At this point, Fortune resumed a hand. She had been singularly absent in
Quincy’s life since her intrusive visit of his first two years when the
fate of the two eldest children, the accident to Marsden and the Burt
finances had so obliquely glanced against his own. From then, his life
had been pure enough of hazard to be in that regard exceptional. For
hazard is the term we apply to striking moments; and each life by its
own testimony, is replete with such. But now, upon his return to
college, after that purging and clarifying fortnight, an apt
facilitation came to his affairs. The Deerings gave a party. There were
about a score of guests. And Quincy was among them.
He was the one member of his class to be invited. Garsted was his sole
haven from the social waves. And Garsted, having other friendships
there, had other responsibilities. In consequence, the boy was somewhat
lost. The gathering had the proclivity of breaking up into small groups,
discussing in hushed and exclusive tones. Over these fragmentary units,
the clear loud laughter of Professor Deering rolled at times, himself
the heart of the largest fragment. Quincy was afraid to make himself one
of this, since his relation with Professor Deering might be so easily
abused. He did not know how to join with any of the others. So not long
after the onset of the evening, there he was dangling, miserable at
first, then conscious of his misery and at length fearful lest this
consciousness in him project to those about him and so crystallize his
discord with them. In this state his hostess rescued him.
He had scarce noticed her before. She was a much used pigment in the
bright picture’s pallet. But she had scarcely been a figure. Her general
affability with her reserve kept her from distinctness. But now he saw
her coming, directly toward him. Her air was not that of a rescuer. She
seemed to be saying: “I know you are having a splendid time without me.
But I’m greedy. I’m not having a splendid time without you.” This was
half the battle. She began casually and soon they were seated together.
Fitfully, others joined her. But he alone remained. She left him to
persuade an eminent pianist to perform. But she returned to listen to
the music. The artist played several complex pieces--modern--that
stirred Quincy potently.
“I can’t understand that music,” said Mrs. Deering.
“I’m not trying to,” he said, “I get all relaxed and then it comes in
and--understands me.”
This answer seemed to impress her hugely.
“That was an infinite answer, Mr. Burt,” she said. And, then, the
pianist joined them. He was introduced to Mr. Carvalho. And his remark
about the music was repeated, as a gem, word for word. In her mouth, it
rang profound. Mr. Carvalho, also, was impressed.
“Probably, you compose?” he asked.
The bringing in of the pianist meant the loss of Mrs. Deering, who left
now, and did not return. There had been fully half-an-hour of her
company. And the energy which she had aroused propelled him happily
through the remainder of the evening. As soon as he was free of Mr.
Carvalho, to whom he had absolutely naught to say, and who forsook him
as soon as he politely could in order to trail after Mrs. Deering,
Quincy crossed into the study where the Professor held an intent group.
At the rear of his room which Quincy, of course, knew, the door had been
thrown open into a smaller chamber in which stood the piano. This was
Mrs. Deering’s. It was rather closely furnished and fully ornamented. It
contrasted strikingly with the naked, larger room. Here they had
sat--close to the music. Quincy did not catch many details on this
occasion. He recalled a languid couch, littered with barbaric
cushions--the modern German school--and bowered by a canopy of orange
silk that turned the blue base below it into a liquid marine color. He
recalled several cozy arm-chairs wherein guests were ensconced deeply, a
tea-table of Japanese wood upon which was a case of _cloisonné_. Out of
it, the guests took cigarettes. This was essentially a setting for the
hostess. Her figure, thin and tense and simply draped in a dull violet
dress, stood out nobly in this rather lavish mass. Even so, the generous
and ample form of the Professor was well marked against the scant rigor
of his study.
Quincy found him sprawling in a Windsor fan-backed chair--an old spindle
of oak. One heavy leg was thrown over the side, the other curled up on
the seat. His evening clothes, which were a bit too tight, had the
semblance of broadcloth in the soft haze of the candles. The Professor
puffed on a rich, red briar pipe.
“Bring a chair up--right here. There’s room,” he hailed him from a
distance.
As he came, Quincy felt a strained pressure about him. These half-dozen
men had banded themselves into a unit, designed for the momentary
purpose of enjoying the big man that sat among them. Tacitly,
unconsciously they had grown together; they felt together; they gave out
a voice together. Their vibrance murmured adversely at this intrusion.
