IV

The early bewilderments of college did not wear away. They formed a

swirling veil through which the unknown features of his new life seemed

glamorous and splendid. The pulsing rhythm of so much youth centered

about a point gave college a lilt that did not fail to whirl Quincy with

it. For a time, the mere sense of motion suffused his consciousness. He

was content.

And then, he understood. A windstorm in a desert is engrossing. But

while one dashed off the onslaught of hot sand, sweeping one’s senses,

there might still come stirring through the monotone of sting and color

the thought of other action, the doubt of this fight’s good. So, now,

with Quincy. Life as he knew it had been largely desert. Here was merely

a new stormy stretch. But despite this, his longing for somewhat else

grew, as the lack went on. His longing was based upon no fact. It was

becoming slowly a basis for all future facts.

During the first glamor and the first fright of freshman year, Quincy

observed a tone of affability about him in his mates. They, also, were

unsure of their position, unsure of the importance of this fellow

student, Quincy Burt. And they were cautious. Therefore, they were

hospitable, affable. They introduced themselves and asked him to call.

Numbers of them called on him. Quincy was touched, excited by this

reality of comradeship. But he soon learned that something would rise

up, as a barrier, between him and his tentative friends. The feeling of

a difference, a gulf of reservation would come upon the onset of an

attempt at fellowship. In their talks, these boys seemed to have a

definite ideal. And in Quincy’s lack of one, they found an unforgivable

distinction. Their ideals were pragmatic and immediate. They referred to

foot-ball or to the music-clubs or to golf. It made little difference.

But it welded the class together. And it left Quincy out.

A few solicitous fellows told him: “You must try for something. It

doesn’t matter if you make a team or not--so long as you try.”

Quincy was too slight for foot-ball. So he “went out” for the track

team.

He got the necessary suit and shoes. And he reported.

Quincy had reached full height at seventeen. He was fairly tall, lithe,

splendidly loose-knit. His muscles were soft but long. His shoulders

were sharp. His neck was thin and he held his head always slightly

forward. He looked to be excellent material. The coach selected him for

the “220 yard dash,” since he had no pre-conceptions on the matter.

In that first try-out, Quincy won his race. It was a strange and sharp

experience for him. Ten panting fellows lined out beside him under the

bleak sky. The cold air ate against the heat of his body. He felt free

and the feeling gave him a sense almost of shame. He had no right to win

that race! As his feet tore ground away, something within him told him

to come in second, if need be--but not first! But he was unleashed. He

raced with his soul. And he won, as if he had committed an improper

act.

The upperclassmen congratulated him. His fellows also, did not seem to

think that he had had no right to win. That night at dinner, his every

word was respectfully attended. He was consulted upon the effect of

cigarettes on “wind.” He was asked how many medals he had won at school.

And when he answered that he had never raced before, they smiled with

deprecation as if the fact of his nonage had been a boast of

supernatural powers.

But in the atmosphere of new impressions, this strange event did not

intrude too much. He slept well and early. He began to be troubled by

the attentions of his class-mates. A few days later, he ran the “100

yard dash” and won again. He was subjected, now, to very direct

attention, at the track house. He was rubbed down, massaged, questioned

about his habits. The boys took him for granted. Upon the third day, he

was asked in the field if he would try the “440.” He was willing. He

finished third in excellent company. This time the captain of the

college track team shook his hand.

“Burt, you’re the real thing,” he said. “Now work--! Train! There’s

glory for you.”

* * * * *

Quincy got back to his room and discovered that he hated this favor into

which he had fallen. He loved to run. He loved to race, although the

conspicuousness of winning made him uncomfortable. What he detested was

the “business” and the importance that had been attached to a quite

natural and unassuming exercise. If it was joy to hurl himself through

the air and wind, with his breast atingle and his head aflame, it was

torture straightway to be currycombed--mentally and physically--like a

race-horse. It was torture to be patronized by a shallow-mouthed senior

who, by some insuperable right, was his captain and his mentor. It was

torture to be told what to eat, when to rest, how to pace. And it was

torture to feel himself engaged, harnessed, to run--whether the mood was

there or no.

For a week more, Quincy bore this tyranny to which his prowess had

subjected him. And then, calmly, bravely, he quit. He was not aware of

the heroism of his act. And to be sure, there was no voice nor mind

about him so to paint it. What he had done was cowardly, perverse,

vicious and monstrous in the light of this new world. There was no

possible alternative in viewpoint.

