“Why am I interested in the household life of a philosopher? Why do I resent his wife yet dream of her? Why, when I dwell on his perfections, does she seem to mar them? Why, when I let her vision come does his seem to dim? What business are all these things to me? I am a protégé of Professor Deering. Each year, out of the incoming mass, he selects a few like me. I have interested a woman happening to be his wife, who, being an interesting woman, is naturally capable of interest in another. There is nothing more. Yet my mind goes—like fingers picking rags—hoping for a fabulous jewel; tremulously. What is wrong with me?”
These questions Quincy put to himself, as the sun mellowed and the spring burst forth from the brown earth and the haggard trees. Quincy took them withhim on his country runs. The ground was damp with moisture. Maple buttons stood on the long twigs. And as he ran or sauntered or reclined on a dry rock, garlanded in the shoots of little elms and oaks, the question rounded like a fist, hardened and struck him silent.
All of that spring this phenomenon was repeated. There would sprawl the questions, pricking or stroking him—no more. Suddenly, a vital force would encompass, then compress them. They would become a fist and strike him. He would startle, resist, give way. And then, as suddenly, the fist would once more disintegrate. Again, there would be relaxation until the following blow. All of that spring, moreover, there was no conclusion.
Certain things were plain enough.
Professor Deering was the greatest man in the world. His friendship was priceless. But Julia Deering was the first woman in the world willing to consort with him. Was that less a treasure? And why should it be? Why did some sickly sense within him tell him of a conflict between these two possessions? He had a mind; he had a soul. Did these two possessions menace one another? Perhaps that explained the mist about the two new human elements. But with all this, the boy’s head hurt. And his mind helped him out, through some centrifugal tangent.
There was nothing really personal in the relation of Quincy and Julia Deering. There was nothing really personal in the relation of Quincy and Lawrence Deering. The personal, in either instance, was the boy’s contribution. The man believed to have discovered in him a mind; he had not gone far enough yet with him to view this, save as a specimen, as a relief, perhaps,in his work. The woman thought to have found in him a spirit. She also had not gone far enough to adventure there, preferring to bring it up within the scope of her own play. Quincy, quite with an equal egoism, had subjected these to his own lights. But his lights were feebler than their medium. So it was he who was refracted, rather than they who were transfigured. Quincy was the suffering one; for Quincy was the changing one.
All this was a whirling in the dark for him. He understood so little. His year at college seemed so sounding a failure. What had it got him?
He sat on a rock, panting for breath, from his run up-hill. Columbine and azalias flourished about him. The fresh hum of insects deepened the glow of last autumn’s leaves, heightened the clear tenderness of the anemones. A great oak twisted above him on its tortuous way to the sun-flushed sky. Numerous little oak trees with fresh red leaves, most of them doomed to perish, ran riot with the other foliage in the cleft where he sat. Solomon’s seal and chestnut sprouts, liquid patches of wild violets, geranium and slender sprays of the wild grape with its leaves ruddy red and velvet green, shared his nook with him. Below swept the valley, splashed with dogwood, an infinity of greens and rose-bathed white. Through all the woodland, the wind raced daintily. A copse of aspen swayed in a complex unison, while the sun danced counterpoint on the leaves. Blossoming fragrance and a humid acrid strain of fecund life waved over him. The sky came down, its blue burning upon him. And beyond, the sun slanted westward, bursting well up in a haze that consumed its less gentle fires.
So garrisoned, Quincy met himself, and sought an accounting of his year in college. The boy frowned. And the day’s grandeur went over him like a rich garment over a soiled body. He shivered for it. He was ashamed. He understood nothing save his own impotence. He felt nothing save his suffering. He was nothing, before a universe of splendor. Family and friendship, fellowship and duty—in all relations, he seemed slipping, tottering. There was no name for what he was, since there was no name to describe anything within his life. He was unsure of qualities at home. In the house of college as in the house of Deering, he was uncertain. He was a nameless thing. And all the nameless things that touched him, for want of appellation, faded to naught or turned against him; all things save this one thing that grew greater without a title: his unhappiness.
The sun sent a spear of flame through the haze. It gleamed on his face, as he sat there, gazing with steady eyes. His eyes were in shadow. Deep purple they were, a pathetic counterpart of black. The lashes lay long about them. On his mouth were myriad little nervous frets, such as make up a pathetic counterpart of smiling. Quincy turned his eyes toward the falling sun. They glowed now, a limpid blue. And the black lashes were bronze. And the moist mouth opened and grew strong.
Meanwhile, however, the sun was falling.
Quincywas not very well, that summer. He had always been hardy. His supple muscles, which he could trace ridging beneath the white skin of his arms and shoulders, had seemed a barrier to trouble, despite the delicate tension of his nerves. Even on this occasion, he was not really ill.
He had caught cold in the woods. Often, although he did not tell the doctor this, he would throw himself prone on the moist soil and fling his head into a tuft of verdure, where he could absorb the incense of new-born things. Often he would clamber on a tree—an apple tree groaning with blossoms was his predilection—and lie there, across a branch, arms balancing his weight, until his eyes grew heavy and he had to go, lest sleep tumble him down. Or—this was a new discovery of that spring—he would find a sudden cleft on a high bench above a brook, made smooth and sweet with the last season’s underbrush. Seating himself at its head, he would slide down through brambles of blackberry and over clumps of moss, arms waving, head bare. Running hatless in the rain was an ecstasy that even he was wary of. But more than once that spring, with the rain pouring, his head grew waterlogged with lessons and meditations—neither of which he seemed able to bring to a conclusion. He would throw himself from his desk, board a trolley to the outskirts of the town and trudge forth on the muddy road until there came a spacewhere there was no one in sight. Then, off would come his hat, and like a wild thing vaguely aware of trespass, he would cut into the drenching fields, bare-headed, ardent, until his body glowed and his feet weighed like lead. Then, with his face down he would return and silently change his clothes.
But about this spirit of a faun was after all the body of a man. Congestion and inflammation fastened on Quincy. The doctor made a long face, gave him a diet and told him to stay as much as possible on the porch.
Needless to say, the Burt household moved from the sweating city every June. Summer torridity in New York is an unnatural thing. It does not come gently like the fires of France or Italy. It is as if the monstrous city had been rushing, rushing, rushing—all of the winter. At last it got overheated. That was the summer. Only a very young and healthy person can rush himself into a sweat and husband his good nature. New York’s overheatedness is angry. So those that can, leave her alone, until she is cool again and ready for another rushing.
