Now came the Christmas vacation.
A time of ill-suppressed anticipation in a college town. Spirits soar
and marks descend. Men laugh more readily; kindness comes to the surface
of expression. Charity and self-indulgence, disguised as a fine denial
conscious of its temporary being, give life a buoyancy. Energy juts into
the future, leaving the swamp of deserted channels for the present. Eyes
and mind and above all, the softer sense, wait upon the morrow. There is
an abstinence about, as of guests before a feast not quite ready to
begin.
And then, the last day, the last hour. The swift march of feet bedecking
the frozen station road like flowers. The ring of voices in prospect and
good wish, fretting the grey air like tendrils of warm sun. The mad
largess to drivers; the luxury of lugging fat valises; the display of
bright neckwear and urban suits. There may be slush and ice on the
station road-way, but there is spring in the feet that tread it.
Quincy, also, went home for his Christmas vacation. He was one of the
few that felt these things about him. Most were in these things, making
their sum. He was outside, so he felt and understood. The glitter and
ring grew and transformed in him, as he forsook them. Things spiritual
too, however fair, have shadows, when they stand within the flood of
some subjective sun. So stood these bright things to Quincy’s spirit.
Their shadows broadened upon him. And they made him gloomy; for the
shadow, even of a painted picture, will be dark.
When he reached New York, with home before him, he smiled ironically to
himself. The grey loom from the past brightness was wide across him. He
bethought himself that he was going jerkily, obtusely, through a set of
motions meaning nothing to him. He was partaking of a ceremony without
its spirit. It was a deep and pregnant ritual for these others--home
turned host, home in a roseate smile and at attention. So much the
hollower did its successive rhythms sound in his own emptiness. For
without the promise of felicity, what is baptism but an untimely
wetting? Yet, he was caught within this process and with one speed, one
exterior, he had been lifted up and hurried homeward. If he lacked
knowledge of his own direction, he saw the pomp of promise of the
others. And in this combination, his spirits fell and his eyes and lips
grew subtly vagrant, as if they had desired to escape from the pain
whereof his face was symbol.
A home of prophets would have understood this boy’s distress, launched
on them at the set, rigid hour of vacation. But in his home if he came
upon it as he was now, journeying uptown, the sullen silence would be
received as if the mark were already known, shrugged at with the sole
possible comment that one had hoped for college to have bettered him.
All this, as well, Quincy understood.
So, as he rang the bell, he feared already his reception. And knowing
what its consequence must be, he shut down his mood. He found a smile,
inspired by his fear. It was perhaps a meagre smile. But its source was
not a common one for cheerfulness. And at this moment, he had no other
source.
In this way, he entered.
* * * * *
Many things in the Christmas fortnight served to move Quincy out of
himself upon a vantage-point where self might be envisaged.
All of it was a Pattern to him, once it was behind. And in the process
of its unfolding, he was the unit that recurred persistently within it.
He was the dark part of the design: richly, suavely black. About him
fell burstings of color, scatteredly composed and half drawn toward him,
as if a slightly stronger force prevailed against the colors’ impulse to
fly clear. The whole was restless. The dark center-part--himself--seemed
strangely unmoved. It was Quincy’s first intensive lesson in the design
of spirit--that mad craftsman who hurls strident clashings into a
harmony so fluent that all the world, if one step back and look, falls
to a monochrome.
There was no distinguishable episode, at first. His strollings in New
York, lit by his own fluttering lights far more than by the city’s
screaming incandescence, made no chapter apart. His family was there,
all-swerving in its crowd-way: Rhoda with her flagrant and acid beauty;
Marsden the oracle; Adelaide the unformidable sphinx; his mother,
lacking a motor to her sentiments, beyond the power to clap her hands
painfully about his ears; his father with his language of greed; the
city with its tongue of brass. But the two weeks were one. And the
shadow of college was within them,--indivisible like any shadow, so that
our minds alone and not our senses know it for a projection.
The Pattern’s early form was allied with the city....
There was a great tongue of metal that had sharp, cutting edges. It
struck against tooth and palate with ironic clangor. The teeth were cold
buildings, and the lips about which the metal tongue drew blood were the
pervasive helpless passions of the city’s life. In reality, the soft and
suffering things were hidden and the metal shone. In his impression, the
agony stood out and the element which cut and punished seemed
insidiously hid. This inversion his own wish explained. He yearned for
optimism. He still had strong within him the essential touch of a gay
nature, made for a gay God. Perhaps, since such inversions are a part of
wit, the gay God was the merrier for this.
