IX

Quincy was not very well, that summer. He had always been hardy. His

supple muscles, which he could trace ridging beneath the white skin of

his arms and shoulders, had seemed a barrier to trouble, despite the

delicate tension of his nerves. Even on this occasion, he was not really

ill.

He had caught cold in the woods. Often, although he did not tell the

doctor this, he would throw himself prone on the moist soil and fling

his head into a tuft of verdure, where he could absorb the incense of

new-born things. Often he would clamber on a tree--an apple tree

groaning with blossoms was his predilection--and lie there, across a

branch, arms balancing his weight, until his eyes grew heavy and he had

to go, lest sleep tumble him down. Or--this was a new discovery of that

spring--he would find a sudden cleft on a high bench above a brook, made

smooth and sweet with the last season’s underbrush. Seating himself at

its head, he would slide down through brambles of blackberry and over

clumps of moss, arms waving, head bare. Running hatless in the rain was

an ecstasy that even he was wary of. But more than once that spring,

with the rain pouring, his head grew waterlogged with lessons and

meditations--neither of which he seemed able to bring to a conclusion.

He would throw himself from his desk, board a trolley to the outskirts

of the town and trudge forth on the muddy road until there came a space

where there was no one in sight. Then, off would come his hat, and like

a wild thing vaguely aware of trespass, he would cut into the drenching

fields, bare-headed, ardent, until his body glowed and his feet weighed

like lead. Then, with his face down he would return and silently change

his clothes.

But about this spirit of a faun was after all the body of a man.

Congestion and inflammation fastened on Quincy. The doctor made a long

face, gave him a diet and told him to stay as much as possible on the

porch.

Needless to say, the Burt household moved from the sweating city every

June. Summer torridity in New York is an unnatural thing. It does not

come gently like the fires of France or Italy. It is as if the monstrous

city had been rushing, rushing, rushing--all of the winter. At last it

got overheated. That was the summer. Only a very young and healthy

person can rush himself into a sweat and husband his good nature. New

York’s overheatedness is angry. So those that can, leave her alone,

until she is cool again and ready for another rushing.

The summer house of the Burts on this occasion was an old splendid

mansion hidden in three acres of uncultivated woodland. It was but an

hour from New York. From the macadam highway where the motors flashed

continually by, a rustic road led past a fence and a tiny wooden bridge.

The bridge was over a thread of brooklet. Thick shrubs smothered it from

sight. And all of the gentle green things here were stained with dust

and matted with gasoline. The road ran a hundred yards, between great

oaks and willows. Here, shielded splendidly, was the house. There were

great white pillars. The forward wall was brick. The porch was broad

and open. And within, the high-ceilinged, ample rooms were perpetually

cool. Rambler roses, petunias and canna surrounded the porch, above

which on either side were frames for wistaria and grape-vines. From the

porch one could hear the crash of the motors, glimpse their dust. And in

the evenings, their lamps shot into view, flooded a space of foliage and

then clapped away. This did not interest Quincy--although it was

Marsden’s chief delight. But at the house’s rear lay a thick, brambled

bit of forest--a complete miniature of nature. Within a few acres, the

boy discovered rocks and hills, valleys and rivers, a settlement of

birds that made symphony each night over a sunken pond where the frogs

croaked, and a dingle utterly enclosed in elder-bushes where a space of

grass lay sweet and gentle, in contrast to the riot of rough foliage

without. Here he could steal away and be as well secluded from alien

sight and sound as if home were in another State--save when the wind

brought him his mother’s voice, scolding the servants in the kitchen.

“Look here, little East Wind,” he would scold in turn, “are you turned

traitor, to bring me _that_?” And straightway, the wind would curl about

the willow tree, and giggle a bit and stop.

He had been gazing at that tree a long time--and many times. His dingle

sloped somewhat so that, for comfort, he had always to lie facing one

way. That way was nearly west. And it brought the willow full into his

vision. Of a sudden, this struck him as a portent.

“Oh, great willow tree,” he asked, “is it on purpose that I must always

gaze on you and see the sun fall through your fingers?”

A bright red bug with purple stripes, round and fatherly, had climbed on

his cuff. Presently, it jumped off in his palm. He held it up and as it

trudged toward his finger tips, it too faced westward.

“Admire the sun, little bourgeois!” Quincy commanded.

Of a sudden, the bug hopped away. There had been no food on his palm,

for it.

“You refuse to admire the sun?” said the boy, thoroughly serious. “Well,

you’re a lucky little bourgeois not to have to.”

In ways like this, Quincy managed to forget himself. He was alert

always, for a dialogue in the woods. But a few hundred yards beyond, in

the old house, he was forever still and eaten-up with moods.

Despite the real simplicity of their house, the Burts liked it. Rhoda

and her husband consented to spend a month there with them. Later,

during her husband’s vacation, they were going to the mountains. Rhoda’s

close presence that July was of import to Quincy. His family had several

more acute impressions to inject in him before its full task was done.

