Quincy sat on a rock that formed part of a stone fence. About him were
briars of blackberry in bloom. It was May. Before him, the brow of the
hill rose gently a half hundred feet. And above that was the falling
sun. Its golden glow flushed the green stretch; little innumerable
shadows, greyish purple, were in those depths of the grass where the sun
could not enter. A single tree--an elm--stood between the skyline and
Quincy’s fence, just to the left of the sun. The wind skimmed up the
hill and turned the elm-leaves silver. Below Quincy’s back, through a
thick fringe of elder and maple bushes, was a collaret of locust trees.
And in the valley was a little town. Its murmurs rose and mingled with
the trill of the trees. A subtle counterpoint met Quincy’s ears--a fugue
of leaf and whistle and children’s voices; of a motor-horn and a girl’s
laugh and a raven’s crow; of an infant’s cry and a wagon’s crunch and a
cricket....
Meantime, the sun went down for Quincy. In the village, it was still
day,--and on the hill-top.
Quincy descended to the railroad station. But by that time, of course,
it was evening everywhere.
He took a train back to the City. He had been in country only for the
day. He wore a smart straw hat. A faint moustache composed the tremorous
length of his mouth. His eyes gleamed like pale lights in a hollow.
Under them were rings of grey. His cheeks were drawn. His head seemed
longer than it had been. He had a gaunt and dry look for one who had
been in converse with the May sun. There seemed little fire in him. Even
his eyes appeared to catch their color from the dark grey that went
about them.
Quincy preferred these little lonely trips to the duty-calls on Frondham
mansion. He preferred them always. And when, like this day, his mood was
strong, even a monthly visit home would have been unbearable.
He left the train, swept toward the exit like a half-floating thing
among light jetsam upon a rapid current. This occurred to him. For,
though he did not associate the thought, he said to himself:
“Most people succeed in America, not because they have brains or
shrewdness or luck, but because the current is too strong to let them
sink.”
Then, he struck across town toward his little flat. As he passed Sixth
Avenue, the conjoined noises of the cars, the elevated trains, the
trucks, the motors, the newsboys and the surging, shuffling crowds rose,
of a sudden, to a terrifying climax--thundered, trembled, crashed.
Quincy clenched his fists.
“Good God!” he cried aloud. But the woman with a shawl over her greasy
hair, who passed so near as to brush his hand, heard not a word.
Quincy’s head had been empty of thought. He reached the sidewalk. He
needed some cigarettes. There was a store at that corner. A fire
automobile, painted red, added the clangor of its bell to the general
din. Quincy watched it swerve and swing and dodge through the maze of
traffic. With his eyes on its twisting thread of crimson, he walked
toward the shop and passed the threshold. Next to the tobacco-store
there was a pawn-shop. He had entered this, by error.
The wickered counter was before him. Behind it stood a little, swarthy
man in a skull cap. At either side was a litter of jewelry, gold
watches, ticking alarm-clocks, resplendent canes and pictures. He and
the man were in the shop alone.
“What can I do for you, sir?”
Quincy was sure he was going to explain, apologize and leave. His eyes
were on a gun-metal object hanging below a gleaming samovar. He lifted
his arm.
“How much is that?” he asked.
“The revolver--?”
Quincy trembled. He saw the little man’s sharp eyes stand on his
thoughts like beads.
He went home, taking his purchase. He tucked it away beneath some winter
underwear that he had camphored for the summer. Then he took off his
clothes and calmly went to bed.
* * * * *
He slept well--three hours--until midnight. And then, all of a sudden,
he awoke, clear-headed and sleep-less; his state as distinct from that
of an earlier instant as is a bright cliff from the sea that slumbers at
its foot.
And now, he ceased being the automaton that had gone forth that morning
and come back that evening, laden, it is true, with new experience and
new possession, but until then unconscious save of the reality of having
moved.
He lay in his bed, high up above himself, as if he had stood indeed upon
a cliff above the sleepy sea. It was a clear, white cliff. Before him,
the sun lay on the opalescent waters. It shot a ray of flame below his
feet. It struck the stone and fell back gleaming to the little waves
that lapped it in. Above the sun was a purple cloud. In the cloud was
orange lightning! There was the sun, farthest away from all, faintly
receding toward the cliff, falling short and tumbling away into the
water. There was the orange storm, lurid and encompassing, a little
nearer--also beyond. And all about him, despite the sun, despite the
glinted sea, was night. Upon it, these many things were visitations.