Out of the mouth came speech. Rhoda had Julia Deering as a refrain.
There was a rhyming sequence between his father and the Professor.
Adelaide was at once a low refrain and an epigram that bit under a soft
semblance. Strangely, his mother figured little by herself. But her part
was never lacking. She had the ubiquity of intonation.
His impressions crystallized, drew back into actual events. But these
events from which logically his impressions had gained life seemed a
tracing not to a former, but to a later thing. The Pattern was clear in
Quincy’s mind before the events were clear, that caused it.
* * * * *
Above all, there was an afternoon, spent in her room with Adelaide.
“If you have time, Quint,” she had said to him on the first evening
after his arrival, “I hope we’ll see something of each other.”
“I have no engagements, Adelaide.”
So, when the time came: “Shall we just talk, this once?” she asked him.
They went up to her room.
It had been “Rhoda’s room” when the two sisters shared it. But Rhoda had
been married nearly a year. Yet, the old name and the old association
clung to Quincy as they arose from luncheon--Marsden, Adelaide, his
mother and himself.
“Well, children, I must run.” Sarah looked at her daughter. “It wouldn’t
hurt you, Adelaide, to come along and help your mother.” It was a case
of belated Christmas shopping--gifts Sarah had overlooked.
“Mother, Quint and I have planned a cozy afternoon upstairs in my room.”
Sarah gazed tragically at the window. The sleet pounded against it like
a snare-drum. She had discovered lately that Adelaide was very prone to
make a sanctuary in her room. She had to say something. This inspired
her.
“And what would you have done, if Rhoda were still here with you?” she
asked.
“But she isn’t, Mother.”
“Perhaps,” judged Marsden, opening a book, “it is only fair Adelaide
should have some benefit out of her loss of Rhoda.”
“Oh, very well, I’ll go alone,” Sarah shifted her point, with
unconscious agility. And once more she observed the storm, as if she had
been called upon to brave it. “Let your Mother go alone in the snow.”
“I’ll help you into the machine, Mama,” said Quincy. This irritated
Sarah. The mention of the car lessened the woman’s heroism in braving
such a storm to gladden a few more forgotten hearts. And what right had
a son to deprive a woman of her heroism, whom wealth had deprived
already of her less far-fetched qualities?
But at last, Sarah got off. As Marsden settled in his splendid chair, he
smiled quizzically at Adelaide, left alone with him for a minute.
“What are you going to talk about?” he asked.
The girl looked at her brother. He was nearly twenty-seven. His grey
eyes lay light and remote in the dark, unhealthy folds of his skin. She
looked at them. And they seemed unrelated to her brother. Her brother
was the cripple. The curl of his lips, the morbid delicacy of his
greying hair, the eternal pain that pinched his brow--these were her
brother; and the words that the curled lips had spoken. But those
remote, grey eyes! They were fair and bright and beckoned eerily.
Adelaide could not understand them. She could understand and answer only
her brother, the cripple. And at him, for his words, she was angry.
“What do you think?” she retorted.
“It’s beyond thought,” his mouth said. “To know what you will have to
say to Quincy would require inspiration.”
“Speak out,” his eyes asked her.
“Pooh!” She scowled and was silent.
But in the silence, this mystery of one to whom she lived so close came
uncomfortably nigh. She preferred the cynic-cripple, though his tongue
did sear her. He, at least, might be answered or escaped. She went
upstairs wondering why the ties of family were so strangely false, why
they solved so little and why, since they gave so little, they should
demand so much. It did not occur to her that the ties of family were
ties of least effort, glutton ties, carnal ties. It did not occur to her
that the tuft of white soul within her must revolt, by its very nature,
against a law that hallowed such! Adelaide was not strong enough to let
things like that occur to her. She merely wondered and went upstairs.
Quincy examined the books on the table, though they had not changed in
four months; nor in six. He scrutinized the pictures on the walls; he
examined a cheap photograph, in an elaborate ivory frame, of Sylvia who
had died the winter he was born. He resented, unconsciously, his
sister’s perpetuation of this traditional child. His mother could be
forgiven for dwelling on Sylvia and Josiah junior. But Adelaide had no
excuse. Somewhere within the boy, a recollection must have smouldered of
how his father had reckoned up his own unwelcome birth with the death of
his two favorites. But this childish embryon of memory had grown, from
the boy’s own rationalization, into a distrust of so sheerly sentimental
an attachment as must be Adelaide’s for a sister who had died when she
was three.
