I
Beauty is a rose that needs tears to keep it fresh. Sensing the purport
of this, Quincy resolved that there be no more crying.
He was in an office--a huge, dinning, polished office of which the
remote head was an acquaintance of his father, a man avid, according to
Josiah’s warning, for youths who were alert, and relentless against
youths with any but “serious” ideas. He was a capitalist. And since, by
circumstance and lack of soul, all of his life had been expended in
leash to a grindstone, he was convinced that just this fact, and it
alone, contained the essence of good and right. The business wherein he
had lived he made to be a temple wherein he might worship himself. And
there was no temple but his temple, no success but his success. His
obtuseness was the cornerstone, his narrowness the nave, his greed the
altar, his purblind word the choir of that temple. His limitations were
its creed, and his life’s chanceful directions were its law. He
moreover, taken in form, was apotheosis. He was the sentimental sort of
business man, the type known by America as “hard-headed and
conservative.” No sex-bound woman could have been more moved by a
romance than he, by a failure. Indeed, to his feeling, dabbling in
stocks was as gross a sin as, to the feeling of the priest, adultery.
His name was Amos Cugeller. And Josiah Burt was rather surprised at
himself for having done Quincy so good a turn. But Quincy was convinced
that his “serious” days were come, his worthless period over. He
believed himself now capable of putting Marsden and his father to blush
with his materialism. He had screwed himself tight and rigid, calling
this confidence.
With Mr. Cugeller, of course, the archetype of “seriousness” was the cog
of a machine; the nadir of “worthlessness” was to stand alone, making no
money--like a wild-flower.
* * * * *
The first year of his new life, Quincy was at home. It was the family’s
last year in town. The Frondham mansion had been purchased and was in
process of redecoration. Upon the following fall, with Jonas comfortably
married, Quincy’s parents and Adelaide and Marsden were to move back to
the land. New York had never really welcomed them. The period of
dazzlement was over. The period of sheer discomfort had long since set
in. And it had been enhanced by their ignoring that New York never
really welcomed anyone. They moved away then, with a feeling of
resentment. And thereby, Quincy came to live alone. So this new year of
sharing life at home was to become a vivid one, when, later, it was seen
to be the last.
What confronted the boy most immediately was, of course, the city. All
the rest was new perhaps. But its newness was a growth, and that which
had gone before had subliminally taught him what such growth must be.
New York, however, as he now received it, was unheralded and
unanticipated. Mornings, as he went downtown, its acerb qualities
entered him most forcibly. This was due perhaps to the night’s influence
upon himself in opening his spiritual pores, making him more sensitive,
since more alien, to the city’s nature. But also, doubtless, the early
drubbing itself awake from the miasma of its sleep calls to the surface
in the morning the City’s essences.
Quincy’s heart misgave him in these first trials. He hung on a strap in
the elevated train. The shaken condiment of sluggish bodies and drowned
voices and falsetto-screaming newspapers was like a plaster for drawing
out his strength. As they lurched on, the cadenced rise and fall of the
train’s pace grew to be a hammer on his consciousness. The streets
hurled by in a drab monotone whose single, ugly accent could be no other
than that of a fierce indifference. The crowd congealed within itself, a
maze of cluttered energies, having no mind. And as the mournful streets
struck past, a tithe of the crowd leaked out, mute, sullen, while those
remaining gave no flash of interest. None of the murmurous expectancy of
a crowd turned to adventure, none of the resilient interplay of
personality transfigured the dull mass. A community this was! The iron
car and the vile brick houses moved. _It_ seemed to rot! Quincy felt
lonely unto pain in it. So cruel the silences of the woods had never
been, as this inert cacophony of union.
And then, the sequel, as the train swung on, leaving him behind at the
place which irony called his “destination.” The huddled, nervous,
slack-eyed flow churned by some unknown design between the dizzy walls
of offices and there absorbed as if to add by their own crushed spirit
to the towers of brick and mortar. The poisonous sense of innumerable
little cells--like the one to which he went--where all this half-quick
matter was laid out, agitant yet fixed like flies in the shifting scum
of stagnant waters. A pulp it was for the increasing of the City.
