The rift was started by a visit home.
The Burts had moved into an apartment near the Hudson. In fact, from the
windows of the drawing room and sitting room one’s sight dodged several
towering structures and met the river, flat and cool below the city.
Beyond, rose the serried strokes of the Palisades, purple for the most
part, athwart the blue haze of New York.
It was a splendid apartment and Quincy’s family had moved to it after
his return to college. So this was his first view. All the old furniture
was gone. Sarah and Adelaide had had a fresh start. The seven years
since Harriet therefore marked their change in the new trappings. For
these years had nourished Adelaide. And her word was final in all things
pertaining to the household. Long since, Sarah had sighingly accepted
that “she had no heart” to manage servants nor the “trumpery” to
decorate a parlor. It was by savage encroachments of this sort upon her
ancient territory, that Sarah’s languor and decomposition were effected.
It requires intellect to be a happy idle woman.
As they sat down to dinner something in the room’s blatancy gave the boy
pause--rendered cloud-like the texture of the life he had been living.
The room was panelled high in oak. The inevitable favrille-glass
inverted bowl loomed over the table. Above, at the ceiling, was another
cluster of lights. These shed their unimaginative glow. And the
chandelier was dark. It seemed menacing to Quincy, like a rich thing
without a spirit. But it was indefeasibly real. There was a side-board,
also of oak, cut by a swinging door, radiant with silver. Upon the
mantel stood four porcelain vases which Sarah had seen and rebelliously
acquired. They were the room’s rococo residue--and the sole things in it
Sarah could warm up to. They shrieked with their dove-blue and their
rose-pink against the room’s sombre munificence. Between them stood a
chaste, dull wooden clock--by Thomas, whose every tick was a protest
against its neighbors.
Quincy was oppressed once more. He wished to get away. His afflatus
seemed asthmatic in this rigid air. In sympathy, he almost liked the
towering porcelain vases. They, at least, with their quaint scrollings
and flutings, seemed to aspire upwards. The rest of the room’s dead
perfection was a dead weight downward. It lacked even the falsetto
spirit of the vases. The family teased Sarah about them. And Quincy took
his mother’s part. This troubled Adelaide to silence. Marsden seldom
stooped to teasing, Josiah had leaned on Adelaide and Jonas was busy
eating. So Quincy’s word won the day for the rococo vases.
What was this acrid reality within his mother that brooked no blinking
and ate into the substance of his dreams? Why did she make something--of
all people--totter within him? Was she more _real_ than the rest of the
world? He could laugh at _it_!
Quincy went back to college, militant more than ever against her, yet
unknowing of how great a tribute this militancy was. She was indeed more
real within him than the rest of the world he laughed at. For we laugh
only at things outside of us. The man lies who says he has laughed at
himself--save his laughter be hysterical. Quincy could not laugh at his
mother, for she was of him. But he could deny her, despise her, rail
against her.
In this spirit of idealism, he returned to college.
And now, began the subtle _dégringolade_ toward the great cross-road
where Quincy was to meet himself. The stone that starts an avalanche
need not be at the summit of the precipice. It may lie far down toward
the valley. And its crumbling may unleash, farther and farther upward,
stone after stone, in indirect progression, until the top be loosed and
the whole mountain-side crush downward. But long ere this the lowly
stone that started will lie buried in the valley. Such a stone was
Sarah.
She lay low in the slope of her boy’s emotions. And as her stirring
loosed the soil above her, she was the first to be overwhelmed. Quincy
had suffered a sharp, rude shock in this reality of which she was the
basis--the family that he had looked on as an outgrown cradle! This
reality, the juices of his dream-life could not digest. As he left home,
he therefore made his effort to cast it out. All this came rationally to
the surface in fault-finding. But in the effort of rejection, a shock
tremored through all of the boy’s factitious structure. And this shock
was to have sequels.
Julia reappeared in his dreams. Quincy instinctively feared an omen.