And what with his undigested year at college still upon him, and the

vague threats of a second year to impose upon a first which had not yet

retired into a spiritual composition, Quincy was in a sensitive state

for new shocks and for new colors. His self-constituted idylls back of

the house were not all of his summer. Life in the raw came to the

country with him. Nor was it ashamed, it seemed, to grate and pound and

give ruthless exhibitions, even if the flowers and trees and birds did

sing outside the windows.

There was an excursion into new land. And of course, all of these

things, new and old, while they seemed at first merely to make more mud

of his problems, were really a solvent to help clear them. The new

excursion came in the form of a girl--a friend of Adelaide--Clarice

Lodge.

The Lodge family had a house, half a mile away, not nearly so splendid

as the one which the Burts rented. But Mr. Lodge owned his house and

they lived in it, all of the year. He was a lawyer, in New York--a real

commuter. Adelaide had met Clarice in the city. They were not very close

friends, at the summer’s outset. Nor were they any closer at the

summer’s end. Adelaide, who was twenty-one, explained that she could

never possibly grow intimate with a girl who was only seventeen. Withal,

Clarice looked up to her and vigorously sought her out, when she learned

that the Burts had leased the Frondham mansion.

That was the title of the house. It was owned by Miss Juliet Frondham,

an ancient lady of an ancient stock. She was too poor to live in this

mocking relic of her whilom glory. But she was too proud to sell it and

too fond of it to live far away. So Miss Frondham with her maid lived in

a suite of rooms in the more built-up section of the township. She kept

her own house immaculate and rented it for as long periods as she could.

Two years later, this proud, poor lady--the last of her line--died,

leaving a fortune of three hundred thousand dollars to her maid. Three

brothers came like a storm out of Illinois. The will was contested and

eventually broken. The faithful maid proved to be a villain who with

fiendish cunning had turned her mistress against her entire kin. She

ended in the penitentiary. And Josiah Burt bought the Frondham mansion.

* * * * *

Into the press, then, of Quincy’s summer went these three new

ingredients: a feeling of Rhoda’s married life, the tide-like load upon

him of all the first year’s happenings at college, and Clarice.

The awful inconsequentiality of life, the absoluteness of each moment

and the doom of never-more that lurks in each moment’s easy, gliding

pace, the state of death to which inexorably each new state of life is

born--these are the things of which youth happily is unaware. He plunges

on like a swift runner upon a path pied with sweet flowers. He does not

really know that these flowers are everything and the goal, a mere place

for dropping off. He says: “These flowers are as naught, to the flowers

yonder.” So he suffers them to escape past him in a blurred line of

recollection. Their intimate detail he sacrifices to a distant

vagueness. He refrains from fingering the down on their petals, from

breathing their live perfume in order to be possessed by a monster

builded of his own energy. If the truth flashed his way, he would stand

still and the world would stand still. He would fear to venture and to

desire. Or his steps would become the groping of a blind man in a

wilderness. He would make a universe out of a single flower at his foot;

not make a flower at his foot out of the universe. But the greater truth

is doubtless that he should not know the truth; that he should press on

unheeding. For courage is an ignorant and fresh-born thing that is wiser

and older than wisdom.

July was the month of Rhoda, August the month of Clarice. Julia Deering,

of course, was always present. There was a strange bitterness to see

the un-ideal intercourse of Rhoda and her husband. Since their marriage,

Quincy had seen less of them than one does of a good acquaintance. He

had not accepted Theodore Cram. But in his capacity of mate to Rhoda, he

had idealized him. He did not consciously idealize his brilliant sister,

but in his own quality of younger brother, he had accepted her as, of

course, winningly adjusted. Now, came this sordid revelation. Rhoda and

her husband could quarrel with each other, sneer at each other, remain

indifferent to each other’s presence, and make a pleasure of each

other’s irritations! These were all little things, of course. Sarah

would smile in her rocker, folding her hands and declaring that such

insignificant disagreements were inevitable. Josiah did not pay heed

enough even to pass them over. To Marsden, they furnished amusement.

Jonas, like his father, seemed temperamentally impervious, and Adelaide,

as with most things that happened in the household, would be quickly

aggrieved and as quickly her unruffled self again. To Quincy, these

little quarrels--that Rhoda or Theodore were the last to take seriously

or to remember--were soilings of dirt on a work of art. The analogy was

perfect, since the thing soiled was indeed his handicraft. But they were

more: they were a source of stirring the old waters. They led to

speculations about Julia Deering and her husband; they compelled painful

efforts to seek conclusions and to avoid conclusions, about the

generality of men and women.

It was unbearable to think of Professor Deering as so haggled and so

upset. Yet, could one have guessed from the calm brow of Theodore Cram,

from the smooth bosom of his magnificent sister, that such things could

be? Was all of the world a hypocrite? Could there be worms beneath the

surface of his marble masterpiece, before even the soil marred it to the

eyes?

It was a droll commentary upon justice that Quincy, at whom this couple

snapped their fingers, should have been hurt by their delinquencies. Of

course, in the old days, there had been murmurings at home about Rhoda.