While Quincy moved about to hide his deep discomfiture at this set
occasion, and to submerge in casualness his qualms as to meeting
expectations, Adelaide sat calmly in an armless chair and waited for her
brother to subside. She ventured no word. She did not appear to dislike
this silence which was so patently wracking him. The truth was that she
was forcing herself to bear it. It hurt. But it was the one way, she
thought, of testing Quincy’s willingness to be a friend and to be loved.
That she might hazard a first step toward a desired consequence with
equal right, simply did not occur to Adelaide. She was the sort of girl
to whom social initiative was as repugnant as nakedness--and for the
self-same reason. The obscure channelings of sex in girls spread it at
times so widely from its normal moorings that the remotest mental
regions become colored, with the result that some amenities of social
life are as impossible for them as a crude, physical aggression. Most
girls of this girl’s age and background would have been just so silent
and so passive before a man from whom they awaited a proposal. Adelaide
hoped for a mere sisterly relation--the privilege of friendship with a
brother. Yet, with this seemingly humble dream, her way was that of a
girl aroused and wooed. And the reason, although she might never know
it, was that within, her condition also was the same.
Of course, Quincy did not understand. He saw merely that Adelaide was at
her ancient trick of silence and of resenting his--as if the right of
silence lay all with her, the need of speaking entirely with him. This,
with the set formality of their retiring to her room, and the portrait
of Sylvia and an indescribable something that was Adelaide herself,
conjoined to complete his mood. It was a mood pathetically different
from what Adelaide had hoped for. And this also dawned on Quincy:--that
it would have been easier for him had she succeeded.
In this mood, silence grew too oppressive and he began to speak. Wonder
was small that the girl’s first confession at his words was pain. But
from the discord of these two unrhythmed ones--a discord ashamed of
itself--came a great pity; and from this at length, a sort of rhythm
between them. So talk grew possible, and there was born, slow and
unheeded, the boy’s intuition:--that Adelaide was in the ruck and base
of life, and that, with her at life’s pinnacle, there had been room
there, too, for him.
She showed her wish to know about his friends. Quincy spoke of Garsted.
“Next time you come to town, why not bring him with you?”
“If I knew--” he stopped.
“If you knew what?” she asked. She could easily have completed his
remark. It had to do with his insecurity at home. He would not care to
bring a friend--granted it was allowed--and have himself humiliated
before a guest. Garsted had never seemed to understand his rank at home.
Garsted told him, in a year college would respect him. And his family
had had seventeen years.
Now, Quincy was silent. Adelaide blushed for him, in his emotion.
“I--I’ll see to it, he has a nice time. You know, we can take him to the
theatres. Dad isn’t stingy about the money.”
“No, but Mama is.”
“We’ll get the money from Dad.”
Quincy had found a stiff position in a chair--across the room from
Adelaide. Now he arose.
“Adelaide! That isn’t everything,” he rebuked her.
At least, Adelaide felt rebuked;--as if she had not known! as if it had
not been delicacy that made her also waive the issue!
“Quincy--don’t get angry with me.”
“I’m not!”
Once more, he picked up a book from the table near which, as if
unconsciously for help, he had found his seat. It was a folio volume
with colored pictures. They really interested him. So he turned them
over, one by one.
“If you’re not going to talk with me, Quincy--”
He placed away the book at once. And they began afresh.
Another remark opened the problem of the track-team. By now, something
was tiring deep down in them. Each of these failures in rapport made the
new effort wearier. But on they struggled, with a heroism that was the
more poignant for its hopeless inarticulation.
Quincy’s attempt to explain about the track-team suffered from an
earlier behavior of the others. This subject had come up, the first
evening at dinner. Suddenly, he had seen the expression about the soft
mouth of Jonas that had been there in the old days when his one-time
idol placed a captured fly in a spider-web. And Jonas had said, knowing
already:
“You did not make a fraternity, did you?”
The expression had stung. “I would have, if I’d wanted to stay on the
track-team.”
This was beyond Jonas’ comprehension. “If you’d _wanted_ to?” he
sneered. And the conversation changed before a saving word from
Adelaide. For Adelaide had noticed. And now, in Quincy’s rigid manner,
she knew that she was suffering for Jonas. Adelaide knew much. But her
mind lacked a motor. And so hampered, it could not reach those
increments which are the flower of knowledge.
Quincy recalled her saving him. He deemed her act the result of mercy,
of pity--as if she shared Jonas’ incredulity but lacked his wish to make
him suffer.
“I just didn’t wish to bind myself. Lots of men in college thought I was
right. That’s how I got to know Garsted.” He began gropingly and ended
in a hurry.
