XI

Quincy found himself on the street. The machine stood before him. Beyond

two obstructing tires and a net-work of gleaming steel sat Farrel, the

chauffeur. His peaked cap was over his brow. A cigarette lay on his

lips, the smoke a perpendicular thread in composition with his

square-massed face. A newspaper was below his nose. Quincy stood beyond

the barriers and called.

“Farrel!”

There was no response.

“Farrel!”

The man turned his head. The look in his eye was grey and filmed and

sluggish like the thread of smoke. The mind was gone.

“Where’s mother, Farrel?”

“I don’t know. I left her shopping.”

Farrel rustled his pink paper ostentatiously. Then, folding it, he

slapped it into a receptive shape with his bulky hand and plunged to a

new page of screaming nullities. He had forgotten Quincy. He was piqued

at having to remain there, he knew not how long. He wished to go home to

his wife. He had learned that the Burts were very careless about

discharging him at the end of a day’s long work. He was not minded to be

polite to Quincy. For Quincy was a Burt, so that he resented him; yet an

insignificant Burt, so that he could show it.

Quincy turned toward the house.

It was evening. A gentle, blue haze was on the street. The lights came

out suddenly, in periodic spurts, as if separate from the mist that

lulled about them. There was in the air a languid note, such as may

follow a siege of fever. The traffic pounded heavily by, as if in token

of its weary passengers. And now, Quincy looked toward the house.

What he saw there drove his hands cup-like to his head. A flash of fire

shot through his mind. Then, motively, he connected his sensations. On

his head was a cap. The great red door was shut. Something within Quincy

had worked deliberately through his body, yet told his consciousness no

word. Still it worked; still Quincy bowed to it, unknowing. His hands

fell from their momentary, cup-like grasp. They clenched at his side.

And then, rhythmically, he struck out in the direction of Central Park.

The electric light over Farrel’s head threw a concentrated glow of

yellow on his page. A car on the Avenue crashed past, wheels groaning,

bell a-jangle. Then, Quincy crossed. With huddled shoulder he mounted

the sloping asphalt whose lights shot shadows of black and floods of

blue against its marge of trees. A distant symphony of whistles and of

fog-horns rose dimly from the Hudson over his back. Beyond him, the Park

traced out its purple monotone, flecked with the cut of lights.

People were walking here. Their foot-fall was like a noise heard in a

dream and doubted. Their words were like the impact of water falling on

stone. Their forms were comets flashing from nowhere into nowhere

through a sombre and thick infinitude. They left a wake of drab. They

were innumerable. And the sum of all their wakes made almost an

atmosphere. This cloyed and choked and somehow had a sneer in it. So

Quincy walked fast. And as he did so, the forms blocked in upon the flow

of being with less frequence, less consistency. The Park itself had

become the undertone. The curving of the paths gave to his motion a

tonality. The bushes lay deep in their beds of grass. Above was a lacing

of trees, a shameless cover for the naked night. For so the trees seemed

to Quincy. The bright sky that shone through and above them was like the

hot skin of some empassioned creature--a thing consumed in sex. And the

short trees and ruffled bushes that lay before it were like shreds of

lace on a vast nudity. They pricked it, they heightened it; even they

adorned it. They did not hide it. And somehow, it was suggested to

Quincy that they meant to hide it. Quincy’s lips were parted as he

walked. And there was moisture on them. Also, there was a veil of

dryness on his eyes. And the sky reclined before him like a woman’s

breast--like Rhoda’s. Its slope was infinitely slight, delicate yet

vast. He recalled the time when he had seen his sister. So he knew! And

knowing, so he enjoyed. But in this overwhelming symbol entered more

than that experience of sight. This mighty, pulsing sweep of sky gave

him a glow, half-memory and half-eternal. For what are instincts but

unconscious recollections? So, perhaps, it was natural that of a sudden,

his mother came to him, stayed there, pervaded him; and in the spreading

grew so vague that his mind caught no glimpse of her.

Quincy walked, then, beneath this naked breast with its empurpled shreds

of green. And his mind slept--slept perhaps in the same cadence wherein

he had slept once, tight in a woman’s arms. And meantime, his feet beat

on their way, even as had then his heart. And his lips were moist,

taking in life.