Almost at once, Julia was no more in his dreams. He began to dream of
Rhoda and of bloody scenes wherein his father suffered--nightmares in
which an anonymous woman lurked vaguely, clothed in the mystery of prize
and instigator. Then came a time when he could not catch his dreams at
all. As he awoke, there in his mind would lift a smoke of struggle. But
as he grasped at it, it went and underneath was nothing.
Meantime, the year wore away. Christmas vacation happened. Quincy
experienced a radiant New Year. For naught took place. His projection of
dream had the æther to itself. There were no obstructions great enough
to make him conscious that he was gliding--that the avalanche had subtly
started. His mother had been ill and was South during the holidays. This
may have saved him. But howsoever, the New Year came radiant upon its
tracks of ice.
* * * * *
With January, there was an afternoon that revealed many things already
long alive.
It was the first “tea” with Julia Deering since the last May. In
Quincy’s still confident state this fact required no comment beyond the
probability that she had had no inclination or no time for him, alone.
Her previous favors in this light called neither for sequel nor for
conclusion. He went that afternoon then, splendidly at ease, eager by
anticipation to show his friend how full and serious a man he was. He
knew he must impress her. And in that impress, she would see the
handwork of her husband. This must delight a devoted spouse.
Quincy did not recall, even, as he rang the bell, how he had come that
first time, a year since. His grip on memory was of rare efficiency.
This grip it was, forsooth, that made the delusion possible of his grip
on life. There was no happy mean in Quincy’s nature. He had suffered
through too wide a surface of fine feeling. His memory had been too keen
to suggest ways in which the present and the future might attack him.
Too great had been his liking to an exposed nerve. And now, there was no
surface at all for life to sting, no memory at all for life to grope by,
no meeting on life’s plane. He was beyond the rule of the realities. He
was a boy, nursing his spirit. And no more unreal being can be found in
the vast Mirage called Truth.
As he came, then, that day, to chat and perhaps clumsily gulp down his
tea, a subtle streak fenced off the real Quincy from the conscious one.
These two mingled their accents. To the thoughts of the one, the other
expressed speech; to the feelings of the other, the first gave
utterance. And at times, the lips and the hearts of each made
instantaneous counterpoint. The harmony of all this was minor. A mere
thread of vibrance often drew the line between them. And in such faint
distinctions, voiced at once, lies discord. Music, builded upon this
searching wisdom, Quincy had not failed to love, that night at the
Deering party. The subtle barriers of its sound, thrown together into a
stirring discord, had gone forth and understood him. Julia had not loved
the music. But here, played on this gentler instrument, the same, weird,
lingering detonations gripped and swayed her. At last, in his gestures
and his words and the flash of his eyes, the Modern Music was articulate
enough for her to hear.
From the point of her reception, of her vibration in response, life
turned to red for Quincy. For it is dangerous in a boy to be as music
for a woman.
But meantime, he chatted blandly and balanced his uncomfortable tea-cup
and was assured of the depths of his composure.
They sat in her room. The door into the study was shut. But the
Professor was out.
She wore a dress of faint blue crêpe, with still gentler streakings of
orange. The bodice was caught high under her arms by a double seam.
Here, an elastic drew the dress close to her body. Her black hair was
knotted low so that the two coils of it above her ears which he had
previously noticed, were not in evidence. Now her ears were covered. The
hair lay flat, cutting apart from the center of her forehead. In this
way, its cold, froward whiteness and her eyes’ warm depths came to
accentuation.
As the boy sat with her, a delicate aroma seemed to flow into him from
her. He could almost fix its point of issuance--her tantalizing, tight
corsage. It held him firmly, like a soft bond that gives but cannot
break.
And as she sat with him, it came to Julia Deering with irresistible
force, that here was a sensitive mind which would receive whatever she
might choose to grant. It is hard to withstand this feeling--when one is
dizzy with being straight--of a great, free depth to fall in. It is the
sensation of the weary man before the brink of the precipice--of one
whose muscles ache from holding him so long erect. Below, there lies a
patch of cool waters and fanning trees. Upon the rock, the sun sears and
the shadows cannot live.