The summer house of the Burts on this occasion was an old splendid mansion hidden in three acres of uncultivated woodland. It was but an hour from New York. From the macadam highway where the motors flashed continually by, a rustic road led past a fence and a tiny wooden bridge. The bridge was over a thread of brooklet. Thick shrubs smothered it from sight. And all of the gentle green things here were stained with dust and matted with gasoline. The road ran a hundred yards, between great oaks and willows. Here, shielded splendidly, was the house. There were great white pillars. The forward wall was brick.The porch was broad and open. And within, the high-ceilinged, ample rooms were perpetually cool. Rambler roses, petunias and canna surrounded the porch, above which on either side were frames for wistaria and grape-vines. From the porch one could hear the crash of the motors, glimpse their dust. And in the evenings, their lamps shot into view, flooded a space of foliage and then clapped away. This did not interest Quincy—although it was Marsden’s chief delight. But at the house’s rear lay a thick, brambled bit of forest—a complete miniature of nature. Within a few acres, the boy discovered rocks and hills, valleys and rivers, a settlement of birds that made symphony each night over a sunken pond where the frogs croaked, and a dingle utterly enclosed in elder-bushes where a space of grass lay sweet and gentle, in contrast to the riot of rough foliage without. Here he could steal away and be as well secluded from alien sight and sound as if home were in another State—save when the wind brought him his mother’s voice, scolding the servants in the kitchen.
“Look here, little East Wind,” he would scold in turn, “are you turned traitor, to bring methat?” And straightway, the wind would curl about the willow tree, and giggle a bit and stop.
He had been gazing at that tree a long time—and many times. His dingle sloped somewhat so that, for comfort, he had always to lie facing one way. That way was nearly west. And it brought the willow full into his vision. Of a sudden, this struck him as a portent.
“Oh, great willow tree,” he asked, “is it on purpose that I must always gaze on you and see the sun fall through your fingers?”
A bright red bug with purple stripes, round and fatherly, had climbed on his cuff. Presently, it jumped off in his palm. He held it up and as it trudged toward his finger tips, it too faced westward.
“Admire the sun, little bourgeois!” Quincy commanded.
Of a sudden, the bug hopped away. There had been no food on his palm, for it.
“You refuse to admire the sun?” said the boy, thoroughly serious. “Well, you’re a lucky little bourgeois not to have to.”
In ways like this, Quincy managed to forget himself. He was alert always, for a dialogue in the woods. But a few hundred yards beyond, in the old house, he was forever still and eaten-up with moods.
Despite the real simplicity of their house, the Burts liked it. Rhoda and her husband consented to spend a month there with them. Later, during her husband’s vacation, they were going to the mountains. Rhoda’s close presence that July was of import to Quincy. His family had several more acute impressions to inject in him before its full task was done. And what with his undigested year at college still upon him, and the vague threats of a second year to impose upon a first which had not yet retired into a spiritual composition, Quincy was in a sensitive state for new shocks and for new colors. His self-constituted idylls back of the house were not all of his summer. Life in the raw came to the country with him. Nor was it ashamed, it seemed, to grate and pound and give ruthless exhibitions, even if the flowers and trees and birds did sing outside the windows.
There was an excursion into new land. And ofcourse, all of these things, new and old, while they seemed at first merely to make more mud of his problems, were really a solvent to help clear them. The new excursion came in the form of a girl—a friend of Adelaide—Clarice Lodge.
The Lodge family had a house, half a mile away, not nearly so splendid as the one which the Burts rented. But Mr. Lodge owned his house and they lived in it, all of the year. He was a lawyer, in New York—a real commuter. Adelaide had met Clarice in the city. They were not very close friends, at the summer’s outset. Nor were they any closer at the summer’s end. Adelaide, who was twenty-one, explained that she could never possibly grow intimate with a girl who was only seventeen. Withal, Clarice looked up to her and vigorously sought her out, when she learned that the Burts had leased the Frondham mansion.
That was the title of the house. It was owned by Miss Juliet Frondham, an ancient lady of an ancient stock. She was too poor to live in this mocking relic of her whilom glory. But she was too proud to sell it and too fond of it to live far away. So Miss Frondham with her maid lived in a suite of rooms in the more built-up section of the township. She kept her own house immaculate and rented it for as long periods as she could.
Two years later, this proud, poor lady—the last of her line—died, leaving a fortune of three hundred thousand dollars to her maid. Three brothers came like a storm out of Illinois. The will was contested and eventually broken. The faithful maid proved to be a villain who with fiendish cunning had turned her mistress against her entire kin. She ended in thepenitentiary. And Josiah Burt bought the Frondham mansion.
Into the press, then, of Quincy’s summer went these three new ingredients: a feeling of Rhoda’s married life, the tide-like load upon him of all the first year’s happenings at college, and Clarice.
The awful inconsequentiality of life, the absoluteness of each moment and the doom of never-more that lurks in each moment’s easy, gliding pace, the state of death to which inexorably each new state of life is born—these are the things of which youth happily is unaware. He plunges on like a swift runner upon a path pied with sweet flowers. He does not really know that these flowers are everything and the goal, a mere place for dropping off. He says: “These flowers are as naught, to the flowers yonder.” So he suffers them to escape past him in a blurred line of recollection. Their intimate detail he sacrifices to a distant vagueness. He refrains from fingering the down on their petals, from breathing their live perfume in order to be possessed by a monster builded of his own energy. If the truth flashed his way, he would stand still and the world would stand still. He would fear to venture and to desire. Or his steps would become the groping of a blind man in a wilderness. He would make a universe out of a single flower at his foot; not make a flower at his foot out of the universe. But the greater truth is doubtless that he should not know the truth; that he should press on unheeding. For courage is an ignorant and fresh-born thing that is wiser and older than wisdom.
July was the month of Rhoda, August the month of Clarice. Julia Deering, of course, was always present. There was a strange bitterness to see the un-ideal intercourse of Rhoda and her husband. Since their marriage, Quincy had seen less of them than one does of a good acquaintance. He had not accepted Theodore Cram. But in his capacity of mate to Rhoda, he had idealized him. He did not consciously idealize his brilliant sister, but in his own quality of younger brother, he had accepted her as, of course, winningly adjusted. Now, came this sordid revelation. Rhoda and her husband could quarrel with each other, sneer at each other, remain indifferent to each other’s presence, and make a pleasure of each other’s irritations! These were all little things, of course. Sarah would smile in her rocker, folding her hands and declaring that such insignificant disagreements were inevitable. Josiah did not pay heed enough even to pass them over. To Marsden, they furnished amusement. Jonas, like his father, seemed temperamentally impervious, and Adelaide, as with most things that happened in the household, would be quickly aggrieved and as quickly her unruffled self again. To Quincy, these little quarrels—that Rhoda or Theodore were the last to take seriously or to remember—were soilings of dirt on a work of art. The analogy was perfect, since the thing soiled was indeed his handicraft. But they were more: they were a source of stirring the old waters. They led to speculations about Julia Deering and her husband; they compelled painful efforts to seek conclusions and to avoid conclusions, about the generality of men and women.
It was unbearable to think of Professor Deering as so haggled and so upset. Yet, could one have guessed from the calm brow of Theodore Cram, from thesmooth bosom of his magnificent sister, that such things could be? Was all of the world a hypocrite? Could there be worms beneath the surface of his marble masterpiece, before even the soil marred it to the eyes?