Quincy was tired, so he sat on a bench. His fingers dug in the damp

paint. He brought them before his eyes. They were stained slightly

green. This was a jarring note. It disturbed him. It caused a separate

vibrating. A tendril of his mind quivered, as if in warning that he was

to begin to think. The motion projected by this faint jarring upon

himself had to be absorbed. It had to be absorbed either in mind or

body. If in the former, he would think; if in the latter, he would walk.

He walked.

He was always in the Park. His veerings minimized the distance he had

come. As he proceeded now, a tinge of questioning traversed him. He had

been too close within himself to poise even an outline of his

experience. Now he seemed somehow to fall apart from himself. This did

not gain him vision; it did inspire a question. What was he about?

Quincy’s eyes were no longer dry, and his mouth moist. The ecstasy of

the night went before a shrinking sense of its strangeness. And now, his

eyes were moist and his lips parched. He breathed heavily. He was, after

all, only a boy, young for his years in those external sophistries men

call experience. And so, fear filtered in with the chill. He walked

fast. He was man enough to strive not to escape his situation but to

escape the fright it brought him. He was animal enough not to entertain

a mental quandary,--to go on, as his will drove him. He was child enough

to blink up at the transformed heavens and find fault with them. This

fear was a thing, after all, scarce distinguishable from the chill he

felt through having failed to bring an overcoat. He knew this. And so,

in speeding on, he found dual relief.

He went up a steep path. And then, on the brow of a promontory he came

to a halt. He was in that section of the Park known as the Rambles--a

maze of diverse traceries on uneven ground, upon one spur of which

stands a Belvedere, curiously heroic viewed in the spirit of its purpose

and environs.

Quincy faced south. A tuft of cool wind filled his eyes. This was a

balm. Below him fell a rock-buttressed gulch, filled with the night.

From a rustic bridge that spanned it, softly separate from the air, he

could see a black opening in purple haze--a cavern. Water dripped

luridly on the rock. The coarse, trim shrubs behind him seemed the

flourish of a filigree mocking the romantic mood before him. From the

south came a cold glow, the upshot of myriad downtown lights swelling

like an aureole above the sunken Park. And beneath this, against the

mass of trees, gleamed the City’s fires, fitful and fantastic, some set

in rigid form, some straggled, some leading deep, some flaming forth.

The boy found a bench. Now he faced west. Manhattan’s murmur came on

him. A shiver seemed to rise from the far-spun houses. Here was more

regularity--a frigid diapason of lights, serried, unfriendly, looming.

And spaced upon it, deep cuts of black, the gloomy westward streets--one

of which was his! Quincy cupped his chin in his hands and gazed. A tiny

thread of train swept between two darknesses on far Columbus Avenue.

And then the hollow tread of feet below him on the walk. Quincy

straightened up. There was a musical note in their pad. They were

leisurely. There was a long mounting of suspense. At last, over the

brow, was a man.

He was tall and thin. A derby hat that seemed too small for him

disclosed a height of forehead. He walked on, his head turned westward.

He had but glimpsed the figure on the bench. And as he spoke now, he did

not face the boy.

“A splendid night!” The man’s remark, for some reason, had a ring far

deeper than the banal usage of his words.

“New York’s at her best, when she’s bathed in a blue gloom. Ever notice

that?--Blue’s her color.”

He stopped, still gazing, his back full on Quincy.

The night seemed, for a moment, hushed. It was as if, before this subtle

audience, it wished to show its best. The mists gyred before the

battlements of light. And the Park breathed deeply. Quincy wished to get

up and leave. Somehow, he failed. And an impression of his discomfort

must have struck his anonymous companion. The man turned. Then, he

stepped forward.

“Why,” he exclaimed, “you’re only a lad!” He came closer. “Tall, though,

for your age.”

Quincy clasped the bench with his two hands. The man stood before him,

calmly observant.

“What’s wrong?” he said. His voice was cool but interested. It had in it

the poise of a physician who is concerned yet unharassed. Quincy could

not speak.

“Have you run away?” the man went on. And then, he began to

laugh--quietly, to himself, as if in retrospect upon some joke. “Good

for you,” he continued. “Good for you.... Tell me, can’t stand your

father?”

“That’s not so!” Quincy choked out, indignant yet ignoring exactly why.

“Oh, I see! Father can’t stand you.”

The boy had craned forward. This stroke thrust him back, almost huddled

on his bench. And the man thought he had guessed true.