A remark of his started her upon that inevitable forward lurch--the
giving way to self-confession. And for an hour, Quincy heard, his eyes
steadfast, as if he feared that the least movement would break the
charm.
She saw him preponderant, as she spoke. And his sight was the tonal of
her words. He leaned forward in his chair. His legs huddled beneath him.
In one bony, knotted hand--throughout that hour--a cup was held with
its remnant of tepid tea. And his lank body stood out, loose and tense,
responsive infinitely, yet lost clumsily within his blue serge suit. His
face was a little drawn. But his eyes beat the measures as she talked,
with the gentle drooping of their lids as a point went home, and with a
sudden fire as she left a conclusion for his delicacy. His lips, all of
this time, moved also. They would lie parted. And then, he would slowly
moisten them with his tongue, purse them, as if to strangle a tell-tale
quiver, and once more let them fall faintly away from his control, until
again his interest parched them.
What she told him was nothing. What she made him know was fraught with
fever. It was as if a burning rod had struck clear through his pretty
treasury of cobwebs and scalded them away. Where they had been--gleaming
in the sun of his conceit like a fine lacework--remained an emptiness
that ached.
Quincy said little in response. The woman smiled at his silence and his
lack of judgment.
“I must go now.” He suddenly jumped up.
She also rose. She came beside him. And the mist of her bodice came over
him afresh.
“Do--if you wish to,” she said, quite close to him.
He moved toward the door.
“Good-bye,” she stopped him. Her tone had the lilt of two rhythms
intertwined--a conversational happiness and a pathetic fatalism forcing
it. She held out her hand.
Quincy grasped it. It was soft at the first touch, and then, in the
ensuing instant, fearfully strong and masterful.
After that, he was in his rooms. He was unconscious of having walked
there.
Here, then, was Quincy face to face with a problem.
For what Julia Deering, saying no thing, had given him to know was that
her married life had been an endless failure and that, within the great
man, was a limited creature--not cruelly so, not deliberately so, of
course--but yet a creature who could deny and crush and misunderstand
another!
His room, waiting for him, as he entered it, had the air and nature of a
mighty list. There was naught to do but to step up and prepare for
battle. The pictures on the walls, the books he loved in their racks,
the letter he had just received from Adelaide, the bed in the
alcove--everything alive there, seemed tense and expectant, concentrated
on him. He had read of ancient tournaments. Here was his gallery,
looming about him, with intricate weavings of smile and scowl, a mass of
emotional tangents; yet unisoned all in the word it spoke:
“We watch you, now. It is your turn.”
* * * * *
The first phase of the conflict lasted two weeks. It began largely
with cautious measurings of mount and lance. And of course,
these gained nothing. They were signs of a deep reluctance for a
clash--finger-feelings and toe-feelings where the truth called for
blood and body. They measured nothing.
Out of this phase, Quincy emerged, equally undoubting of Julia’s
truthfulness and of Professor Deering’s greatness. And a new discretion
was born in him. Why should he endeavor to solve this problem? What was
it to him? He could not help. He would be broad--and ignore both sides.
In this serene state, he went back to the box-frame house.
“I am afraid,” she said to him, “from the way you acted, you may have
misunderstood my words. I was mistaken to talk to you at all. Some of
you is so old--but the conscious part of you is so very young!”
Quincy protested that he was inimitably broad--broad enough to ignore
both sides. These were of course not his words. But Julia also was
receiving, now, not what he spoke but what he gave her to know. They
changed the subject. They talked of books and of music. She was her old
commanding self. He understood what this meant: that she once more
despised him.
The Professor entered.
“Hello! Hello!” he cried. “Stay to supper, Mr. Burt. Can he, Julia?”
“Why, Lawrence,--we’re going out.”
Professor Deering was caught up by this rebuke. For he knew that they
were not going out. Soon, he left them.
“That was a lie--about our going out,” she said, at once, “But I am not
sure, Quincy, that you quite deserve to dine, at present, at the
Professor’s table.”
With this twist of her two-edged sword, she let him go.
It was all plain enough to Quincy now. His ignoring both sides had been
ignorance. And ignorance meant weakness. The finger-feeling stage was
dead.