Was he awake after all? Yes. For there, with all the rest, was his room.
He faced a door--a very black door. Its transom was thrown open. And
through it came the yellow vagueness of the hall. Other doors were also
on that hall. And within them, other people. The little transom let them
in and let him out. His watch sang away on a chair, next to his pillow.
The vague light of the hall drifted to one side and met the vague light
of the window at his head. In this conflict, he saw the meagre gleam of
the glass in his bureau. In the morning, he could turn upon one side and
see himself reflected there. Now it was a mere ghost of light--a grey
pall hung over the darkness. He thought: “I can not see myself, now.”
Then, he began to think of himself. The glass in the bureau had helped.
Two years passed through his mind--passed many times; muddled pell-mell,
grotesquely stressed, fancifully slurred, parts of them repeated with
endless variance until his nerves shrieked for respite, other parts
lurking away in the Hinterland, lurid yet ashamed. No reason for this
disorder; no rule for the unimaginable gaps, the huddled
over-determinations. And yet, withal, a rhythm and a lilt that held him
there, gently receptive as one who listens to a well-studied symphony,
finding it new.
Rather a dream than a recapitulation. The one measured thing was the
little watch, singing away that monotone, the time. Yet, since all the
rest lay like a mighty matrix for that beat, it too must have had
measure. Perhaps the master of this symphony was a complex composer--too
complex to be measured, yet too great not to be enjoyed.
Two years.
What must two years be, in which is nothing that outweighs their number.
Not failure. For failure is infinite. Not achievement. For though that
be limited, it too transcends counting. What then? Weariness, perhaps?
Or a clutter of details signifying the same thing? Or a mass of grey
without that spot of gleam which makes parts brighter, greater, than the
whole? Or somewhat of all these?
He could rehearse the parts, if he desired. But it seemed more real to
let them gyre about at will--as they were doing. Clarice, business,
Adelaide and home--a friend looked for, an acquaintance had but not
cherished. The indefatigable past, limed with indifference lest it bring
nausea. Mother who clamped his ears when she was ineffectually fond. A
raise and praise from his employer. Two weeks in the mountains with
Lamory whom he had long since detested.... Whom else to go with? Two
weeks with himself was no vacation.... Here was such an hour--with
himself. And only the lying on his back, so that the two years slid over
him, made that hour possible! Two weeks--a thousand such hours? They
would have been unlivable! Lamory prevented the woods from speaking to
him. At least, since Lamory was there, he blamed Lamory. He was glad,
therefore, that Lamory had been there. Suppose he had been alone and the
woods had not spoken! Yet, there had been this very afternoon. Well--the
village had made noises behind his back. Can a pagan make love with a
Christian boy peeping through the curtains? Small wonder, the elm trees
and the clambering grass had remained silent. By the mercy of God, let
it not be that really, really, the woods were always, now, to be silent
to him! Quincy shivered in bed and prayed for that.
And his prayer broke away in the middle, to a waking dream. Clarice
walked by his side along a path of poplars and silver-birch that was
familiar.
“Quincy,” she said, “why don’t you tell me that you love me?”
“Why--do you love me, Clarice?”
He recalled the day when the sun had been a tiny golden pool in a grey
firmament and he had kissed her. Now, he kissed her again. He was very
happy, somehow, to recall the earlier occasion. And this angered him.
His prayer had broken. Now, also, broke his waking dream. He recalled
that he had been praying. It seemed strangely significant that he could
never sustain his prayers and dreams. Always, always, they straggled
into sleep--or into something else. They were the realest of things to
Quincy. Naturally, then, his other ways fared little better.
Once more, the two years, outweighing all within them.
Why, just two years? He remembered. Of course, it was an approximation.
But with that last summer spent with the family in their unfitting home,
the great disgust had been born. It had been the great disgust, not
because it was intrinsically greater than all the others marking his
life, but because it was the first that he had met--the first that he
had grasped--the first that he had dared! He had remained until the
fall, marshalling his resolution, throwing away his garret-full of
insincerities. And then, clean, light, glistening with spiritual sinew,
he had come away to the little room in Murray Hill. Here, his fight had
begun. What made him think it was ended? Only two years.