“Don’t you think, perhaps, it was wrong to antagonize your class?”
“I do not. Damn the class.”
“Well, then you were right, if you think that way about it. But
then--but then, you can scarcely blame the fraternities.”
“And who blamed ’em?” cried Quincy.
Of course, it was Adelaide who blamed them. She was about to say so. But
evidently, from his outburst, her next step must be to concur in his
refusal to.
“Of course,” she smiled, “I don’t blame them. Who cares?”
There was a pause. Adelaide got up, came to his side:
“Well, _I_ love you, Quincy dear.”
Audiences laugh when clumsy acrobats fall over tables. So it is fair to
assume that the gods laughed at Adelaide.
The conversation died once more. And when it was renewed with a last
painful effort, it was far less personal. At once, now, Quincy threw
himself in it. He careered freely, happily. And in this abandon, his
remarks seemed brutal to his sister. It was her turn to be hurt in this
pitiful ricochet.
Garsted had told him he had a mistress. Quincy gloried in this. He knew
all of Garsted’s arguments against Puritan morality. Here was another
case of sex gratified in purely psychic channels. The boy launched upon
a eulogy of his friend’s free life.
“Isn’t he going to marry her?” asked Adelaide. She was gripping
herself. She did not mind this open talk with Quincy. Her bringing-up
forbade it. And the discrepancy between the tingling pleasure that she
felt and the horror that she should have felt, made her insecure. So she
gripped herself and gave Quincy rein. Adelaide rode horseback--now that
they were rich. A vision flashed across her of her latest mount,
galloping in Central Park. She had always felt a similar strange discord
between the prim Park and her joy in galloping. But the vision went,
without a challenge.
“Oh,” her brother was saying, “when he has money enough, if he still
loves her, I guess he’ll marry her.”
“But suppose, Quincy, suppose he stops loving her!”
“Well?”
“Don’t you see, how terrible it would be? What could the poor girl do?”
The boy looked at his sister. She seemed actually suffering. But the
wealth of feeling that flowered in her pain had, as usual, gone wrong.
He did not care to have his friend’s course criticized. So he attacked
his sister, by extolling his friend’s mistress.
“She’s the sort of girl, I suppose,” he answered sharply, “who has other
qualifications to recommend her, besides virginity.”
Tears came to Adelaide’s eyes. Quincy was contrite. He jumped up and
kissed her. But her tears had made her ugly. Her tender little lids were
red. Her hair seemed a trifle colorless. She was three years older than
he. Why should he be able to make her weep? He despised her for it. This
rôle, he disliked more heartily than being bullied. Could he not find a
balance somewhere? or a pleasurable subjection? He thought of Rhoda and
of Mrs. Deering. And the tenderness of Adelaide seemed cloying....
Soon, Rhoda came in for tea. And there was Adelaide--perversely at the
bottom.
“Well, have you had a nice long chat?” were her first words.
Quincy could not help thinking of her as Mrs. Theodore Cram. Her husband
was so important a man. Quincy disliked him so much. And he was so
serenely above any feeling, even of dislike, for Quincy. All this hurt.
Rhoda was fresh and cool and full as compared to Adelaide, who now
looked moist and warm and straggly.
The sisters embraced heartily. Quincy got Rhoda’s hand.
“You’re getting too old to kiss,” she smiled at him. Previously,
perhaps, he had not been old enough?
“I am not,” cried Quincy. It was one of those quick flashes of
effrontery that mark the strain of deprivation in timid boys.
He came forward and held Rhoda’s head, vise-like in his hands. Quincy
was of full height. His tall, nervous figure bent over the voluptuous
lined woman in striking contrast. While she was everywhere firmly
composed, his form was uncertain and angular and loose.
“Behave yourself, Quincy!” Rhoda struggled.
The boy laughed feverishly. His hands held her head. But her body was
writhing away. He meant to kiss her cheek. But Rhoda flashed back her
head and his mouth skimmed her lips. His heart melted with the flame of
that instant. And then, she broke away altogether. Quincy stood where
the event had happened, arms still out, hands still before him, feeling
the floor gratefully beneath his feet.
“Why, you impudent boy!” Rhoda sneered at him; “how dared you?”
“You talk as if a brother hasn’t a right to kiss his sister,” said
Adelaide.
Rhoda turned upon her in a white fury: “You--shut up!”
And Quincy felt Adelaide melt into a corner. He was still looking at
Rhoda.
“I am sorry if I hurt you,” he said.
