From that day, life was a battleground for Quincy.
The next time that he saw Julia Deering, he was swept clear of strong
emotions. And this made his countenance easier to uphold. She wished no
more, it seemed, than to have him docile at her feet, avid for whatever
she might say. So it was needless for her to give much. And in his swept
condition, it was easy for him to receive little. The kiss had been
forgotten. The promise was being only tacitly lived up to.
No remorse had gripped him, after that evening. Remorse requires a
consciousness of what has been, to cause it. And this, he lacked. He had
kissed her. But what was in that kiss? Had it indeed been more than a
promise of their fellowship? He had no way of knowing how it had seemed
to Julia, and how much of her had gone out with her lips, or been there,
when for a brief moment he had clasped her body.
Quincy envisaged dimly the wide variations that spirit makes in human
action. In his dreams no more than such a kiss had made him drunk with
joy; a fancied embrace no longer than this real one which had been, had
made him faint with the need of giving. But these realities were far
less sharply limned, their contents and their meanings were infinitely
more complex than the willed dramas of his dreams. So Quincy felt no
remorse. He was far too wildly drained by puzzlement.
The way of his soul was like a lake, wide and clear and full, at one
end of which was a lock. And at times, the bolt in the lock slipped out
and the waters rushed away with marvellous swiftness and there remained
but a hollow basin, reeking and vaporous. So had been the week after
that night. He had seen her again. But she had seemed content with his
empty self. It did not occur to Quincy that this might have been,
because she also had been swept of her fullness.
And then, gradually, came a healing. There had been no other sequel. The
Professor had returned. He had not dared speculate upon the meeting him
and facing him. But when, one day, the great man stopped him on the
Campus, all of the torture he had imagined for this moment seemed
strangely fanciful. He talked with him, calmly, and mentioned the dinner
with his wife, and smiled at an apt remark and responded with another.
Beyond, behind, he glimpsed in his brain another Quincy, spotted with
red, writhing in his quandary. But this was upon the plane of his
imagined tortures, a remote plane. He went away, wondering if he was a
hypocrite, questioning which Quincy was the false one, hating his
adaptability with life. For in his thoughts, a situation half so hard
would have made his head whirl, and his heart bleed and his breath
smother. Yet here he was, coolly at his lessons, chatting, digesting
normally! He grew to be a wonder to himself greater than Julia was, or
the Professor.
And all of the remainder of the year, there was no sequel. His calm was
the calm of a great battle. But since Quincy had accepted the
traditional idea of conflict, he did not know how deeply he was
fighting. Yet he who has fought knows well that there is no calm so vast
and so profound as the calm of conflict. Above it, the clouds may writhe
and the air clash with thunder. Before it, the soul may quake and after
it, the heart may bleed. But in the conflict, there is no energy at
leisure to make a storm within. All of man’s power to stir has been
projected outward. Within, there can be only peace. And then, little by
little, as the struggle flags, the mind begins to move--the mind which
is the herald of the soul. And as the inner forces put about and return
homeward, they bring the turmoil and the stirring with them. And the
mind catches these. And the mind speaks of bleeding or of winning, of
dying or of living. And this is the consciousness of conflict--when the
conflict flags.
So came it, that at that time which his jejune imaginings had pictured
as unbearably upsetting, Quincy moved quietly about. And where he had
dreamed of a decision in an open lists, behold! in the glamor, there was
only the announcement of what had been done in secret from himself.
Julia allowed him to be alone. She demanded nothing. He saw her scarce
more often than before. And when they were together, he found her
reserved and smiling, with a deep suggestion of confidence and
seriousness. All this helped him to a decision. And his decision was:
that a great responsibility had come to him. His task must be to add
Julia to her husband’s conscious treasures--to his ideals. In all ways,
he must help herself to give herself to him. For he was sure that it was
his failure to go out toward her, and hers to go out toward him--no
more--which caused this state of famine. He did not seek a word for his
emotion toward Julia. He admired her intensely; and she was a woman.