He had told the captain that he loved to run, but that he did not wish

to make sprinting the master of his time and soul. The captain had

smiled knowingly.

“I know it’s hard. But you have to, Burt. It’s the way.”

“Well--I’d rather not.”

The captain looked at him sharply. “You got to, I say!”

“How do you mean--I got to?”

“You can’t keep on a team and not practice every day. And not train all

the time.”

And the man had walked off, not dreaming of a further protest.

Quincy, then, came close to the truth. There was something sacred,

almost prayerful in running. It was the service of the trees and brooks.

The strain of his muscles, the pant of his breath, the burn of his eyes,

the hewing-down by this fleet spirit within him of the world’s

resistances, came to him as romance, as worship. And to yoke this

splendor to an affair of points and team-work seemed sacrilege. He

could run when he wished. He had now learned the glory of that. He

would not prostitute his best delight.

He broke training and failed to report.

The captain called on him. There was a stormy half-hour, in which the

captain showed his native lights and talked much of treachery to one’s

college. And so, Quincy was _queered_.

At the fall fraternity elections, he was left out. He knew that he had

been marked for slaughter. The majority of his class now evinced

nervousness at talking to him. They had fallen off as quickly as they

had first rushed to accept him. He had committed the unpardonable sin.

He stood there, in their midst, as a rebuke to their standards and

activities--as an _individual_--as one who prized his pleasure and

rejected the college shibboleth of “doing something.” There was no

health in him. And there was danger of being associated with him, if one

were seen too much about with him. Elections came. And Quincy,

courageous as he had been in the lists of decision, was too young to

smile and too weak not to suffer.

But a firm idea had been implanted in his soul; and a great gift given

it. Each afternoon now, in the days that came before the snow, and while

he should have been sprinting for his Alma Mater, he went out in the

sparse woods beyond the field and ran and raced with his own spirit.

This was the gift that had been given him. The idea was one of

criticism. He began to see the poverty of this college scope, to deplore

the lack of a real, free romanticism in its routine and aspirations. He

longed for the opportunity to talk with Professor Deering. But the

Professor taught only upperclassmen.

And then, Quincy thought of expressing his idea more vicariously. He

worked a week on an essay that he entitled “College Cramps.” In it, he

made reference to the grip of college routine and business on all the

native energies of youth that should run wild; to the effort through

team-work and club-work, to channel ebullience into a trough where

college gods--cattle of iron and wood--could drink and guzzle. He sent

his essay to the college literary magazine. It was sent back. Across the

title page a witty editor had scribbled: “We’re sorry you have them, old

man.”

Then the boy retouched his essay and mailed it to Professor Deering.

Within, he enclosed a note stating that it had been rejected by the

college paper. He hoped, however, that it would be read by the man who

really had inspired it.

He heard nothing from Professor Deering. And soon after, he made a

momentous journey to New York. But before this, he had found a friend.

V

His name was Garsted--Simon Garsted.

One day, Quincy crossed the campus with him. He had been a slight ways

behind. He had overtaken Quincy.

“Aren’t you Burt of the freshman class?” he asked, introducing himself.

He was a junior--an obscure one as far as college honors were concerned.

“I was at a tea, last Sunday, at Professor Deering’s house,” Garsted

explained. “He read your paper aloud.”

“Did he?”

For a moment, Quincy was rejoiced. And then it occurred to him that Mr.

Deering might have acknowledged the paper’s receipt--if he had thought

so highly of it--might have asked his permission about reading it aloud.

So Quincy withdrew into his shell. And since only Garsted was there,

congratulating him, he turned his resentment upon him.

“I hope you liked it,” he said icily.

“You’re a mighty independent young chap, Burt,” Garsted went on, “I like

that.”

“Thanks.”

Garsted stopped, causing Quincy to do likewise and to face him. And

then, he smiled.

“Look here, Burt,” he said softly, “Deering’s a strange, sloppy man. But

he’s the biggest man here. Don’t take what he did amiss. If I know him,

he forgot even to invite you to his tea. That’s just like him. One day,

when his interest in your paper is a bit subsided, he’ll recall that

there’s more to you than it--that you’re behind it. Then he’ll drop you

a note. Meantime, however, don’t be sensitive--with _him_.”