“You did hurt me, you little fool,” the woman’s instinct for giving pain
was unerring; “why else do you think I’m angry? You hurt me--here.” She
placed a hand above her waist. “If that’s the sort of nonsense you learn
at college, my dear Quincy--”
Then she had not even been angry at the kiss? This submerged the boy’s
spirits altogether.
And now, with a quick change of mood and a sweet word, she drew Adelaide
out of her repentant corner. The two sisters seated themselves for a
quiet chat. The servant brought tea on a mahogany platter, based with
glass. With a few healing smiles, there was Adelaide, once more glad to
bask in Rhoda’s sunshine. Quincy drew up a chair in order to have a
place in the sun. But he fared ill. Rhoda’s resentment took the
direction of ignoring him. And Adelaide was feeble at bringing him
within the conversation. Rhoda feinted her attempts with phrases that
recalled the hand-twist of a clever fencer. The boy was being ruthlessly
punished. He had had hopes of Rhoda, now he was a college man. And here
he was in disgrace with her! What a clumsy, inopportune brute he had
been!
Soon, he gave up his desperate attempts--they made him bleed, although
she ignored them--to play an integral rôle, at least for the moment, in
her consciousness. He retired spiritually. He would have gone away
altogether, but he was afraid that his going would not be noticed; this
would hurt too much. So he sat there, gloomily, brooding. And again,
without restraint or question, his mind fell upon that unknown quality
in his experience, Julia Deering. Were all women like either Adelaide or
Rhoda? He feared, then, Mrs. Deering must be like the latter. She was
splendid, also. And splendid women despised men. How came it, they ever
married? What curious streak of humility and mercy made them do this? He
knew women were incomprehensible by general consent. This must be the
crux of their enigma: that, despite their splendor, suddenly they gave
themselves to man! And then, some of them grew to be like his own
mother. He was sure she had been like Rhoda, also. Adelaide resembled
Jonas and his father. Marsden and Rhoda and he had the grey colorings of
his mother.
Yet, where spiritually did he fit in? He was alone. He used to think he
was only an adopted child, in the early days of familial agony. Then, he
had allowed of his mother, excluding still his father. For some secret
reason, it was decided that his father call Quincy “son.” But he knew
his lack of authorship. That was why he despised Quincy. Also, he was
jealous. For Quincy’s real father had not been so fat, so gruff, so
stupid, with breath so foul smelling and hands crusted with little
stains. But now, he failed to feel the link even with his mother. For if
there was a link with her, surely it must extend to Marsden and to
Rhoda. And this was palpably untrue. Oh! it was all a grim play of
nature. Doubtless, this fat, crushing, vulgar man was really the only
father he had ever had; doubtless this woman with a submerged soul like
violets under stagnant waters--was it not patent in her eyes?--had
justice in calling him her son. Doubtless, the young woman who had
wounded him and the girl who spoke an irritating language he could not
respond to, were really sisters. It was a grim jest of nature. He might
as well crunch cookies that were good and look forward to the less
sneering world of which college was the gate. And yet, at college also--
The door opened and his mother was there.
“Quincy, don’t spoil your appetite for dinner.”
She had first busily kissed Rhoda, maternally kissed Adelaide, and
inquiringly kissed him. He had held a half-eaten cookie during all this
cycle.
It was now night. The snow had subsided. Most of it had melted as it
fell. An odor of moist discomfort came from the streets with Sarah--the
odor of the city shopping for Christmas gifts. It was warm and cozy in
Adelaide’s room. But as Quincy stood against the window and looked out,
this petty ease lay in the back of his brain like a sucking plaster. The
street was grey and brown. The lamp-light stumbled through the mists and
vapors. A motor car went swaying, snorting; its reeking tires seemed to
cut swaths in the thick gutter, like hot irons.
His mother was reciting her adventures in half-a-dozen stores. Also, she
was repeating for Rhoda a series of petty household troubles which
already he and Adelaide had heard four times. But Adelaide never seemed
to grow impatient. And the majestic Rhoda was at attention. Quincy
found in this no virtue.
Little huddled figures were sprayed through the street. They moved
slowly, but laboriously. They were wet and irritated by the weather.
Soon they would enter homes, like his, and recite to those they found
there, eager to listen, the same round of petty trouble and smug
adventure and fallacious sentiment. Would they find one among their
various audiences who, like himself, objected? like himself was there
through a grim jest of Nature? like himself, longed to be elsewhere? And
if so, why could not he, Quincy, discover him? Why could not they be
given one to another? A delivery wagon came splashing to their house and
stopped. The horse shook his drenched hide. A boy leaped out, laden with
packages. He saw the quick crunch of his feet, the stamp of the horse’s
hoofs. And then, the bell rang loud and long. Everything outside, this
sound reminded him, was muffled. It and he were inexorably separate.