He could find nothing to hate or to deny in those two years. That was a
signal reason for recalling them and no other term of his ill-fitting
life. He could find nothing to alter or undo. And this also, was
brilliantly unique. Yet no more. What pregnancy in these two years? What
achievement? What hope gained? Quincy asked himself.... He had bought a
pistol.
Then two years, virgin of misdeed, free of dross, forged in a true fire,
gave no more than the muddy, lazing, treacherous years before them! Gave
no more? Gave less! For those years in which he had stultified himself
and which, in turn, he had repudiated, offered memories. He could
pasture among them. Filthy and false as he had branded them, they had
borne something. Their sin had had a fruit that was sweet. Their
wrongness had been pregnant with something that endured. These last two
years had been chaste--and sterile. Here was an encouraging observation.
It was wrong! He would fight for the true, two years of his life! He
would deny the rest--deny Garsted and Deering, deny the woods, deny
Rhoda and his mother, deny his dreams. He would deny Julia most of all!
All of these things had been wrong, yet they lived! All of these last
two years were dead, yet they were right! Here was a new thing to
ponder.
The City came into the lists. He had been awaiting this. It threw the
balance into a solution. He began to understand.
Two years again--wearying to have lived, wearying to think of. The two
years in which he had been alone with the City.
A little squirming thread came out of the welter and ran to an open
place. This place was cold and barren and utterly disagreeable. The
welter had been fretted with sweet things, streaked with warmth, bathed
with perfume. But it had no dimension, no perspective. And the cold
place that was open had both of these! The thread was crimson like the
fire-car that he had seen in the cold City lights. _That_ rushed to a
place which presumably was hot. This thread of his shivered its way to a
place that was cold. It was unfortunate. The City had given him a
comparison that made him yearn. There was a seed in this!
What was unhappiness? He had been thinking about the City. Now, he
pondered this? Well--let his mind reel like a drunken man. It is as good
a gait, when one has no place to go, as straight ahead. And that is why
drunkards reel. The liquor gives sway to their unconscious self. They do
not care to go where they are going. So they go reelingly. So his mind,
perhaps. Here it was vainly philosophizing? Let it go.
With relaxation, magically, came an answer.
He had said to himself: “I am unhappy.”
And he had followed it with: “I am glad.”
He would never understand the complete depth of this sincere reaction:
that unhappiness is the energy of life, its purest facet, its semen of
progression: that to be swept with it is therefore to be alive: and that
youth’s glorying in unhappiness is not a fancy, not a form, but an
immortal intuition whereby youth renders its account of the world’s
essence. Not to be unhappy is not to be destined to create. And every
fiber of youth’s soul is drenched with just that destiny, fashioned
toward just that consummation--to create. Wherefore, youth’s eternal
syllogism: “I am unhappy. I am glad.”
All of this was not conscious to Quincy, lying between night and day
under his sheets with the sleepy glow of the transom full in his eyes.
But he knew that with his double cry something flew free in him, hovered
in the air and beat its wings. He was no longer in a welter now, nor in
an open place that froze. He was in New York. And he understood that the
barrenness of the two years wherein he had been _himself_ accrued from
the inexorable bar between that which he had been and the City which
should have mothered his desire. Two of a different form may couple. But
they will not bear fruit. He and the City had been together. He had
remained himself and so had it. They had been barren of each other.
There was the solution.
A good fight it had been. And yet, a hopeless one. Quincy lay in his
bed, a-quiver as never before with the sense of the inevitable, with the
sense of tragedy. Why had he not made the City molten to his ends? Why,
barring this, had he himself been rigid, untransformable? Oh, he had
tried! He had twisted himself enough, tortured himself, cut off parts
that protruded, warped away parts that differed. But that had been in
vain. Here was no task for carpenters. He had tried every means save the
two means that were achievement--the two means of mastery. For it
requires mastery to mould the City to one’s own end, in one’s own fire.
But it requires mastery no less to give all of oneself, wholly, freely,
bravely, to be reshaped and recreated. This which he might have done, he
had failed to do.