They were a crowd, conservative, greedy like all crowds. A primitive
mist came from them. Behind, in the other room, such groups were
also--fashioned for their own delectation, to enjoy their hostess or
some other person who had something to give out. Everywhere, Quincy felt
these subtle bands, these correlated breathings, these intense
concentrations of many energies upon some little temporary point. He was
unused to gatherings. He could still understand them. But he could not
understand himself. There was no hint in him of why, alone after his
half hour with the Professor’s wife, he had gone straight toward the
Professor.
In Quincy’s mind remained the print of these two rooms, undulant in
their candle-glow, where many persons sat, restrained, vital, softened
only by the tremor of the lights, subdued by skin-deep custom; yet
eager, all, for acquisition and enjoyment to a degree that rubbed
menacingly close to the frailties that hemmed them in. In his mind was
the great, sanguine figure of the Professor, dominating, laughing at
this little crowded drama; was the sharp, nervous body of Julia Deering,
a-field in it, like some splendid animal that furrows. That was all.
But Garsted told him that he had acquitted himself with honor. And that
Fairfax and Littleton had asked about him....
During the rest of freshman year, the boy was at the Deering home
perhaps six times. Outside, he saw the Professor seldom. But no more was
needed to establish him as idol in that youthful sanctuary. Garsted, of
course, was the high priest. And though the ultimate presence was but
briefly, and then scantily, approached, Garsted was always there. The
junior had constant recourse to Mr. Deering in his work. Also, he was a
friend of Julia Deering. This was an added bond for Quincy.
“I knew her when she was Julia Cairn,” he told him. “She is of old New
England stock, but her parents had so little sense of fitness as to
permit her to be born in Omaha, where they had settled. She’s been
married only three years, you know. From private school in New York, she
went to Paris. No--she did not study there. She has never studied, that
I know of. After Paris, she returned to Omaha! Actually! And stood it
two years. By then, she had been made president of so many women’s clubs
and circles, forcibly--you know her opinion of such truck--that she
escaped to an aunt in Bangor, Maine. From cellar to refrigerator. Next,
she came to New York and began to work.”
“I thought you said she had never studied.”
“She never did. But she worked. She got a job as teacher of English in
the private school which she had graduated from, five years before.
Without a degree, without anything very much, except her power to get
anything she desires. Her knowledge in English literature is rather
rudimentary. But she had read tremendously in French and Spanish and
Italian.”
“Why, then, didn’t she get a job in one of these languages?” asked
Quincy.
“I don’t know. Except that Julia Cairn never did what was expected, any
more than does Julia Deering now. It was down there I heard of her and
met her--at a silly tea, which she veined with gold. A friend of mine,
Betty Robinson, used to tell me about their amazing lectures in English
literature, delivered by a Miss Cairn. It seems her course was devoted
to a systematic proof of the inferiority of English letters to the
French. Think of it! In a respectable private school. And her adoring
principal never minded. While the girls in their French course were
reading Erckmann-Chatrian, Halèvy, Ohnet and other fourth-rate writers,
she, in the English department, made them acquainted with Flaubert and
Balzac, Zola and Stendhal, so that they might see for themselves how
unutterably second-rate were Eliot and Thackeray. She made them read the
Englishmen. But she made them love the real European literatures. In
that way, she justified teaching what she had often told me she deemed a
language that has been ‘decadent since the time of Swift.’ Lead up to
these things, yourself. She’ll tell you.”
“And what happened then?” Quincy was not interested in a decadent
literature.
“She taught in that one school until the principal, Doctor Tomley, went
and died. She was twenty-six, then, at least. Although I’m not sure of
her age.”
“Did she lose her job or leave it?”
“She says she was told to go, by the new man who had been assistant
master and who probably, in that menial position, had learned to hate
her. I am convinced she could never have found another school to
tolerate her original ideas of the duties of an English teacher. But she
did not try. She insists she could have won over another principal, had
she been forced to. It is highly probable. Certainly, Dr. Tomley had
agreed with none of her views. And yet, he kept her there. At all
events, the boast never went to the proof.”
“Well?” Quincy was impatient.
“Well, one fine day, she married Deering--bless his great soul. That’s
all. And came up here.”
Here, somehow, with the entrance of the Professor upon the scene,
Quincy’s real interest began. But his friend’s news ended.
“I know nothing about that, Quint,” he smiled. “One never really asks
Julia Deering anything. One inclines toward a subject. And if she
inclines back, one gets something. On the subject of her personal life,
she has always _declined_, with a firm sweetness. I have no idea, even
of where they met or how. No one else has, either. I suppose,” the
upperclassman threw a cigarette out of the window and reached for a
pipe, “I suppose they were married and will live happily ever after.
