A blow in the face would have shattered Quincy less than this girlish,
forward promise of sympathy and love.
On the last day of the year--late afternoon--Quincy lay on his couch, on
his stomach, supporting his head in his two hands, re-reading that
letter.
The promise was precisely what he could not bear. The widening train of
cherished things possessed, of things to do, was what he could not bear.
Quincy was weary. All of him that was still flushed with life he had
raised in his invitation for that night--no other--to a point. He had
hoped his highest hope, fixed his highest joy, named his highest
holding. He had missed--or Clarice had missed. He wanted nothing more.
He wanted no longer any hope or joy or holding. He was done.
So, at least, it seemed to Quincy. Once more he laid his trouble upon
one place and thought thereby to make it no longer his.
He thought little of Clarice as he went out, that last night of the
year, to eat alone.
* * * * *
New Year’s Eve. Carnival time in the City. Carnival in the Latin lands
makes one forget poverty. Carnival in New York makes one remember it.
It was late when Quincy had done dining. The restaurant had been nearly
empty. He alone sat without a neighbor. A huge woman in a red waist that
made her lips look blue fed her lover--a wisp of a man--with a spoon;
fed him soup. All of the restaurant laughed at this. In a corner were
two slack-chinned Jewish men talking business. They also stopped and
laughed. Quincy felt nothing.
He faced uptown. He had dined at a well-known eating place on Grand
Street. His idea was to run the gamut of the City. Now, he was on the
Bowery.
The night was bitterly, humidly cold. It ate into his face and hands
like innumerable pointed icicles. Clotted throngs of revelers--pale
boys, daubed girls--shouting, pushing, scrambling past him. Pied horns
at their mouths, feather mops to tickle with in their unsavory hands. A
crass atmosphere of roughness, ugly and strained and starved. The dingy
Bowery rolled ahead with its sepulchral lodging-houses, its crashing
elevated structure, its glint of drink. Squalid eating shops in a
pathetic holiday regalia: American flags, red ruching, vari-colored
placards bidding “Happy New Year!” enflamed the dirty windows like paint
on a grey visage. Turkeys, apples, meat-pies swelled the decoration.
Prices and meretricious welcomes were iced together on the panes. All of
it laughed gutturally.
A mob before the theater, sweating within, frozen without--pushing,
cursing, empty. Clouds of boys, dark like flies in the glitter of an
arc-lamp before the lurid posters of the “movies.” A cry with a laugh
encased. Quincy felt nothing.
Then a dismal stretch of darkness--Broadway below the section of it that
is aflame with life. Huge dead buildings here, cars echoing back from
the grey walls as lambent metal would fall if thrown against them.
Sparse passers-by, hurrying, freezing, absent. The cold air seemed to
shiver, to splinter like powdered glass. A derelict, coatless and
gloveless, shuffled uptown as an injured moth sways toward a lamp.
And then, beyond, between the gaping walls of the chill orifice,
the gleam of fire, the light-limned towers, the flaring
incandescence--Broadway that lives.
In the open square was a vast Christmas tree, gawdy and colorless with
varicolored electric lamps. Deep about it lay the shadow of humanity.
Under its paltry dazzle of illumination that the chill air crushed
inward was an open stand. A band spluttered religious music. Upon a wide
sheet aloft, the words of an old hymn were lanterned. Beyond, stood a
great tower, dim and frigid, topped by a clock and an electric star. The
sheltered volunteers cried out the song after the band. Their voices
were hard, laggard, frozen also. A stray voice rose in scanty
concord from the crowd. But for the most part, the crowd was
silent--murmurously, sullenly watchful. A leader exhorted the mass to
sing. The arc-lamps crashed against the cold. The police shredded the
thick maze of humans into shape. The band blared. Quincy felt nothing.
He stood and watched the heavy silence that sank below the music like a
fearful shadow beneath a troubled boat in a deep lake. He watched the
dumb buildings and the clamorous lights and the cut of the air and the
spiritless, sordid mass--a swarm of insects pressed against a window
that shut them out.