There was a pause. Quincy was looking a trifle sheepish. Garsted was

laughing: “Save your sensitiveness for other things, Burt--and come and

see me.” He put out his hand.

Quincy inclined his head slightly and as their hands clasped their eyes

met. Garsted caught the deep pathos of this boy, lost and alone in a

college campus. He felt a thrill as one does at some beautiful flash of

thought. He saw the contrast between this silent, stubborn boy and the

easy obviousness of the things about him.

“Let me see,” he said in a still more quiet tone, “these indefinite

invitations are insulting.” It was the second time he had caught the

cause of Quincy’s trouble. “What about a date to-night? Can you come?”

Quincy looked at him. The first general wave of invitations, and that

succeeding flood when he was harnessed to the track team, had died

utterly away. He had been alone for three weeks. He was sensitive and he

was skeptical. But Garsted was different. And it was hard to transfer

upon him so sustainedly his irritation at Mr. Deering. Garsted was a

close-set fellow. His head was long, almost ponderous, with coarse,

blond, short-cropped hair. His nose was massive, angularly chiseled, his

mouth was broad and showed a row of teeth immaculately white and

separate one from the other. All of him seemed roughly hewn out of some

stubborn stone--abrupt, big, yet anomalously delicate. As he spoke, he

stammered at the beginning of each sentence; but once over this initial

barrier, he went on freely, until the pause.

“I have nothing on, to-night.”

“Very well,” said Garsted. “Come at six. There’s my dorm. Room number

ten.” He pointed, and dashed off.

Quincy had never seen such a room as this. Through a maze of tobacco

smoke, a naked gas-jet gave out its light. Garsted, in suspenders,

loomed out of the shadows, looking like some grotesque statue, his hair

dishevelled, a cigarette dropping from his lips. “Hello. Come in,” he

said without a sign of stammering.

Quincy felt his way into the room. It was long and low. It had three

leaded lattice windows. Above one was the gas-jet. On the full wall was

a suspended book-case, littered with manuscripts, papers and

exotic-looking volumes. Below, was a cot, unmade; and lost in the

heterogeneous bed-clothes were trousers, books, two hats and a

carelessly flung fiddle. Below the two other windows was a plain kitchen

table, unvarnished and bewilderingly strewn with hodge-podge of small

things. Beside a pen was a tooth-brush. Mingled with clean sheets of

paper were pipes, neckties and a pile of silver change. In one corner

stood an antiquated typewriter. Garsted seemed splendidly at home and in

a key with all this harmonious medley.

He flung three paper volumes from a chair to the floor and offered the

seat to Quincy. Quincy took it. Garsted rolled a cigarette, lighted it

from the gas and suggested that they dine at the town’s most expensive

restaurant. Then, he looked down at his shoes.

“Damn it,” he said with a chuckle, “they’ll never do.” He excused

himself and went out into the hall, leaving the door ajar behind him.

“Oh, Bobby! Oh, Bobby!” he sang out. A door opened.

“Going fussing to-night?” cried Garsted.

“No,” came the distant voice.

“Let me have your good shoes?”

There were more footsteps above. Presently, Quincy heard Garsted at the

bottom of the stairs catch one shoe and muff the second. Then, he

entered and without comment pulled off his own, tossed them under the

kitchen-study table and put on the others.

“I’m hungry; let’s go,” said Garsted, moving toward the door.

“Should I put out the light?” said Quincy, who was behind him.

“Lord, no! I never have any matches. I’d have to go to bed in the dark.”

And still more Quincy marvelled. Gas had to be paid for, in the college

dormitories.

The waiters in the town’s most expensive restaurant (the only one with

metropolitan prices) treated Simon Garsted as if he had lived in a

mansion. They judged by the sort of dinner he ordered and his taste in

wine. Garsted made it a rule not to enter the place save his purse was

full. Also, in order that this might not be too infrequently, he would

go long without good nourishment, subsisting on coffee, tobacco and free

lunch. Another of his economies was in matches.

However, it was a memorable evening for Quincy. He did not pretend to

understand. He was subtle enough to be dazzled as much by the incident

of the borrowed shoes as by the salaams of the headwaiter. He saw a

dizzy accomplishment in either. He liked Garsted, besides admiring him.

He found it easy to converse with him. And Garsted proved his entire

comfort by not stammering once after the oysters.

