The morning of Quincy’s departure, it had rained. Then, it had cleared.
To the plashy gloom of an autumn storm succeeded a sudden cheer of
Indian Summer. When, in his “usual” manner, the boy dashed from the
house, the sky was a shrill blue shredded with fragile clouds. And below
foot, were still the puddles and grey odors of the rain.
Filled with a painful, pleasurable sense of having been unjust, Quincy
boarded a car at the corner. Then he alighted. There was so much time,
he had decided to walk from the place of transfer--a trifling journey.
In the car his thoughts had been at once intensely personal and
inchoate. He was thinking back. He resolved to write his mother an
affectionate letter of apology. Yes: he would write to Adelaide as well.
He had not wanted to bother them. Many a time, they had made him
feel--oh, perhaps not these two, but _they_--how little it was wise to
bother them. He was going to a new life. He wished to start on it,
alone. There was no reason in not cutting clean, when cut one had to.
His last thought gave him pause. He was going to a new life. A new life.
Life....
The car clanked and screeched, the braked wheels slid--to a halt; the
conductor bawled out the place of transfer.
Quincy was suddenly aware only of the pungent dampness in the car. He
pushed his way to the platform, clumsily. But what hindered him was
solely the fact of his suit-case. He stepped down--into a wide, flat
puddle. And he was piqued, only because his shoes were freshly shined.
He righted himself, waiting for a safe chance to cross. With his
thoughts had come the need of moving. And this had stopped his thoughts.
He stood midway in the sopping thoroughfare with the sun’s glad drench
above his head. The new life began.
* * * * *
He heard the voices. The starting, clanking, abruptly halted cars that
swung with groan of wood and iron. The darting flash of wagons, brittle
and uproarious of wheel over the asphalt’s crevices or the weave of
tracks. The heavier trucks, plunging along with perched, gesticulating
drivers, that gave forth their rumble like a flood of undertone shot
through with lighter notes. The dull-rhythmed matrix--the crowd’s
shuffle--wherein the metallic urge of cars, the tangent flurries of
light wheels, the impress of thick masses glowed and hummed and pounded
while the air swung response. And through it all, catching it up,
knitting it together, the web--the web whereof now Quincy grew aware.
For it was none of these: not the traffic’s voice, not the crowd’s
shuffle. It was the crowd itself.
Everywhere--interminably movemented, yet inexorably fixed. The base, the
weave, the limits of this cacophony. The web, gapped solitarily by the
air--and air that stifled, died within the web’s cloying interstices.
The crowd closed on Quincy’s heart. And Quincy felt the crowd. He
grasped his burden tightly, and pushed ahead. But meantime, and for the
first time, he was a-feel with this new substance. What it gave him went
to all the senses. It was a sharp, quick taste that drew and a pungent
odor that clouded eyes. It was subtle and it was slight. Yet, once
impinged upon his being, it remained. And now, he recognized it:--
A desire not to go on--a yearning to cease altogether. A weariness,
which in its scope was cosmic, yet in its application seemed almost not
to be!
Still, the boy’s energies pricked him on. There was no tremor of
hesitation in his walk or in his face. But it was as if the spirit that
had forged these energies by which he was now acting, had flickered out.
As the light of a star, after the star has died, pierces through space
uncaring, so it seemed that Quincy pursued his goal, with his source
gone. All this about him seemed to have sapped his soul. It was all so
huge and crass and crushing. It cared so little for him. He was a
particle within it, too light to sink, too heavy to ascend.
The crowd. And the boy on his way to college.
He had not reckoned on this thing. He had lived within it all of his
life. Yet, until this moment, it had been as remote as non-existence.
Now, ere he knew how, it was at work upon him. And already, he was
weary!
Quincy knew enough--just enough--to be horrified at this; to feel the
fitness of a venturing spirit, eager, elastic, for a beginning; and to
grow sick at the lack. He did not know enough even to blame the crowd.
Nor did he know that the glad face and joyous limbs of the pioneer are
figments of fable-weaving; that the mood of the morning is ever a grim
facing forward against the soul’s pull backward; and that he shared
this weariness that so distressed him with most men who, aching of sinew
and sick of heart, go out and win.
An impulse murmured to go back. He crushed it. Back, there was all he
yearned to overcome. The impulse which made it preferable to the unknown
filled him with shame. He had not been this shirker, two years past. He
trudged on. Before him, was much unknown, but one thing
certain--Struggle. As he envisaged this, a part of Quincy blanched. It
was not because he feared; because he lacked daring for pain or for
discomfort. Both of these lay behind him. He thought, and rightly, to
have sounded them. What was unbearable in the future was the struggle,
the exertion. Whatever the fruit of it, with struggle the price seemed
vain. Whatever the bitter emptiness he left behind, since he could lie
still and without deeds, seemed welcome. While the world shrieked about
him, horrible in its clangor of steel and its dull delirium of feet,
Quincy was filled with the desire to share nothing with it, to cut
loose, aloof, to cast out whatever element he might conceal in common.
He was weary because this crowd seemed tireless; he craved peace because
it breathed out conflict; he longed for abnegation, though it was
failure, since the crowd was as it was, with its attainment.
Subreptively, unformed, the desire stirred within him, if this hideous
pervasion was life, for non-existence.
And then, he thrust that from him, also. For though the source seemed
cold, the light was flashing forth. Clearly, he knew that he did not
court the future; that he would fain have gone from his past into a
region without measure. But none the less, he had reached the station.
While his soul yearned for a state without time, his eyes had seen the
clock and his brain grasped that it was later than he had surmised.
While his soul longed for an endless truce to goal and striving, he had
doubled his pace so as not to miss his train. And with his heart set
against any sequel whatsoever, he had bought a ticket for the immediate
future!
The crowds swirled in eddies and great streams to the narrow gates that
sucked them in. The vibrance of movement and adventure hummed in the
air. The incense of man’s activity reached his nostrils. He, also, was
caught up. His feet carried him down the throbbing passage. The long,
silent train lay out like a mystery, beyond his sight. There was a Song
in this commotion; a Promise in these steps....
Quincy caught hold of the platform bar. And a lithe, eager body swung
aboard the train.