Quincy thought of the innumerable living things of the sea whose rotted
bones made up the chalk cliffs of England. So, it appeared to him, had
the City come to be. For what other than some such passion, inexorable
and perverse, could explain the blind din of traffic merging into the
barriers of buildings--monuments all to work’s travesty, where the pride
of labor was shrunk to an interminable lamentation?
Each morning, at first, these things gripped Quincy while his heart
forsook him. So that he found it hard to go, hard to bear, easy to fall
away.
And in the office, the dread rhythm was continued. Here, men, boys,
girls were drawn together, the secret of their lives apart forever a
little dimmer in their eyes. And here, unendingly, they stayed with no
hope more bright than that fortune hold them there, since that hold was
living, and with no intercourse more high than that of wolves sharing a
carcass, through want of strength, not will, to drive each other off.
How poor a thing it was for which each day, they shook off their souls,
trampled those flowers, their thoughts, to conjoin and fit in here! And
yet, little as they accomplished, that little was not theirs. Theirs was
merely the naked hold on living, the taste of the shared carcass,--life.
But was this living? Decomposition rather--the blind, inglorious making
of chalk cliffs! Quincy could almost see the process. Soon the spirit
they were forever starving would die, and the flowers they were forever
trampling would cease to bloom. And if the rotting carcass grew not
noisome to them, it must inexorably be that their senses were rotting
also. And lo! a higher city, from their miserable contribution.
Quincy was alert to the danger of these feelings. He sensed in them a
recrudescence of the life he had determined to shut out. He resolved not
to see these things since to do so was to have eyes and to have eyes was
to have tears. He elected to look upon these things as a treachery to
the new self which he believed was born--strong and rebellious--from his
past mistakes. His effort to shake off such thoughts, trample such
moods, he chose to know as will. And his savage muting of the least
vibrance in him toward his surroundings, he chose to know as strength.
He had not yet learned of the power and the efficiency of weakness.
And so, from the first loathing, grew a system of defenses; from the
first bewilderment, a hedge of rationalization--the world’s course,
miniatured....
It had been a common way with Quincy to bear about with him an
undigested load of his past experiences. So it had been in childhood, in
love; so it was still. The pitiful unknitting of his life at college had
been no analysis at all. Even as the pattern of the effect of home upon
him had been the later consequence of tracing back from its felt stamp,
so now, away from it, Quincy was to attempt a reason of his abandoning
college.
The conscious mind is an interpreter, a journal. It does not create;
neither does it impartially report. Rather does it deflect, refract and
so transform what is, into a thing acceptable to the mind’s ego--the
journal’s reader. And what it gives, with the nature of its versions,
the demand brings about. So now, with Quincy--the call had gone forth
for an accounting. It was as if he had sent in his query: “I am here.
How did it come about that I am here? And above all, let there be
nothing in the report that I can not endure!” For this is the way of all
men. And until each man has sharpened his instrument for vision within
himself, there is no need in his decrying, or attempting to reform, the
frauds and mockeries of government and church and public utterance. The
amount of misconception swells with the mass. He who clears the eyes of
one child toward itself does more for the truth than the leader of a
national rebellion. And until there be a nation made up of men who were
just such children, all reform and all revolt must be a romantic variant
upon some theme of falsehood.
It pleased Quincy, then, to look upon the calamities of college as the
result of foolish conduct and false direction. His idealizing, his
dream-gathering, his emotion had been at fault. Manifestly, then, the
turn to make was away from ideals and dreams and feeling. These things
upon which he had leaned had given way. They must therefore have been
fictions. For if one leans upon Reality, one finds support. All that
Professor Deering and his wife and his attitudes at college seemed to
imply must have been fictions. Reality must lie at the outset, in the
antipodal direction--away, that is, from culture, truth-seeking, love
and the qualities of self. He had been sleeping with stars, creating
flowers, parleying with extramundane fires. He had made great mistakes.
He could now make reparation. So, in this way of finding superficial
fault, Quincy escaped a scrutiny of his more basic weaknesses--escaped
the truth.
Here he was, then, launched upon a rushing tide of complete reaction--an
adverse avalanche. He did not know that he was again rushing from
himself, that falsehood is an easing drug, and that it was the truth
which had hurt him. Long, long since, the flash of it which he had
entertained that autumn day in the woods after his talk with the
Professor, had fallen beyond the rim of his world. He did not know how
cowardice had betrayed him in the guise of loyalty and virtue, and how
the very subtle plea of the herd had filled his ears, edging him on to
serve it and deny himself, give up to it his treasures, in hope of some
vague interest which the herd proclaimed as duty and morality and good.
