Thefall of his eighteenth birthday, Quincy went to college. He had completed his examinations in June; and he had passed them with a single deficiency. Although his college was out-of-town, these hours of trial had been set in the city—in a vast, cold gymnasium filled with little stubby tables and larded with apparatus that in their similarity to instruments of torture seemed appropriate enough. Here he sat, weighed down with the stupid sense of the authority about him. He had gazed at the printed slips with their silly, circumscribed demands upon his knowledge and been impressed with the irrelevance of higher education. In one instance, he had been impressed too well. He had failed. And for the purpose of passing off this failure, he had now to start from home two days before the beginning of the term.
He took his leave in the sitting room. The family had just returned from the country. The room was still muffled in camphor draperies and grey-blue covers. There were no curtains. And the cleaning to which the sedulous Sarah had subjected it had robbed the room of the one glow of ease and warmth it might have kept—the dusty deposits of the summer. The room, then, was cold and harsh. The table shone out with its bare mahogany red. All else was under the protective cloths.
Quincy came down, suit-case in hand. Upstairs,he had applied the last minute attentions, putting off the ultimate plunge with a zealous mania for details, much as a diver sticks his toe into the water. Thrice he had locked his suit-case and reopened it—to brush his hair again, to take out a letter of announcement for the Dean, to see if aught was missing. Long he looked at himself in the mirror, adjusting his fresh collar and his tie. Then he unfastened his silver watch from its leather chain and placed it before him on the bureau for constant consultation. Changing his mind, fearful lest he forget it, he replaced it in his pocket. This also, made him nervous. He wished to track the lapse of time. So once again, the watch was out before him. He wondered if his watch was right. It was really too early to leave for the train. But perhaps it was five minutes later than he thought. In a trice, he had convinced himself of this imagining,—was ready to act upon it. He flung on his coat, strapped his suit-case and made for the stairs. He descended, clumsily, conscious of his feet.
He placed his suit-case in the hall and entered the room, where his mother and Adelaide were seated.
“Well, is it time to go?” his mother spoke. “Or can you sit down a few minutes?”
“I’m afraid not, Mama.” The boy shifted nervously from foot to foot.
With this Adelaide got up.
“Have you room for this in your valise?” she asked, handing him a tidily wrapped box.
Quincy reached out his hand. “What is it?”
“Oh, I thought—perhaps—” she faltered, “now you are to be a college man—you might want to smoke.” There was a pause. “It is a tin of cigarettes.”
“Child! Why put the idea into his head?” cried Sarah.
“I had the idea before,” Quincy retorted. And then, he thanked his sister who stood expectant, not yet knowing whether she had done a thing extremely felicitous or awkward.
“Even if I don’t smoke there’ll be plenty of the boys who will,” was his colorless observation. He slipped the box into his pocket.
“Good-bye, Quincy, and good luck.” Adelaide kissed him. “And don’t get homesick.”
“Homesick? No chance!”
Sarah took his head in her hands. “Won’t you get a little homesick for me, dear—just once in a while?”
At this, Quincy smiled. He preferred it. Yet of the two, his sister’s had been the selfless remark.
He kissed them both—unostentatiously, though both longed to linger with his dark, serious head beside their own. Both of these women loved him. Yet, at the time, they were no more than momentary details on his path—obstructions of no import on his vision. So he drew his head away from their hands and lips as quickly as he could. And then, stung triflingly by conscience at the fact that he had done just this, he stepped back, half-way across the room, kissed them again, saw the gleam of tears in their eyes, and sturdily marched out.
“Don’t come downstairs!”
But they stepped after him. Adelaide helped him on with his new coat. His mother gave a loving brush to his new hat. And then, Adelaide spoke.
“Oh, Quincy! You’ve fifty minutes yet.” She had espied the parlor clock.
The boy held back, ashamed at his puerile impatience. The girl clapped her hands with a sudden thought that evidently gave her pleasure.
“I’ll take you to the station, Quincy.”
“No. That’s ridiculous.” He did not want her.
“And why not?” said Sarah. “It’s an excellent idea.”
“Do let me! I’ll just be a minute. I’ll throw on a coat and hat—”
Quincy stood, unable to reject her; lacking the wits for it, yet loathing this adventitious family concern, clinging upon him on his way to college. Adelaide dashed upstairs.
“That’s a very good idea,” pondered Sarah. “You’ve lots of time.”
Quincy paced nervously up and down; he was distressed. He did not like what seemed the significance of this—he did not like the afterthought.
And then an idea came to Sarah that gave her pleasure also.
“Why,” she said, “you might have the machine! I’m sure your father hasn’t got it.”
“No! No! No!” cried Quincy, heaping on this proposal much of the vehement denial brought over from the first.
“Why, you silly boy?”
“I don’t want it. I’ll take the car.”
“Nonsense!” Sarah looked uncomprehending, doubting his protest. Then, she moved toward the telephone.
“Mother,” said Quincy from his position near the door, “I don’t want your automobile. Do you hear? If you call for it, I’ll not take it. I’ll not take it, even if it should come this very minute.”
Sarah paused.
“You’re a very ungracious boy,” she said slowly.
His face turned pale, with a white fire.
“Oh, am I?—Very well, then—.” He grasped his suit-case. Thrusting his hat low over his eyes, he dashed away.