“I ran away once,” he began, musingly aloof.

There was a pause while he thought. And then, as if for the first time,

he seemed to espy the boy. He stepped still farther forward and grasped

his shoulder with a wiry hand. Of a sudden, he was serious and intense.

And he uttered his words as a man speaks an order in a quick emergency.

“Good for you,” he said. “Good for you, to have come away! And now--no

weakening! No getting sentimental! Ah--I see it. Don’t start thinking

about mother--about how mother’ll carry on. Every man for himself.

Mothers keep you for themselves. Give you a penny-worth of love for the

privilege of sucking your soul. Keep you, but don’t sustain you. Keep

you, but don’t protect you. I know. Tears--that’s their weapon. A

coward’s--as you’d know in any one save a mother. You must be sixteen.

Am I right?”

“Fifteen--” Quincy was awed into response.

“Good! Now, heart of steel; thin lips curled slightly downward--that’s

armor to hold you tight. I went back. I thought that was more heroic,

harder, nobler. Well, perhaps it was. Also, it was damn-foolishness!”

He stopped and released Quincy’s shoulder. And again, in a flash, his

mood transformed.

“Good-bye, sonny,” he said, once more aloof and without trace of the

intensity which had cut sharp his former words. “I guess I’ll go below.

The stars may be visible through the mist from the cave’s mouth.” He

turned into the path.

“Blue’s certainly her color--Don’t think of family!” he mused aloud, as

he went down.

* * * * *

Quincy sat, dazed for a while. And then, quite as if the power to do so

had not before been utterly away, he glided rapid and easy into

thinking. Consciousness of where he was--that whose myriad colors had

obsessed him--now went entirely. He had been whirled in a maelstrom of

sensation. Now, he flew along a track of thought. So at least, however

wrong, it appeared to Quincy.

For a while longer he sat. And then, he got up and walked.

He had turned in the direction of his house. Already, he was gone a

considerable distance ere he learned this. He stopped. He did not change

his route. He merely stood stock still, while his future should be born

within him. This also, was how it appeared to Quincy.

He was near a lamp-post. The path he had descended fell abruptly upon a

wider walk that sloped down from it at a right angle, A rustic railing

ran along it. Great clusters of rhododendron filled the sides. Opposite,

on the wider walk, was a sheer rock, ensconced in shrubbery, crowned

with a tree. Beside this, was the lamp. And here stood Quincy. A

policeman, rounding his beat from above, caught sight of him. He also

stopped.

He saw a boy, already tall, fixed and intent--but upon what, he could

not discover. The boy stood as if charmed, his face full toward the

lamp. The officer took in his long, dark face over which the tweed cap

lay low. He felt the delicate, firm fibre of his body, disclosed through

his tight sack suit. The boy’s arms were held straight at his sides. He

was faintly swaying in his balance.

Curiosity is a duty if one happen to wear an official uniform. So the

officer drew nearer. He saw now that the boy was slightly shivering and

that his eyes were intent upon no thing other than the lamp itself! His

face was brought out clearly in the sheet of light. The man gleaned the

impression of a tender, nervous, high-wrought mood, such as

Park-suicides were supposed to have. Clearly, here was a case to be

investigated.

Marching up close, he spoke: “A bit chilly, young feller?”

Quincy looked sharply. In his eyes were irritation and alarm. Then,

turning his back on the patrolman, he started down the hill.

“Hold on!” cried the Law.

Quincy stopped without turning back. This required of the policeman to

catch up to him. Abreast, they faced each other.

“What you doin’ here?” he demanded. The boy’s demeanor had dispersed the

sympathy which his good clothes aroused.

“What I’m doing?” Quincy got the question by repeating it. “I’m walking,

of course.”

“Is that what you call standin’ in front of a lamp-post fer half an

hour, starin’ like a madman?”

Quincy straightened perceptibly. And then, an angry look came into his

eyes.

“Look here,” he said, “you leave me alone!”

He marched down the walk. And the policeman mounted back to the height

of the hill. For once, Law had been chastened and the individual not

crushed, in their perpetual encounter.

* * * * *

What the man in the Rambles had not done, this last completed.