He did not suspect a weakness rotting far deeper than his attempt to
bridge from Julia’s love to the Professor’s friendship, menacing far
more than was implied in his failure to hold either. In the tingling
rebuke of his dismissal upon both sides, he did not see a measure of his
deserts, nor in Julia’s fears for him did he understand the possibility
of reason. The real truth must have swelled that love, meeting the other
friendship; the real good must have nurtured both. But Quincy missed
wider than these. He had defiled the separate gifts of a man and a
woman, with his crude effort to bind and compass them in a view imposed
and a standard borrowed. But Quincy had erred deeper than this. For he
did not guess that, behind it all, lay the fear of venturing alone, the
fear of being a measure to himself and of wielding his life as his
life’s measure. He did not dare to dream that there was in him, glorying
itself, the ancient, leprous fear of the herd’s children to graze
outside of the herd’s shadow. All of these truths had trembled in him;
he had rejected them as unendurable; they had died away. And now,
worst of all, he was content! His failure was breeding a
self-satisfaction--failure’s way. For in that breeding lies failure’s
secret--its birth and its recurrence. The eternal slave lauds his cell
and his shackles, calling them home and law. The rare master ignores
his freedom, looking beyond it.
* * * * *
This year was the one when he was least at odds with his family. He
sensed a truce in his father, as if the old man had held off, stepped
back and were scrutinizing him. One day, toward Christmas, his father
spoke to him, before they went in to the paneled dining room:
“I saw your boss, Mr. Cugeller, to-day.”
Sarah was at once intent, laying aside her knitting--for Rhoda’s
expected baby.
“He seems satisfied with you, my boy.”
There was a stroke of tender respect in the appellation. His mother
smiled with surprise and sighed with relief.
“Come, dear--dinner.”
Here was a new atmosphere indeed. Quincy sat down with a sense of
mastership that goes with a sense of having been accepted. He judged
that his parents were good, homely folk. He judged their respect a
worthy thing. He felt arms go out and draw him within the circle. And it
seemed to him that this was what he had longed for, fought for, always.
He judged his past revolts as misapplied. He judged himself, if
anything, more harshly than had they.
That evening, Adelaide found him in his room. He had brought home some
sales-slips which by rights belonged to office hours.
“Do you really care for business, Quint?” she asked, seating herself on
his bed.
The boy had not changed for his sister. He resented her lack of vision
into his revolution. Something unconscious within him must have told him
that if Adelaide failed to see it, it could not, after all, be so very
deep. This made him strike an imperious and patronizing air.
“Of course I do!”
“You never seemed to be turning in that direction.”
“I had no direction at all, my dear. Now, I have one.”
Adelaide leaned forward, her hands supporting her head.
“Why, Quint!” she said, “You talk as if business were the one direction
possible.”
“Well--” he combatted her in this easy way of combatting himself, “what
other direction is there?”
“You ask me? I--I--thought you might study--something.”
Her vagueness pleased him. It made her easier to confound. “Study
something! That just about expresses it.”
She knew that the Deerings were forbidden ground. She was untaught in
leading up to such without an immediate trespass. So she was silent. But
here was a chance for Quincy to deal a blow at that self of him which he
had buried partially alive. He went on, with eloquence.
“Adelaide--I was a fool. I’m surprised you didn’t see it, for yourself.
I made a mess of things. I was a dreamer. I’ve stopped now!” He
brandished his pile of yellow papers. “America has no place for men who
make a profession of what fills leisure moments. What do philosophizing
and book-reading get you? What earning capacity have they? It’s been my
experience--and I’ve had enough to speak--that these professional
fillers of leisure moments fall flat as dough when real life strikes
them.”
Adelaide was looking at him intently. It seemed to Quincy that she was
heeding with so serious an air not so much his words as a part of him
that had been silent.
“Why don’t you speak frankly with me, ever?” she said at last.
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know about _you_, Quincy--not about all these ideas with
which you keep on fighting yourself!”
He sneered at her. “Aren’t they worth anything, then?”
“Not in your mouth, Quincy,” was her quick rejoinder.