The exhorter bullied for voices that did not exist.
Then Quincy heard some one speak beside him:
“For some folk, religion seems to be simply this: put off till tomorrow
what you can’t have to-day.”
“I like that!” cried Quincy with spontaneous pleasure. His mood broke in
an instant.
“Do you?” asked the woman.
They looked at each other.
She was young and dark, with hot grey eyes.
They turned uptown together. They fell in line with the regimented
revelers, whipped into form by the mounted police. Confetti flooded
them. Ticklers threatened their eyes. The lurching mob pressed them
together. He felt her, hot and lithe beneath her drab, stiff coat. They
entered a café. Quincy paid a dollar for a little table tucked away
under a stair. Only wine was served that night. And “wine” in America
means champagne. They began to drink, and to crumble burning chestnuts
on the gleaming, clothless table.
Outside, the crowds seethed, torn with voices, undulant and angular, hot
and cold, deliberate and head-long. The stuffy room with its blinking
light mellowed with the wine. Women grew loose of arm and breast, slack
of mouth, heedless of word. Men grew hard, savage, wet-lipped.
Quincy and she leaned over the table, drinking and looking at each
other. For the most part, they were silent. Each of them was still
alone. It was easier so. Each of them fended the other from the hectic
floods of light and life. Each of them shut the other in.
Quincy melted with the wine. He grew warm. He poured offerings unto this
woman, saying no word. He made her an altar, not knowing her name; a
goddess, not knowing her will. She was beautiful with the wine fretting
her grey cheeks and the fire fanning in her eyes. She said no thing that
spoiled his incantation. She, before him at his table, drinking his
bought wine, loomed nearer and higher. She was greater than the madness
out-of-doors; sharper than the frenzy in the blinking room where they
sat. She was greater than his memories.
Soon there were no memories. Then she was greater than everything. She
was a mighty ocean wherein to pour the sun and wherein to let dance the
winds.
The night wore away. The crimson tide ebbed on the avenue. It grew more
savage, more snarling, sharper. Within, the spirits simmered, turned
yellow, acid. A woman wished to tear off her waist. Two men fought to
stay her. Another woman they carried out. She was asleep. A man stood on
a chair and made ribald eloquence. The waiters yawned, knowing there
would be no more wine bought--only wine spilt.
Quincy and she began to speak.
He listened with rapt and equal interest to her words and his, quavering
between them, over their glasses. They were indifferent words. It
mattered little what they meant. These words, also, were part of the
great, rhythmic flow wherein the sun could pour and the winds could
play.
A bitter lust steeped up through his veins, stiffening his body,
tightening the clasp of his fingers about her hand. He leaned over, and
she leaned over, and they kissed. He caught no scent of her hair. But
the feel of her lips was sharp and clinging. They drew him. They heated
the liquor in his veins. They made his veins burst.
“Come!” he said, crushing her hands.
Her arms were stiff.
“Where?”
“Home.”
She wrenched away her hands.
“No,” she said, in a new sharp voice.
Quincy stood up, towering over her.
“Come, I say. Come, I say,” he cried.
“No!” She held her seat.
“Why not?” He swayed in his arrested energy.
“Sit down, boy.” She seemed frightened. “Sit down. Sit down, first.”
He sank stiffly to his seat. She leaned back rigidly in hers. Their eyes
met.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”
“Why not--” He put his fist out on the table, as if to crush her reason
as she gave it.
“Can’t you guess?” she almost pleaded.
He waited until her words came, like a bath of melted ice.
“There’s something wrong, boy,--with me. I don’t want you to--just
because we’ve been good pals,--not _that_!”
A man began to sing “America.” Outside, an ambulance crashed past. A
dull tussle in the street lay below a screen of piercing voices.
A pause.
Quincy was sober.