The old fault--the old weakness. Was it the crux of all his interminable
misdirections? That he could never give himself entirely--was this why
he had not received. That he could never lose himself utterly--was this
why he had not found?
Julia flashed on his mind and he did not spurn her. And the point of
this association--it flashed also on his mind. The old story--the
crux--the kernel of his misadventures.
Was it too late? He was unhappy. That was a sign of hope. But no. It was
a token merely that the end was not yet there. He would go on fighting,
struggling. But he would not win. Already he knew that he could not
hope. He still wished to win; he still wished to hope. This proved only
that the end was not yet there.
Quincy lay cold within his sheets, awed by the beauty of his vision.
* * * * *
Like a dank breath, morning blew into the open window. The world
shivered; the air was streaked and tremorous with chill. A piercing
gleam, splintered into myriad tiny weakling emanations, came stirring
upon him with the burdened air. A faint murmur lay hesitant above the
damp-drenched streets. The smell of a fresh round to life was shrill in
the blue glow. The murmur broke into sharp noises, desperate,
marvelously clear. The color of the whole was an unclean reluctance.
Here was not morning’s birth, but the night’s grave; the winding sheet
of rest; a pall upon the City.
Quincy fell asleep.
* * * * *
The summer was hot and clinging. It sucked the moisture and fruitfulness
of men. Quincy suffered along. But he suffered more. For most, the City
had its compensations. There were the beaches, the garish playgrounds of
Coney Island, the dirty rocks and rotten wharves of East River, studded
with naked bodies of boys, draped, crouching forms of girls, who swam
and dived and reveled despite the City ordinance forbidding it and the
pestiferous state of the sewer-soaked river. None of these means of
wringing pleasure from the heat attracted Quincy. The last summer, when
it had been far more a bearable proposal, he had declined his mother’s
offer that he commute to them. This summer it was out of thought. His
mother did not even make the suggestion. So he was alone. Clarice, the
one girl he really cared to be with, was away. And he avoided Lamory,
ranking him now with half a dozen other uncongenial friends.
He worked hard. He took an occasional harbor sail in the evening. But
the fragor of the beaches was foretasted by the packed, chattering
masses on the boats. So that there was very little harbor and much
intimate association with nursing mothers, with romping boys, with
clamorous, obtrusive minstrels, with beery men. The water lay below all
this, a satined stretch, ruffled by rude craft, faintly musical and
faintly blue and faintly perfumed with the salt. But the irrepressible
boat shut it out for the most part. About it, there was naught faint or
vague. Quincy would sit in the stern and watch the huddled buildings of
lower Manhattan draw together as he drew away. What an eloquent memorial
they were--these unkempt buildings--to a vast energy run wild, arrogant,
lacking a soul to guide it. He knew the scene’s repute for beauty. But
he did little more than shrug his shoulders. New York’s aesthetic he had
long since recognized as an uncritical sentimentalism. A mass of
ill-related, misshapen, meaningless structures prodding the air with
imitation cathedral towers or Egyptian pyramids or fortress battlements
could not be beautiful. Yet, as they died away and the blue mist of the
harbor thickened and the myriad gold lights came out, shooting their
gleam into an overtone, and the water’s murmur turned to a sheen of
silver, and the whistles of the water-craft thridded the vagueness with
their sharp reports, Quincy changed his mind. The City was now a ghost
looming away, a thing of uncanny life, vibrant and portentous;--a thing
of beauty. Quincy went back to that first visit of discovery when he had
come down, thrilled with adventure, from his college and walked Brooklyn
Bridge. The City then had not needed the veil of night and the garlands
of the water to make it beautiful. It had not changed. He had. Was it
for the better?
It was a heavy summer. Quincy declined his two weeks’ vacation, earning
by this display of his heart’s emptiness, the praise of his employer.
Week-ends, he spent at home. But they did not rest him. And the little
copse in the rear of the house where he had once made revel, was a
mockery. The willow tree through whose fingers the sun fell each day
became a burden upon Quincy’s sight. It hurt him. He avoided it. He
remained with his family. He bathed with them, motored with them, sat on
the veranda, doing naught with them. Adelaide had never found him so
pliant, so agreeable, so heart-wrenchingly sad. But it was too late to
alter the course of this petty tragedy. They were side by side, needing
each other, as they had always done, starving and wasting away. They had
no hands to clasp each other with, no arms to hold with. But they had
breasts, hearts--vainly, since their lips were silent and their words
did not concord.