It was his turn to look intent. He felt somewhat ashamed to meet her
little, soft eyes. He saw the crinkly flesh about them. He felt guilty
in so scrutinizing her. But to hide his shame and guilt he had to keep
on looking. And as he did so, Adelaide grew fearful of her boldness,
regretful lest she had wounded him. Truth, after all, was less important
than his well-being. If truth made him uncomfortable, it was a thing to
be slain! With a real victory in her hands, she gave it up. She rose and
went toward the door.
“You’re busy. I’ll not disturb you now”--and she left.
Quincy looked where she had gone. And then, he looked at his work.
“Damn!” he said. “I’m too tired to-night”
He put on his hat and coat and went to a nearby vaudeville. He had an
empty evening. Thereby, he managed to escape his sister, himself, the
suddenly obnoxious sales-slips. For the sales-slips, he hated Adelaide;
for Adelaide, he hated the sales-slips;--for entertaining either
feeling, he hated himself. It was a little case of general
annihilation--a first, subtle, unconscious taste of the delights of
emptiness....
This taste was nourished in talk with Marsden.
Marsden was thirty. Without aid or consultation, there he was--a mature
man! This seemed wonderful to Quincy who had never dared or cared to
watch him grow, It seemed right to him that a cripple should be a
child--or a young man. But to be thirty and have to be wheeled about; to
have grey hair and no salary; to be very wise, yet very helpless! Quincy
felt the same _malaise_ in Marsden’s presence that might have been
expected of a stranger. He was resolved that this must change. And it
was interesting, now they talked together, to watch this gnarled being
gather itself tight and close from the mists which in Quincy’s former
thoughts had constituted Marsden. As Quincy now listened to his words,
he watched his head. And he was minded of a shell, full of the murmur of
some vastness which it derided through its own emptiness. Here also, was
a sense to be submerged like his first taste of the City.
Said Marsden: “I never had much use for you, Quincy, for I always took
you for a ninny.”
“Why?”
As the boy asked, he heard his voice, rather high and tremulous against
the resonance of Marsden’s. This contrast made him conscious that he was
being swayed, in the very accusation, to agree with it.
Marsden answered him. His willingness to talk to Quincy was a new
thing--a compliment. So, at least, the boy took it. He was being
noticed, he was being taken into consideration. The boy allowed no doubt
of the value of all this. He allowed no memory of other notice, of other
consideration which had been given him, and in the light of which all
this was mockery. That way lay hating his new self. And
self-satisfaction had to win.
Marsden had been aware of his desire, exerted through all his youth, to
erect idealities against life’s barrenness and to feed on these. Marsden
seemed to assume that, of course, such a behavior was both bad and
foolish; that life’s barrenness was the sole thing to acknowledge, that
feeding on any ideality, or any ideality on which to feed, was adjunct
to the name of “ninny.” The boy bowed--asserting that he had changed.
“I think you have,” said Marsden. And Quincy was gratified once more.
It was now, that the sensation and the delight of emptiness were
furthered.
“What is the use,” Marsden rhetorically asked, “what is the use of
blinking the facts?--Here we are, having to feed ourselves and get some
pleasure out of the world. If you deny the world it will deny you, and
that means--wipe you out. If you please it, it will give you a little
something. Of course, even then, it will cheat you and finally run you
through the shoulder-blades. But if you don’t please it, it won’t give
you even the little that cheating you implies. It won’t give you even
the breathing-space before the dagger-thrust. It will not let you come
to life, at all. And then, what have you got? Dreams;--a handful of
shoddy, aged make-believes that will poison you with their mold and
rust.”