The boy walked now, sturdily, though slowly, toward the Park gate by

which he had flung in. An acute observer might have remarked, as he

walked on, a curious asymmetry between the force that he seemed to be

requiring as he went and the little speed that he attained. A portion of

the boy’s energies appeared to load his heels and to impede him. The

full swing of his legs was evidently not impressed upon the business of

walking. The jerky, heavy gait that he maintained, despite his efforts,

proved a divorce of purpose. Quincy’s upper body, his head, his arms

were in the rhythm of a steady stride. His legs, somehow, were

recalcitrant. And in consequence of this, the boy moved slowly, veered

perceptibly in a way that to a tyro might have seemed the signal of

intoxication.

Doubtless, the strange sermon of the man in the Rambles had let loose

the flow of argument that surged in Quincy. And the rational conclusion

to which his thinking brought him was all of a harmony with that strange

sermon. Yet, Quincy was going home!

Indeed, in this seeming contradiction, lay the crux of his experience.

Quincy was sounding, vividly, the paltriness of logic, the bland

imperviousness to it, of truth. His mind swirled in and out of the

channels of his resentment, his miseries, his hopes. His mind measured,

of course, in flood or ebb, exactly with these channels which it could

not escape. And yet, though their course lay outward, he was going

home! Before, while he thought his mind submerged and gone, he had yet

acted by it. His going forth had been a mental sally though his mind

slept. His going-home was an irrepressible emotion, though his mind

clamored against it. What a strange paradox for fifteen years to

glimpse, though the way of sight was only a pervasive sense of helpless

pain, an almost cosmic irritation. Quincy walked on. And his thoughts

surged against his walking. And gradually, as he walked, he grappled

with his thoughts, grimly determined to deflect them, to turn them back,

in stride with his own steps. All of his power went into this battle.

His mind must be convinced, won over! He, long since, and ere he had so

much as guessed it, had been won over. But even now, Quincy did not

know. While he strove to force his intellect into compliance, he

believed himself merely in process of thinking out his problem. The

struggle to bend his mind to the way of his soul came to him merely as

the mechanics of deliberation. Long ago, Quincy was decided. There

remained, now, only to propitiate his mind. And this paltry afterlude

assumed within him the dimensions of the whole. He would perhaps have

called it “making up his mind.” He did not dream that this was an act of

kindly reconciliation--the winning over of an un-needed minority in

whose dissent lay, at the worst, a source of irritation.

But mind holds the channels of our consciousness--controls the self’s

publicity. And from this not inconsiderable power, it has built up a

prestige for itself. It delays the announcement of any state until it

has been approached; and then, it so gives out the news that its

consent seems necessary, not for the mere announcement through its

channels, but for the state itself. And so, the mind’s

acknowledgment--often a hard-wrung effort to make it face a long

accomplished fact--seems a protagonist where it is naught but a chorus,

commissioned to explain and to chime in.

The real decision, then, impelling Quincy homeward, was not an affair of

words or of deliberation. It had been born in that deep land of him that

is never heard save through its far remote ambassadors. It had been born

of that will which does not argue, which makes its indomitable

revelation and then subsides, while its deed runs subtly through

innumerable channels to the outer lands. Here then, takes place the

clash of denial and of argument. Within, there is the serenity of fate.

But if Quincy’s recognition was to come only within the shadow of his

goal, it was none the less acute for the delay. However wrong was his

belief that, in this struggle of deliberation which held him now, lay

the finality of what he was to do, by means of it he at least came to

understand.

As he walked, he thought of life as it would be, if he did not return.

At once, he had the picture of it, uncensored by the least knowledge of

reality. He saw himself living in a miraculous family, a group of

persons who would respect him, leave him alone, and welcome with

attentive eagerness his least advance. Of course, out of his

graciousness, he did advance, at times. This family knew his worth and

felt his tragedy. Under their roof he grew and his powers spread. And

his life became one of great service. But of pleasure, there was little.

He kept to himself, nursing his delicious sorrow, a beneficent

knight-errant, with the bleeding soul of a recluse. But gradually, the

edifice of his good deeds rose into view. And at last, it came within

the ken of those that had driven him away. Partly through age, his

parents’ hair would by now be white; mostly, however, through remorse.

All of his old family, in heroic resolution, had shouldered the guilt

for his departure. And now, he returned to them, magnanimous, loving,

and forgave them. He kissed his father’s wrinkled face down which tears

of contrition fell. Rhoda also was there--husbandless, somehow,

chastened, eyes soft with the wish to be accepted. And he went up to

her, and took first her hands and then, her head, and gave forgiveness.