Adelaide returned to the head of the stairs. A cozy rough wool coat was close against her body; a brown cloth hat clustered with strawberries was atilt over her wavy hair. She saw her mother standing alone near the open door.
“Has he gone?” she said.
Sarah sighed. “The usual Quincy—”
And as she went on, Adelaide descended. “I offered him the car and he flew into a passion—into a passion, and out of the house. Oh! Oh!”
Now Adelaide was beside her.
“One would think, the way he acts, we didn’t love him.”
“We don’t love him right, Mama,” the girl spoke calmly and threw off her coat.
Sarah turned on her with anger: “How dare you say that? What’s wrong withyounow? What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s true. And he feels it.”
All of Sarah’s suppressed emotion turned on her daughter.
“Didn’t I offer him the machine, out of consideration?” she cried with a rasp in her voice.
“Yes—at the last minute. For a guest, you’d have thought of it two hours ago.”
“Well, what aboutyoursuggestion. When did you think of offering to go with him?”
“At the last minute, also, Mama.”
“And does that prove you don’t love him?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Does that prove you don’t love him enough?”
“I didn’t say that either.”
Sarah threw out her arms in a gesture of bewilderment.
“I said we didn’t love himright,” Adelaide continued.
Sarah gazed in silence at her daughter. She was awed by the conciseness of the answer, however little she understood it. Then, fronting her, she put her question.
“Why?”
The girl shook her head.
“It’s not our fault. It’s in the house. It’s the spirit here. I can’t explain. But you should understand. We can’t help it. But he feels it. Yes,—he feels it.”
She stopped and the two women were still. Both of them were looking far, vaguely, beyond the open door.
“He’s gone, now,” said Sarah.
Themorning of Quincy’s departure, it had rained. Then, it had cleared. To the plashy gloom of an autumn storm succeeded a sudden cheer of Indian Summer. When, in his “usual” manner, the boy dashed from the house, the sky was a shrill blue shredded with fragile clouds. And below foot, were still the puddles and grey odors of the rain.
Filled with a painful, pleasurable sense of having been unjust, Quincy boarded a car at the corner. Then he alighted. There was so much time, he had decided to walk from the place of transfer—a trifling journey.
In the car his thoughts had been at once intensely personal and inchoate. He was thinking back. He resolved to write his mother an affectionate letter of apology. Yes: he would write to Adelaide as well. He had not wanted to bother them. Many a time, they had made him feel—oh, perhaps not these two, butthey—how little it was wise to bother them. He was going to a new life. He wished to start on it, alone. There was no reason in not cutting clean, when cut one had to. His last thought gave him pause. He was going to a new life. A new life. Life....
The car clanked and screeched, the braked wheels slid—to a halt; the conductor bawled out the place of transfer.
Quincy was suddenly aware only of the pungentdampness in the car. He pushed his way to the platform, clumsily. But what hindered him was solely the fact of his suit-case. He stepped down—into a wide, flat puddle. And he was piqued, only because his shoes were freshly shined. He righted himself, waiting for a safe chance to cross. With his thoughts had come the need of moving. And this had stopped his thoughts. He stood midway in the sopping thoroughfare with the sun’s glad drench above his head. The new life began.
He heard the voices. The starting, clanking, abruptly halted cars that swung with groan of wood and iron. The darting flash of wagons, brittle and uproarious of wheel over the asphalt’s crevices or the weave of tracks. The heavier trucks, plunging along with perched, gesticulating drivers, that gave forth their rumble like a flood of undertone shot through with lighter notes. The dull-rhythmed matrix—the crowd’s shuffle—wherein the metallic urge of cars, the tangent flurries of light wheels, the impress of thick masses glowed and hummed and pounded while the air swung response. And through it all, catching it up, knitting it together, the web—the web whereof now Quincy grew aware. For it was none of these: not the traffic’s voice, not the crowd’s shuffle. It was the crowd itself.
Everywhere—interminably movemented, yet inexorably fixed. The base, the weave, the limits of this cacophony. The web, gapped solitarily by the air—and air that stifled, died within the web’s cloying interstices.
The crowd closed on Quincy’s heart. And Quincy felt the crowd. He grasped his burden tightly, andpushed ahead. But meantime, and for the first time, he was a-feel with this new substance. What it gave him went to all the senses. It was a sharp, quick taste that drew and a pungent odor that clouded eyes. It was subtle and it was slight. Yet, once impinged upon his being, it remained. And now, he recognized it:—
A desire not to go on—a yearning to cease altogether. A weariness, which in its scope was cosmic, yet in its application seemed almost not to be!
Still, the boy’s energies pricked him on. There was no tremor of hesitation in his walk or in his face. But it was as if the spirit that had forged these energies by which he was now acting, had flickered out. As the light of a star, after the star has died, pierces through space uncaring, so it seemed that Quincy pursued his goal, with his source gone. All this about him seemed to have sapped his soul. It was all so huge and crass and crushing. It cared so little for him. He was a particle within it, too light to sink, too heavy to ascend.
The crowd. And the boy on his way to college.
He had not reckoned on this thing. He had lived within it all of his life. Yet, until this moment, it had been as remote as non-existence. Now, ere he knew how, it was at work upon him. And already, he was weary!