All this--and more of the sort--proved Marsden’s new friendship for his
brother. Quincy was very glad to have it. It occurred to him that here
was a cripple happier than he had been! a cripple, therefore, to be
emulated! He wanted to be happy. He had not been happy long on the old
path. If dry bones and a bent back pointed an easier way than the glad
promptings of his own rhythmic body, then manifestly the impellings of
free muscles and of eyes that danced in the sun must be denied. It might
seem natural to find gaiety through them and the old plays that he had
undertaken. But it was not so. Wiser it was, then, to incline before the
successful mandate of dry bones and a bent back. Moreover, in this new
atmosphere of business, Marsden seemed to fit in as less of an anomaly,
more of a norm. There was a somewhat all about him kindred to this
cripple with his aging head and his brittle, tottering body and his
cavernous hot eyes. Marsden appeared to him almost as a symbol and a
prophet. If he accepted the City, it was an apt step to accept him. And
if he went about in the City extolling its nature, denying its
deformities, then Marsden also ceased to be a sickly monster. To this
Quincy had brought himself--to this brink of assimilation. In his old
world, the sun’s slant through the trees had been the morning’s
journalistic headline, a tender man’s word the affair of state, his own
surviving spirit the season’s crop;--there, Marsden had indeed been a
poor, pitiable outcast, a grotesque denial of the world’s lilt, to be
avoided and to be feared. But now it was different. Marsden’s limbs
seemed no longer an exception to the world’s meaning--which had grown
also lame and palsied. His malignant power, smouldering in the gloom of
his infirmities, seemed of a note with the world’s might, smothered as
deep in its rotting malady. Marsden’s philosophy sat on his helplessness
and healthlessness, making them power and a grim enjoyment. And even so,
Quincy’s new world builded its prestige from its barriers, mined its
pride from the innumerable things--its wealth and laws--that cluttered
it, gleaned pleasure from a poverty of vision making real freedom and
real adventure undesirable.
Marsden and the City--how one they were! Marsden in his cripple’s chair
that was the seat of his dominion, Marsden who had builded his state and
founded his pleasure in the sick senses of his being. And the City which
gained its eminence and reason also from its shackles, from its myopia,
from its deformities. Eloquently, these two, shut off alike from
nature’s rhythm, thriving alike in the shelter of their moribund
condition, fitted together.
And now, won by the hard glamor of their perfection within their morbid
limits, Quincy elected to join their company. Marsden the cripple must
be his captain. For no wild flower, standing alone, was shielded in such
permanence and might as he.
This extremity of choice tokened the violence of effort which Quincy put
to his so-called adjustment; and this violence of effort proved the
strength of what still held him back. Needless to say, in all this time,
Quincy did not grow fond of Marsden; he never reached the stage of even
being comfortable in his presence. But in so far as he had not grown
fond of work, nor of the City either--not grown comfortable in them, the
analogy of resolution to abide with them and with his brother suffered
no shock. If aught gave way in this factitious structure, it must be the
base. All had been builded logically. And logic in a superstructure is a
good thing; logic in a foundation is a lie. And the first gust of
feeling, the first tremor of the unconscious, may make it totter.
Meantime, Quincy furrowed a rut for himself in Mr. Cugeller’s office.
He went about with Adelaide and with her friends. He struck up an
acquaintance with a young man called Herbert Lamory, who worked beside
him.
Lamory was a cousin of Mr. Cugeller--a handsome boy who spent money
handsomely even though he did not have it. He took Quincy
about--introduced him to his acquaintances--undertook his education. He
was bright and charmful, shallow and content. Quincy grew very fond of
him.
And so, the year went. Work progressed admirably. Its new intricate
developments from the stupid beginnings captivated Quincy in a sense. So
he applied himself. And he had a mind that could have mastered far more
difficult tasks than those of business. That is, he had a real mind,
whereas business requires chiefly an applied and unvarying intuition.
This same mind, intent on business, must have made him prosper. But mind
has a way of varying and wandering. And if this takes place, it is worse
in business--infinitely worse--than no mind at all. However, that time
was not yet.
* * * * *
Herbert Lamory became a help to Marsden. By this friendship was assuaged
in Quincy the lingering discomfort of being a disciple. Herbert seemed
pleasant practice to what his brother had so miserably marked in theory.
Herbert also was warped, eyeless, deformed. Yet, with all this, he had
contrived to found a really pleasurable Helicon. Quincy liked Herbert.
And the spirit within him of his Protestant forefathers was glad at
having so amiable a pasture wherein to let out his brother’s and the
City’s perverted dogmas.
At a subscription dance to which Herbert took him, Quincy again met
Clarice Lodge.
The lit cold room seemed to glance off from the slender heads and the
throats of the men and women, so that it was they who were really lit
and cold. The figures pressed down below the rigid walls smothered in
gilt and fluting and brocade--a mass of colorless detail despite the
gowns, a cluttering of motionless undeviation despite the dancing. And
of a sudden, all of it was a unit addressing Quincy with a strained
air--like some beplastered woman between the times of desire and seed,
who talks to an indifferent neighbor, glancing beyond him. Yes: it was
old, it was rouged and, if one watched beneath the dazzle of lace, even
a trifle knock-kneed and a trifle lame! Yet its voice as it addressed
him was high and piercing. What troubled Quincy was that there should be
no way of answer. He went through the gesture of understanding and of
being part. He also talked to an indifferent neighbor, yearning beyond.