It was a droll commentary upon justice that Quincy, at whom this couple snapped their fingers, should have been hurt by their delinquencies. Of course, in the old days, there had been murmurings at home about Rhoda. He recalled her as a child, screaming and scratching, carrying war upon Adelaide and Jonas. But always, it had been successful war—war with a quick and unqualified decision. Adelaide was always surrendering, Jonas was always being overwhelmed. That justified Rhoda. There had been a sweep of power in her place at home. She had dominated; she had wielded her sway. When she sneered at Adelaide or him, her sneer cut true. When she shot angry words at her mother, or Jonas, or her father, these words stood trembling, like an arrow, in the heart of the target. And with Marsden, there had been always a deference and a calm—like two great Powers at balance on a continent between their mutual dependencies.
Here, however, it was different. Theodore Cram did not bleed at her sneers, nor lie transfixed with her angry words. Theodore Cram could cut back and shoot back. And tears came more readily in Rhoda’s eyes than the flash of pain on her husband’s mouth. Rhoda had her match. And in the poise of this even combat, Quincy learned its pettiness and sordidness. From this conclusion, came the inevitable step: that her warfare of old must have been similarly petty, and that the woman who waged such, with such incessance,must be of a measure with her battles. The boy’s brain receded before it would take on this lesson. Was Rhoda narrow and petty and mean of spirit? Had her cause of battle against them all been sordid? and her victims, the result not of her own excellence but of their own mediocrity? Here were two strong and striking observations to make lie together: that in their marital irritations, Rhoda was no more generous or ideal than her hard-hearted husband—and that, in her appearance and her charm, Rhoda was as enfevering and inspiring as ever. Could these two knowledges couple and give birth to strength in Quincy? At least the struggle of conception and the ensuing labor were painful interludes. A woman, then, could be beautiful, dominant, entrancing, yet have a soul of flint? a woman could hold one, yet by qualities that one despised? a woman could forge sovereignty at home, yet abdicate to the level of those she ruled at her maturity? What was this creature, woman? And how came it that he, Quincy, full with his eighteen years, could compute and reckon his superiority all of a forenoon in the woods, yet be a mute, inglorious thing before her glance, at lunch?
In Theodore Cram there was no longer any glamor. The man was without vision or ideals or beauty. Yet Rhoda loved him! gave herself to him! And an hour after those dark mystic hours they must have spent together, she could despise him or ignore him—he could despise her or ignore her! Was there not this ugly identity between them? And then how, viewing her husband’s pettiness, could Rhoda be deemed better? How, with these things established, could she still have power and charm for Quincy? It had sufficed merely to glimpse them to cause Theodore Cramto lose his glamor. Oh! the perplexities were myriad and infinitely intertwining.
Perhaps he might have solved—or at least met them—had they led no farther than these two. But irrevocably, the perplexities flowed out to Julia Deering, to his mother, to himself. Until the whole whirled like a dizzy dream, where arms, outstretched for a firm hold, turned into gyres and spun along.
Though the act was unconscious, Quincy fixed on Clarice Lodge to solve these problems, answer these questions. She had no part in his emotions. She seemed solid and dependable to Quincy. He did not know that when she also had been drawn into the furnace of his feeling, she also would swirl with the fire and fumes. Childishly confident, he fixed on her, being unaware that at his age to attach upon another is really to absorb that other and burn that other up. Even so does flame fix on a twig. But Quincy was sure that he would learn everything from her and that his interest was scientific.
She was known as a pretty girl. And until one time when he really saw her, this had seemed the right term to Quincy. Thereafter, it appeared to him to be injustice.
It was at their house. Adelaide was below the porch, trimming the roses that had drooped too low. Clarice leaned over the porch railing. Quincy was to one side and unobserved. He had stepped out through the door. The two girls chatted brightly. Clarice led the conversation. She was coaxing her friend to admit that red was far more beautiful than blue. In a prim, white jumper, with Dutch neck, she bent her alert body downward. The pressure of the rail below her waist drew the frail cloth tight against her breasts.She was bending toward the left. When she laughed—which was half the time—a tremor went through her body as if it too were laughing. When she talked, she swayed gently, her whole form together, to and fro against the railing that first ate hard upon her and then gave her up. In this way the fluted railing spokes marked out their pattern against her body. Her right knee was forward and her right foot dangled. This gave accent to her rhythm. The discovered leg with its black silk stockings, pointed with tiny, white-canvas slippers, was straight and strong and fleshless. It cut like a tangent movement to the misty sway of her body. And here, Quincy kept his eyes enchanted. In the slow, steady rhythm of her body, to and fro against the railing, while her words sparked brightly, there seemed a faint, voluptuous deliberation. Her voice was a moist crystal. The nape of her neck was a nook with tiny and bronzed ringlets. He did not see her face. But now, in the pause, the girl’s subtle sense came into play. She felt him there; she straightened and turned toward him. And their eyes met.
Both of them felt the burn of their blushing. With a soft hand, Clarice smoothed her skirt in front from the waist down—slowly. It had been very faintly ruffled. But the fact that her consciousness was there, drove Quincy’s eyes to her face, though in his quandary they had once more fallen. He did not know how to take them entirely away.
At that moment, it came about that he discovered it unjust to call Clarice merely pretty.
With a sudden fervor, he had said to her: “Will you go walking with me, tomorrow?”
She had given one peal of laughter, grown seriousand between the two states, replied: “Why—of course, I will!”
But if their walks, that summer, through the woods were so many wild-flowers, they were of the sort that onrushing youth could not stop to contemplate. Quincy deemed commendably mature the dispassionate way in which he set out to take Clarice. They were to be simply friends, and perhaps they might bring good to one another. The boy was sure that, had she known, his mother would have approved his conduct. But the doubting Sarah had no insight into his calm. Her eyes grew cloudy and troubled when his walks with Clarice became engrossingly frequent. On one occasion she said to him:
“Are there no young men about for you to play with?”
Quincy had seen the young men in the town’s post-office, and at the soda fountains. They were a typical group—shallow-eyed, and narrow-headed, with the manners of fox-terriers and the souls also—probably. They were the sort of boys who instinctively stiffened their necks when Quincy was about. There were no other boys—Clarice’s brother was fourteen. So Quincy’s mother should have been less fearful of this new friendship.
Adelaide found a way to express her view of it.
“Clarice is a child—a dear child,” she fell into repeating. She seemed to believe that childhood was a race. One who was once a child would remain one always. Never could the chance be admitted that there exist in Clarice at seventeen, things which would one day grow like Adelaide at twenty-one. Perhaps, Adelaide was right Perhaps, childhood is a generic quality. But, howsoever, from the days ofQuincy’s absorption, there was a barrier between the girls.
Clarice felt this. And being with Quincy was a way of resenting it. She was a fresh, unspoiled sprout at seventeen. Her body was tall. But her head was little and rounded and her face was rather soft in contrast to the firm, narrow lines of the rest of her. Quincy called her “Buttercup.” For her hair was gold and her cheeks were tanned and her eyes were green in the sun rather than blue.