Quincy knew enough—just enough—to be horrified at this; to feel the fitness of a venturing spirit, eager, elastic, for a beginning; and to grow sick at the lack. He did not know enough even to blame the crowd. Nor did he know that the glad face and joyous limbs of the pioneer are figments of fable-weaving; that the mood of the morning is ever a grim facing forward against the soul’s pull backward; and thathe shared this weariness that so distressed him with most men who, aching of sinew and sick of heart, go out and win.
An impulse murmured to go back. He crushed it. Back, there was all he yearned to overcome. The impulse which made it preferable to the unknown filled him with shame. He had not been this shirker, two years past. He trudged on. Before him, was much unknown, but one thing certain—Struggle. As he envisaged this, a part of Quincy blanched. It was not because he feared; because he lacked daring for pain or for discomfort. Both of these lay behind him. He thought, and rightly, to have sounded them. What was unbearable in the future was the struggle, the exertion. Whatever the fruit of it, with struggle the price seemed vain. Whatever the bitter emptiness he left behind, since he could lie still and without deeds, seemed welcome. While the world shrieked about him, horrible in its clangor of steel and its dull delirium of feet, Quincy was filled with the desire to share nothing with it, to cut loose, aloof, to cast out whatever element he might conceal in common.
He was weary because this crowd seemed tireless; he craved peace because it breathed out conflict; he longed for abnegation, though it was failure, since the crowd was as it was, with its attainment. Subreptively, unformed, the desire stirred within him, if this hideous pervasion was life, for non-existence.
And then, he thrust that from him, also. For though the source seemed cold, the light was flashing forth. Clearly, he knew that he did not court the future; that he would fain have gone from his past into a region without measure. But none the less, he had reached the station. While his soul yearned fora state without time, his eyes had seen the clock and his brain grasped that it was later than he had surmised. While his soul longed for an endless truce to goal and striving, he had doubled his pace so as not to miss his train. And with his heart set against any sequel whatsoever, he had bought a ticket for the immediate future!
The crowds swirled in eddies and great streams to the narrow gates that sucked them in. The vibrance of movement and adventure hummed in the air. The incense of man’s activity reached his nostrils. He, also, was caught up. His feet carried him down the throbbing passage. The long, silent train lay out like a mystery, beyond his sight. There was a Song in this commotion; a Promise in these steps....
Quincy caught hold of the platform bar. And a lithe, eager body swung aboard the train.
Quincyfound one of the last seats. A string of cars at the rear had not been opened. By this means, the astute Company packed its patrons economically and, as the traffic overflowed, opened another car. The boy made himself at ease by the window. He hoped fervently that no one would come beside him. But especially, he hoped that no one of the other fellows whom he saw grouped and chatting in the corridor, on the platform, would be his neighbor, if neighbor he must have. Quincy feared that with one of these there would be danger of a conversation. And he feared that. He feared it, because he felt that he should have things in common with his prospective mates. And he had none—that he could think of.
Greatly to his relief, then, just as the filled train glided into motion, a huge man with a great black slouch hat, sat down beside him.
Quincy gazed steadily out of the window. He half observed his neighbor open a leather case, draw from it a batch of pamphlets and proceed, quietly, unflaggingly, to go through them. They were well on their way before the boy’s interest made him turn for a look at the nature of these pamphlets. The big man had placed all of them back in his case, save the one he was reading. This one he held close, vertically, before his face so that Quincy could not possibly have seen its subject. He did remark, however, that this man must be very near-sighted. Then he looked athim more keenly. Could it be that he was a professor? His bad eyes and his portfolio seemed proof. But his huge, strong body and his western hat belied it. The man had a strong, yet gentle face. All of his features were large, yet all of them were soft in an harmonious expression. As he read, he bit nervously at his lips. His massive, fleshy hands clutched periodically at the fragile paper, rumpling it. His nostrils distended as he took breath.
And then, of a sudden, as Quincy looked, the man turned from his reading and their gaze met. The boy was embarrassed. He wished to look away. But the big brown smile in the man’s eyes held his.
“This your first year?”
“Yes, sir.” He wished to ask whether “freshman” was really writ so large upon him. But instead, he smiled rather sheepishly.
“This paper,” the man went on, talking with a free confidence, “is so stupid, that if I go on reading it, I shall be ill-humored by the time I reach home.” He placed it, face-downward, on his lap.
“M-may I see what it is?” Quincy stammered.
The man broke into a hearty laughter that sounded liquid above the rush of the train.
“Oh! Oh!” he said, “after what I’ve said of it, it would scarcely be discreet—wouldit, now? You see, it’s by a colleague.” He seemed to leave the verdict to Quincy.
“Excuse me. I—I didn’t know.”
“You agree, then?” asked the man.
“I certainly do,” replied Quincy with conviction.
“Good!” And this paper also, was thrust back with the others. There was a pause. Then, he continued: “I’ll tell you, however, generally, what itwas that I found stupid. It was one of those ‘common-sense’ ideas. They’re usually stupid. This is a paper on education. It talks chiefly of teaching rules.”
“Yes?” asked the boy, awaiting more.
“Well—isn’t that enough? Can you imagine anything more stupid and less educational than teachingrules?”
Quincy beamed with amazement. “You really think that?”