The dance and rigid music gave way to innumerable little eddies physical
and murmurous, of conversation. The long hall shrunk in this more
intricate design. The crowd turned upon itself with false gestures of
ease, deeply aware of its own stiffness. All of this life moved as if
embarrassed by what neighbored it. So its impulse became broken also,
its voice became a sum of flinty, too small mosaics, its movements
lignified. Here and there was the gleam of an eye lit by a mind. And
where that was, there was a note dissenting, a line out of all
composition with the rest. Quincy was learning balance. He held himself
erect in this disharmony of currents, joined so compactly because the
place and the purpose formed a like disharmony. He was swirled about
here, like a canoeist amid mild breakers, where the ocean meets the land
and it is neither land nor ocean. There was no sense here of direction
so that his swirling to and fro was proper. All that was needed was not
to be submerged. And this prowess, Quincy had attained. By being aware
of the unit of all this, the surface grew hard beneath him so as to
support him. In this consciousness, he was sustained from pressing upon
one point, from sinking with a weight of interest below the
convention-outlined waves. So long as he could survive in this
impersonality, he was safe.
And then, he espied Clarice Lodge.
With this stress, the dance grew tenuous; the crowd turned from hard,
choked material to vapor; the music which had been obtrusive, separate,
was a mere rhythm of accompaniment. All of it in a trice became an
incense to him. It had been external, alien--copable. Now, it was no
case of balancing above it nor of falling in. All of it was an
atmosphere. And all of him was a maze of pores, aching and yearning to
receive.
He pressed his way toward her through shreds and fragments of life that
gesticulated, gyred, sent up and over him their acrid wafts of perfume.
A silk gown swished against him; a bare arm touched his hand; a pointed
slipper scarred the surface of his own. The couples stood close
together, clapped their hands metallically for an encore. The band
turned back into the nearly naked rhythm it had just torn to
scraps--repiecing it. The couples swayed and slid away. He lost his
quarry in the once more thickening, knotted turmoil--half substance and
half atmosphere. He was whiffed to the margin of it. He stood now,
flanked by a long straggled row of men, until once more the music gave
him respite to resume his search.
The crowds streaked off with the last chord--veering from the center
maëlstrom in tangents of silk and strutting black, subsiding once more
in little puddles of voice and posture. As Quincy passed, he felt about
him the heat of barely mastered sex slakishly a-stir beneath its
gossamer guards of dress and of convention; he caught the shrill flush
of the repressed and the unconscious, fretting the smooth lines of talk
and rendering cramped the lissome carriage of these bodies. Though his
eyes saw no soil, no awkwardness, it was as if he felt the presence of a
creamy silk smutted with sweat, or of a gentle drapery tortured from
shape by some protrusion. Then he almost ran into Clarice.
She was far more surprised as their hands clasped, than he. For she had
changed more. And this was her domain. He had kissed her, so of course
she recalled everything about him. He who had been, remained like a
crystal in her memory. This Quincy, she knew. Of no other Quincy had she
the slightest cognizance. So she was really amazed, finding him in this
new strange milieu that was her own, who in her mind could never change
from the wild boy of nearly four years past. This flash from her old
self had an effect almost as intimate as if his embrace and talk had
actually been repeated, there in the glitter of the ball. And as she
must have rebuffed any advance at such a time, so now she turned cold
and hot for Quincy, from no reason more real than the reality of her
recollections.
But if Clarice was disturbed by the old spirit--all she caught,--Quincy
was dazed by the new, outer form. And this was the more unwieldly, so
that, in a trice, she was the master. Close on her impulse to fend him
off for having ventured an old impression in so unapt and new a place,
came a desire to attach to him, a nostalgia for her old self whom he had
known. In him, she could enjoy this glint of herself at seventeen. For
there was the lad she had played with! Her proper partners would not see
her metamorphosis. She could be the old Clarice, as this stiff young man
was the old Quincy. Her technique of delusion--her need of it--was sharp
enough for far harder, less true games.
