II

Quincy was in his new room, alone. Just back of and above his head

burned a naked gas-jet for which he had not yet bought a globe. To his

right was an open window and within it, the street; within the street

were autumn and the city. It was a quiet street. Its smooth pavements

answered the beat of traffic as a windless lake responds to the tossing

of pebbles. From each liquid impact went forth a wreath of murmurs to an

impassive marge, like ripples on the water. He was that marge. Yet, from

another point he was that stone, weighted and insignificant, dropped on

the surface murmur now turned lake, and wrinkling for the brief span of

passage--to the bottom. Car-bells and human voices lay upon the

undertone like false jewels on a rich garment. Their movement trembled,

cutting through the haze of evening sound as a jewel’s gleam might fall

on satin. Quincy stood silently receptive, while the light dozed about

him and the violet evening grew purple night through the window. Before

his eyes was a mirror. He was examining himself.

He saw his face. He saw his sinewed neck drawn down within the flaring

collar of his open shirt. He saw the muscles move on his haired forearm;

he saw the knotted twist and the lean length of his hand. He met his

eyes. From the reflected yellow flame, they glowed almost bronze beneath

their blue. It was as if violets were blooming among autumn stubble--an

impossibility. Just so, there was the hectic flush beside the spring

freshness of their mien. He was young. Yet, his way of gazing in the

glass was the way of one who had been a journey. He left his eyes and

saw his mouth. The lips were brown. Vertical, faint lines broke their

roundness as the parch cracks the earth. And then, his eyes’ focus

wandered, receiving all of him. He saw himself.

As he looked, the form of his long head and of his flaring forehead

fallen over with black hair was within his gaze like a clear thing in a

mist. As he looked, he could not but watch his mouth part, his upper

teeth bite down upon his lower lip, his jaw thrust gradually forward,

the lines of his throat straighten and hollow with strain. At the same

time, his eyes grew more reflective of the glow above him, less tinged

with the blue that came from within. His eyes also were rigid. His hands

were on his hips. And his arms fell, relaxed as his face rose,

stiffened. But gradually there was less of this; always less. For it was

not this at which he looked.

As the picture on the glass grew dimmer, he began to think--another way

of looking. The mental picture waxed, until it was no less clear, no

less striking. But it was bitterly at variance with the other. He had

not escaped the charm of strength and rhythm in this portrait of

himself. But all of it was irony, as he turned inward. And thus

inclined, the outer semblance hung upon his thoughts as does a gay

refrain pinned, for its recurrent mockery, to a sad song.

* * * * *

There had been this scene at home--the new home--the Frondham mansion,

as they let their guests know.

“If your father commutes, I don’t see why you can’t.”

“But Mother, Father doesn’t have to be in town until so much later.”

“Well,--you’re so much younger. That evens matters.”

“Perhaps Quincy doesn’t want to live at home any more,” Adelaide

suggested.

“I guess that’s it,” from Quincy. “It’s a good chance to strike out

alone.”

“Very well, my son.” Josiah whipped himself into a state of being

injured. “Go, by all means. But if you leave the house--you pay your own

way.”

“I can afford to. I’m making twenty dollars a week.”

“Go, then,” said the old man. “It’ll do you good.”

Sarah sighed. Adelaide, who suffered most, was the one who did not cast

a dart by way of godspeed.

“You’ll come out week-ends, dear?” she said, placing her hands about his

face.

But Quincy was angry at the ease with which his father seemed to shake

him off.

“If I have nothing better to do,” he exclaimed, stepping away from

Adelaide. His mother clasped her hands at this. And his father shook his

head angrily, thinking thus to token his indifference.

“You may come when you like--or stay away!” he said.

“So this is how I am repaid! This is how I am repaid!” cried Sarah.

“Why, Mama--”

“Don’t talk to me! I’m beginning to see how right your father used to

be. Come, Josiah.”

She was the more severe, because, that season, Quincy had been the more

amenable. Only parents who are not fond are not bullies.

Meantime, Marsden, knowing long ere this that he had lost his

short-lived disciple, whistled a tune.

For there had been many things prior to this brief and trenchant

consummation. But this was the immediate way that Quincy came to live

alone, that autumn, in a boarding house in Murray Hill.