With her came the others--respectful, humbled, yearning toward him. (His

mother was not in the picture. But he was unaware of this.) He exacted

no punishment; he said no word of sorrowful reminder. He threw open his

arms for all and took them in. And there was happiness.

Here was a roseate arrangement; and yet, to Quincy, one certain of

accomplishment, if only he would face about. But he walked on. Why?

He saw his family, coldly, clearly, in the event of his return. He read

the added sneer of their lips, the arching of brows that meant

indulgence for one who was hopelessly foolish and incompetent. He saw

the wrath of his father at this new turn on his dignity which he had

played him; the knowing whistle of Marsden, discounting childish

weakness; the sharp unconcern of Rhoda, not honoring his adventure even

with contempt. And he dramatized for himself the sensations of his

mother. She would be glad to have him back--oh, yes! But how little she

would understand! To her, his going would seem an escapade luckily done

with--a spurt of temper, subsiding fortunately. She would think thus:

“Quincy was naughty. But thank God, he thought better of it. Thank God,

he was too weak to turn naughtiness into badness. Quincy was too much of

a child to do real injury to me. Thank God, for Quincy’s childishness!”

In her regard, as in that of all the others, he would have lost. His

return would mean the sacrifice of those few considerations which he had

somehow won. It would mark a new depth for his inferiority, forge a new

weapon for tyranny and contempt and misconstruction. To stay away meant

a path of glory. To return meant skulking back into a cell made dingier

and poorer for him in his absence. And in his act, no single one of them

would see aught but a lack of will, a dearth of spirit, a sickly fall.

And yet, in this direction went his feet!

No tinge of cowardice was there. Quincy knew too little of the world to

be afraid of it, to hesitate in choice between his home that he did

know, and it. His going-out had been the irresistible plunge of a long

propped-up weight, rushing toward the goal of its momentum. In his

return--if return he did--there was no falling; rather, a laborious,

painful urging back against the sweep of that momentum. The one way,

craned his thoughts and his ambition. The way he went, a voice he did

not recognize or know of, had sent a syllable.

But now, he came to feel its nature. The words of the man had been wise

words indeed. That was perhaps a reason for defeating them. They had

singled out the fact of mother, and there dwelt. And though Quincy was

inclined to think him right, these very words had inspired within him a

protest of antithesis. His mother! Was the man wrong in his uncanny

penetration? What had she helped him? How sustained him? how really

served to protect him? Her love was real enough. But was it not a

sickly, swaying plant--roots spread too wide for clinging, leaves thrust

too close within the shadow of others, to have the sun? What did he owe

her? Was her love not in its essence selfish, weakly? Did it not subsist

on tears and sterile moments? Could he conceive of living on such

sustenance, of mounting with such feeble help?

The man had been right. Quincy’s mind agreed. But Quincy in each step

proved that both man and mind were wrong. For Quincy was going back to

this discredited mother. Mentally, he nullified her and discarded her.

Always, she stood there, with outstretched arms, as he rushed toward

her. He thought he knew the formula of her tears, yet they ate deep in

him. He thought he knew the grammar of her words; yet they commanded

him. Quincy was learning.

And now, the Park was behind him. The adventure stood at its climax. And

if there be gods who cease at times their celestial indifference, when

the gleam of a real heroism smarts in their dull eyes from earth, they

were now watching Quincy. Learn the book of life and the nature of the

heroic becomes plain. It is the deliberate negation of what is sense and

rote, of that which the interminable average makes life; it is the

disavowal of all laws, the compliance with what is but a shadow, a

shred, and a suggestion. It is the leaning on an instant and the

despising of all time. It is the paradoxical resolve to prove a spot of

star greater and wider and more important than the mass of earth. It is

the truth. And it is even more, for it is the acting on it.

Quincy knew to what he was returning. He knew that no soul within the

house would feel the power of his temptation to stay away, though it

meant starving. He knew that she for whom he walked back into the

shambles would translate his deed to fit in her own petty scope and

wishes and perturbations. He knew the utter vainness of his act for his

own self; the bitter fruit that it must bear; the insufferable slur that

it would cast upon his fine rush for freedom.

For a moment, he paused, lost in a cloud almost of extinction. And then,

something put force upon his finger. And his finger pressed the

bell....