right, Herbert, put them on. The End, A Better Angel, by Richard Meeker.