It was a natural step to take with his family an hour from the City. And

this, his family knew. He had even mentioned contemplating it, that

summer. There had been no talk then. But it would have been unseemly to

their particular etiquette not to have protested at the moment of

action. Had Quincy succumbed to their formal outburst and remained, he

would have won for it no praise or grateful comment. Nor, in the stand

he made, did he incur a serious blame. The family was sure to forget the

strained discomfort which, by tradition bound, it was required to inject

on any move, any decision whatsoever. Quincy would not be harshly

judged. Quincy would not be less welcome. He knew that this being

disagreeable merely eased a family, that the throwing its weight to

“Nay” and tarnishing a normal impulse with its inertia’d hue and cry

went always, by its nature, before accepting.

That first evening, he had seen Clarice.

He had taken her to dine at one of the French restaurants that garnish

the side-streets of Broadway. He was aglow in the momentum of his

self-freeing step. He had found his friend at first remarkably atune to

the glad impulse in him.

They faced each other over the narrow little table. The unusual

surroundings, the packed clamor of the guests, sharpened in each a sense

of intimacy with the other. They drank the red wine that had been

brought without their asking for it. Quincy was proud of the fresh firm

girl that marked him off from the other men with their faded or drab or

hectic women. And Clarice was proud, seeing in Quincy a man strong

enough to run the race when its rhythm pleased him, without the

engulfment that degraded all these other men--their slavish dress, and

their inelastic hands and their stamped features.

She lifted her glass; its scarlet made her wrist a mere shred of white.

“Here’s to the new, old unbroken Quincy. May he have the strength he

needs!”

The boy did not understand. As they clinked glasses:

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Are you so confident that you don’t feel the need even of a toast to

hearten you?”

“What do you mean?” he could do no better than repeat.

She laughed and leaned back in her chair and poised him so.

“There is only one side of you--or is it depth?--that means anything to

me, at all. One side only, that I will tolerate. I drank to that.”

And then, seeing his quandary in his eyes, she went on.

“Can you imagine yourself, Quincy dear, as just a lost note in this ugly

din?--here it is all about us. Of course you can’t! But I can. Because I

know so many such--because most of me is just that sort--and dedicated

to it. Well, if you shrink ever to be just part of the din, you’ll be

lost to me; you’ll be worse, even worse than I am. You’ll be utterly

and dismally negligible. I shan’t be able to notice you at all.” She

paused. “Quincy--I’m straining with you with all my might, so that

shan’t be.”

Why would she not accept him, whatever he might be, or turn to? Why was

she always a taskmaster before she would be friend? Why did she demand

that he _work_ for her smile?

At last, he spoke this out.

“You don’t care for me a bit, just for myself.”

“That’s sentimental! Of course, it is what you can give me, what

differentiates you, that I can care for. Otherwise, why am I dining just

with you?”

He shook his head. He had come there swinging in his momentum. And

Clarice was standing still. She had a philosophy against moving with

him. It occurred to him that this rational friendship was the antipode

of love. And this troubled him--unreasonably, since he felt no love for

her.

There was a dear light in Clarice’s eyes--while all his mind grew

blurred.

“You don’t despise--_just being_,” she rebuked him. “Just being has

eaten into you a bit. Whenever I look at you, I feel the danger that you

are going to melt away; and that in your place where I was so glad to

know you, I shall some day find a ghost, an echo, an empty shell--like

the rest.”

“And what do you give me, to help keep me real? A set of rules!”

Clarice sobered. He had touched her, there. She wanted him to be strong,

to be true. But out of her own weakness yearning for all this in him,

there came no strength to help him. She shrugged. But she could not deny

his accusation.

Gradually their talk sagged into a minor key. It was clear to Quincy

that if he failed--even if he complied with the life about him--he would

simply, automatically fade from Clarice’s consciousness; it would be as

if he were not, and as if--passing him on a crowded street--her eyes

looked through him and did not warm. It was clear to him that this was

not right. And it was clear to her that this could not be different.

But to neither of them was it known that perhaps her need was as great,

in all this, as his....

So they had parted. Here also, there was no mischance, no real clash.

If he stood that night before his mirror, fearful and harassed, it was

entirely what Quincy found within himself--or failed to find--that

tortured him.

* * * * *

He thought, then.

Another year laden to his accounts. And no doubt of how to qualify that

year--a year, another year of treachery! By it the latter episodes of

college had not been erased. Rather they had served as easy slopes

leading down to that which followed. A nadiral year!

But Quincy’s jaw thrust out. He knew it. He was alone. He stood against

a blank, grey wall, facing the truth. There was no praise of self, no

pride, no confidence in his position. There was no alternative. There

were merely the nausea of the past, the grim facing of the present, the

not caring for the future.

Quincy was about to enact, simply, clumsily, the Word that his heart

spoke; to become sincere; to become chastened of all things save that

Word’s simplicity and the co-ordination with it, of his deed. Quincy

was about to be a man.