They talked long. Quincy discovered in himself ideas--and ideas, in

addition, to which an evidently brilliant upperclassman was glad to

listen. He found that many of his host’s spicily couched remarks were

final forms of feelings he had long vaguely nursed. And, being human, he

respected Garsted for this reason as well as for another.

There were, moreover, many points in his new friend’s mind that had

never occurred, even remotely, to the boy. Most of these, as Garsted

made them, seemed bewilderingly true. Others, he argued frantically,

unaware that he was in this way defending his old grounds, his old

spiritual habits.

It was obvious from the outset that Garsted was a rebel. He told him so.

“Well, so are you,” retorted the older man. And this was news to Quincy.

“Why, that’s anarchism!” cried Quincy, when Garsted was inveighing

against the theoretic right of imprisonment for crime.

“And what was your leaving the track team?” came the quick rejoinder.

So, by this penetrating means the boy gained insight into himself. Small

wonder, then, that he found himself growing enthusiastically fond of

Garsted. There is no commoner cause, among the honest, for devoted

friendships.

No middle way exists in natures like that of Quincy. Once they let go

their blanketing reserve, they feel no shame in nakedness. They have not

learned a technique of graded confidence. They withhold everything with

a single grip. They know only how to maintain that grip or to release

it. They lack experience in the _nuances_ of human correlations. Their

rule is not to adventure. When they break it--since it is so sincere a

rule--they break it utterly. For behind the rule, is the great,

incessant need of what the rule forbids--the conviction that in such

intensity of need abstinence is good.

Quincy flung his reserves out from him, that evening. And Garsted had no

reason to dream that this candid boy could be as secretive as a cat. He

sat high up in his chair, haled by his wine, receiving Quincy’s brave

opinions with an equal gusto. His own remarks served to expose and

annotate them. Garsted had a genius in apt conversation. He knew when to

obtain a major effect by playing _obbligato_. Quincy’s purposes and

judgments were put forth acridly, naked, crudely, as seventeen years are

wont. Had the boy heard himself as he actually spoke, he must have felt

the strident immaturity of his opinions, been rebuffed by them and so

reacted against Garsted. But here, this young man’s cleverness came out.

As Quincy’s thoughts ran, Garsted dressed them, trimmed them, softened

them. Such was the mission of his own accompanying remarks. And in

consequence of this, Quincy’s impressions were not of his ideas alone,

but of these tempered and glorified by his host’s part. So Quincy glowed

with a strange assurance. And his subliminal gratitude for Garsted

inspired a conscious admiration.

They parted late.

Quincy lay, stare-eyed, in bed; and by fancy continued his past

conversation, until sleep cheated him. Even so, a young knight of old,

fresh from a first tourney, might over and over again have fought in

vision, stroke by stroke, the battle he had won.

* * * * *

One of the remarks of Simon Garsted had been responsible for Quincy’s

journey to New York. The boy had claimed the years he lived there as

credentials of his knowledge of the city.

“But your family’s been there with you, all that time?” asked Garsted.

“Of course.”

“Then you know less of New York than the immigrant who lands at South

Ferry from Ellis Island. He at least has been receptive to the real

welcome--attack, if you will. With you, inevitably, the home you lived

in and the hordes of people you knew must have interfered.”

Quincy smiled at these “hordes.” But he resolved to meet New York

without the fact or reservation of his family within his mind.

Garsted had summarized: “Knowing a city is being open to the vibrance of

its crowds and buildings. A family stops these apertures.”

* * * * *

The time was early in November. Fraternity elections had just placed a

mark upon Quincy’s lack of favor. They had thrown him into a gloom. But

what really harassed the boy was not the disapproval of his class, so

much as the palpable weakness which he read into the fact that this had

troubled him. This was the source of real misgivings. If he was what he

was, had done with conscience that which he had done, the results should

have been powerless to distress him. They were not. His unpopularity,

now brutally concreted, gave him periods of despond. And seeing this,

he rebelled at his own self-styled fatuity and thereby fixed his mood.

It was in such a mood that he set out to meet New York. The thrill of

real adventure shot through him as he stepped forth, under these new

auspices, upon the crashing street. The power of suggestion had availed.

It seemed indeed as if he had never before known the great city.

He plunged at once into the subway and alighted at Brooklyn Bridge.

There had been no plan in this. But it had seemed the natural tendency.