“Have rules ever done you any good,” went on the professor; “any rules except such as you dug out for yourself? What’s a good rule on a false basis? And what’s the use of any rule at all, if the right thing’s underneath? Do you have to teach a rule to a tree to make it grow—or to a ball to make it fall? If we build up from a right basis, the rest—the right rule—must follow by mathematical law. Isn’t that reasonable? And if, with a true foundation, the rules an individual derives clash with the rules accepted,—why the accepted rules are simply wrong. I think, to tell you the truth, that we all teach rules the way the good-hearted practice charity—to overcome with an act what has grown wrong from the bottom up.”
“I’m glad to hear you talk that way,” replied the boy. “It seems strange.”
The man laughed.
“Do you—” Quincy hesitated,—“Are you a—teacher?”
“My name is Deering.”
“Not Professor Lawrence Deering!” Quincy demanded. The other nodded.
So this was the famous Professor Deering. “Oh! And you teach that way yourself?”
“I try to. But it’s hard in an institution that doesn’t agree with you. Hard also, with products so nearly finished as—say—you are. I should have gone in for kindergartening.”
What an open candor this was, thought Quincy, from a great man to an unknown boy! From this moment of realization, he would have gone far and suffered much for Professor Deering. Then it occurred to him that since he knew the professor’s name, he must announce his own.
“My name is Burt—Quincy Burt,” he said.
The great man’s hand went out warmly. “I am glad to know you, Mr. Burt. I hope you will like your college years.”
“Oh—I’m sure now, I will!”
“You have lots of friends, I suppose, entering with you?”
“None at all,” the boy answered quickly, “I come from a private school in New York. There were only ten boys in my class. None of them is coming up here.”
“Then, if I may ask,” the man spoke deferentially, “why are you so confident that you will enjoy your college course?”
Quincy looked up with feeling, at his questioner.
“I seem somehow,” he said, “to have been welcomed.”
There was a note in the boy’s voice that silenced the big man. Quincy, in that moment, felt that Professor Deering must be very sensitive. He also would have been silenced by such a leak of sentiment.
“You make me glad I spoke to you,” he said at last. “Our college is not too well adapted for boyswho enter without a crowd. That very fact is a good thing, if the boys really have thestuff.”
Quincy’s amazement here was that a scholar famed throughout America should employ slang.
“What do you mean, exactly, bystuff?” he asked.
Professor Deering examined him closely. “Well, you see,” he said, “there’s an empire of false standards in such a college as ours,—in all American institutions, to speak frankly. The flaw lies in the creed, which is fostered by the faculty, that college is a place to do things, a standard-in-itself, a place-in-itself. For this arbitrary creed, arbitrary goals and targets are set up—secret societies, athletic insignia, a host of extra-curriculum activities. These are looked on, not as play, but as ends. They become thebusinessof the bulk of our students. By senior year, the students themselves laugh at them—at the professors for fostering them—with real life before them. But at the beginning, it is hard to hold one’s balance, to remember that college as a thing-in-itself is trumpery; that it can be exalted only if it be made subservient to personal, spiritual growth.”
“Results, then—you mean—are bad?”
“They’re as bad as rules,” laughed Professor Deering.
This excited Quincy. “How then can you give marks in your classes?”
The Professor looked at him, not with anger as Quincy had feared, after putting this question, but with pleasure. He smiled.
“You haven’t got me there! I must give marks, since our College thinks it must give degrees. But I give the marks only nominally. In my classes, each June, the students hand in to me their ownmarks—given to themselves in honor and by their personal lights. In that way, I outdo the authorities above me.”
“Does anyone ever flunk himself?”
“It has happened frequently. My practice, moreover, has proved to me how little conceit there really is in youth.” Quincy’s eyes glowed at this. “I have a reputation for very low marking. Of course, it is the men who are responsible. But I never over-ride their judgment, in either extreme.”
“Even if you disagree?”
“Would that be reasonable?” flashed back Professor Deering.
Just then, a man came up and placed his hand on the Professor’s shoulder.
“I’ve been all through the train, looking for you, Deering,” he said. “Didn’t you know we had an extra seat for you in the Pullman? Will you come?”
The Professor smiled as a man does who is found out, once again, in an old foible. Then, he turned politely to his neighbor.
“If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Burt?”
Quincy wished to speak graciously. “Thank you,” he said, with what seemed irrelevance.
The big man nodded seriously—embarrassed at such embarrassment.
He gathered up his coat and his portfolio and trudged away, supporting himself with his massive hands down the corridor of the swinging train.
The time that remained—though the long part of the journey—was brief to Quincy. He now had his seat to himself—and he was doubly glad. For he could have thought of no substitute for Professor Deering who would not have been sacrilege.
What an amazing adventure this had been! Quincy had found strange opinions in books; but to meet them vitally, poignantly in life, to hear them imparted, not to the world, but to him, and to him, not as the humble listener he would willingly have been, but as the equal, the critic, the fellow-thinker! In these things that had actually come to pass should have lain almost ecstasy to Quincy. Yet, he was bewildered at not being more bewildered by them. He could not understand how he was managing, in their light, to contain himself. For it dawned on him that he was taking all these wonders quite calmly, almost as matters-of-course; as if their like had occurred even in fancy, many times before. It seemed they should have dazzled him, flung him into some land where such things belong. And instead, here he was solidly in his seat, while the train rushed on, in full possession of his nature, sturdily, serenely eased with life.