Down this new slope, events continued until March. He did not return to
her. He saw the Professor only casually. But the sight of either was
unnecessary. There was progress without them. The conflict was really
on. The boy lumbered out his musty weapons of ideals, groaningly
shouldered them and so fell to, against the seething, searing inroads of
the enemy.
Of course, of all this there could be no word with Garsted. Quincy was
inarticulate enough by nature, of his realities. But to talk of a deep
thing that was still chaos in him was impossible. For silence, he did
not have to lean on an ideal of chivalry. The stoppage caused by his
other ideals sufficed for that. So the boy withdrew utterly. He was
alone. And this he felt with a twinge of self-commiseration. His friend,
also, felt something.
“My dear Quint,” he said, “you are become like a sounding cave--which
gives forth from its mouth only a lugubrious counterpart of what is
spoken to it.”
“Talk sense, Simon.”
Quincy was at his desk, doing a page of Cicero’s immortal tract _On
Friendship_. His coat was on the floor near a chair where he had meant
to throw it. He wore a plain white shirt with a soft collar. His chest
and shoulders ridged fluently. He looked strong and at ease. Garsted
sprawled, head up, mouth open, on the window seat. One leg lay high over
the other knee. He was smoking a pipe.
“All right,” he said; “--what the devil’s wrong?”
“Nothing, old man.”
“Now you’ve delivered yourself of the conventional denial, dispense with
the conventional ten pages of hesitation and come to the avowal.”
“I am not a character in a novel.” Quincy was incensed.
“You don’t talk enough to be a character in a play.”
“I’ll say anything you want. Only you’ve got to tell me what it is you
want.” Quincy went ahead gingerly, for he felt his guilt.
Garsted rolled over to face him, on his cushioned window-seat.
“Very well,” he said, “first of all--close your book.” The boy complied.
“Now listen. We are going to reverse the order of examination. I shall
tell you your symptoms. And you shall tell _me_ what they mean.”
They were quite ordinary things, Garsted had found in Quincy. But they
flattered him. That his eyes were given over to sudden reveries, that he
spoke strangely cynical doubts about humanity, that he seemed only
partially present in discussions which formerly he had entered with a
whole spirit--these qualities, seen in him by a friend, resolved
themselves to Quincy into an aura of mystic and romantic import. He was
very happy to be so enigmatic. He began to feel that his was a beautiful
dilemma. These were of course the days before that dilemma really
gripped him. So he beamed on Garsted who had just accused him of being
emotional in his statements and shoddy in his observations--as if he had
been flattered.
“I am sure, Simon,” he said, “I can’t help you. Since you’ve done the
symptoms, you’ll have to do the diagnosis also.”
“Well!” Garsted stretched, yawned and jumped up, “I guess perhaps it is
nothing after all but the spring fever a month too early. Good-bye.”
And Quincy despised him for being so easily satisfied, so lightly
affected at the end, in this outward mystery of his soul. Had he known
Garsted would drop his inquiry so soon, he would have made his reticence
more savory with a few gleams of the great truth.
Here then, he was--alone with himself, and the rustiness of his armor
beginning to scratch and shriek.
He had a month of this. And when, at the end of it, a note from Julia
marked still another phase, matters were at least more clearly before
him, even if he had not resolved them. It was a step to have
reconnoitred his position,--however far he was from having fathomed it.
* * * * *
Plainly, his ideals and aspirations lined out before him, with the
Professor as their captain and their priest. And as flatly on the other
side, stood Julia with her deep heart and her still soul and her
cherished charm, reaching within him also. Within these antipodes was
all of him, needing, in order to embrace them all, to reconcile them and
make them one. Did they really destroy each other? Did they deny each
other? Did they drive home the wrongness to some part of him who craved
them all? Why did the whole of him seem shaken, if any part of his
possession in these two threatened to disappear? What lay beneath his
grim resolve to save them both, prove them both right, prove them both
one--these antipodes? If the meat of his convictions lay really in him,
why this desperate need of saving them? Were they merely a treasure he
loved, or a prop of all his structure? And if a prop, why should they
not be steadfast, unified, as a prop must be? Why was recognizing one
needfully a blow to the other? Why could he not take his treasures
blindly, like the rest of the world, and forget about them?