Yet, the house and the interminably repeated talk in the back of his
brain--was it a solace for this isolation? The wagon churned its way
from sight. Vaguely, he heard the rattle of the wheels. After it was
gone, an elevated train mounted uptown with a slow rhythm. A car’s clear
clang came to him, draped in fog. Two men trudged on the farther
sidewalk. One of them laughed and slapped his comrade’s shoulder. The
other pulled his hat low and turned up the collar of his coat. They
disappeared--for ever. The lamps glared in the darkness that kept away
from them. And his mother’s voice crushed on the melody of all these
vagrant notes, bathed in the minor harmony of the night.
“Quincy--father’s just come. Suppose you go down and greet him and tell
him we’re all up here.”
* * * * *
Then, there was the day--a Sunday--when his mother was ill and Quincy
stayed with her, in her bedroom.
Adelaide had gone on an excursion. Jonas and Marsden never bothered. In
the afternoon, for a while, his father came as if to perform a duty. On
the mandate of his mother that he needed air, Quincy strolled out alone.
This too, fell into the Pattern, as he traced back for it.
After the departure of the others, Quincy’s visit had begun with the
reading aloud of two columns in the paper and of five pages in a
magazine. This effort tired the good Sarah who, in the Harriet days,
with an equal illness would not have deemed it worthy of mention to her
husband. When Sarah was tired, she grew nervous. And like so many
nervous women, she balanced herself with talk. The effect that women
force by dint of words is a stimulant for them as insidious as liquor.
The volume of words is a mere subsidiary, like the number of glasses.
The effect, in either instance, is the heart of the habit. In the
drinker the effect is immediate; in the talker, it rebounds from the
attention of the victims talked to. In this way, it will be seen that of
the two vices, talking is the worse. Drinking may confine its ravages to
the drinker. At most, it will aggrieve only his close relations. The
talker, however, is a curse-carrier with no conscience and no limit.
Unfortunately, Quincy’s mother had lapsed into this weakness. She had
been repressed, silent, really noble for so long a term! She had the
right to wreak vengeance on society. Moreover, she loved her son. This
called for an intense reparation.
She lectured him, that morning. For three hours, she trod on his soul,
harassed his spirit and crucified his secret self for being secret--here
lay the real reason of her irritation. And then, she said:
“Dearie, would you like to have your dinner brought up, so you can eat
with your mother and keep her company?”
Of course, Quincy was delighted. So Quincy’s food was brought to him on
the same mahogany platter with glass base. And meanwhile, the maternal
service flowed. The misunderstanding boy writhed in the quandary of two
necessities--loving this woman and being hurt by her. The hand of the
gay God was still too strong on him; he did not know that these two
elements--love and pain--must be rejoicingly accepted. Often, his mother
spoke of how her children had made her suffer.
“You can never know, my boy, what a mother goes through, for a child.”
Such remarks also, were designed to instil love and veneration. But
again, the gay God intervened. The idea of pain still horrified the boy.
Its perversion into a boast still filled him with disgust. He would fain
have had it that motherhood be joyous; that the best things be the happy
things of life. His mother’s lugubrity in speaking of her works of love
struck him as sacrilege. And to a gay God, it was.
Quincy was simply not grown-up. But it seemed to Sarah that in matters
of sympathy and feeling, he was strangely backward.
“I should like to be able to talk to you like a man, my dear. You are no
longer a child.”
And through divers thrusts, Quincy learned what she meant by this. To be
like a man was to be moved by ugly things--like business and money and
machinery. To be like a man was to be edified by things not only ugly
but wrong,--like pain, and that murder of self called sacrifice. To be
like a man was to agree, in everything, with a battered, complaining
woman whose drowned violet eyes had always been a mother’s. He looked at
her. He tried to understand and to consent. But it was revolting work.
“Think of the privilege your father has given you,” she said, “in
letting you grow up in New York.”
“Mama--New York is ugly!”
“It is the center of the greatest country of the world,” Sarah replied.
“Isn’t that of importance?”
Quincy was moved by her eloquence. Perhaps, that was of importance. Yet
something in him mutely stirred negation. He was impressed. But he could
not agree. And this conflict fevered him.
“An ugly metropolis is less important than a wild-flower!” he cried,
stung to inspiration by his failure to express himself calmly.