Quincy found himself watching the shoulders, the necks, the heads of two young men who were several seats in front of him. From the tilt of their hats, the cool assurance of their nods, he knew them as upperclassmen. They fascinated him, somehow. They seemed very remote from Professor Deering. They seemed more the expected thing. And always, the expected thing tended to unnerve him, even as the sudden flash of wonder gave him a grip on the realities.
The forward door opened suddenly. There was the inrush of air, the clatter of pounding wheels, the swift slam as the door fell to. Before it, stood a tall, svelte fellow, exuding a smooth confidence. He espied the two men whom Quincy had been watching. Hands went up; names were called warmly. Herushed to them. And with affectionate hand-shakes and stout slaps on shoulders, they gave greeting after the summer’s separation. Then, they began to talk. The svelte newcomer leaned over from the aisle and words flew fast. Evidently, it was the man by the window for whom his words were especially intended. This continued for some time, and then the man directly below him got up. The newcomer protested suavely. Quincy marvelled at such affection and ceremonious courtesy. The man who had arisen evidently assured the other that he would gladly and easily find another seat so that the two might with more comfort impart their urgent news. He stepped away. The newcomer, as quickly and utterfully forgetful as he had been solicitous, slipped into the seat. And he who had given it up came down the aisle and placed himself with Quincy.
They examined each other; Quincy surreptitiously, the upperclassman with a bland impudence. Quincy was thoroughly ill at ease. He turned his face full on the window. And then he heard the man’s voice coming toward him. He was a rather stout, florid fellow with fat lips and eyes that would have been a merry blue had they not turned so hard.
“Goin’ up, first time?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Quincy.
“Where do you come from?”
“New York.”
The man shook his head impatiently. “What prep, I mean.”
“None.” He named his private school.
With unconcealed effrontery, the man looked him over,—his clothes, his hands, his face. At Quincy’s answer, a change had come over the fellow. It wasas if the boy had admitted that he was a pauper or an idiot. He had been in a mood for asking questions; Quincy’s admission that he came unlabeled, unclassified, uncounted, put him in a mood for giving advice.
“Well,” said the upperclassman, “you’ll find that your coming in alone will make no difference—” as if his manner had not stultified his words! “This is a democratic place. Every man has as good a chance to make good as another. Prep school prominence wears off by midyears. Don’t let it worry you. Go in for as many activities as you can. You look as if you could run. Can you?”
“Yes,” said Quincy.
“Fine! Go in for track. Go in for the papers, whether you can write or not. Keep a cool head. You got the odds against you, of course, coming in alone. But if you can sprint or tear off funny stories better than the next fellow, you’ll make good, just the same.”
Quincy did not like this man—nor understand him. His words gave him a sense of faintness. He wished to be silent. But his consciousness of the new life made him feel that he must try to understand, even if it did mean a process so painful and disagreeable as the asking of questions. So he nerved himself and spoke:
“What exactly do you mean by ‘making good’?”
The upperclassman smiled with an air of amiable sufferance.
“Getting there, of course,” he said. “Doing something.... You’ll find out soon enough.”
This explanation was very vague to Quincy. He thought perhaps he might help him to explain.
“Do you mean,” he asked, “being elected to a fraternity?”
His neighbor turned upon him with a look of horror in his eyes. He seemed speechless with an inexplicable pain, much as Quincy thought he might be, if some stranger suddenly, gratuitously, should insult his sister. And then, after a pause, the wounded upperclassman spoke.
“Look here!” he said, in a solemn monotone that was suffused with deep emotion. “Do you want to getqueered? Shut up about such things; do you understand? Shut uptight!”
The boy sat there, ashamed and helpless as if he had been stripped. He could not get away. He could not defend himself. He could not act as if he had done nothing. He could not apologize. So he merely sat there and faced his tormentor with eyes that had in them both pride and humiliation.
The upperclassman seemed pleased with the result of his gentle warning. He seemed even a little sorry; and it tickled him, doubtless, to entertain so generous a sentiment toward a freshman. He nodded wisely, shook his head as if conscious of the lavish weakness in so kind an attitude, and then got up. The visitor forward, had gone. As he left for his own seat, he turned back to Quincy and bowed.
“My name is Guthridge. I’m a senior. Come and see me,any time. I’ll be glad if I can be of service.” He seemed to be easing himself of a formula as well learned as was his name. Then he left.
Quincy remembered that Professor Deering had not invited him to call. How thrilled and happy that would have made him! And here was an invitation he would have gone far in order to avoid—had therebeen compulsion of accepting it. There were curious ironies in this new life.
By the time the train-man had shouted out his station and they had rolled, with airy sighings and steely creakings, to a stand-still, these impressions of the new reality were still swirling inchoate, hectically colored, in his head. He was far from having mastered them. He had not yet even faced them. Yet, here it was!
Theearly bewilderments of college did not wear away. They formed a swirling veil through which the unknown features of his new life seemed glamorous and splendid. The pulsing rhythm of so much youth centered about a point gave college a lilt that did not fail to whirl Quincy with it. For a time, the mere sense of motion suffused his consciousness. He was content.