Pathetic little gained him his unceasing questions. There in his soul,
the insidious, beautiful woman and the man who embodied the one program
of happiness he had ever known, seemed grimacing and threatening. In the
man, he had learned a technique of happiness; in the woman found a field
for exercising his new, life-giving powers. By all the laws of justice,
these two should smile upon each other, be supplements in an eternal
concord. Yet here they were, plotting mutual destruction! And in his
need of saving them both, Quincy was fighting for the one strain of
happiness he had ever had. Without the way, what was the means? Without
the means, how empty was the way! And more. How could he place his faith
in the one, if by so doing, it destroyed the necessary other?
Quincy sensed his quandary. He must be faithful endlessly to him, in
order to have faith in her. Yet, in receiving her with what she gave
him, where went the faith in him? It was as if the moon, which has her
light from the sun, should say:
“If you would have my light, first you must destroy the sun.”
In Quincy’s ideal world, the problem was just so unreal and just so
reasonless. Yet--though he argued it away into non-existence--there it
was! A sun that would not shine, save he denied the moon; and a moon
that left dark the night, save he destroyed the sun through which not
alone the day but herself had come to life! The petty wisdom of the
savage, Quincy did not possess. For the young race, in its tactful
henotheism, says by day: “O sun, thou art the one God”--and by night: “O
moon, thou alone reignest.” But Quincy had gone beyond such paltry
compromise. Morality and faith and an inflexible law buoyed him up. By
all means and forever, his sun and moon _should_ shine at once--and side
by side--in the astonished heavens. He would have it so! With
commendable courage, he set about his task.
Any little human spark may strike clear to heaven. And it is probable
that heaven linked up the immemorial conflicts of the stars and of the
races of men, with this infinitely small yet infinitely old attempt of
Quincy’s to wed what he wanted, with what he had.
Like a somnambulist, he had tasted a balm in his walking-sleep. His
waking had ever been so painful! And now, again, his eyes were being
opened. Surely, he would fight well for his dreams!
In March, came the note from Julia.
Professor Deering had gone to Chicago. Here, for two weeks, he was to
represent his college at a conference. Quincy was bidden to dinner. He
was told that they would be alone.
He went, armed with his resolution to beat down as superficial and
untrue, any discrepancy between his ideal and his reality. He was eager
to go, yet fearful. Knowledge had pricked him that this woman could do
with him, according to her will; and that her will might disagree with
his.
She received him, in a simple, straight-cut, black gown--caught up
close, like all her garments, below her breast--a soft and singing
thing. Quincy was in a dinner coat which he had had two years and had
outgrown. The padded shoulder and artificial box effect made his
slenderness seem gaunt. But he was really pale.
It was a plain meal and took little time. There was no wine. And, with
academic grace, Julia Deering carved the chicken and served the fruit,
herself. But when Quincy arose from the table, he was flushed and
exalted as if the little supper had been a feast. A glow fretted the
green pallor of his cheeks.
He followed Julia into her room and sank upon the primmest chair,
holding his knees. When she went to light a lamp, he did not offer to
assist her. He watched her supple figure bend over the table. He saw
the gap caused by her posture, between her breast and the garment. The
glow gave a red note to her hair. Then, she passed him, her dress
forever singing, and composed herself upon the couch--cushions
supporting her back and one of gleaming copper, which she had carefully
smoothed, before her to rest her hand. The other arm was flung behind
her head. She faced him, erect from her waist, with her gown lost in the
shadow.
“What have you done, this last month?” she suddenly asked. “Have you
been thinking of me?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“And what have you been thinking?”
“I’ve been wondering why you liked me.”
“Should I tell you?” She questioned him with her eyes also. “I like you
because you are all in the future. When women get to be my age, they
love to feel that they have a hold on the future. I am thirty-two,” she
laughed.