* * * * *
And so, came the fall.
There was naught very new with Quincy. He was unhappy. He was conscious
that some day that unhappiness must cease. And that day would be
auspicious of what already he felt mistily impending.
Meantime, however, he doubled his visits to Clarice. And Clarice was
glad. She had played badly her game of straddling two mounts. Disgust
for the one direction, yearning to leave it, grew. And her respect, her
need of the new, old Quincy, the brave Quincy that called things by
their thrillingly right names, grew also. They were intimate friends.
But Quincy never forgot the philosophy that she had given him as
hers--her stern determination to mark her life along pragmatic measures.
He did not venture to change this; he was not sure that he really cared
to. He was fond of Clarice. Encouraged, this fondness might have been
easily transfigured. But although Clarice came to look on him as the one
fresh part of her living, she also still persisted in the false routine
of traveling the desert. So she helped him in no aggressive way to love
her, to win her. And no less a way could have swerved Quincy. He had no
fuel for passion. Clarice had plenty. But the old creed in her prevented
her from giving it. Thus matters stood.
So far, he had been well. But with this fall, he felt an ebb in his
physical reserve. He needed more sleep; he ate less food; he drowsed
over his work. Often, he came to the office with limbs like lead.
In November came an early snow-storm. Quincy caught cold. He failed to
shake it off as he had other colds. He drove himself each morning out of
bed, with his head aching and his eyes hot. The office-manager who
prized him said to him:
“Quincy--you’re not well. Business is slack. Why not take two weeks
off?”
But the boy demurred. What should he do with “two weeks off”? Was not
the hard régime of business his salvation, his redemption from the
barrenness that parched him, bit into him, when his mind turned toward
it? He grew worse. But he persevered. And the office-manager, meeting
Josiah Burt one day by chance, mentioned his boy’s condition. Josiah
spoke to Sarah. Quincy’s mother took a six o’clock train the following
morning to New York. At seven-thirty she was in Quincy’s room. He lay
there awake, in bed, parched with fever, his brain sweating with effort,
looking at her.
Too disconsolate to demur long, the boy agreed to accompany his mother
to Atlantic City.
* * * * *
Thanksgiving time. A vast sea, flashing in the sun. A golden beach
standing upon the sea. A squadron of miserable shops and huge hotels,
loudly awry in line and decoration, standing upon the beach. A number of
garish piers, muddy, shapeless, plastered with advertisements, reaching
over the purled waters like the fingers of a lecherous man upon a
woman’s breast.
From the far corner of the pier Quincy could sit and hold the ocean in
his soul. If he turned, the city sprawled out before him, defiling the
sun that shone on it. Innumerable little creatures crawled upon the
gleaming board-walk, a black line spotted with the blare of women’s
colors. Also, on the beach they pranced like sand-fleas, or rode horses
that caught the sun’s spark on their flanks along the combers.
But to turn was not necessary. He sat there, his mother chattering
beside him, and essayed not to listen. For hours he would sit and watch
the symphony of light within the waves, for hours play at the game of
trying to tell the water’s colors. If only his mother had had less to
ask him! How he longed for a more humble mother, one to respect his
silence, to be mute before his ecstasy. How he would have cherished such
a one! But she who was there meant just as well, albeit her deed was
different. He must endeavor to bear this in mind.
Sarah’s chief theme was scolding him because he had allowed himself to
sicken; and, granting that, because he had not at once called on her.
There were many variations--rather similar--to this. But at times, the
plethora of words would cease, and then, despite the ugly charm she
could cast on him when he silenced her, with her injured mien, the sea
came up and spoke to him.
“How wondrous this beach would be,” he cried--a flash of his old self,
“if only there were no hotels, no piers, no board-walk!”
“Nonsense!” Sarah, like all good Americans, felt personally hurt at the
suggestion that her race had not improved on Nature’s America. “Where
could you sleep?--or have your chair rolled?”