Sarah smiled. She had lived among wild-flowers; she knew. She had
drudged among them; sweated among them; wanted among them. She was
angered by such dangerous illusions in a son of hers.
“My dear--you are talking nonsense. You’d do far better to grasp your
opportunities, than to go wool-gathering--like a poet.”
“I am not a poet,” Quincy defended himself.
“That’s precisely it, my dear.” Sarah rose on her pillows and leaned
toward him, taking his hand. Her skin was very grey and rough beside the
whiteness of her night-gown and the smoothness of her bed-clothes.
Brown streaks robbed the grey in her hair of dignity. It was drawn close
over her scalp and a single, poorly braid was caught up and fastened at
the back. Her arms were bone and her throat was a rugose mass of folds
that lacked even the pomp of fat. Sarah was an old wreck for her fifty
years. And Quincy looked at her. He was no physiognomist. But it pierced
him that his mother was an ill argument for her own ways of living.
“That’s just it, my dear,” Sarah repeated. “You’re not a poet. You’re an
ordinary person like the rest of us. We’ve got to get our beauty--not in
wild flowers, but in all this--” she waved her tortured hand about the
room and let it fall on the rich linen.
“If your skin were more white and smooth, little mother,” Quincy thought
silently, “I wouldn’t care if the bed-clothes were of coarse cotton.”
His mother was still speaking. “You must work hard, dear. You must
prepare yourself to get along in the world. You know--you mustn’t expect
too much from your father. He will give you an education. But remember,
there are five of you. And, of course, Marsden and the girls will
deserve most of what little there is. Only by working now, my dear, can
you earn the comfort and time to do your day dreaming later.”
“And when my skin is yellow, I also will have white linen,” the boy
thought to himself.
Oh! he demanded so little. And all the plenty that was forced on him
contained not that little. Everywhere, about him, above him, that little
was. Yet, he could not reach it. He did not know how; he did not dare,
even if he had known! For it seemed to him that all the world of men
was a conspiracy against his having this mite he needed, this mite that
had once been strewn through all the world and that now, only the
despised were left to revel in. And he did not dare. For, vague as his
knowledge was, he saw that the arch-conspirators against his having it
were those he loved. To gain his little would be to wound these loved
ones. With the thought, his heart broke in two.
So Quincy merely sat there. And finally, he allowed his mussed head with
its flood of delicate black hair to fall on his mother’s faultless
linen, where her old hand could stroke it. And in this posture of strain
and of devotion, the woman that gripped his soul as once her womb had
gripped his body, gave forth the poison-nourishment that he drank in.
When was he to be born of her, again?
“Quincy, my boy,” she said, “there are so many ways for you to change,
that it gives your mother a big pain to think of them. You must be
thankful for these pains, my dear. A mother’s suffering should be a
treasure and a reminder of duty, that you should never forget.”
And the old, weary canons of a herd-race, hedging in its deformities and
greed against the flaming grandeur of a nature it has denied, were
vented to make this child conform, in whom a tinge of the old gaieties
and loves still dared to linger. A mother’s advice! How stubborn is the
strength of man, that through these generations man’s tender sprouts
should have outlived a mother’s advice! By the old laws, she bears her
child--the old laws of nature and of joy, of fertility and courage and
abandon. And by the new laws, she rears him--the laws of compromise and
pain, of soul-oppression and cowardice and cover. And by the fair love
of the first law, she presses her advantage for the law of the herd that
claims her creature as a slave. A queen, conceiving in her regal bed,
enslaved and giving birth to a slave-child. Here is the cycle of most
women.
Quincy held his head low as his mother admonished and advised him. It
was all still dim and uncertain in his mind, why these things seemed
wrong to him; why they revolted him; why the common wisdom and love of
his mother should be despised. Quincy did not understand, as she went
on, how apt it was that his head should be held low.
A glimmer there was, in the Pattern--he saw that, later--of the truth:
that he had been so moved that day, only because the woman who spoke was
his mother. Quincy knew that she was stupid; that she parroted her
moralities and arguments; that mentally, she was a slave of the
herd-leaders who cared no whit for either of them. He saw, then, the
fallacy in this: that by reason of a mother’s love, he should have
hearkened to a plea voiced for a vast, impersonal machine to which he
mattered nothing save as a conforming cog. Of course, that part of his
mother was also such a cog. It had no right to exploit the bonds of the
real mother who knew and cared for no machine.
All this bred resentment. And there began for Quincy the period in which
he despised his mother, judged her ruthlessly and had little thought for
her when she was not about.