Quincy had merely flowed along. Here was one channel of the city’s life

that had happened to catch him in. Since he was there to invite and to

enhance this receptivity, it would have been wrong to choose.

So Quincy reached the street from the subway. At once, he was washed

along like a splinter of wood on a rising wave, into a screaming welter

of humanity and trolley-cars. He was in the terminal whence soars the

incline pathway rising to the Manhattan Tower of Brooklyn Bridge.

It was not yet four o’clock. And the sparse stream of early hurriers

about him was as nothing against his feeling of solitude. He recalled

almost vaguely now the packed recesses whence he had emerged--the

delirium of cars churning the crowds, the hammer of the outlying city.

Before him swept the bridge. He felt that every cable of the web-like

maze was vibrant with stress and strain. With these things he was alone.

Yet he felt no insecurity, such as the crowds inspired. Beyond, through

the net-work of steel, huddled Brooklyn. And below his very feet,

tumbled together as if some giant had tipped the city eastward and sent

all the houses pell-mell toward the down-tilted corner, lay the wharves

and slums of Manhattan. It seemed to Quincy that he was being caught

upon a monstrous swing and swept with its pulsed lilt above the

grovelling life of the metropolis. Suddenly, the fancy flashed upon him

that from his perch of shivering steel the power should indeed come to

poise and judge the swarm above which he rocked. The bridge that reeled

beyond him seemed an arbiter. It bound the city. It must know the city’s

soul since it was so close to the city’s breath. In its throbbing cables

there must be a message. In its lacings and filigrees of steel, there

must be subtle words!...

He was already above the river. The sun was cold. The waters of the

harbor cut out like sapphire fretted with gleam. Beyond, Brooklyn was in

shadow--shadow that sprang rather from its nature than the sun’s lack.

Quincy turned north where the great East Side crowded out under two

bridges, stifling the river to an inlet. The city rose in a blue haze.

Quincy recalled the words of the man in the Park: “Blue’s her color.” It

was all like the piled ascent of some brobdingnagian ant-hill. He

scrutinized it carefully,--from the stall-like wharves to the tower,

turreted and carved in ice at the hill’s crest. It seemed ugly. And yet,

as his eyes went back over the mazy whole, down from the notched skyline

to the turmoiled streets that fell brown and grey into the water, it

seemed beautiful as well. Quincy was puzzled. He did not know that in

this flaunting grandeur, building from myriad misery and ugliness, lay

the nature of New York.

Quincy too was cold. Instinctively, he turned south. The sun was very

ineffectual against the lower city with its escarpments of wrought

stone. There was a cruelty about these that laughed at the falling sun.

The tall buildings were ugly--fearfully so. They lacked grace and color.

One of them was a titanic telescope done in cake and sugar. A huge

structure farther north--ridiculous with a flounce as a flank and its

tiny turrets--reminded him of building-blocks. And this brought to

Quincy the idea of giant babies, sportively responsible for it all. But

there was tragedy as well as farce. The vaster buildings rose all white

and impervious and cool from the wallow of unlit mediocrity below.

Monsters indeed, they seemed to have sucked the strength for rising from

the nondescript ruck that they submerged. Ferocious, sapping prodigies

they seemed, now, to Quincy--the sort to which men are sacrificed and

that make slaves of their creators.

All of this was like the blow of a mailed fist to the boy. It made him

turn toward Brooklyn. The borough of homes appeared shabby and foul, a

neglected step-sister unworthy the name of Cinderella. For here was no

virtue under the spell of persecution. Brooklyn also was sinister

enough. Merely, she had been less successful. Homes, evidently, counted

little.

Suddenly, Quincy found that he had left the bridge and was standing upon

a street in Brooklyn. He struck down its dingy length. He wondered if

the wealth that had raised all the glories he had just observed was in

some manner parent to this squalor. For not more than fifteen minutes,

he searched the swart, hovelled depths below the Bridge. He saw a

ferry-boat at the foot of a street, relieved with plants and romping

boys, which had been turned into a consumptives’ home. He was not used

to stinking court-ways, houses that leered, rank saloons advertising rum

and sidewalks crumbling with neglect. He looked up at the span of

bridge. It seemed an unattainable pathway. His nerves told him he would

be better looking down at Brooklyn. So he returned.