There were too many people about; there was too much of this fond
mother, who knew so well about Quincy’s body, so little of Quincy’s
soul. At least, on these, Quincy blamed the failure of his ironic
journey. The passionate sea had beckoned so beautifully to him--to him
that once might have known its accent.
He stood alone on the longest pier; his mother left at the hotel. His
eyes went out to the horizon and his ears met the plash of the cool,
deep waves against the slimed concrete posts. It seemed to him that he
must jump--and die. It was a real impulse--one to be squarely met.
No! There was enjoyment in this coolth, hope in the waves’ music, health
in the easy, limbered kiss of the sky and the water. The waves slumbered
in their bronze rings, topped with sapphire. Beyond was a streak of
opal--about a mass of murmurous emerald slaked with fire. How
unutterably beautiful was this! He did not wish to be below the waves.
It could not be so beautiful when one failed to catch the changes of the
sun on the waves’ surfaces. He thought of life. Were its beauties also
the sun’s and the sky’s gleam on it? Was it also an opaque
mass--smothering, colorless, eyeless--below its surface? The ocean was
dead without the wind and the air, the elemental fires and their tides.
It was really separate from these. Was this true of life? Was this true
of him?
No!--the sun had been a part of him. And if the wind had not, why had he
understood its words so well? Desperately, he would cling to his
conviction, that though the sea was a subtle, mighty mirror, he was a
part of the far things of beauty that swept and flamed and trilled
above them both. Unto the last, he would cling to this. And a man
clinging lives.
* * * * *
Sarah was back in her home. Quincy was back in the City.
The first evening which the much-affaired young lady found for him, he
went to see Clarice. She had to break a dance engagement in order to fit
him in, at all. This gladdened Quincy. But the evening was none the less
a failure. Clarice seemed mostly the self she showed to the world. Her
talk was practical and hard. Within, the cause of this was solely her
irritation at Quincy’s supine acceptance of just that self. She longed
to have him crush it away--in his arms if need be. So she flaunted it in
his face. She meant to goad Quincy on. But she succeeded merely in
dejecting him. He was past fighting the van-guards of the City. Its body
had annihilated him. He needed help, revivement--not taunting. But
Clarice was not yet inclined, even had she felt this, to go so far.
Wherefore, Quincy went away, resolved not to come back too soon again.
Meantime, December crept along on its frozen feet--crept along half of
its ironic passage. Frost and the blare of lights, frost and the heat of
music, frost and the fluency of crowds. A month of paradox is December
in Manhattan. Quincy was in no mood for it, even as for its offshoot,
the methods of Clarice.
And now, the New Year shook out the wrinkles from its frills and made
announcement of its hilarious advent.
Quincy decided to stay alone--not to go home, not to make an engagement.
To stay really alone among the millions.
But as the day drew near, something old and clamorous and yearning
stirred once more within him. A swan song perhaps, but it amazed him
with its lilt and fervor. He feared that lonely night as any lad,
brimming with vitality. He wished to live, to joy, to share. Life
bubbled. He threw over his diseased resolve--for so he termed it--to
stay alone. He was unhappy. He would be glad. His mind swam to Clarice
in a bath of colored feeling. He saw her differently. He saw that he
wanted her. He saw that she wanted him. He looked upon his place of
business as one of promise. He counted his prospects--his income in one
year, in two, in ten! He knew that he wished to share the New Year’s Eve
with her, with no one else,--and with no one else, his life!
Throbbing with expectancy, half parched in his fever, he dashed off a
note to her, inviting her to dine with him alone on the year’s last
day--to revel with him alone, into the New. He put a special delivery
stamp upon his note and mailed it, fatefully. Then he waited. New Year’s
Eve was four days beyond. Would she come? Would he live? Was there a
difference between these questions?
That night, her answer came. It read:
_Dear, dear Quincy_:
Why did you not ask me before? Why do you ask me an impossible
thing? You know how I long to spend New Year’s Eve with you. But
how can I leave the family party? Please understand! I am
broken-hearted. And come soon--_soon_. I have a date on January 2
that I will break for you. Oh, I would have broken any other date!
You will come then. Come to dinner. The family are going out. We
will be alone. Oh! how miserable you have made me by holding out
this promise of a joyous time that I can not have.