He recalled her as a child, screaming and scratching, carrying war upon

Adelaide and Jonas. But always, it had been successful war--war with a

quick and unqualified decision. Adelaide was always surrendering, Jonas

was always being overwhelmed. That justified Rhoda. There had been a

sweep of power in her place at home. She had dominated; she had wielded

her sway. When she sneered at Adelaide or him, her sneer cut true. When

she shot angry words at her mother, or Jonas, or her father, these words

stood trembling, like an arrow, in the heart of the target. And with

Marsden, there had been always a deference and a calm--like two great

Powers at balance on a continent between their mutual dependencies.

Here, however, it was different. Theodore Cram did not bleed at her

sneers, nor lie transfixed with her angry words. Theodore Cram could cut

back and shoot back. And tears came more readily in Rhoda’s eyes than

the flash of pain on her husband’s mouth. Rhoda had her match. And in

the poise of this even combat, Quincy learned its pettiness and

sordidness. From this conclusion, came the inevitable step: that her

warfare of old must have been similarly petty, and that the woman who

waged such, with such incessance, must be of a measure with her

battles. The boy’s brain receded before it would take on this lesson.

Was Rhoda narrow and petty and mean of spirit? Had her cause of battle

against them all been sordid? and her victims, the result not of her own

excellence but of their own mediocrity? Here were two strong and

striking observations to make lie together: that in their marital

irritations, Rhoda was no more generous or ideal than her hard-hearted

husband--and that, in her appearance and her charm, Rhoda was as

enfevering and inspiring as ever. Could these two knowledges couple and

give birth to strength in Quincy? At least the struggle of conception

and the ensuing labor were painful interludes. A woman, then, could be

beautiful, dominant, entrancing, yet have a soul of flint? a woman could

hold one, yet by qualities that one despised? a woman could forge

sovereignty at home, yet abdicate to the level of those she ruled at her

maturity? What was this creature, woman? And how came it that he,

Quincy, full with his eighteen years, could compute and reckon his

superiority all of a forenoon in the woods, yet be a mute, inglorious

thing before her glance, at lunch?

In Theodore Cram there was no longer any glamor. The man was without

vision or ideals or beauty. Yet Rhoda loved him! gave herself to him!

And an hour after those dark mystic hours they must have spent together,

she could despise him or ignore him--he could despise her or ignore her!

Was there not this ugly identity between them? And then how, viewing her

husband’s pettiness, could Rhoda be deemed better? How, with these

things established, could she still have power and charm for Quincy? It

had sufficed merely to glimpse them to cause Theodore Cram to lose his

glamor. Oh! the perplexities were myriad and infinitely intertwining.

Perhaps he might have solved--or at least met them--had they led no

farther than these two. But irrevocably, the perplexities flowed out to

Julia Deering, to his mother, to himself. Until the whole whirled like a

dizzy dream, where arms, outstretched for a firm hold, turned into gyres

and spun along.

Though the act was unconscious, Quincy fixed on Clarice Lodge to solve

these problems, answer these questions. She had no part in his emotions.

She seemed solid and dependable to Quincy. He did not know that when she

also had been drawn into the furnace of his feeling, she also would

swirl with the fire and fumes. Childishly confident, he fixed on her,

being unaware that at his age to attach upon another is really to absorb

that other and burn that other up. Even so does flame fix on a twig. But

Quincy was sure that he would learn everything from her and that his

interest was scientific.

She was known as a pretty girl. And until one time when he really saw

her, this had seemed the right term to Quincy. Thereafter, it appeared

to him to be injustice.

It was at their house. Adelaide was below the porch, trimming the roses

that had drooped too low. Clarice leaned over the porch railing. Quincy

was to one side and unobserved. He had stepped out through the door. The

two girls chatted brightly. Clarice led the conversation. She was

coaxing her friend to admit that red was far more beautiful than blue.

In a prim, white jumper, with Dutch neck, she bent her alert body

downward. The pressure of the rail below her waist drew the frail cloth

tight against her breasts. She was bending toward the left. When she

laughed--which was half the time--a tremor went through her body as if

it too were laughing. When she talked, she swayed gently, her whole form

together, to and fro against the railing that first ate hard upon her

and then gave her up. In this way the fluted railing spokes marked out

their pattern against her body. Her right knee was forward and her right

foot dangled. This gave accent to her rhythm. The discovered leg with

its black silk stockings, pointed with tiny, white-canvas slippers, was

straight and strong and fleshless. It cut like a tangent movement to the

misty sway of her body. And here, Quincy kept his eyes enchanted. In the

slow, steady rhythm of her body, to and fro against the railing, while

her words sparked brightly, there seemed a faint, voluptuous

deliberation. Her voice was a moist crystal. The nape of her neck was a

nook with tiny and bronzed ringlets. He did not see her face. But now,

in the pause, the girl’s subtle sense came into play. She felt him

there; she straightened and turned toward him. And their eyes met.

Both of them felt the burn of their blushing. With a soft hand, Clarice

smoothed her skirt in front from the waist down--slowly. It had been

very faintly ruffled. But the fact that her consciousness was there,

drove Quincy’s eyes to her face, though in his quandary they had once

more fallen. He did not know how to take them entirely away.