And so it was that in the blare of a waltz on a crowded floor, Quincy
was seen more truly than he would see himself that night, at home,
surrounded by the pretensions that he dared not give up.
Clarice cut back to their last talk, once they were alone. Quincy tried
bravely to show in the words he spoke that he had changed. And Clarice
laughed him out quite as she had laughed out his older pretensions.
Thus, they fared well together. And with another dance, filched like the
first from one of the proper partners, she invited him to call.
The City’s intricate machinery for bringing about what is already
there--an engine for making paper leaves grow on real trees--creates a
pathetic dualism even in its girls. It provides well that the gulf of
after-marriage between their natures and their positions may be sure to
have had time to widen. Already in their choice of friends, girls know
the limitations of the laws that bind them, develop a technique of
evasion, straddle two mounts in order to ride two ways. And if later, as
a clear due of this, they are torn limb from limb, man with his insect
vision blames their desire to ride, instead of the false direction in
which they have been placed.
It was with some such canny calculation that Clarice welcomed Quincy.
She knew well the sort of man whom she must wed. She was able to judge
how his capacity for filling certain major needs of a conventionalized
life must unfit him for many pleasant matters. She was well prepared to
split herself in two, dally with Quincy--while she went on hunting for a
husband. And having already classified his assets and her demands on
him, she was little prone to tolerate Quincy’s offering aught else. She
was well able to cope with the boy’s set resolve to be one of the City’s
crowd in his relations. She had plenty of such. And besides, his very
desperate wish, now, to show his right within those ranks was proof that
she knew, far better than he, what Quincy really was.
And so it came about that the first evening in which he called at her
home was the onset of a new consciousness in Quincy. He found it
difficult even to mention what at home, or with Herbert, was almost a
matter of boast:--that he had abandoned college after three years in
order to enter business. He found it hard to air his new born
materialism; then hard not to conceal it. He found it hard to take pride
in his new contentment; and finally, to be content! Doubtless he felt
already that these elements, wherewith he had won recognition since his
return, were not the ones that Clarice sought in him. But the
significance of this was a slow-dawning thing. First it was imperative
that he somewhat understand the qualities of her who was to cherish
those self-stultified qualities of himself.
He found a fund of disillusion in Clarice. Bravely and openly she
despised the atmosphere she lived in. He was afraid to. For with him, to
despise it, was to stop breathing it. For her, this did not seem to
follow. Clarice was not alone quite sure that she would persevere in
this land whose mockeries she knew; she was willing to. And she gleaned
a constructive aim for her energies in knocking down as she ran along.
Here was a mystery for Quincy. The strange admixture of tenderness and
flint, joy and detachment, which Clarice displayed, was unknown to him.
Willingly, he would have stated that such a girl could not in reality
exist. Yet there she was--intellectually radical, emotionally set and
conserved--more than existing, living with a clear efficiency and a firm
conscience! Nothing she gave him, Adelaide could not have given him to
know. But his spirit’s pores were open here. With his unfortunate sister
all of him was shut and rigid. That was why these talks counted more.
Clarice knew Herbert Lamory slightly. She had never asked him to call.
“He is pretty empty, I think,” she said. “When I talk with him, it is as
if I were talking with a glazed terra-cotta brick on the wall of some
one of a million buildings in New York. He fits in just so
unobtrusively.”
Quincy realized that this was true, and that, because of this very
fitness and his desire to emulate it, he had aligned himself with
Herbert.
She went on: “I really can’t understand your devotion to him. You say
you’re chums? It reminds me a bit--” she smiled, “of the devotion of a
man in the sea for a piece of sea-weed that happens to be floating.”
“A man in the sea is out of his element,” protested Quincy.
“Precisely,” she was content with saying. And as he pondered, there came
a pause.
Clarice had something to say upon the subject of failure. Quincy had
broached it.
“Think of all those young fellows in our office,” he exclaimed, “and as
many more in any other office. How few of them could ever, by reason of
actual physical conditions rise from the menial places they now hold!
After all, each office has only a few heads. And twenty years from now
there won’t be enough new offices to give high places to all these men.”
“No,” said Clarice. “But don’t you think very probably, that only those
who really _fit_ will get ahead? I don’t think it is brains or hard work
or even luck that makes men succeed in New York. It’s _fitting-in_.”