He was become eased of worldly irritations. They seemed to have left him

permanently. They had been a help to his false self, what time he shut

his senses to the hurts of spirit. In dwelling upon them, he had been

better able to persevere without a consciousness of deeper pains. All of

that had belonged to the first year. He had chafed, then writhed, then

railed against the City....

The hammering monotony of huge buildings that were neither beautiful to

look upon nor useful to be dwelt in--monuments of vanity and folly,

hideous with stolen decoration no one understood, or lavished with

detail, intricate, costly, stupid that no one ever saw, sheathed in

insincerities whose one successful purpose was to hide the

structures,--and these, twice as tall as conditions warranted, built

with money that was needed--sorely needed--elsewhere; the fetid subways,

packed with humanity as no humane company would pack a poultry car,

cesspools that stunk in summer and were a stain upon the community that

used them, always; the crass, nasty, lying theaters of Broadway,

expressive of a mudworm’s aspirations; the spiritless cafés that

interspersed them, ruled and erected to glorify the souls of lackeys,

serving bad food no one would eat elsewhere at the expense of

entertainments no one would sit through elsewhere: the unending blight

of magazines and journals--made from the crushing of fair forests into

wood-pulp!--one built upon the sweaty, fatuous dimensions of a traveling

salesman, one leveled at the rouged, frilled creature that lazes in a

cheap flat, mothers a puppy and dreams of motors, a third aimed to

titillate the woman with less sex, more children, a wider hallway but

no more brains--littered all and innumerably, with false optimism, false

advice, false pictures and false plots: the blatancy of the

ensemble--its utter uselessness--journals screaming above the houses,

traffic screaming above the public halls, clubs glittering above the

shops, theaters and restaurants exhibiting above the brothels--all of it

shutting out the blue of heaven, the glance of the sun on the Hudson,

the murmur of the few surviving trees, the spirit of the few surviving

souls. And the mad misery of the dwellers!--proud to be smothered in the

biggest subway, proud to be cheated in the biggest stores, proud to be

lied to by the biggest journals, proud to be sheep in the biggest

pen!...

But all this was behind Quincy. All this was behind him, as is the

surface when a man has burrowed deep. All this was. But it was

unimportant. And none of it would be, if each man so burrowed beneath it

to the poisoned ego of which all of it, in cumulation, was a putrescent

outer deposit. It interested Quincy no longer. He had no time to dwell

on it, or to inveigh against it. He was engaged upon himself.

Here was a new sort of serenity--the sort that accepts a certain thing

as an economy of strength for fighting elsewhere; the economy, not of

blinking the truth, but of indifference to superficial falsehood. This

is the economy of the artist toward what is evil, and of the priest

toward what is contradictory to his faith. Quincy applied it to what had

so far engrossed and maddened him.

Dwelling upon the City’s faults--by feeling them, combatting them--he

had no time or muscle for himself. Now, he plowed deeper.

But all of this was, after all, no wondrous vision or wondrous might

coming to Quincy. So it did not seem even to him, although in contrast

to the darkness and debility of his former states, he might well have

been pardoned if it had. Quincy was not, of a sudden, over his

stammering and his stumbling.

He had exhausted two extremes of error. He was bound--he was sure--to

be, this time, less wrong than he had been. As the wise East has said:

All progress is through a series of disgusts.

Here he was, then, twenty-two, earning his living, living

alone--unhampered by too great devotion either for any man or for any

woman. He had the feeling, now that the City no longer troubled him,

that family was gone, and business ran smooth, of being able to swing

his arms and legs without obstruction. This was his start. Here was his

race. During it, his sense of progress was in the things he passed.

Until the end, he would not know in his weariness how fast and hard he

had gone; in his position how far and whither he had come. The rest of

the consciousness of Quincy was to be the consciousness of motion.

He had himself now, to traverse, to judge, to reckon with. His freedom

of external bars did not give him freedom, did not make him light. But

it loosed him upon the realler things. It gave him a movement wherein,

for the first time, really to know. And a dark thing known is a dark

thing made light. A heavy thing in motion is a heavy thing to stop.

Here, then, was Quincy’s start within himself. At last, he was flowing

forward--all of him, from depth to surface. He had bent back reality to

fit childish loves of mother or of dream; he had warped the natural

offshoot of these loves to make them fit reality; he had denied one or

the other, twisted them, dammed up his life’s current in order to have

a smooth lake for lolling or a dry place for forgetting. This was over.

He was flowing forward. Stormily, muddily, cramped. But yet, a

passage....