* * * * *
His father came in at four. So Quincy left for a walk.
That walk was in the Pattern. But when he traced back his feelings for
his father, he could not fix, as in the other cases, upon some event of
this fortnight that lodged within him as a form. Thought and emotion
about his father rushed back with an indefeasible momentum to the days
of Harriet, to his running away or to the nights when he was sent up,
a-tremble, through the hollow house, to bed or on an errand. As he
traced back, now, for signs of his father that were alive, all he caught
up was that his entering on that afternoon had spread a surface of great
toleration upon his mother’s words. He had gone forth in peace with her.
Perhaps, he recalled enough of the old days to feel that she might need
his sympathy, being alone with her husband. There had been such times.
Quincy had cold crisp hours for his walk. He went northward in the Park.
At first he had had a qualm. He had told his mother New York was ugly.
He had escaped to sophistry and metaphysics in order to prove with
Garsted that it was beautiful. It did not occur to the boy that since in
both cases he had been sincere, he had no cause for worry. He racked his
brain in order to find out in which instance he had said the truth. And
to his mother, he felt the debt of an apology. But it occurred to him
how ludicrous it would be to beg his mother’s pardon on such a subject.
She would think him wilder and more scatter-brained than ever.
Doubtless, she had long since forgotten his remark. At least, she
attached no importance to it. This aggrieved Quincy. And in his new-born
resentment, he forgot about inconsistencies and pardons. Soon, he was
engrossed in the City.
This was at the point where the Park ends and Eighth Avenue begins
afresh, with a new acquisition in the clatter and grime and darkness of
the elevated structure. During his swift walk in the Park, it had been
simple to cogitate upon himself. The Park did not hold Quincy. It was a
rough, varied and knotted expanse of dirty snow and gaunt, dwarfed
trees. It had none of the mystery, none of the tonic, of a winter
woodland. It was a large back-yard of the City. Through it, cut wide,
cleared swathes for City vehicles and narrow ones, less cleared, more
tortuous, for those inhabitants that went on foot. There were few
people, though the day had been bright. It was too cold. New Yorkers
suffer such inclemency of life that the least inclemency of weather rids
them of spirit. So Quincy had advanced through the Park without a thrill
of nature. Though he was a messenger of her spirit--he who ran
bare-headed through the woods--this cut-in mass of rocks and trees had
no voice for him. The girders of steel and stone that on all sides bound
the Park have smothered the soul which that fragment of forest must once
have had. Central Park is a half-dead thing, at best. Its winter snows
are grey; its summer trees are grey; its autumn fever is a wasting chill
without the flame. Some day, inevitably, this must be true also of the
great Park in the Bronx.
But now, on the noisy Avenue, matters were different.
Quincy recalled his feeling that the City’s life spoke to him. Night was
there. Most of the shops were closed. But beneath the blinds of the
saloons, lights shone and a welcome winked. In the tall dun buildings,
all enterprise seemed choked like the space, into a rigid ever-recurrent
form. The movement on the Avenue was dogged, outcast, heavy. But its
dullness did not penetrate behind the brick and plaster. The trains
crashed past angrily as if they had preferred to linger, and also watch.
Beneath the structure, the lights seemed badly nourished. Those in the
houses were of a yellow that suggested malady and poison. It was the
life throbbing in these that spoke to Quincy. What did it say?
Something he had heard before: something he had already suffered. Again,
there was the strident tongue of metal and the lips that bled. Again,
the lips lay quiveringly forward, piteous and eloquent, while the tongue
lurked back and darted forth in the swings of pain. And behind the mouth
were words; below the rhythm was a music, as fire is beneath the smoke.
It was his own experience; it was his family; it was his life. All of
the City spoke it--sang it--the obscure, muffled rooms, and the frangent
traffic; the glimmer of breath in the dark hallways and the flash of
commerce on the elevated structure, as a train met ice with its current.
The entire symphony of twisted, agonizing life, bent upon false errands,
hungering with false lusts, deforming the red heart of nature, spoke out
to Quincy. And that which he heard was that which he already knew, that
whence he had come bleeding and whither he must return to bleed some
more.
And so, with subtle intertwinings, this vast impersonal life and his own
narrow living became one, as the Pattern whirled.
There were many other salient parts of it; many other clarified events,
as he traced back. And the veins and curvings were to dispart and spread
and multiply. But even the tight seed was a weighty form, lodged in his
mind....
* * * * *
Greatly increased with the new year, Quincy had returned to college.