But the unfortunate thing was that, although Quincy enjoyed all this, he seemed to be learning very little about the ultimate qualities of woman. He caught himself up at times, in his enjoyment. He seemed of the opinion that if he enjoyed himself, he could not profit. In this treasurable thought, a stain of schooling had indeed fixed on his else impervious nature.
With the heavy heat of August, when the trees turn purple and a translucent flame waves over nature and sears her gentle freshness, Quincy learned that in his rigid purpose he had failed altogether. He learned also that his mother had been silently right—just as often she had been volubly wrong. Clarice was become a part of the fire and fumes. He could not help this. But he could keep from seeing her so often. He resented her attraction. And with set teeth and a stern eye, he put a censorship upon their walks.
A few days later than Rhoda—in the height of August—Clarice also was leaving for the mountains. Rhoda and her husband approved of the Lodges.
“He is a big lawyer,” said he.
“She was a Querelton,” said she. And always, she had smiled when Quincy’s attention to a Querelton’s daughter came up to her notice.
“See her as much as you can;” she advised him once. “When she makes her début next season, you’ll not be looked at—I assure you. You know,” Rhoda turned to her mother, “the Lodges are coming to live in town next winter, just so that Clarice has a chance.”
This speech rankled Quincy and amazed him. He pondered it for some time, after the Crams had gone. When his wild flower “had a chance” to become a wired thing of wax, she would, then, welcome it? and he who must stand in her spirit for the scent of the moist fern and the dancing of the brook would not be noticed?
There were a few days left of Clarice when these words, spoken at random, crystallized their effect on Quincy. It was well in the period of holding off from Clarice—and of resentment that she should have given him so little knowledge, yet occupied so fiery a part within him. At once, his ardor and his curiosity re-kindled. He sought her out for a last walk in the woods.
Clarice told him that she was very busy packing. But she would take an afternoon from her important duty.
If she was reluctant, as he called her downstairs, so was the sun that came through the pervasive grey like a little shot of fire. They went forth, and the sun gave way, altogether, before the clouds.
It was evident to Quincy that Clarice was angry at his sudden lessening of attention. He did not know that this anger might have been adduced from the fact that his behavior left a void in her heart. He thought only her pride was injured. That was why he said, by way of buttress to it:
“I understand—Rhoda told me—you were going to live in New York next winter and have society.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Are you glad about dances and parties?”
Clarice puckered her pale-red lips. “No! I shall hate them.”
“Then,” Quincy went on, gladdened, “why are you going to do it?”
“You have to—of course. Everybody does.” Clarice talked as to one who could not possibly understand. And Quincy, acquiescent in the import of her tone, grew silent.
They wandered along a neglected road, half green with grass. A barbed wire fence straggled through the opaque bushes, laden with berries. They were walking rather more rapidly than their wont. It was as if the unconscious impulse of their limbs was to free each from the other. Quincy wore a grey, soft shirt. He had flared it at the throat, allowing his blue tie to fall low over his chest. Instinctively, his fingers groped to his neck, buttoned the collar close and drew up the tie.
“I’ve packed all my rompy clothes, Quint,” said Clarice, suggesting thereby that their ancient habit of striking across fence and meadow must be abandoned for want of a fit dress.
“Well, at least don’t let us rush so,” the boy said. “This is a bully road. Remember where it goes to? Three miles of rolling country and then that farm-house where they have the buttermilk.”
“Oh, my!” said Clarice, “I can’t go that far! There’s not time.”
All of the things she said were true enough—and pardonable. Yet in her manner, she seemed makingstock of these unfortunate contingencies. It was this that hurt Quincy. He resolved to try again.
“Clarice dear,” he began, “if you knew why I’ve not seen you so much of late, you’d not be mad at me.”
“Who said I was mad at you?”
“Well—I meant—”
“Sometimes, you’re too funny for words, Quincy Burt,” said the girl, serious as a sermon.
“Oh—be quiet!” The boy rebelled at this suggestion of being laughed at, despite the lack of a particle of smile in her. “I’m glad you’re not mad. All I wanted to say was—was that—well—the reason I’ve seen you less is not that I like you less.”
Clarice took this in silence.
“Look here!” The boy turned to her roughly almost—and stopped walking. The girl, of course, stopped also. He was turned so that she faced him. And still, she was quiet.
“Clarice, don’t you like me, too?”
She met his face. It was very still and solemn. And the mouth quivered a bit, though he drew it close in order to control it. And the eyes were a very deep, piercing blue, indeed. It was the inevitable moment for seventeen girlish years to laugh.
“What do you think—you silly? Would I have seen you so much—?”
“Then, Clarice,” Quincy put his hands forward and broke in, so eager was he, “youwillsee me, next winter?”
Of course, Clarice drew back, bodily, from his onrush. And of course, her words symbolized her action. It was nothing more.
“I shall be awful busy, Quint.”
They stood in the middle of the road. It was longand green and silent. A great elm, its trunk choking in poison-ivy, leaned over them. The boy grasped her shoulders and drew her toward him.
“Promise me, Clarice dear,—you’ll see me when I come to New York, next Christmas. Even with all the parties. Give me a kiss in promise.”
Her face was directly under his. And her lips were smiling. With no effort, he kissed them. They were cool and soft and pricking. It was as if he had kissed a smile. How different from this granted kiss had been the stolen one, of Rhoda! But now, her face was a little flushed and the smile was gone—as if he had kissed it away. Clarice fell back a step. And Quincy spoke though a bubble of warmth kept rising in his throat.
“That was a promise, Clarice?”
The girl frowned. “It was nothing of the sort!”
“Clarice!” he cried, in amazement.
But still she was angry. Her face was first red, then almost grey. “I’m going home,” she said and turned away.
Quincy reached for her fleeing waist and threw her back into his arms.
“You shan’t behave that way, toward me!”
“Shan’t I, though? Good-bye! You needn’t come along.” And once more she made a start.
The boy stopped her. He took her angrily and bent her backward, until her face was under his.
“If you behave like that, I’ll kiss you again!”
He kissed her—savagely. And Clarice, as before, lay there in his arms, almost unheeding. He kissed her again—tenderly. And then, he looked at her. The lips were parted and moist. Her spirit seemed slumbering beneath a covert. Only her mouth wasa taste of it. Her eyes were meaningless. She was not beautiful after all.
He set her up once more upon her balance.
“You have promised me now—to let me see you next Christmas?”
Clarice straightened herself. “I have done nothing of the sort.”
She spoke with a wrinkle of her forehead and her kissed mouth dryly puckered. “Next Christmas—” she paused and tilted her head vaguely up with a distant look, “Next Christmas—who knows?”
“Then why,” said the angry boy, as he followed after her, “then why did you let me kiss you?”
This time, Clarice stopped.
“Are you sorry?” she asked.
“I most certainly am!” burst from him.
Unscathed, Clarice shrugged her shoulders.