And then, he understood. A windstorm in a desert is engrossing. But while one dashed off the onslaught of hot sand, sweeping one’s senses, there might still come stirring through the monotone of sting and color the thought of other action, the doubt of this fight’s good. So, now, with Quincy. Life as he knew it had been largely desert. Here was merely a new stormy stretch. But despite this, his longing for somewhat else grew, as the lack went on. His longing was based upon no fact. It was becoming slowly a basis for all future facts.
During the first glamor and the first fright of freshman year, Quincy observed a tone of affability about him in his mates. They, also, were unsure of their position, unsure of the importance of this fellow student, Quincy Burt. And they were cautious. Therefore, they were hospitable, affable. They introduced themselves and asked him to call. Numbers of them called on him. Quincy was touched, excited by this reality of comradeship. But he soon learned thatsomething would rise up, as a barrier, between him and his tentative friends. The feeling of a difference, a gulf of reservation would come upon the onset of an attempt at fellowship. In their talks, these boys seemed to have a definite ideal. And in Quincy’s lack of one, they found an unforgivable distinction. Their ideals were pragmatic and immediate. They referred to foot-ball or to the music-clubs or to golf. It made little difference. But it welded the class together. And it left Quincy out.
A few solicitous fellows told him: “You must try for something. It doesn’t matter if you make a team or not—so long as you try.”
Quincy was too slight for foot-ball. So he “went out” for the track team.
He got the necessary suit and shoes. And he reported.
Quincy had reached full height at seventeen. He was fairly tall, lithe, splendidly loose-knit. His muscles were soft but long. His shoulders were sharp. His neck was thin and he held his head always slightly forward. He looked to be excellent material. The coach selected him for the “220 yard dash,” since he had no pre-conceptions on the matter.
In that first try-out, Quincy won his race. It was a strange and sharp experience for him. Ten panting fellows lined out beside him under the bleak sky. The cold air ate against the heat of his body. He felt free and the feeling gave him a sense almost of shame. He had no right to win that race! As his feet tore ground away, something within him told him to come in second, if need be—but not first! But he was unleashed. He raced with his soul. And he won, as if he had committed an improper act.
The upperclassmen congratulated him. His fellows also, did not seem to think that he had had no right to win. That night at dinner, his every word was respectfully attended. He was consulted upon the effect of cigarettes on “wind.” He was asked how many medals he had won at school. And when he answered that he had never raced before, they smiled with deprecation as if the fact of his nonage had been a boast of supernatural powers.
But in the atmosphere of new impressions, this strange event did not intrude too much. He slept well and early. He began to be troubled by the attentions of his class-mates. A few days later, he ran the “100 yard dash” and won again. He was subjected, now, to very direct attention, at the track house. He was rubbed down, massaged, questioned about his habits. The boys took him for granted. Upon the third day, he was asked in the field if he would try the “440.” He was willing. He finished third in excellent company. This time the captain of the college track team shook his hand.
“Burt, you’re the real thing,” he said. “Now work—! Train! There’s glory for you.”
Quincy got back to his room and discovered that he hated this favor into which he had fallen. He loved to run. He loved to race, although the conspicuousness of winning made him uncomfortable. What he detested was the “business” and the importance that had been attached to a quite natural and unassuming exercise. If it was joy to hurl himself through the air and wind, with his breast atingle and his head aflame, it was torture straightway to be currycombed—mentally and physically—like a race-horse. It was torture tobe patronized by a shallow-mouthed senior who, by some insuperable right, was his captain and his mentor. It was torture to be told what to eat, when to rest, how to pace. And it was torture to feel himself engaged, harnessed, to run—whether the mood was there or no.
For a week more, Quincy bore this tyranny to which his prowess had subjected him. And then, calmly, bravely, he quit. He was not aware of the heroism of his act. And to be sure, there was no voice nor mind about him so to paint it. What he had done was cowardly, perverse, vicious and monstrous in the light of this new world. There was no possible alternative in viewpoint.
He had told the captain that he loved to run, but that he did not wish to make sprinting the master of his time and soul. The captain had smiled knowingly.
“I know it’s hard. But you have to, Burt. It’s the way.”
“Well—I’d rather not.”
The captain looked at him sharply. “You got to, I say!”
“How do you mean—I got to?”
“You can’t keep on a team and not practice every day. And not train all the time.”
And the man had walked off, not dreaming of a further protest.
Quincy, then, came close to the truth. There was something sacred, almost prayerful in running. It was the service of the trees and brooks. The strain of his muscles, the pant of his breath, the burn of his eyes, the hewing-down by this fleet spirit within him of the world’s resistances, came to him as romance, as worship. And to yoke this splendor to an affair of points and team-work seemed sacrilege. He couldrun when he wished. He had now learned the glory of that. He would not prostitute his best delight.
He broke training and failed to report.
The captain called on him. There was a stormy half-hour, in which the captain showed his native lights and talked much of treachery to one’s college. And so, Quincy wasqueered.
At the fall fraternity elections, he was left out. He knew that he had been marked for slaughter. The majority of his class now evinced nervousness at talking to him. They had fallen off as quickly as they had first rushed to accept him. He had committed the unpardonable sin. He stood there, in their midst, as a rebuke to their standards and activities—as anindividual—as one who prized his pleasure and rejected the college shibboleth of “doing something.” There was no health in him. And there was danger of being associated with him, if one were seen too much about with him. Elections came. And Quincy, courageous as he had been in the lists of decision, was too young to smile and too weak not to suffer.