At that moment, it came about that he discovered it unjust to call

Clarice merely pretty.

With a sudden fervor, he had said to her: “Will you go walking with me,

tomorrow?”

She had given one peal of laughter, grown serious and between the two

states, replied: “Why--of course, I will!”

But if their walks, that summer, through the woods were so many

wild-flowers, they were of the sort that onrushing youth could not stop

to contemplate. Quincy deemed commendably mature the dispassionate way

in which he set out to take Clarice. They were to be simply friends, and

perhaps they might bring good to one another. The boy was sure that, had

she known, his mother would have approved his conduct. But the doubting

Sarah had no insight into his calm. Her eyes grew cloudy and troubled

when his walks with Clarice became engrossingly frequent. On one

occasion she said to him:

“Are there no young men about for you to play with?”

Quincy had seen the young men in the town’s post-office, and at the soda

fountains. They were a typical group--shallow-eyed, and narrow-headed,

with the manners of fox-terriers and the souls also--probably. They were

the sort of boys who instinctively stiffened their necks when Quincy was

about. There were no other boys--Clarice’s brother was fourteen. So

Quincy’s mother should have been less fearful of this new friendship.

Adelaide found a way to express her view of it.

“Clarice is a child--a dear child,” she fell into repeating. She seemed

to believe that childhood was a race. One who was once a child would

remain one always. Never could the chance be admitted that there exist

in Clarice at seventeen, things which would one day grow like Adelaide

at twenty-one. Perhaps, Adelaide was right Perhaps, childhood is a

generic quality. But, howsoever, from the days of Quincy’s absorption,

there was a barrier between the girls.

Clarice felt this. And being with Quincy was a way of resenting it. She

was a fresh, unspoiled sprout at seventeen. Her body was tall. But her

head was little and rounded and her face was rather soft in contrast to

the firm, narrow lines of the rest of her. Quincy called her

“Buttercup.” For her hair was gold and her cheeks were tanned and her

eyes were green in the sun rather than blue.

But the unfortunate thing was that, although Quincy enjoyed all this, he

seemed to be learning very little about the ultimate qualities of woman.

He caught himself up at times, in his enjoyment. He seemed of the

opinion that if he enjoyed himself, he could not profit. In this

treasurable thought, a stain of schooling had indeed fixed on his else

impervious nature.

With the heavy heat of August, when the trees turn purple and a

translucent flame waves over nature and sears her gentle freshness,

Quincy learned that in his rigid purpose he had failed altogether. He

learned also that his mother had been silently right--just as often she

had been volubly wrong. Clarice was become a part of the fire and fumes.

He could not help this. But he could keep from seeing her so often. He

resented her attraction. And with set teeth and a stern eye, he put a

censorship upon their walks.

A few days later than Rhoda--in the height of August--Clarice also was

leaving for the mountains. Rhoda and her husband approved of the Lodges.

“He is a big lawyer,” said he.

“She was a Querelton,” said she. And always, she had smiled when

Quincy’s attention to a Querelton’s daughter came up to her notice.

“See her as much as you can;” she advised him once. “When she makes her

début next season, you’ll not be looked at--I assure you. You know,”

Rhoda turned to her mother, “the Lodges are coming to live in town next

winter, just so that Clarice has a chance.”

This speech rankled Quincy and amazed him. He pondered it for some time,

after the Crams had gone. When his wild flower “had a chance” to become

a wired thing of wax, she would, then, welcome it? and he who must stand

in her spirit for the scent of the moist fern and the dancing of the

brook would not be noticed?

There were a few days left of Clarice when these words, spoken at

random, crystallized their effect on Quincy. It was well in the period

of holding off from Clarice--and of resentment that she should have

given him so little knowledge, yet occupied so fiery a part within him.

At once, his ardor and his curiosity re-kindled. He sought her out for a

last walk in the woods.

Clarice told him that she was very busy packing. But she would take an

afternoon from her important duty.

If she was reluctant, as he called her downstairs, so was the sun that

came through the pervasive grey like a little shot of fire. They went

forth, and the sun gave way, altogether, before the clouds.

It was evident to Quincy that Clarice was angry at his sudden lessening

of attention. He did not know that this anger might have been adduced

from the fact that his behavior left a void in her heart. He thought

only her pride was injured. That was why he said, by way of buttress to

it:

“I understand--Rhoda told me--you were going to live in New York next

winter and have society.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“Are you glad about dances and parties?”

Clarice puckered her pale-red lips. “No! I shall hate them.”

“Then,” Quincy went on, gladdened, “why are you going to do it?”

“You have to--of course. Everybody does.” Clarice talked as to one who

could not possibly understand. And Quincy, acquiescent in the import of

her tone, grew silent.

They wandered along a neglected road, half green with grass. A barbed

wire fence straggled through the opaque bushes, laden with berries. They

were walking rather more rapidly than their wont. It was as if the

unconscious impulse of their limbs was to free each from the other.