That sufficed. As a woman, she did not see her husband as fully as did
he. And her husband had limitations--in his capacity for living. But
fortunately, he was there--he, Quincy, with his mission. He thanked God
for it.
One night, after long pondering upon his ideal and strong bond with
Julia, a strange lust devoured Quincy. In the hands of it he went and
spent several hours with a woman whom he had met, liked, but not dreamed
before of visiting. The adventure was an empty, dismal failure. And
Quincy found more joy in telling Julia about it, than he had felt all of
those set, uncomfortable hours.
Julia listened with her old, deep smile.
“You’re not the sort to do things like that,” she said.
And Quincy agreed. He was hungry no more--until the lust next possessed
him.
Three times, that spring, he went forth that way, joyless, hopeless,
brutal all at once after a roseate revery about his friend. And each
time, he returned, smiling bitterly at his folly, cured of his
possession, yet filled with an acrid will for something which that
visit, somehow, had not come near supplying. But after the first
occasion, he spoke no more of such things, to Julia. A shame had caught
him, which he had not felt at first. There seemed less innocence, now,
in talking to her, than there had been. He was beginning--a part of
him--to understand.
Then, also, there were other storms,--sudden lusts of another stamp that
swung him elsewhere away for satisfaction. At such times, he seemed a
fool himself, and his task a mockery.
“Take her for what she is,” he cried then. “You’ve spun her all over
with your ideals. These blind you to her and keep you off from her. What
has she to do with the greatness of her husband’s brain? That is one
thing. If he, the man, is so sated that he doesn’t need her, the
woman--well--” and he would sit there, late at night, in his chair, and
strip her lusciously of these ideals he had spun about her; strip her
with trembling hands as if it had been her clothes that fell away. And
he would strip also himself of his ideals and his aspirations. Until,
there they two would stand--naked and shivering, needful of each other’s
bodies to be warm.
But Quincy had not abandoned his brisk daily runs. He learned that when
he missed his exercise, these lusts were best able to overwhelm him. So
he sought his woods and the throb of his ridging muscles as a
storm-threatened ship seeks harbor.
One day, they walked together. It seemed to Quincy as if he had never
been less near to the meaning of the swaying woodland. All of him was
shut to it. And most of him was shut as well to her. He did not know, of
course, that here his customary tension against her had given him an
outward signal. For this same effort to shut out her, although it might
pass unnoticed in his room, had brought as its effect to shut out
nature. In her wan smile, he felt however, that she knew something of
which he was not aware.
It was a sterile hour that stung. But after she had left him and he was
home, the memory of it seemed to blossom forth into a thing of a rare
beauty and a lingering perfume, so that he soon forgot that it had been
a sterile hour. If his own walks in the woods had been wild-flowers,
this walk had been a rose. But the rose was as yet a small, tight bud.
The thorns had grown more quickly.
* * * * *
And now, without clash of decision, or glamor of sequel, the summer
holidays were near.
He sat in his room, one night. It had been a sultry day. All of the
cloying afternoon, he had lain on his windowseat and given himself to
reveries so nebulous that the humid air about seemed thicker to him.
Below his window a forever changing crowd of boys laughed and gamboled
and played at simple games. The music of their mingled feet and voices
came up from underneath and seemed to shove him farther from them. He
had neglected his lessons. So now he sat at his desk with an electric
lamp beside him. The windows were wide open. The night breathed heavily,
as if it were unwell. Then it began to rain and thunder.
At first, the water fell in clouds, drenching his window cushions. He
spread a mackintosh to cover them. He did not wish to shut out the
storm. He felt that he must choke without the fresh, panting vigor of
the rain. Here was something elemental, simple, clear. Although he did
not understand, he yearned for this, he with his mist-clogged soul, as a
parched throat yearns for water. And then the downfall subsided partly
and the lightning drew near. Flash after flash submerged the glow of his
electric lamp. The thunder shot about him like a whirling battery in the
air.