But a firm idea had been implanted in his soul; and a great gift given it. Each afternoon now, in the days that came before the snow, and while he should have been sprinting for his Alma Mater, he went out in the sparse woods beyond the field and ran and raced with his own spirit. This was the gift that had been given him. The idea was one of criticism. He began to see the poverty of this college scope, to deplore the lack of a real, free romanticism in its routine and aspirations. He longed for the opportunity to talk with Professor Deering. But the Professor taught only upperclassmen.
And then, Quincy thought of expressing his ideamore vicariously. He worked a week on an essay that he entitled “College Cramps.” In it, he made reference to the grip of college routine and business on all the native energies of youth that should run wild; to the effort through team-work and club-work, to channel ebullience into a trough where college gods—cattle of iron and wood—could drink and guzzle. He sent his essay to the college literary magazine. It was sent back. Across the title page a witty editor had scribbled: “We’re sorry you have them, old man.”
Then the boy retouched his essay and mailed it to Professor Deering. Within, he enclosed a note stating that it had been rejected by the college paper. He hoped, however, that it would be read by the man who really had inspired it.
He heard nothing from Professor Deering. And soon after, he made a momentous journey to New York. But before this, he had found a friend.
Hisname was Garsted—Simon Garsted.
One day, Quincy crossed the campus with him. He had been a slight ways behind. He had overtaken Quincy.
“Aren’t you Burt of the freshman class?” he asked, introducing himself. He was a junior—an obscure one as far as college honors were concerned.
“I was at a tea, last Sunday, at Professor Deering’s house,” Garsted explained. “He read your paper aloud.”
“Did he?”
For a moment, Quincy was rejoiced. And then it occurred to him that Mr. Deering might have acknowledged the paper’s receipt—if he had thought so highly of it—might have asked his permission about reading it aloud. So Quincy withdrew into his shell. And since only Garsted was there, congratulating him, he turned his resentment upon him.
“I hope you liked it,” he said icily.
“You’re a mighty independent young chap, Burt,” Garsted went on, “I like that.”
“Thanks.”
Garsted stopped, causing Quincy to do likewise and to face him. And then, he smiled.
“Look here, Burt,” he said softly, “Deering’s a strange, sloppy man. But he’s the biggest man here. Don’t take what he did amiss. If I know him, he forgot even to invite you to his tea. That’s just like him.One day, when his interest in your paper is a bit subsided, he’ll recall that there’s more to you than it—that you’re behind it. Then he’ll drop you a note. Meantime, however, don’t be sensitive—withhim.”
There was a pause. Quincy was looking a trifle sheepish. Garsted was laughing: “Save your sensitiveness for other things, Burt—and come and see me.” He put out his hand.
Quincy inclined his head slightly and as their hands clasped their eyes met. Garsted caught the deep pathos of this boy, lost and alone in a college campus. He felt a thrill as one does at some beautiful flash of thought. He saw the contrast between this silent, stubborn boy and the easy obviousness of the things about him.
“Let me see,” he said in a still more quiet tone, “these indefinite invitations are insulting.” It was the second time he had caught the cause of Quincy’s trouble. “What about a date to-night? Can you come?”
Quincy looked at him. The first general wave of invitations, and that succeeding flood when he was harnessed to the track team, had died utterly away. He had been alone for three weeks. He was sensitive and he was skeptical. But Garsted was different. And it was hard to transfer upon him so sustainedly his irritation at Mr. Deering. Garsted was a close-set fellow. His head was long, almost ponderous, with coarse, blond, short-cropped hair. His nose was massive, angularly chiseled, his mouth was broad and showed a row of teeth immaculately white and separate one from the other. All of him seemed roughly hewn out of some stubborn stone—abrupt, big, yet anomalously delicate. As he spoke, he stammered atthe beginning of each sentence; but once over this initial barrier, he went on freely, until the pause.
“I have nothing on, to-night.”
“Very well,” said Garsted. “Come at six. There’s my dorm. Room number ten.” He pointed, and dashed off.
Quincy had never seen such a room as this. Through a maze of tobacco smoke, a naked gas-jet gave out its light. Garsted, in suspenders, loomed out of the shadows, looking like some grotesque statue, his hair dishevelled, a cigarette dropping from his lips. “Hello. Come in,” he said without a sign of stammering.
Quincy felt his way into the room. It was long and low. It had three leaded lattice windows. Above one was the gas-jet. On the full wall was a suspended book-case, littered with manuscripts, papers and exotic-looking volumes. Below, was a cot, unmade; and lost in the heterogeneous bed-clothes were trousers, books, two hats and a carelessly flung fiddle. Below the two other windows was a plain kitchen table, unvarnished and bewilderingly strewn with hodge-podge of small things. Beside a pen was a tooth-brush. Mingled with clean sheets of paper were pipes, neckties and a pile of silver change. In one corner stood an antiquated typewriter. Garsted seemed splendidly at home and in a key with all this harmonious medley.
He flung three paper volumes from a chair to the floor and offered the seat to Quincy. Quincy took it. Garsted rolled a cigarette, lighted it from the gas and suggested that they dine at the town’s most expensive restaurant. Then, he looked down at his shoes.
“Damn it,” he said with a chuckle, “they’ll neverdo.” He excused himself and went out into the hall, leaving the door ajar behind him.