Quincy wore a grey, soft shirt. He had flared it at the throat, allowing

his blue tie to fall low over his chest. Instinctively, his fingers

groped to his neck, buttoned the collar close and drew up the tie.

“I’ve packed all my rompy clothes, Quint,” said Clarice, suggesting

thereby that their ancient habit of striking across fence and meadow

must be abandoned for want of a fit dress.

“Well, at least don’t let us rush so,” the boy said. “This is a bully

road. Remember where it goes to? Three miles of rolling country and then

that farm-house where they have the buttermilk.”

“Oh, my!” said Clarice, “I can’t go that far! There’s not time.”

All of the things she said were true enough--and pardonable. Yet in her

manner, she seemed making stock of these unfortunate contingencies. It

was this that hurt Quincy. He resolved to try again.

“Clarice dear,” he began, “if you knew why I’ve not seen you so much of

late, you’d not be mad at me.”

“Who said I was mad at you?”

“Well--I meant--”

“Sometimes, you’re too funny for words, Quincy Burt,” said the girl,

serious as a sermon.

“Oh--be quiet!” The boy rebelled at this suggestion of being laughed at,

despite the lack of a particle of smile in her. “I’m glad you’re not

mad. All I wanted to say was--was that--well--the reason I’ve seen you

less is not that I like you less.”

Clarice took this in silence.

“Look here!” The boy turned to her roughly almost--and stopped walking.

The girl, of course, stopped also. He was turned so that she faced him.

And still, she was quiet.

“Clarice, don’t you like me, too?”

She met his face. It was very still and solemn. And the mouth quivered a

bit, though he drew it close in order to control it. And the eyes were a

very deep, piercing blue, indeed. It was the inevitable moment for

seventeen girlish years to laugh.

“What do you think--you silly? Would I have seen you so much--?”

“Then, Clarice,” Quincy put his hands forward and broke in, so eager was

he, “you _will_ see me, next winter?”

Of course, Clarice drew back, bodily, from his onrush. And of course,

her words symbolized her action. It was nothing more.

“I shall be awful busy, Quint.”

They stood in the middle of the road. It was long and green and silent.

A great elm, its trunk choking in poison-ivy, leaned over them. The boy

grasped her shoulders and drew her toward him.

“Promise me, Clarice dear,--you’ll see me when I come to New York, next

Christmas. Even with all the parties. Give me a kiss in promise.”

Her face was directly under his. And her lips were smiling. With no

effort, he kissed them. They were cool and soft and pricking. It was as

if he had kissed a smile. How different from this granted kiss had been

the stolen one, of Rhoda! But now, her face was a little flushed and the

smile was gone--as if he had kissed it away. Clarice fell back a step.

And Quincy spoke though a bubble of warmth kept rising in his throat.

“That was a promise, Clarice?”

The girl frowned. “It was nothing of the sort!”

“Clarice!” he cried, in amazement.

But still she was angry. Her face was first red, then almost grey. “I’m

going home,” she said and turned away.

Quincy reached for her fleeing waist and threw her back into his arms.

“You shan’t behave that way, toward me!”

“Shan’t I, though? Good-bye! You needn’t come along.” And once more she

made a start.

The boy stopped her. He took her angrily and bent her backward, until

her face was under his.

“If you behave like that, I’ll kiss you again!”

He kissed her--savagely. And Clarice, as before, lay there in his arms,

almost unheeding. He kissed her again--tenderly. And then, he looked at

her. The lips were parted and moist. Her spirit seemed slumbering

beneath a covert. Only her mouth was a taste of it. Her eyes were

meaningless. She was not beautiful after all.

He set her up once more upon her balance.

“You have promised me now--to let me see you next Christmas?”

Clarice straightened herself. “I have done nothing of the sort.”

She spoke with a wrinkle of her forehead and her kissed mouth dryly

puckered. “Next Christmas--” she paused and tilted her head vaguely up

with a distant look, “Next Christmas--who knows?”

“Then why,” said the angry boy, as he followed after her, “then why did

you let me kiss you?”

This time, Clarice stopped.

“Are you sorry?” she asked.

“I most certainly am!” burst from him.

Unscathed, Clarice shrugged her shoulders.

They walked to her home, in silence.

“Good-bye,” said she.

“Good-bye,” said Quincy.

X

College once more.

It had the busy serenity of a bee hive. Its murmurous exclusiveness went

against the vision of an outer world as a rebuke and a rebuff. But

within the compact regions of honey and smug larvæ and pompous leaders,

for those who were not really of it, however deeply in it, there was the

quality of the sting.

Quincy came back, moved and settled within new chambers, and looked

about him. A sophomore. The heir, that meant, of the hum and the comb

and the autonomy--laden with the equally strict traditions to enjoy

these and to perpetuate them. A generation of larvæ lay, already,

cuddled underneath him. And without, there was the world to which no

visit must be dreamed of, no glance directed, save as a place of

furnishing and fodder for the hive. All of it stretched out, a mere

subsidiary. Its flowers were servants, its fertility was impost to the

hive. In it, as in his home, were cloying and shutting-out and a sting.