Julia Deering is so damned exceptional that it will be just like her to
do that most commonplace of things.”
“Is living happily ever after really commonplace?”
“Well,” Garsted laughed, “if it is rare, she is all the more sure to do
it. So I’ve got you, either way.”
On the campus, however, there was a legend about this pair. College men
have myths for their distinguished teachers. But like all myths, this
one expressed exclusively the myth-makers; and it was Garsted’s
conviction that there was no truth in it save as a commentary on the
undergraduate state of mind.
It was this: that the big, gentle man who was over forty when the
marriage happened, had been proposed to by correspondence. The letter
was so brilliantly couched, its choice of phrases was so concise, so
just, so Greek, that the scholar wired to the writer to appear at once.
Julia Cairn came on the following train and they were married that
afternoon by the college president, who was a minister of the gospel.
The legend went on to relate that the writer of the happy letter was not
Mrs. Deering at all, but one of her girl pupils. This beautiful but
anonymous victim had been caught by her teacher writing in class. Her
letter was detected and confiscated; later on employed with slight
corrections, to fit the purpose of Miss Cairn. Since the Professor’s
discovery of his wife’s plagiarism, the myth concluded, the pair’s lot
had been a miserable one. But Mrs. Deering was too dominant to be got
rid of.
Of course, Quincy laughed at this legend. But its conclusion--that the
marriage was unhappy, that the great man had been betrayed, that he
needed sympathy and rescue--stuck attractively in his mind. For this
very reason, perhaps, he failed to see how the myth reflected the
student body’s general emotional condition. As Garsted told him, since
his state also was reflected by the myth, there was no mystery in his
failure to psychologize it.
It was plain, all of that freshman year, however, that strange conflicts
raged in the boy about the Deering household.
“She always comes in and bothers him,” he remarked. “And the minute she
comes in, he tells her just what we’ve been talking about.”
“He knows you don’t mind,” said Garsted.
“But I do!”
“Will you stop confiding in him? Doesn’t that prove you don’t object?”
At length came an hour alone with her.
“Come in to see _me_, some afternoon,” she called to him from the
stairs, as the Professor and he sat in the study. Later, as he was
leaving, he found her watering the flowers. She was dressed in a frock
of faint rose. A bonnet hid all of her black hair. Her hands were
covered with sod.
“Come next Monday, Mr. Burt,” she said, scarce looking up from her work,
and not in the least anxious as to an answer. Quincy found it awkward to
accept to the back of her head. So he went on, without a word, perfectly
aware that he would be expected.
His anticipation of the visit was perturbed. He was fearful of what it
would entail. He was unwilling to leave it to hazard. He improvised
their dialogue; he edited his inventions and kept constantly
transforming them. All of his fancies were delightful. In them, he
impressed Mrs. Deering greatly. And in the later ones, when he gained
courage, she told him that she liked him more than any other of the
students. She confided in him what she had kept hidden from Garsted--the
secrets of her life. Quincy did not go into details with this. He
thought he might best leave that to her. But at the end, he went
completely disgusted with himself. He knew that the reality and his
imaginings would not agree. In his own fancies, he had exhausted the
pleasant possibilities. Infallibly, therefore, that which was going to
take place could not be pleasant. As he rang the bell, he felt that he
had injured the prospect of a happy time by imagining that happy time.
And then, as she opened the door for him, he forgot his speculations.
He began living in the present.
Before the summer, there were two more tea hours with her. Each of them
stood alone. No word uttered at one could ever have been confused with
any word uttered at the others. Yet, despite their clearness, they were
indissoluble. They lay together in Quincy’s mind as the boundary to a
great and vague impression. The vague impression was first; behind,
remoter, were these clear visits. As the boy envisaged them, it was as
if, before them, Julia Deering had not existed. Instinctively, he
accepted this: that before them, she had not existed, although his
reason told him otherwise. And of course, his reason did not count. In
like fashion, does a primitive people accept a day and an event when the
world began. Its reason also, had it been consulted, would have judged
otherwise.
* * * * *
“Why am I interested in the household life of a philosopher? Why do I
resent his wife yet dream of her? Why, when I dwell on his perfections,
does she seem to mar them? Why, when I let her vision come does his seem
to dim? What business are all these things to me? I am a protégé of
Professor Deering. Each year, out of the incoming mass, he selects a few
like me. I have interested a woman happening to be his wife, who, being
an interesting woman, is naturally capable of interest in another. There
is nothing more. Yet my mind goes--like fingers picking rags--hoping for
a fabulous jewel; tremulously. What is wrong with me?”