It came to Quincy that with the bolts so thick and near, it was
dangerous to sit beside his lamp. He was impelled to shut his window,
put out the threatened light and luxuriate in the storm from the safe
haven of his bed. And then, a stronger impulse stopped him.
“_I want to test God!_” he said, placing his hand about the supple steel
of the student’s lamp.
Doubtless the danger was not great. But with his challenge he had
heightened it. He sat thrilled, expectant, ready to be struck. And with
the fierceness of his imagining and his fancied gauntlet flung to fate,
it was a brave thing he did.
As the last flash had bared the sky, careening with its black clouds
above his window, so his test came to illumine the cluttered mystery of
his soul. He did not know if he was guilty, if he was weak, if he was
wrong. Let the lightning tell!
In the breathless pauses of the storm, he heard his heart leaping
against his throat. He felt the weight of his body vibrant in the
atmosphere. And so he stayed--awaiting his doom, if it cared to meet
him, purified by this arbitrary danger and the dread contact it afforded
with the illimitable, groaning heavens. It was a game; and in it, he for
the nonce, seemed the opponent of an infinitude.
The fires swept past him. And he remained unscathed. He felt this and
smiled at his recklessness. For even if there had been no danger, he had
created one and braved it. Now, in the lull, his reveries grew less
inchoate, his sense of fear and danger crystallized and fixed upon a
less fancied, sweeping thing. He began to think of Julia.
He realized that he had done nothing; and solved nothing.
He realized that he loved her--as a woman.
The thought that at his age, he had earned this eternal, mystic
guerdon--love--went through him like the bolt he had invited. And then,
subtly, sweetly almost, came the bolt’s aftermath: like the crumbled,
gutted charring of a tree that has sung high its song of death as the
storm embraced it. And that aftermath for him was all that seemed left
of his proud structure of ideals:--Professor Deering, a ruined tree with
its leaves piteously seared!
Before this menace of fire, Quincy at last jumped from his seat, which
the storm had not made him quit. He paced his room, to and fro,
delirious with this new birth, hands tremulously open, and head bowed.
It could not be! It must not be! He would save his ideals; he would not
be a Judas to his Christ. She who stood burning now, in the corner of
his brain, must be cast out like a brand, ere her fearful conflagration
caught.
He went to bed; and still the flame of her danced and still the leaves
of his tree trembled piteously and fell away. Here he felt conflict;
here he felt tempest. For the battle was over.
All of the night, he lay wakeful and rocked in the fever of decision
which had been now so glamorously announced to him,--and so
treacherously made without him, since in truth, within him.
He awoke aching and broken and inflamed. His serenity was gone. The
mask, in which he had careered all of these months so featly and so
gracefully through life, was burned away. He stumbled now against the
meanest barrier. The least of his duties reared itself into a crucifix.
He suffered. And he struggled. Even so, struggles the beast after the
trap has inexorably set.
In his pain, he ran about seeking solace. Yet, wherever he turned, he
rejected help. He was afraid of Julia. In fact, she seemed scarcely at
all in his mind. It was an effort to think of her. He had to force his
brain to grasp the fact of her reality; and a concrete vision of what
and how she was, became impossible. In his dreams, there was a looming,
aching mass of agony which menaced him, or turned into a bath of
luscious poison. This, he termed “Julia.” But it was not really she. It
was an inchoate Thing--a thing untinged with the fixed meaning of a
woman, a thing at most that a woman had engendered.
So, fearing her, ignoring her, hoping for balm from her, not recking of
her really, he at last sought her out.
At once, before her, his storm subsided and became unreal; the swollen
waves rolled languorously without aim or meaning.
Even now, he scarcely saw her--and knew her not at all. The time of
consciousness was passed.
But it was sweet still, to be before her--helpless, mute,--while her
smile glanced on him and her little, intimate movements,--the touch of
her hand on her hair or the quiver of her eyelid,--cut through him like
steel and played upon him like soft fingers upon a harp.
In this way, pent-up, giving nothing out, came June.
Quincy’s life rushed into summer, as a swift stream falls over a smooth
precipice....