He watched her with a tender interest that was almost whimsical. She
glittered in anger and defiance, now she had given away her secret. With
that act of humiliation, her pride had risen. She was sober also.
“Do you think,” she spoke piercingly, leaning back still in her chair,
“do you think, if it hadn’t been for somethin’ wrong, I’d ’a’ been out
to-night, alone?”
He nodded. Over and over again, he nodded. That was his answer to her.
His eyes were watching inward a mute, innumerable procession where
little huddled things, grey, warped, stunted, slid away.
She spoke again. “Tell me, boy. You’re alone, too, ain’t you. _What’s
wrong with you?_”
The last grey thing slid out.
Quincy followed it.
In the street was dawn! Dawn with confetti and mud and ice. The street
was yellow and hollow and disillusioned. It was a painted harlot after
an orgy--a creature of streaked rouge and clotted sweat and bedraggled
hair. Quincy left it behind.
* * * * *
On his desk was the letter of Clarice.
Hope. Love. Life. Which was the most unbearable, the most impossible to
face--they or their opposite? Which was wrong--they or their denial?
Hope, love, life danced and beckoned. Quincy knew he must escape them.
Hope, love, life--these were the nadirs of pain, these were the
ecstasies to be annihilated. How?
He was weary. He was weary of all things. Most, he was weary of good
things--things one dreams of, things one spins out one’s life in
fashioning. And now, with Clarice’s letter in his hand, these things
threatened to be born--to be born again? Hope and love and life, they
might really be, with him so weary? All of his years had been the
travail of their first stirring, of their first impulse for the sun. He
must begin afresh? He must mother them again? The answer to that seared
his soul. What he must do was to escape--escape the fire and the
ineffable anguish of just these things.
How?
His hands were cool as was that he held within them--that which might be
the way. He flung his mind beyond the act which stood there ready,
beyond the flash and then the passing. His eyes and all the world within
them would become as two blank, black spaces. He would be lifted beyond
his eyes. But was he sure? Was this the way? Could he know that? How?
* * * * *
A dawn came to Quincy. Was this not another climax, another ecstasy to
be shunned? What led him always and again to the steep scaling of some
height, to the bitter plunge of some depth? This was not the way. This
was merely a last variant of the old painful yearning. The weapon in his
hand blandished him also to a pinnacle that was sharp and throbbing,
imperious and mighty. How then, if not this way?
Quincy stood in his room and his weighted hand dropped to his side and
the pistol within his hand thudded upon the floor.
What a fearful temptation it had been, like all the others, beckoning
and dancing. Travail and ecstasy--could he not escape them? And if the
letter of Clarice and _this_--the height and the depth--were one, with a
hair holding them apart in chaos, was there no middle space,
unmovemented, between?
Quincy’s head dropped a little, and his shoulders fell forward. And a
tuft of black hair crowded his eyes that were half closed. So he
remained. Did he feel? He tried to feel if he was feeling. Did he live?
He tried to feel if he was living. And so standing, the simple way came,
like a magic garment, and possessed him.
A tendril of his consciousness, faint yet infinitely fine, went out to
the world of people. All of a sudden, he knew that they were dead. He
knew that they had long been dead. They ate and laughed and danced--the
dead. They builded cities on the murmurous landsides and haunted the
free waters of the sea--the dead. They had sonorous names for the rhythm
of their rotting--the dead. He--had been alive. He had not been one of
them. He had suffered. He had been unwelcome. But now? What was the
easeful languor through him? the warmth that swathed him, the fellowship
that buoyed him? He no longer suffered. He was one of them. He was dead
also! He had found the way!
All that remained to seal his brotherhood was to forget even that he had
found it, to forget even that he was dead, to walk the way blankly,
blindly. All of his dead life remained for doing that. The battle had
been waged!...
* * * * *
It was the New Year--the New Year, and Quincy welcome in it.
The rising sun flamed into his room.
He pulled down the blind, shutting out the sun.
Then he went to bed in the made, swart shadows, and fell asleep.
* * * * *