These questions Quincy put to himself, as the sun mellowed and the
spring burst forth from the brown earth and the haggard trees. Quincy
took them with him on his country runs. The ground was damp with
moisture. Maple buttons stood on the long twigs. And as he ran or
sauntered or reclined on a dry rock, garlanded in the shoots of little
elms and oaks, the question rounded like a fist, hardened and struck him
silent.
All of that spring this phenomenon was repeated. There would sprawl the
questions, pricking or stroking him--no more. Suddenly, a vital force
would encompass, then compress them. They would become a fist and strike
him. He would startle, resist, give way. And then, as suddenly, the fist
would once more disintegrate. Again, there would be relaxation until the
following blow. All of that spring, moreover, there was no conclusion.
Certain things were plain enough.
Professor Deering was the greatest man in the world. His friendship was
priceless. But Julia Deering was the first woman in the world willing to
consort with him. Was that less a treasure? And why should it be? Why
did some sickly sense within him tell him of a conflict between these
two possessions? He had a mind; he had a soul. Did these two possessions
menace one another? Perhaps that explained the mist about the two new
human elements. But with all this, the boy’s head hurt. And his mind
helped him out, through some centrifugal tangent.
There was nothing really personal in the relation of Quincy and Julia
Deering. There was nothing really personal in the relation of Quincy and
Lawrence Deering. The personal, in either instance, was the boy’s
contribution. The man believed to have discovered in him a mind; he had
not gone far enough yet with him to view this, save as a specimen, as a
relief, perhaps, in his work. The woman thought to have found in him a
spirit. She also had not gone far enough to adventure there, preferring
to bring it up within the scope of her own play. Quincy, quite with an
equal egoism, had subjected these to his own lights. But his lights were
feebler than their medium. So it was he who was refracted, rather than
they who were transfigured. Quincy was the suffering one; for Quincy was
the changing one.
All this was a whirling in the dark for him. He understood so little.
His year at college seemed so sounding a failure. What had it got him?
* * * * *
He sat on a rock, panting for breath, from his run up-hill. Columbine
and azalias flourished about him. The fresh hum of insects deepened the
glow of last autumn’s leaves, heightened the clear tenderness of the
anemones. A great oak twisted above him on its tortuous way to the
sun-flushed sky. Numerous little oak trees with fresh red leaves, most
of them doomed to perish, ran riot with the other foliage in the cleft
where he sat. Solomon’s seal and chestnut sprouts, liquid patches of
wild violets, geranium and slender sprays of the wild grape with its
leaves ruddy red and velvet green, shared his nook with him. Below swept
the valley, splashed with dogwood, an infinity of greens and rose-bathed
white. Through all the woodland, the wind raced daintily. A copse of
aspen swayed in a complex unison, while the sun danced counterpoint on
the leaves. Blossoming fragrance and a humid acrid strain of fecund life
waved over him. The sky came down, its blue burning upon him. And
beyond, the sun slanted westward, bursting well up in a haze that
consumed its less gentle fires.
So garrisoned, Quincy met himself, and sought an accounting of his year
in college. The boy frowned. And the day’s grandeur went over him like a
rich garment over a soiled body. He shivered for it. He was ashamed. He
understood nothing save his own impotence. He felt nothing save his
suffering. He was nothing, before a universe of splendor. Family and
friendship, fellowship and duty--in all relations, he seemed slipping,
tottering. There was no name for what he was, since there was no name to
describe anything within his life. He was unsure of qualities at home.
In the house of college as in the house of Deering, he was uncertain. He
was a nameless thing. And all the nameless things that touched him, for
want of appellation, faded to naught or turned against him; all things
save this one thing that grew greater without a title: his unhappiness.
The sun sent a spear of flame through the haze. It gleamed on his face,
as he sat there, gazing with steady eyes. His eyes were in shadow. Deep
purple they were, a pathetic counterpart of black. The lashes lay long
about them. On his mouth were myriad little nervous frets, such as make
up a pathetic counterpart of smiling. Quincy turned his eyes toward the
falling sun. They glowed now, a limpid blue. And the black lashes were
bronze. And the moist mouth opened and grew strong.
Meanwhile, however, the sun was falling.