They walked to her home, in silence.
“Good-bye,” said she.
“Good-bye,” said Quincy.
Collegeonce more.
It had the busy serenity of a bee hive. Its murmurous exclusiveness went against the vision of an outer world as a rebuke and a rebuff. But within the compact regions of honey and smug larvæ and pompous leaders, for those who were not really of it, however deeply in it, there was the quality of the sting.
Quincy came back, moved and settled within new chambers, and looked about him. A sophomore. The heir, that meant, of the hum and the comb and the autonomy—laden with the equally strict traditions to enjoy these and to perpetuate them. A generation of larvæ lay, already, cuddled underneath him. And without, there was the world to which no visit must be dreamed of, no glance directed, save as a place of furnishing and fodder for the hive. All of it stretched out, a mere subsidiary. Its flowers were servants, its fertility was impost to the hive. In it, as in his home, were cloying and shutting-out and a sting. These were the first impressions. They came without bidding. But Quincy was resolved not to be satisfied with such. He went forth, therefore, to look about him.
Perhaps his new instructor in English helped him as much as anything to bearings. His name was Egbert Simson. He was a graduate of the college. He had won honors in all the possible fields of it. He hadwon his letter in track; he had served on the college monthly; he had led his class in scholarship and presided over the college branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association, He was a perfect man. And now, he was a member of the faculty. In a year, he would have his doctor’s thesis. In five years, he would be grappling toward a professorship. In ten years, he would publish an edition of the Poems of Suckling. All his life he would continue humming and honey-gathering for the hive.
Quincy came to know him, sophomore year, in his capacity of preceptor. For each student had such a one. Early in the fall term, was the time when he had to see the estimable Simson—twice in two weeks. This served greatly, together with the general impression of the class.
Mr. Simson was tall and inclined to fullness of figure. His face had once had lines, hard and aplenty. But general happiness would soon abolish them to roundness. His little clear blue eyes shone forth from their soft frames with an easy prospect, as if they knew beforehand what they were going to see—and should somewhat else be there, they would simply refuse to see it. His nose was still straight, nor had the incipient rising fleshliness of his cheeks yet undermined its shallow impertinence. His lips were of the general blown-ness that smacked often, smiled at will and were not employed when a guttural throat-sound announced laughter. Mr. Simson’s forehead was narrow and smooth and round below his sleek brown hair. His hands were fat but the soft fingers tapered gently. In all of his being there glamored fluency, serenity and an inviolable blindness. This man was one of the favorite figures in the hive. His hum was forevermarked and forever sought. If he had not been a male, one might readily have called him “Queen.” But even his maleness was unobtrusive, since the hive worshipped the more passive sort. Mr. Simson’s voice was soft and high. He was easily shocked and when he was, he wiggled his lissom form and threw back his perfectly rounded head. He was staid and Christian. It was meant to be quite evident that when he married the daughter of some affluent trustee, he would go to her in a state of virginity that would save her blushes. It was quite evident as well that he would never marry the daughter of any one less trustful and less affluent than a trustee. Mr. Simson lacked money. But it was known that several of his relations were financial kings. All of his friends, moreover, were as well chosen as his relations. And since he had not chosen his own father, one never heard of him. Mr. Simson, however, was far too proper not to be untiringly devoted to his mother. One heard often of that. Moreover, she had an infallible eye for trustfulness and affluence. Frequently she went along on a friend’s yachting tour with him.
On Mr. Simson’s more specific qualifications for teaching English literature, it would be sheer pedantry to dwell.
“You should see,” Quincy explained to Garsted, “with what scruples Simson discharges his duties as preceptor, toward me.” The boy laughed. “He can’t stand me.”
“I go into the study. Simson is at the desk—typing a sonnet for the Lit. ‘Oh, good day, Mr. Burt,’ without getting up, ‘and what is there this morning?’ I give him the papers. Without looking at them he signs them. ‘I am convinced, Mr. Burt,they are as they should be.’ There is at least one ‘Mr. Burt’ in every sentence. I am about to leave and a qualm catches him. He smiles and when he smiles his round face breaks into two triangles with the nose as the common base. ‘Does my class satisfy you, Mr. Burt?’ he asks. As the result of that question, he tells the others at the Graduates’ Club how frankly he takes each student into his confidence—asks their advice.”
“Yes,” interrupted Garsted, “they despise Deering, but they all imitate him. Well?”
“Well—I answer: ‘Mr. Simson, why did we skipThe Miller’s Tale? I think it is one of the best Chaucer wrote.’ ‘It is good,’ he answers, tapping a finger on his mahogany desk—yes, there’s a huge seal ring on the tapping finger—‘It is good, Mr. Burt, but it’s unpleasant; it is coarse. We must remember that sometimes Chaucer’s surroundings,’ I was sure he was going to sayMr. Chaucer, since he despised him too, ‘sometimes Chaucer’s surroundings got the upper hand of his good taste. Despite its matter, that tale is good. For Chaucer was a genius. He could not help making even a licentious story interesting and human.’”
Here Garsted roared: “Evena licentious story! The old hypocrite! You know Simson, my dear Quint. You saw his human little eyes and his round lips and his belly—at twenty-seven! Do you think that is his real opinion of a licentious story?”
“I know it isn’t,” answered Quincy. “Several of the boys whom he cares for—Society brothers of course—were repeating some of his own jokes. I heard them.”
“Ugh—let’s have lunch,” said Garsted.
Not alone diffidence held Quincy from calling on the Deerings until late October. His own turmoiled spring and summer had indeed made him unsure of himself toward them and hence unsure of them toward him. It is hard for the man whose sleep has been wracked with dreams to understand the serenity of sleep of the one beside him. So Quincy restrained his impulse to seek out the great man and his wife. He wished, moreover, to adventure a trifle more in the atmosphere of college. He seemed seriously firm and set and steady there. He enjoyed this new sensation. He was afraid lest the Deerings show up its superficial strength. This, of course, was a fear he did not avow to himself. His affairs, his reluctance to seem too pressing in his return sufficed for the admitted reasons. And meanwhile he was able to bask in his new sense of self-dominion.
Garsted had grown aware of this.
“You’re a different man,” he remarked to him; “you must have had a successful love affair this summer.”
“You’re wrong, Simon,” replied Quincy, who was so well over the skirmish with Clarice as not to resent allusion to it.
“Then there was a girl. And didn’t you kiss her?”
“I did.”
“What did I tell you?”
“Is that success?” asked Quincy.
“Rake!” Garsted misunderstood him. And Quincy blushed. Here again, it was impossible to go farther even with his dearest friend.
But at length, one evening, the need of going to the little box-frame house came over Quincy. It was at dinner. There had been six weeks in which to go;yet he had not gone. And now, it seemed imperative that he must go—and that he must, at once. He rushed through his meal, half eating it. He ate his slice of beef, neglected the vegetables and then, when it was too late, found himself still hungry and gulped two cups of coffee whose heat displeased him. A great worry gripped him—lest they be out—or the evening inopportune. He might telephone; no, he did not dare to. He might wait until a surer time; no, he was not able to. He must go, this night. And if the evening was ill, so would be the omen. Was it that of a sudden, his new impression of college was digested and fresh food craved,—that, psychically, he had been released once more for living, now that the state of dormancy (called strength) was over?