These were the first impressions. They came without bidding. But Quincy

was resolved not to be satisfied with such. He went forth, therefore, to

look about him.

Perhaps his new instructor in English helped him as much as anything to

bearings. His name was Egbert Simson. He was a graduate of the college.

He had won honors in all the possible fields of it. He had won his

letter in track; he had served on the college monthly; he had led his

class in scholarship and presided over the college branch of the Young

Men’s Christian Association, He was a perfect man. And now, he was a

member of the faculty. In a year, he would have his doctor’s thesis. In

five years, he would be grappling toward a professorship. In ten years,

he would publish an edition of the Poems of Suckling. All his life he

would continue humming and honey-gathering for the hive.

Quincy came to know him, sophomore year, in his capacity of preceptor.

For each student had such a one. Early in the fall term, was the time

when he had to see the estimable Simson--twice in two weeks. This served

greatly, together with the general impression of the class.

Mr. Simson was tall and inclined to fullness of figure. His face had

once had lines, hard and aplenty. But general happiness would soon

abolish them to roundness. His little clear blue eyes shone forth from

their soft frames with an easy prospect, as if they knew beforehand what

they were going to see--and should somewhat else be there, they would

simply refuse to see it. His nose was still straight, nor had the

incipient rising fleshliness of his cheeks yet undermined its shallow

impertinence. His lips were of the general blown-ness that smacked

often, smiled at will and were not employed when a guttural throat-sound

announced laughter. Mr. Simson’s forehead was narrow and smooth and

round below his sleek brown hair. His hands were fat but the soft

fingers tapered gently. In all of his being there glamored fluency,

serenity and an inviolable blindness. This man was one of the favorite

figures in the hive. His hum was forever marked and forever sought. If

he had not been a male, one might readily have called him “Queen.” But

even his maleness was unobtrusive, since the hive worshipped the more

passive sort. Mr. Simson’s voice was soft and high. He was easily

shocked and when he was, he wiggled his lissom form and threw back his

perfectly rounded head. He was staid and Christian. It was meant to be

quite evident that when he married the daughter of some affluent

trustee, he would go to her in a state of virginity that would save her

blushes. It was quite evident as well that he would never marry the

daughter of any one less trustful and less affluent than a trustee. Mr.

Simson lacked money. But it was known that several of his relations were

financial kings. All of his friends, moreover, were as well chosen as

his relations. And since he had not chosen his own father, one never

heard of him. Mr. Simson, however, was far too proper not to be

untiringly devoted to his mother. One heard often of that. Moreover, she

had an infallible eye for trustfulness and affluence. Frequently she

went along on a friend’s yachting tour with him.

On Mr. Simson’s more specific qualifications for teaching English

literature, it would be sheer pedantry to dwell.

“You should see,” Quincy explained to Garsted, “with what scruples

Simson discharges his duties as preceptor, toward me.” The boy laughed.

“He can’t stand me.”

“I go into the study. Simson is at the desk--typing a sonnet for the

Lit. ‘Oh, good day, Mr. Burt,’ without getting up, ‘and what is there

this morning?’ I give him the papers. Without looking at them he signs

them. ‘I am convinced, Mr. Burt, they are as they should be.’ There is

at least one ‘Mr. Burt’ in every sentence. I am about to leave and a

qualm catches him. He smiles and when he smiles his round face breaks

into two triangles with the nose as the common base. ‘Does my class

satisfy you, Mr. Burt?’ he asks. As the result of that question, he

tells the others at the Graduates’ Club how frankly he takes each

student into his confidence--asks their advice.”

“Yes,” interrupted Garsted, “they despise Deering, but they all imitate

him. Well?”

“Well--I answer: ‘Mr. Simson, why did we skip _The Miller’s Tale_? I

think it is one of the best Chaucer wrote.’ ‘It is good,’ he answers,

tapping a finger on his mahogany desk--yes, there’s a huge seal ring on

the tapping finger--‘It is good, Mr. Burt, but it’s unpleasant; it is

coarse. We must remember that sometimes Chaucer’s surroundings,’ I was

sure he was going to say _Mr. Chaucer_, since he despised him too,

‘sometimes Chaucer’s surroundings got the upper hand of his good taste.

Despite its matter, that tale is good. For Chaucer was a genius. He

could not help making even a licentious story interesting and human.’”

Here Garsted roared: “_Even_ a licentious story! The old hypocrite! You

know Simson, my dear Quint. You saw his human little eyes and his round

lips and his belly--at twenty-seven! Do you think that is his real

opinion of a licentious story?”

“I know it isn’t,” answered Quincy. “Several of the boys whom he cares

for--Society brothers of course--were repeating some of his own jokes. I

heard them.”

“Ugh--let’s have lunch,” said Garsted.

Not alone diffidence held Quincy from calling on the Deerings until late

October. His own turmoiled spring and summer had indeed made him unsure

of himself toward them and hence unsure of them toward him. It is hard

for the man whose sleep has been wracked with dreams to understand the

serenity of sleep of the one beside him. So Quincy restrained his

impulse to seek out the great man and his wife. He wished, moreover, to

adventure a trifle more in the atmosphere of college. He seemed

seriously firm and set and steady there. He enjoyed this new sensation.