The whole world had become another world in half an hour. Quincy

surveyed the sky, the river, distant Manhattan. It came to him with a

thrill that nothing was the same--that everything was radically

something else. It was night--boldly, suddenly, entirely. If New York

had a tongue of its own, would there be a word in it for evening?

What impressed Quincy at once was that night was not falling, as poetry

books would have it, but ascending; and ascending, not in a steady

advance like the shadows on a mountain, but in sudden starts, in

impulsive sallies, like clouds of guerilla warriors pressing up, free of

each other, repulsed here, there held at bay, and here again triumphant.

In the north, Manhattan was already dark. It loomed up, loftier yet more

subdued in mist that was forever turning thicker and more sombre. Not a

light pierced the haze to Quincy’s eye. He seemed now to be looking down

upon an illimitable graveyard. Each house was become a tomb-stone, each

towering building, in the light of day a sentinel of progress, appeared

now a monument to some great death. Below the liquid green of the two

uptown bridges, the East River was opaque amethyst, streaked here and

there where some boat had cut a swathe. The moiling tenements glowed

forth like coral. Poverty, catching a deflected ray, turned lurid.

Now, as he marched on, Quincy observed the south. The arm of Liberty,

wisp-like in the mist, pointed to a blood-orange ball of sun. The nearer

island lay in a deeper purple; its trees waved through a thicker film.

But the waters were in shadow as if night had been an emanation from

them, pushing the sun relentlessly back across the rim of the world.

Above the harbor, was a deep pall, night’s advance guard in its grey,

the sun’s resistance in its orange fretting. The pall fell and the

waters grew more brackish. The sun plunged down against the mists,

pouring a frenzy of disparted color that shot about the buildings of

South Manhattan. And now, a sheet of gold cloud came underneath it.

Slowly, yet visibly, the gold turned to yellow, to lemon, to silver--and

went grey. Steeped as if in its own blood, the sun sank through the

mists, and disappeared.

Quincy shuddered as if he had been witness to a tragedy. Then, huddled

in his coat, he pressed on toward Manhattan.

The lower buildings had receded into shadow. The upper turrets were

still shooting white against a shrill blue sky. Below, Manhattan was

retreating; in the higher line, it still advanced. Quincy thought that

the tall buildings slanted forward, that they must topple into the

river. And throughout the long expanse, came streaks of smoke, all

pointing north, all twining with harmonious measure into the sky.

But now, was the most startling change of all. The phalanx of white

smoke seemed to hesitate, broke and scattered. With the sun had gone the

wind; and with it, given up to the play of a thousand lesser currents,

the smoke eddied forth, curled back and reverted in formless disarray.

Then, with a flash, Quincy was aware of a glitter of lights along the

precipice. They were everywhere--huge bars of them in the north,

clusters of them in the south. The lights of a city do not come out, one

by one. A moment before, he had not noticed any. This, however, Quincy

did remark: at first the lights appeared faint, almost fancied within

the clear eminence of buildings. But by degrees, the lights, thickening

in numbers, grew as well in strength, became more real and more

brilliant. In measure, the cold outline of stone against the blue melted

and merged; the two values--sky and building--fell back into one wash of

grey. And the lights took firmer form in their dimming casements, and

gleamed forth like a new city of flame in place of the city of stone.

Manhattan of the day, with its sharp, cruel outlines and its clumsy

angles, hostile to subtlety and to suggestion, was fading utterly before

this faëry Manhattan with its swarms of color and its deep store of

fancy.

Quincy fought his way to the street through the frantic turbulence of

clattering cars and thronging home-goers. He felt as if he had been

dropped down the muddy vortex of a whirlpool. Night was thick above him.

Great clouds of people swirled toward the bridge and subway, amid the

clangor of traffic and the cacophony of newsboys.

Bruised, frightened, Quincy turned away, eager only to escape. Suddenly,

amazement stopped him. Across the dismal mouth of the street was the

bridge--a giant causeway. One arc-light underneath broke off a circlet

of yellow-white from the surrounding gloom. Above shone a ragged strip

of sky. The air was rank. The solitary light tumbled and flashed in the

vapors.

Panic clutched the boy. There seemed a half uttered charm about this

place. He pressed on. And now, he slipped along the wet walks of Fulton

Market where the fish of a thousand pushcarts had dropped blood and ooze

during the day. Facing the low, red houses with the hectic, gas-burning

shops, Quincy observed Broadway beyond--a long, high gauze of flame.