Howbeit, Quincy went. He found the Professor and his wife alone and ready to receive him. And when, at eleven, he returned campus-ward through the crisp shadows, the impression of the six fresh weeks came at length to a formed consciousness within him.
In this way was that evening a peak whence he was able to look back upon the path he had just come, and forward upon the path ahead. And from its relative height, both paths were new and clear before him. Even so, as the climber stands upon an eminence does he descry for the first time the way that he has taken and view that past with the same eye of interest wherewith he peers into the future.
It was as if the boys, his classmates, stepped outward from their general hum, disintegrated and took on a clear dimension. He saw them now as a seed that the wind would scatter. He felt them as plants that a varied, self-sufficient soil would wrench to its own uses. He knew the blindness of the seed and the plannedfrailty of this little circled harbor holding it up for the air’s sowing. He respected everything save the boys’ pretensions, save the false eternity of the fragile harbor. He saw the bloomless death that there would be, were these pretensions even tinged with the truth. He wondered at the need of these pretensions. He despised the powers—the faculty—that bred them in order to slough over their own crass sterility.
He could not hold to this sudden and veracious vision. Himself intruded. His strong impressions, so flecked and bulged, were of less value and a greater interest. Here then, was he, among the disintegrated boys—among the seed. But with that instant, he could not go on. The boys faded back into the general hum. He did not seem to stand among them, to have an independent contact with them, to be even clearly outside of them. His mind failed to view simply him and them alone. It gave no response to this relation, it left no mark to fix on, no ring to hear as a tonality.
At once, Quincy veered back to the couple he had left—and however he approached himself, there were they, also.
The evening had been auspicious. Since he had ruled—an aboriginal residue in him—that an ill evening should augur ill, surely it was right to read a happy omen from a happy time. Quincy did not hesitate. As he walked home down the silent avenue where the black trees murmurously bent upon the lights, he was convinced. His firmness and grip had not gone from him! He was elated—yet certain of himself. And all of that last spring and summer, he had been a fool.
The three had talked together. And it had been natural to remain till late. There had been no signof fire or haze or friction. As he sat there, he had seemed lifted up. The supple, blue steel of the Professor’s mind had seemed the girders of a firmament whose life-invigorating breath was Julia. There had seemed no crass way of differentiating them. Of course, one was star-metal; the other was æther. But together, they had made the firmament. And within this, he had taken breath and heart. Quincy saved himself from angry laughter at his early qualms and worries and presentiments by promptly forgetting most of them. This is a common function of forgetting—to save from angry laughter. He had blithely become unaware of the intangible misgiving which like a cancer, for all its formlessness, had gnawed into the marrow of the months preceding. He had launched upon an era of confidence and dreaming. He had no inkling of the sheer dogged resolution it had required to swing his rumbling energies from their near concrete pasture into those hinterlands of fantasy and rationalization. He did not guess that this sudden melting of past worries was caused by the laborious effort of his spirit to transform itself from the true state in which such worries could be prompted—that his fresh certainty of life was due to a quick leap from the realities which must be doubtful, to dreams fashioned at will to exclude doubt. The realities were to have their revenge. The dreams, formed as an escape from them, were to be found fitless and wanting. Meantime, however, Quincy tramped bravely down the shadowed street.
Of course, much truth lay in this fresh construed idealism; much health was in this sublimation of his energies. No long process in human nature can omit any part of human nature. A pondered crime has, in its texture, whatever of good or truth the criminal conceal. A deed of service hides all the infirmities and selfishness of the noble man. So, this long grown flower in Quincy, blossoming now in a period of exultant confidence, had come not only from his need of harbor for himself and of translating a truth to fancy, but as well from his rich fund of spirit and his deep strain of nature. His dream as he nursed it, now, was in good sooth extravagant. But the wildest dream has its root in the truth; and the most mendacious is a mere branching out from a confession.
Quincy, then, with his second year at college, revelled in a philosophy. Like all personal things at nineteen years, it was very concise and pointed, left to its own ways; and very vague when he endeavored to articulate it. Quincy of course could not admit this to himself. So when Garsted was dubious or unconvinced, he blamed Garsted’s obtuseness to spiritual things and withdrew farther from the realities.
The authorship of Deering in most of his ideas was manifest. The Professor was welcome in this capacity. Quincy did not object to a descent from such. Of course, Julia had no conscious part. He was the steel; she at best was color. He knew her now as a splendid woman, as a fit mate for a great man. That he had ever doubted this fitness or this harmony or this completeness was as far from Quincy as the once real days when he had lain as a center-presence in his crib. Yet, all of these truths remained. He was, of course, like all of us, still a center-presence to himself; he was of course, like all of us, a doubter of the otherness in a thing desired. But for the moment these truths were latent.
There had been real fire beneath the smoke that had blurred his past spring and summer. But Quincy wasin a state where fire is denied and the smoke blown off by a new draught of energy that gains its intensity through a clear heat. All misgivings, then, about the Deerings went. And went as well, his misgivings about himself, his misgivings about life.
“A new accomplishment of Quincy,” said Rhoda that Christmas; “he’s become conceited.”
The creed of Professor Deering was unmistakable. Nor did Quincy mistake it. He mistook merely himself in believing he had adopted it, because a corner of his being—his intellect—had managed to nod “Yes” to it.
The creed was big and simple like the man that lived it. It was a thoroughfaring, militant idealism, a sublimation indeed throughout the sensory gamut of fact to truth. In it, Lawrence Deering careered, and toward it loved to tender by the hand those about him who were willing. It transfigured the smallest things of life; thereby the smaller souls grew aware of it. It flowed over everything like a fine mist at sunrise, yet protruded nowheres against force; thereby the small souls were made tolerant. The Professor was not molested at college. He was not molested at home. When a barrier came against the spirit’s flow, it wafted over. It had filled Quincy like a meadow, rough with low shrubs to hold it. He was already known in his class as one of the inevitable Deering disciples. A few each year—from the class standpoint—“went wrong” this way, even as a few each year “went wrong” with women. To the busy, humming majority who never took his courses, Deering was an endemic problem. Like the poets—Browning or Francis Thompson—who write nonsense, he had a national renown. But these were their inner confessions. Tothe world, these very philistines, in boasting of their Alma Mater, would have made much of Professor Deering.