He was afraid lest the Deerings show up its superficial strength. This,

of course, was a fear he did not avow to himself. His affairs, his

reluctance to seem too pressing in his return sufficed for the admitted

reasons. And meanwhile he was able to bask in his new sense of

self-dominion.

Garsted had grown aware of this.

“You’re a different man,” he remarked to him; “you must have had a

successful love affair this summer.”

“You’re wrong, Simon,” replied Quincy, who was so well over the skirmish

with Clarice as not to resent allusion to it.

“Then there was a girl. And didn’t you kiss her?”

“I did.”

“What did I tell you?”

“Is that success?” asked Quincy.

“Rake!” Garsted misunderstood him. And Quincy blushed. Here again, it

was impossible to go farther even with his dearest friend.

But at length, one evening, the need of going to the little box-frame

house came over Quincy. It was at dinner. There had been six weeks in

which to go; yet he had not gone. And now, it seemed imperative that he

must go--and that he must, at once. He rushed through his meal, half

eating it. He ate his slice of beef, neglected the vegetables and then,

when it was too late, found himself still hungry and gulped two cups of

coffee whose heat displeased him. A great worry gripped him--lest they

be out--or the evening inopportune. He might telephone; no, he did not

dare to. He might wait until a surer time; no, he was not able to. He

must go, this night. And if the evening was ill, so would be the omen.

Was it that of a sudden, his new impression of college was digested and

fresh food craved,--that, psychically, he had been released once more

for living, now that the state of dormancy (called strength) was over?

Howbeit, Quincy went. He found the Professor and his wife alone and

ready to receive him. And when, at eleven, he returned campus-ward

through the crisp shadows, the impression of the six fresh weeks came at

length to a formed consciousness within him.

In this way was that evening a peak whence he was able to look back upon

the path he had just come, and forward upon the path ahead. And from its

relative height, both paths were new and clear before him. Even so, as

the climber stands upon an eminence does he descry for the first time

the way that he has taken and view that past with the same eye of

interest wherewith he peers into the future.

It was as if the boys, his classmates, stepped outward from their

general hum, disintegrated and took on a clear dimension. He saw them

now as a seed that the wind would scatter. He felt them as plants that a

varied, self-sufficient soil would wrench to its own uses. He knew the

blindness of the seed and the planned frailty of this little circled

harbor holding it up for the air’s sowing. He respected everything save

the boys’ pretensions, save the false eternity of the fragile harbor. He

saw the bloomless death that there would be, were these pretensions even

tinged with the truth. He wondered at the need of these pretensions. He

despised the powers--the faculty--that bred them in order to slough over

their own crass sterility.

He could not hold to this sudden and veracious vision. Himself intruded.

His strong impressions, so flecked and bulged, were of less value and a

greater interest. Here then, was he, among the disintegrated boys--among

the seed. But with that instant, he could not go on. The boys faded back

into the general hum. He did not seem to stand among them, to have an

independent contact with them, to be even clearly outside of them. His

mind failed to view simply him and them alone. It gave no response to

this relation, it left no mark to fix on, no ring to hear as a tonality.

At once, Quincy veered back to the couple he had left--and however he

approached himself, there were they, also.

The evening had been auspicious. Since he had ruled--an aboriginal

residue in him--that an ill evening should augur ill, surely it was

right to read a happy omen from a happy time. Quincy did not hesitate.

As he walked home down the silent avenue where the black trees

murmurously bent upon the lights, he was convinced. His firmness and

grip had not gone from him! He was elated--yet certain of himself. And

all of that last spring and summer, he had been a fool.

The three had talked together. And it had been natural to remain till

late. There had been no sign of fire or haze or friction. As he sat

there, he had seemed lifted up. The supple, blue steel of the

Professor’s mind had seemed the girders of a firmament whose

life-invigorating breath was Julia. There had seemed no crass way of

differentiating them. Of course, one was star-metal; the other was

æther. But together, they had made the firmament. And within this, he

had taken breath and heart. Quincy saved himself from angry laughter at

his early qualms and worries and presentiments by promptly forgetting

most of them. This is a common function of forgetting--to save from

angry laughter. He had blithely become unaware of the intangible

misgiving which like a cancer, for all its formlessness, had gnawed into

the marrow of the months preceding. He had launched upon an era of

confidence and dreaming. He had no inkling of the sheer dogged

resolution it had required to swing his rumbling energies from their

near concrete pasture into those hinterlands of fantasy and

rationalization. He did not guess that this sudden melting of past

worries was caused by the laborious effort of his spirit to transform

itself from the true state in which such worries could be prompted--that

his fresh certainty of life was due to a quick leap from the realities

which must be doubtful, to dreams fashioned at will to exclude doubt.

The realities were to have their revenge. The dreams, formed as an

escape from them, were to be found fitless and wanting. Meantime,

however, Quincy tramped bravely down the shadowed street.