Ponderous trucks rattled past. And a thin stream of drab humanity

shuffled toward the ancient ferry that plies to Brooklyn.

Quincy went north on South Street, past the swinging doors of saloons

and shops where marling-spikes and flag-trucks made display. Under the

Bridge itself he went--looming above him like a curse; and into the

rookeries of Cherry Hill.

Quincy had had enough. He was frightened, horrified.

He pushed up Water Street and westward, eager above all to escape the

omnipresent Bridge. He passed through fetid piles of tenement, pouring

their produce into the street. Crowds jostled him; cars clashed;

machines went braying, shuttling. The taste of New York was bitter on

his lips. Through its sheer bulk, it threatened to submerge him. He

wished to run, in order to be rid of it. But he held himself back. He

must be calm, courageous. All of this delirium, this lurid show of filth

and vice and an inexplicable beauty--was it not life? Would he avoid

life, would he be rid of it? Was he not of it? was he not also life?

And so, aching in his soul, for his experience, yet aware deeply that he

had somehow been visiting himself, Quincy reached the station and

journeyed back to college.

The depth of the impression of this trip on Quincy was such that he did

not begin really to know it until somewhat later. Great shocks often

compound a spiritual bath which takes a long time to soak upon the

nerves. Quincy’s experience, as he looked back on it, was in the nature

of a shock--a physical one. It grew blurred, dimensionless within his

mind. And in proportion, grew the mental reflex. It seemed now, to

Quincy, that the vagueness of what he had encountered was his own

subjective vagueness; as if indeed he had pried into the arcana of

existence. Of course, such a venture into truth could not have the petty

clarity of fact. He learned that a glance within himself gave just such

dim results. Yet here, dimness did not detract from poignancy. And so,

with New York. There was a firm analogy between these delvings; and

between their consequences, at first elusive, physical, and finally

outspreading into an aura of deep importance.

He spoke freely of all this to Garsted.

“Why,” asked Garsted, “do you fail to divorce the sense of beauty from

even the vilest thing you saw?”

“That I can’t understand,” said Quincy.

“You don’t seem to know what the sense of beauty means.”

“Let me see if I can figure it out.” Quincy knit his brow, and his blue

eyes softened. It was as if he had spiritually relaxed, instinctively

aware that in this way one can receive.

“Perhaps,” he groped on, “perhaps, when I feel beauty, I am really

feeling a sense of welcome. A welcome of the spirit.”

“Good!” cried Garsted. “And when do we welcome? Now, look out for your

answer! No sentimentalism. Hypothetically, we welcome when we are

charitable, altruistic, Christian. But actually--”

“When we want, I guess.”

“We feel a sense of welcome, when we feel a sense of one-ness. Is that

not so? Well--now we’re at the kernel. Beauty is nothing but a sense of

welcome within, that we transfer onto an object, because the impulse of

life is to transfer. A sense of harmony, in other words.”

“A sense of harmony with filthy hovels and cruel skyscrapers!”

“Absolutely. Something in them is in you,--is truth. You feel that

vaguely, through the filth and the stolen decoration. And you call all

of it beautiful.”

“Why,” laughed Quincy, “you make me think I was paying a visit to

myself, in extension.”

“Well, what else gripped you? Was it the architecture?”

They laughed together. And then, in the silence, the boy pondered.

“You’re right,” he said at last. “I felt it also,--that I had been

looking into myself. Now, I can do more than feel it--thanks to you; I

can express it.” He paused.

“The devil! Then all these brutalities and contrasts and flauntings are

truth? And they’re in me, also--at least, what makes them be!”

“Don’t you also belong to the world?”

Quincy looked sharply at his friend. This question moved him. He thought

of his life, so far. He thought of the havoc which even this little

glimpse of the world had played with him. He grew sombre and his eyes

lost their liquid glow of relaxation.

“Something’s wrong,” he said solemnly. “If I belong to the world,

there’s that within me objects to it. It cries out, objecting. It felt

the beauty, that day. And, as you say, that meant that it recognized a

fellowship, a harmony. But it hurt, Garsted,--it hurt like being

crushed!”

Garsted laughed--alone. He could go only a certain way with Quincy. This

seemed jejune sensitiveness.

From the moment of that laughter, the boy discovered that there were

things and states about which it was unwise to talk, even in the rare

circumstance of being able to.