The European project had to be abandoned. Josiah could not leave his
affairs for so prolonged a journey. And Sarah declined to leave Marsden.
Beside, Rhoda and Jonas who were its instigators, had their doubts as to
the pleasure of a jaunt in Europe with their mother as guide. And they
were right. Sarah’s training and life in Harriet were scarce such as to
have fitted her for Paris and Berlin, even if the comfortable aid of
Cook’s had been invoked--as Josiah had suggested. So a short run out
West with a peep-in on Yellowstone Park was arranged by way of
compensation.
Sarah and Marsden remained behind in Harriet for the last months.
Workmen and decorators had full swing in a broad, brown-stone house near
Central Park on the West side of Manhattan. And meantime, Josiah, who
needed at any rate to visit his property near Red Bear and to confer
with his promoters in Helena, Butte and Billings, made ready to take his
two daughters and two sons along. The preparation on his part consisted
in the booking of two compartments to Chicago and thence West. For the
children, it meant the buying of clothes, valises, toilet articles, and
descriptive literature. There was much bustle, much serious discussion,
less anticipation than sheer worry. And in all this, Quincy’s part was
passive, disaffected. He knew that he was going along because his mother
had insisted that he was not too young to enjoy geysers. He should
greatly have preferred to remain at home, considering the trip’s company
and the air of fevered preparation that made it from the outset ominous.
But Sarah had nursed the fond illusion that by including him in the
arrangement he would become automatically one, in all its myriad,
impromptu reckonings, with the family life whence she was wise enough to
feel his past exclusion. Sarah, then, was sponsor of the child’s forced
participation in the trip. Sarah, as so often before, was clumsily in
error. But the serious element of this lay not in her mistake, not in
the needless discomfort that her mistake brought on Quincy. It lay in
the circumstance of Quincy’s knowing just these things, of his knowing
how they and their like bore on his life. For Quincy was coming
fatalistically, stoically, to adjudge his mother, to recognize her
failures and to accept her in their shadow.
The trip was interminable. Chiefly, it consisted of long, stiflingly hot
days in a cramped car that lurched and groaned and pounded and halted,
getting nowhere in a scorch of wheat-fields. Nights, Quincy was perched
far up under the chandelier, with no window through which to reaffirm,
by looking out, his hold on the realities. This was insufferable. To be
shuffled along through endless flatlands was bad enough if one could
see. But to be thrust through the black with no sense of direction or of
space, while one’s limbs ached with the unceasing murmurs of the train,
bordered on nightmare. The cities, moreover, were an unmeaning jangle of
lights and muddy, topless houses and clamoring traffic.
The gem of their journey--Yellowstone Park--proved to be the height of
his torture. It lasted, by count, four days. But by this period,
Quincy’s sense of time had gone the way of his other senses. He was
packed stiffly, hotly, into a high, swaying stagecoach. Before being
swung to his position he always saw the horses that drew the wagon. He
loved horses. And the fiery sinew of these Western beasts gave his heart
a turn. He wished to pet them and feed them sugar and talk with them.
But always, he was swung up between Josiah and Jonas where the horses
were invisible. Their rhythmic patter he still heard, and it was bitter
music to him, since he could not fix this one suggested joy by seeing.
And now, as they swayed on, Quincy observed that the Park’s chief
quality was not geysers at all, but dust. True, it was a peculiar sort
of dust. Never had he tasted dust so thick, so bitter, so plentiful, so
blinding. It rolled and plunged over the coach, over the crouched,
packed creatures that hung upon its scruff, over the very skies. It came
in great clouds. It cut into his eyes and ears and mouth. It made him
itch and ache. And yet, so carefully had he been wedged against his
father and his brother that he could not scratch where the dust itched,
nor stretch where the ride stiffened him. At noontime, the coach creaked
to a stand-still and there was a hotel, instead of dust, upon the map of
living. He was fed at a long table where waitresses hurled thick
crockery and men smelled of sweat. Before or after coach-time, he saw
geysers.
Unpleasant, ill-natured, evil-tempered things they were to
Quincy--freaks without form or beauty, uninspiring and meaningless. To
any lad of vision, a brook with a bass sunning in its bed, a flower upon
a ledge of rock, must mean immeasurably more. But for the vague
impression of this truth, Quincy was upbraided. He could not buttress
it with clarifying questions, such, for instance, as whether a man with
three noses would be deemed worshipful or a woman ten feet high
entrancing. And if not, then why these freaks styled geysers? Quincy
knew deeply that he would be more comfortable and more inspired in a
copse of saplings. But to a continent with no imagination, these
miserable spurts of water and hot mud are a property of pride. So, of
course, the boy riled his father and the gaping girls by his
indifference, the few times they turned to sound him.
And then, after the nightmare of dusty roads and advertised
monstrosities which one was ordered to admire, as one is ordered to
brush one’s teeth (and which seemed equally aside the point of living),
came another scourge of trains. And between them, cities that deafened
and terrified and bullied. And then, one blessed day, after the most
abysmal and thundering of all the cities, there was Harriet at the end
of the day’s journey!
With a real sense of joy, Quincy took in the modest, crumbled-wood
station, the box-like freight house on the siding. And when the platform
slid in beneath his staring eyes that seemed glued to the car-window,
and there, in a grey dress and a black shawl over her head, was mother,
he could not restrain himself from a demonstration. Here at last was
something got to by trains that he could rejoice in and wonder at! For
there, despite the ceaseless purgatory he had been hurled or pushed
through, stood the old bulwark, the old love--as serenely unchanged as
if all of it had been an angry dream. And so perchance it had been! Yet,
Quincy did not on that account elect to linger in it. Dream or
actuality, it was to be got behind! And the one efficacious way of that
was to storm from the train, to fling into the arms of the dear
past--and to lie there, huddled, tearful, aglow, while the great iron
monster with snort and scream pulled the horror--dream or
actuality--forever after it, out of the station.
So, it was needful that Quincy act. And so, he acted. Oblivious of hat
or coat, he rushed frantic down the aisle of the lugubrious car--his
hands out, his mouth open. A trainman guarded the door. He passed him,
nor could the car platform hold him. Down he flew, and stumbled upon the
whirling walk of the station. His mother picked him up, bruised but
happy.
He looked up at her. He had seen her first; he had reached her first.
And now, here she was touching him, clasping his shoulders, smoothing
his hair, brushing his coat. What mattered an abrasion on the knee or a
burning on the forehead? He looked up, then, speechless, taking in his
delight.
And his mother said, in the old voice which was somehow not quite the
voice that he had so often summoned to him on his journey:
“You silly boy! You silly boy! Why couldn’t you wait until the train
stops? It’s a wonder you weren’t killed.”
Whereupon, the train did stop--and the scolding, while Sarah went to
greet the others.
For a moment, Quincy stood alone on the platform, next to a very sharp
old man that seemed to be looking through him with steel eyes, so that
he was ashamed. And the abrasion on his knee hurt very much; and the
burning on his forehead seemed somehow to have scorched his heart.