Of course, much truth lay in this fresh construed idealism; much health

was in this sublimation of his energies. No long process in human nature

can omit any part of human nature. A pondered crime has, in its texture,

whatever of good or truth the criminal conceal. A deed of service hides

all the infirmities and selfishness of the noble man. So, this long

grown flower in Quincy, blossoming now in a period of exultant

confidence, had come not only from his need of harbor for himself and of

translating a truth to fancy, but as well from his rich fund of spirit

and his deep strain of nature. His dream as he nursed it, now, was in

good sooth extravagant. But the wildest dream has its root in the truth;

and the most mendacious is a mere branching out from a confession.

Quincy, then, with his second year at college, revelled in a philosophy.

Like all personal things at nineteen years, it was very concise and

pointed, left to its own ways; and very vague when he endeavored to

articulate it. Quincy of course could not admit this to himself. So when

Garsted was dubious or unconvinced, he blamed Garsted’s obtuseness to

spiritual things and withdrew farther from the realities.

The authorship of Deering in most of his ideas was manifest. The

Professor was welcome in this capacity. Quincy did not object to a

descent from such. Of course, Julia had no conscious part. He was the

steel; she at best was color. He knew her now as a splendid woman, as a

fit mate for a great man. That he had ever doubted this fitness or this

harmony or this completeness was as far from Quincy as the once real

days when he had lain as a center-presence in his crib. Yet, all of

these truths remained. He was, of course, like all of us, still a

center-presence to himself; he was of course, like all of us, a doubter

of the otherness in a thing desired. But for the moment these truths

were latent.

There had been real fire beneath the smoke that had blurred his past

spring and summer. But Quincy was in a state where fire is denied and

the smoke blown off by a new draught of energy that gains its intensity

through a clear heat. All misgivings, then, about the Deerings went. And

went as well, his misgivings about himself, his misgivings about life.

“A new accomplishment of Quincy,” said Rhoda that Christmas; “he’s

become conceited.”

The creed of Professor Deering was unmistakable. Nor did Quincy mistake

it. He mistook merely himself in believing he had adopted it, because a

corner of his being--his intellect--had managed to nod “Yes” to it.

The creed was big and simple like the man that lived it. It was a

thoroughfaring, militant idealism, a sublimation indeed throughout the

sensory gamut of fact to truth. In it, Lawrence Deering careered, and

toward it loved to tender by the hand those about him who were willing.

It transfigured the smallest things of life; thereby the smaller souls

grew aware of it. It flowed over everything like a fine mist at sunrise,

yet protruded nowheres against force; thereby the small souls were made

tolerant. The Professor was not molested at college. He was not molested

at home. When a barrier came against the spirit’s flow, it wafted over.

It had filled Quincy like a meadow, rough with low shrubs to hold it. He

was already known in his class as one of the inevitable Deering

disciples. A few each year--from the class standpoint--“went wrong” this

way, even as a few each year “went wrong” with women. To the busy,

humming majority who never took his courses, Deering was an endemic

problem. Like the poets--Browning or Francis Thompson--who write

nonsense, he had a national renown. But these were their inner

confessions. To the world, these very philistines, in boasting of their

Alma Mater, would have made much of Professor Deering.

It was, then, chiefly charged with the Professor, that Quincy began his

period of effervescence. He now denied all troubles by fitting them into

the scheme of “inevitable good.” He denied all evils by stalking so far

beyond the mass as to catch its “inevitable harmony.” He overlooked all

barriers by soaring so high as to see only the globe’s “inevitable

curves.” He was radiant with the same vigor grown extensive which, while

intensive, had made him gloomy. He was perfectly able, in these days, to

argue the rightness of injustice--viewed in its propulsion of virtue; or

the beauty of ugliness--as a part of nature’s composition. These were

the days when he was consciously “vibrant to the whole” and when a deed

was _pragmatic_ instead of practical. Sex, moreover, was a germ that

might “push upward into a flower”; there was an ideal conduit leading

from “mortal brain to infinite mind”; matter was a “badge”; Christ’s

import was not in his ethics but in his “substantiation of the

spiritual,”--and before the advent of Deering the greatest men of the

world had been merely steps in the preparation.

Innumerable concepts taken from the Professor and studdings of

amplification and conclusion--his own part, mostly,--stood on the

surface of Quincy’s soul and made faces at reality. Family became a cot

he had left, finding it narrow and moist and over-rich in covers.

College was a big emptiness in which a few true accents rang the more

truly because of the acoustic of that emptiness. Quincy himself, it was

plain, was a man of sensitive depths.

There then, were all these trappings and borrowings and

mind-absorptions upon the surface of his soul, grimacing at the world

and hiding what lay behind from the world’s onslaught. But the world had

already shot its shaft and made a piercing with its seed. It might stay

out now--shooed off effectually by all these grimaces--and laugh. For it

was destined to laugh last. It had done its part. Quincy’s soul, in its

too late seclusion, would unassisted perform the rest. It could only

guard--it could not undo--the future.

So the boy went blandly on, with his ideals and his

sublimations,--nurturing, the while, the fruit of his past intercourse

with life.