“Well, can’t that be learned?”
“I know something about dogs,” said Clarice. “That’s what I’m really
talking about, only I’m substituting offices for kennels. Well, blue
ribbons aren’t earned, you know. The quality that wins them is there
from the beginning. Your other puppies get the same food and the same
care. But they don’t earn the ribbon even though they are twice as
clever and as strong as the dog that does. Isn’t there an artificial
standard for getting ahead in an artificial city? Well--diligence and
mind are natural things, the result of natural energies. And what have
natural energies to do with artificial standards? I tell you, you must
fit in from the beginning. If you don’t, you’ll be like the vast
majority of dogs in a kennel--an underdog.”
Quincy felt embarassed. He avoided Clarice’s eyes. But she smiled into
him.
“Why did you come and join the kennel, my faun friend?”
“Why did you?” he flashed back at her.
“I am happy here.”
“Well, so am I.”
“It’s the happiness of a bravado. Wait till it wears off. But no,
Quincy--don’t wait! You’ll be used to life here, by then. Used to it,
that is, enough not to be able to get used to any other. Used to
nothing--in other words.”
“You are a very wise girl, Clarice.”
“I was wiser than you, even that summer. That was why I was willing to
like you--willing to like you, Quincy, as much as you cared to ask
for;--but not willing to see you in New York! In fact, _you_ were
exceedingly foolish.”
The young man leaned back in his chair (a posture denoting ease) and
looked at her. Four years had at once subdued and strengthened her. Her
hair was a duller gold and her eyes looked grey in the shaded light,
whereas the gleam of the summer sun had then brought out the spring in
them--the green. Her body was no less slender, no taller. But her
mastership had calmed it, given it a composure in unison with the firm
cut of her dainty mouth and the regular line of her small nose. Quincy
had not liked her hands, since they had been both short and soft. Now
they seemed lighter, freer, longer. They seemed to have the power now to
poise and balance. They had been the paws of a rather destructive
savage; they and her eyes had altered most. Quincy was awed, not by
herself but by the feeling of aloofness that stood between them, making
their past of comradeship unreal. Yet the dash and spice of this made
her all the more desirable, despite the accent of mentorship and of
superiority that now seemed natural to her.
And then, from this easeful figure so composed before him, his mind
glanced back--she was still too hard for piercing--and fell upon
himself. Again, it seemed to Quincy that he had made a mistake. Again,
it became easier to turn against himself, plough there, rend there, than
give calm heed to the force that did this and make his venture
elsewhere.
Clarice seemed so intact, so right! Quincy felt disgust at his own lack
of measure before this girl. She was younger than himself in years; he
had branded her, and, he was sure, once turned her down as a hard flirt.
Yet, despite her lack of mind and of experience, how ably she had
mastered her environment compared to him; how well turned all the
swirling things about her to her advantage, to her own channels, in
contrast to his floundering and illusions and utterly unformed bravado!
For what could he think of his new armor and his new creeds when a few
talks with Clarice disintegrated them, sent them pell-mell, haphazard
like the little evil live things seen through a microscope in a glass of
dirty water?
He thought of Adelaide and his behavior there came to him more nearly in
its proper light. He had never faced her, either. But since she was
tender and soft and inefficient, he had been able to fend her off. That
was not prowess. He felt sorry for her ineptitude; angry at her for not
being able better to present her case since it was worthy and since he
had need of it. Adelaide, self-asserting, might have saved him from
these pitiful, merciless results of a few encounters outside the Rut. He
blamed her for it. And once again the old vision of Marsden came to
him--as if it had been new--of Marsden the unclean thing, and of the
City that was his temple.
But all of these things were uncomfortable and fleeting as yet. For
both reasons they must not seem important; they must not seem to last.
Here, before him was Clarice, looking at him, delving within him
doubtless, for the causes of his silence.
What if she were to find them!
Quincy clasped his hands, and let them fall cavalierly to his knees. He
was in danger--that part of him that was the City’s thing. So the City
came to his rescue. It supplied him with a smile, a fund of evasive
talk, an armor for fencing himself away. And so, with sick foreknowledge
how, he made his slippery escape.
The rest of the evening was a duel--her knowing thrusts, his parryings
that grew forever more self-conscious, more defensive, more
half-hearted.