“I don’t understand,” he stammered.
“You are a bit of my future,” she went on, “you shan’t ever lose the
trace of me that I shall put in you. In that way, some of me has its
youth still before it.”
Quincy had no impulse to break his silence. She continued. The lamp
burned against her face, for him; against his face, for her. The room
rolled away from it in a warm shadow.
“Can you deny that a trace of me will be indelible in you? I understand
you so. Tell me, my boy--am I not the first woman who was ever kind to
you?”
All of his manful air died out. There were tears in his eyes. He had
thought of mentioning the girl he had kissed--and Adelaide, and mother.
But he was afraid she might laugh.
“Do not think less of my kindness, Quincy, because I mentioned it.”
These words came low, and that which followed fitted almost into the
shadows, so warm and still was it.
“You have been kind to me. You have helped me also--more than I ever can
help you. I need you to be kind to, Quincy.”
He gazed at her. Her eyes came straight and true to him. There was no
doubting them. And in the vibrance of their aim, they rang upon the
flint of his old challenge. Thus it was that his words came sudden,
unpremeditated, hard.
“And your husband--?” he asked.
Her face did not move, save for her mouth which closed as if it had been
stung. Then, again, it parted.
“Lawrence lives entirely in his ideas. A woman is no idea. Neither is a
child.”
“A child--” he cried. At once, she caught him up, crystallizing his
presentiment of what she meant into a certainty.
“Yes, Quincy--” she spoke in a biting tone, “I have no child.”
But even his certainty required propping, so vast was the weight of
dream and fancy which tumbled on it. He raked at her heart with a clumsy
savagery.
“Did you--did you want--?”
“It would have been something,” she broke in, “to have been kind to. Do
you understand? It would have been kind to give me that.”
Again, the silence, while she sat looking at him, gently poised, one
hand pressed sensuously down within its copper setting, the other dull
behind her hair, and all of her body a vague rhythm within the shadows.
Quincy was looking within himself. His task, in that tense moment, was
there to find himself and to give her what he found. He felt that his
word must be the next. He felt that it must be sincere. Surely, she
would judge him by it. He was resolved that it should serve them well.
Within the brief space of stillness, what did he find? A great pain for
himself, in this tearing predicament, that faded utterly before the pain
of her who had bared it for him. A great gratitude born of this
offering. A blind rush of resolution searing his mind like lightning,
that she should receive what she desired, though his life and his dreams
tottered for his gift! A vague thrill of the need of risk and of its
beauty.
He knew that he must accept ere he could give. And though, within the
press of that brief pause, no mind or thought could turn about, he must
elect--must place the treasures of his life upon a pin-point altar, and
give her all--or the smoke--incense--of that All’s destruction.
His word was this:
“You may be kind to me.”
She took it in. “Come here,” she said.
He came beside her--awkward.
“Give me a kiss,” she commanded. And her lips waited.
He bent over and kissed her. An agony flashed through the back of his
neck--an agony for more.
“That kiss was a promise?” she asked.
His heart faltered. “A promise--of what?”
“Kiss me again!”
This time, his knees sank upon the couch. His arms went out and he
clasped her, cool and piercing, to himself. His breathing allowed no
word.
“Was that kiss a promise?” she repeated.
“Everything--” he stopped himself.
There she was, still poised in her throne, unruffled, unmoved. But no!
He looked at her bosom. She, also, was breathing hard. But she was
trying to laugh. She was denying this, to herself.
“You are kind, boy,” she said, her voice raised high, with her struggle
to constrain it. “You are kind to let me be kind to you.”
He stepped back toward his chair.
“No!” She stopped him.
The hand that had been behind her hair pressed low against her throat.
That word had been almost a cry. She went on, composedly:
“I am afraid it is time for you to go.”
She released her throat and held out her hand. Quincy grasped it. It was
warm and masterful altogether. Then he went.
* * * * *
Julia Deering heard the door softly shut. She flung herself face-down
upon the couch and began tearlessly to sob. Behind her back, her two
arms went out, straining and rigid. The fists were clenched.