It was, then, chiefly charged with the Professor, that Quincy began his period of effervescence. He now denied all troubles by fitting them into the scheme of “inevitable good.” He denied all evils by stalking so far beyond the mass as to catch its “inevitable harmony.” He overlooked all barriers by soaring so high as to see only the globe’s “inevitable curves.” He was radiant with the same vigor grown extensive which, while intensive, had made him gloomy. He was perfectly able, in these days, to argue the rightness of injustice—viewed in its propulsion of virtue; or the beauty of ugliness—as a part of nature’s composition. These were the days when he was consciously “vibrant to the whole” and when a deed waspragmaticinstead of practical. Sex, moreover, was a germ that might “push upward into a flower”; there was an ideal conduit leading from “mortal brain to infinite mind”; matter was a “badge”; Christ’s import was not in his ethics but in his “substantiation of the spiritual,”—and before the advent of Deering the greatest men of the world had been merely steps in the preparation.
Innumerable concepts taken from the Professor and studdings of amplification and conclusion—his own part, mostly,—stood on the surface of Quincy’s soul and made faces at reality. Family became a cot he had left, finding it narrow and moist and over-rich in covers. College was a big emptiness in which a few true accents rang the more truly because of the acoustic of that emptiness. Quincy himself, it was plain, was a man of sensitive depths.
There then, were all these trappings and borrowingsand mind-absorptions upon the surface of his soul, grimacing at the world and hiding what lay behind from the world’s onslaught. But the world had already shot its shaft and made a piercing with its seed. It might stay out now—shooed off effectually by all these grimaces—and laugh. For it was destined to laugh last. It had done its part. Quincy’s soul, in its too late seclusion, would unassisted perform the rest. It could only guard—it could not undo—the future.
So the boy went blandly on, with his ideals and his sublimations,—nurturing, the while, the fruit of his past intercourse with life.
Therewere sublime moments in that period—moments that were sparks for later fires and that abided with him until the end.
Professor Deering had said to him: “The atheist is a man in whom a sense is lacking.”
Armed with this, Quincy went forth into the night to be alone with it. He sought a terrain that he already knew. The road crawled out of the town at a low incline. And then, abrupt from it, rose a path over a hill that was clad thick in summer. Now, it lay naked above the squatting road—a vast blue grey, a round of briar stalks and matted underbrush that sang with his racing feet. Upon the summit was a rock that Quincy loved. From one approach it was sheer and rugged. Beyond, a cleft in it, deepened with soil, curved gently down to a copse of elder bushes. From its sheer corner rose an oak tree. Several new tufts sprang from its foot. Above twined ivy and at the top a blaze of quartz, set in the granite, made a seat so that the hill’s declivity rolled away from the eyes to a distant murmurous valley. Here, flashing in sun or moonlight, one caught the river—agleam through its thick marge of summer, or swift and sleek without hindrance for the eye when the gaunt trees of winter basketed its flow.
Upon the rock, now, Quincy sat and shivered a bit and looked up at the frozen stars and the steely pool of heaven and asked to sense God.
Everything stood in silence. The voice of the forest was in the silence like the grain in a smooth surface,—perceptible but without harm to it. And such a surface, so fretted by innumerable stirrings, was the silence. Quincy huddled low, head forward, and let the silence enter and pervade him. At last he was drenched with it. And now, it frightened him no longer. He felt free, now, to career in it; since he was part of it, he could go forth beyond it and hear the voice it scabbarded. While his heart had beat against it, he had sat there, strangely afraid and alien to it all. But now, his heart rhythmed to its measure so that he heard it beat no longer. Now, his soul was swathed and soaked to its color, so that he could mount upon the silence and traverse it without sinking, and attain beyond. He and the silence were one. He, then, could know what it knew; feel the purple flame that gave it forth; and sense the slow-moving pulse of which its undulant shadows were a shroud.
With his eyes so freed, Quincy looked up, his head no longer stiffly straining forward.
And then, slowly, like the colors of sunset upon the eastern sky, it came to him. A fibre here, in his soul; a dart there, of fire, and beyond, over a space of grey, a shred of light. Until at last, like the glow of the hid sun below the land, all of him was athrob and painted with it, all of him flamed and sang and quickened to it. There against the stars; there in the deep mazes where other stars lay drowned like pearls in wine; there in that hinted ecstasy of space before which the vibrant lights were hung like a fine girdle before a quivering passion.
And below sat Quincy, breathing a calm breath, knowing no cold, no fear, no strangeness—in communion....
His soul loosed within him. Without pain, it broke the bonds of body and went forth. The firm air was an illimitable path, whose boundlessness pointed one way toward that which made it as a candle’s flash, short and ephemeral. All of the world breathed and rolled underneath. All of the world and its firm atmosphere—he saw it swinging eastward, away from the night and toward the long-set sun that it must meet again at dawn. He rested above the rock and above the hill. But beyond him were the stars and the veiled voice, so that he also swung—back, back, back ... to meet the morning.
And so poised, in tremulous unison with the earth and the other stars, he rested—while below, vaguely, he was aware of his crouched body and his burning eyes....
A tuft of wind fingered his hair. It tumbled against his forehead. The soft bonds of his body clamped close upon his soul. Like a dream on waking, the stars retreated; and as they went, closed in to an infinitude of hopeless depth the subtle Hand that had drawn him forth with its own ecstasied advance.
He sat there, cold under the heavens. A fresh wind pierced him. He shivered with it. He arose. He sought out the squatting road that tumbled back into the town. And he was glad to find it; glad of the vulgar lights that blinked against the noiseless houses, glad of the rattle of the car that brought bed nearer.
Like a magnet had the Hand drawn from him that which could be at home with silence and the stars. And like the tremor of a harp, the voice came on the wind:
“I keep you until each time that you seek Me. Then, shall you come forth and receive.”
Therift was started by a visit home.
The Burts had moved into an apartment near the Hudson. In fact, from the windows of the drawing room and sitting room one’s sight dodged several towering structures and met the river, flat and cool below the city. Beyond, rose the serried strokes of the Palisades, purple for the most part, athwart the blue haze of New York.
It was a splendid apartment and Quincy’s family had moved to it after his return to college. So this was his first view. All the old furniture was gone. Sarah and Adelaide had had a fresh start. The seven years since Harriet therefore marked their change in the new trappings. For these years had nourished Adelaide. And her word was final in all things pertaining to the household. Long since, Sarah had sighingly accepted that “she had no heart” to manage servants nor the “trumpery” to decorate a parlor. It was by savage encroachments of this sort upon her ancient territory, that Sarah’s languor and decomposition were effected. It requires intellect to be a happy idle woman.
As they sat down to dinner something in the room’s blatancy gave the boy pause—rendered cloud-like the texture of the life he had been living. The room was panelled high in oak. The inevitable favrille-glass inverted bowl loomed over the table. Above, at the ceiling, was another cluster of lights. These shed their unimaginative glow. And the chandelier was dark. It seemed menacing to Quincy, like a rich thing without a spirit. But it was indefeasibly real. There was a side-board, also of oak, cut by a swinging door, radiant with silver. Upon the mantel stood four porcelain vases which Sarah had seen and rebelliously acquired. They were the room’s rococo residue—and the sole things in it Sarah could warm up to. They shrieked with their dove-blue and their rose-pink against the room’s sombre munificence. Between them stood a chaste, dull wooden clock—by Thomas, whose every tick was a protest against its neighbors.
Quincy was oppressed once more. He wished to get away. His afflatus seemed asthmatic in this rigid air. In sympathy, he almost liked the towering porcelain vases. They, at least, with their quaint scrollings and flutings, seemed to aspire upwards. The rest of the room’s dead perfection was a dead weight downward. It lacked even the falsetto spirit of the vases. The family teased Sarah about them. And Quincy took his mother’s part. This troubled Adelaide to silence. Marsden seldom stooped to teasing, Josiah had leaned on Adelaide and Jonas was busy eating. So Quincy’s word won the day for the rococo vases.
What was this acrid reality within his mother that brooked no blinking and ate into the substance of his dreams? Why did she make something—of all people—totter within him? Was she morerealthan the rest of the world? He could laugh atit!
Quincy went back to college, militant more than ever against her, yet unknowing of how great a tribute this militancy was. She was indeed more real within him than the rest of the world he laughed at. For welaugh only at things outside of us. The man lies who says he has laughed at himself—save his laughter be hysterical. Quincy could not laugh at his mother, for she was of him. But he could deny her, despise her, rail against her.
In this spirit of idealism, he returned to college.
And now, began the subtledégringoladetoward the great cross-road where Quincy was to meet himself. The stone that starts an avalanche need not be at the summit of the precipice. It may lie far down toward the valley. And its crumbling may unleash, farther and farther upward, stone after stone, in indirect progression, until the top be loosed and the whole mountain-side crush downward. But long ere this the lowly stone that started will lie buried in the valley. Such a stone was Sarah.
She lay low in the slope of her boy’s emotions. And as her stirring loosed the soil above her, she was the first to be overwhelmed. Quincy had suffered a sharp, rude shock in this reality of which she was the basis—the family that he had looked on as an outgrown cradle! This reality, the juices of his dream-life could not digest. As he left home, he therefore made his effort to cast it out. All this came rationally to the surface in fault-finding. But in the effort of rejection, a shock tremored through all of the boy’s factitious structure. And this shock was to have sequels.
Julia reappeared in his dreams. Quincy instinctively feared an omen. Almost at once, Julia was no more in his dreams. He began to dream of Rhoda and of bloody scenes wherein his father suffered—nightmares in which an anonymous woman lurked vaguely, clothed in the mystery of prize and instigator. Then came a time when he could not catch his dreams at all.As he awoke, there in his mind would lift a smoke of struggle. But as he grasped at it, it went and underneath was nothing.
Meantime, the year wore away. Christmas vacation happened. Quincy experienced a radiant New Year. For naught took place. His projection of dream had the æther to itself. There were no obstructions great enough to make him conscious that he was gliding—that the avalanche had subtly started. His mother had been ill and was South during the holidays. This may have saved him. But howsoever, the New Year came radiant upon its tracks of ice.
With January, there was an afternoon that revealed many things already long alive.
It was the first “tea” with Julia Deering since the last May. In Quincy’s still confident state this fact required no comment beyond the probability that she had had no inclination or no time for him, alone. Her previous favors in this light called neither for sequel nor for conclusion. He went that afternoon then, splendidly at ease, eager by anticipation to show his friend how full and serious a man he was. He knew he must impress her. And in that impress, she would see the handwork of her husband. This must delight a devoted spouse.
Quincy did not recall, even, as he rang the bell, how he had come that first time, a year since. His grip on memory was of rare efficiency. This grip it was, forsooth, that made the delusion possible of his grip on life. There was no happy mean in Quincy’s nature. He had suffered through too wide a surface of fine feeling. His memory had been too keen to suggest ways in which the present and the future might attackhim. Too great had been his liking to an exposed nerve. And now, there was no surface at all for life to sting, no memory at all for life to grope by, no meeting on life’s plane. He was beyond the rule of the realities. He was a boy, nursing his spirit. And no more unreal being can be found in the vast Mirage called Truth.
As he came, then, that day, to chat and perhaps clumsily gulp down his tea, a subtle streak fenced off the real Quincy from the conscious one. These two mingled their accents. To the thoughts of the one, the other expressed speech; to the feelings of the other, the first gave utterance. And at times, the lips and the hearts of each made instantaneous counterpoint. The harmony of all this was minor. A mere thread of vibrance often drew the line between them. And in such faint distinctions, voiced at once, lies discord. Music, builded upon this searching wisdom, Quincy had not failed to love, that night at the Deering party. The subtle barriers of its sound, thrown together into a stirring discord, had gone forth and understood him. Julia had not loved the music. But here, played on this gentler instrument, the same, weird, lingering detonations gripped and swayed her. At last, in his gestures and his words and the flash of his eyes, the Modern Music was articulate enough for her to hear.
From the point of her reception, of her vibration in response, life turned to red for Quincy. For it is dangerous in a boy to be as music for a woman.
But meantime, he chatted blandly and balanced his uncomfortable tea-cup and was assured of the depths of his composure.
They sat in her room. The door into the study was shut. But the Professor was out.
She wore a dress of faint blue crêpe, with still gentler streakings of orange. The bodice was caught high under her arms by a double seam. Here, an elastic drew the dress close to her body. Her black hair was knotted low so that the two coils of it above her ears which he had previously noticed, were not in evidence. Now her ears were covered. The hair lay flat, cutting apart from the center of her forehead. In this way, its cold, froward whiteness and her eyes’ warm depths came to accentuation.
As the boy sat with her, a delicate aroma seemed to flow into him from her. He could almost fix its point of issuance—her tantalizing, tight corsage. It held him firmly, like a soft bond that gives but cannot break.
And as she sat with him, it came to Julia Deering with irresistible force, that here was a sensitive mind which would receive whatever she might choose to grant. It is hard to withstand this feeling—when one is dizzy with being straight—of a great, free depth to fall in. It is the sensation of the weary man before the brink of the precipice—of one whose muscles ache from holding him so long erect. Below, there lies a patch of cool waters and fanning trees. Upon the rock, the sun sears and the shadows cannot live.
A remark of his started her upon that inevitable forward lurch—the giving way to self-confession. And for an hour, Quincy heard, his eyes steadfast, as if he feared that the least movement would break the charm.
She saw him preponderant, as she spoke. And his sight was the tonal of her words. He leaned forward in his chair. His legs huddled beneath him. In one bony, knotted hand—throughout that hour—a cupwas held with its remnant of tepid tea. And his lank body stood out, loose and tense, responsive infinitely, yet lost clumsily within his blue serge suit. His face was a little drawn. But his eyes beat the measures as she talked, with the gentle drooping of their lids as a point went home, and with a sudden fire as she left a conclusion for his delicacy. His lips, all of this time, moved also. They would lie parted. And then, he would slowly moisten them with his tongue, purse them, as if to strangle a tell-tale quiver, and once more let them fall faintly away from his control, until again his interest parched them.