“Oh, Bobby! Oh, Bobby!” he sang out. A door opened.
“Going fussing to-night?” cried Garsted.
“No,” came the distant voice.
“Let me have your good shoes?”
There were more footsteps above. Presently, Quincy heard Garsted at the bottom of the stairs catch one shoe and muff the second. Then, he entered and without comment pulled off his own, tossed them under the kitchen-study table and put on the others.
“I’m hungry; let’s go,” said Garsted, moving toward the door.
“Should I put out the light?” said Quincy, who was behind him.
“Lord, no! I never have any matches. I’d have to go to bed in the dark.” And still more Quincy marvelled. Gas had to be paid for, in the college dormitories.
The waiters in the town’s most expensive restaurant (the only one with metropolitan prices) treated Simon Garsted as if he had lived in a mansion. They judged by the sort of dinner he ordered and his taste in wine. Garsted made it a rule not to enter the place save his purse was full. Also, in order that this might not be too infrequently, he would go long without good nourishment, subsisting on coffee, tobacco and free lunch. Another of his economies was in matches.
However, it was a memorable evening for Quincy. He did not pretend to understand. He was subtle enough to be dazzled as much by the incident of the borrowed shoes as by the salaams of the headwaiter. He saw a dizzy accomplishment in either. He likedGarsted, besides admiring him. He found it easy to converse with him. And Garsted proved his entire comfort by not stammering once after the oysters.
They talked long. Quincy discovered in himself ideas—and ideas, in addition, to which an evidently brilliant upperclassman was glad to listen. He found that many of his host’s spicily couched remarks were final forms of feelings he had long vaguely nursed. And, being human, he respected Garsted for this reason as well as for another.
There were, moreover, many points in his new friend’s mind that had never occurred, even remotely, to the boy. Most of these, as Garsted made them, seemed bewilderingly true. Others, he argued frantically, unaware that he was in this way defending his old grounds, his old spiritual habits.
It was obvious from the outset that Garsted was a rebel. He told him so.
“Well, so are you,” retorted the older man. And this was news to Quincy.
“Why, that’s anarchism!” cried Quincy, when Garsted was inveighing against the theoretic right of imprisonment for crime.
“And what was your leaving the track team?” came the quick rejoinder.
So, by this penetrating means the boy gained insight into himself. Small wonder, then, that he found himself growing enthusiastically fond of Garsted. There is no commoner cause, among the honest, for devoted friendships.
No middle way exists in natures like that of Quincy. Once they let go their blanketing reserve, they feel no shame in nakedness. They have not learned a technique of graded confidence. They withhold everything with a single grip. They know only how to maintain that grip or to release it. They lack experience in thenuancesof human correlations. Their rule is not to adventure. When they break it—since it is so sincere a rule—they break it utterly. For behind the rule, is the great, incessant need of what the rule forbids—the conviction that in such intensity of need abstinence is good.
Quincy flung his reserves out from him, that evening. And Garsted had no reason to dream that this candid boy could be as secretive as a cat. He sat high up in his chair, haled by his wine, receiving Quincy’s brave opinions with an equal gusto. His own remarks served to expose and annotate them. Garsted had a genius in apt conversation. He knew when to obtain a major effect by playingobbligato. Quincy’s purposes and judgments were put forth acridly, naked, crudely, as seventeen years are wont. Had the boy heard himself as he actually spoke, he must have felt the strident immaturity of his opinions, been rebuffed by them and so reacted against Garsted. But here, this young man’s cleverness came out. As Quincy’s thoughts ran, Garsted dressed them, trimmed them, softened them. Such was the mission of his own accompanying remarks. And in consequence of this, Quincy’s impressions were not of his ideas alone, but of these tempered and glorified by his host’s part. So Quincy glowed with a strange assurance. And his subliminal gratitude for Garsted inspired a conscious admiration.
They parted late.
Quincy lay, stare-eyed, in bed; and by fancy continued his past conversation, until sleep cheated him. Even so, a young knight of old, fresh from a firsttourney, might over and over again have fought in vision, stroke by stroke, the battle he had won.
One of the remarks of Simon Garsted had been responsible for Quincy’s journey to New York. The boy had claimed the years he lived there as credentials of his knowledge of the city.
“But your family’s been there with you, all that time?” asked Garsted.
“Of course.”
“Then you know less of New York than the immigrant who lands at South Ferry from Ellis Island. He at least has been receptive to the real welcome—attack, if you will. With you, inevitably, the home you lived in and the hordes of people you knew must have interfered.”
Quincy smiled at these “hordes.” But he resolved to meet New York without the fact or reservation of his family within his mind.
Garsted had summarized: “Knowing a city is being open to the vibrance of its crowds and buildings. A family stops these apertures.”
The time was early in November. Fraternity elections had just placed a mark upon Quincy’s lack of favor. They had thrown him into a gloom. But what really harassed the boy was not the disapproval of his class, so much as the palpable weakness which he read into the fact that this had troubled him. This was the source of real misgivings. If he was what he was, had done with conscience that which he had done, the results should have been powerless to distress him. They were not. His unpopularity, now brutally concreted, gave him periods of despond. Andseeing this, he rebelled at his own self-styled fatuity and thereby fixed his mood.
It was in such a mood that he set out to meet New York. The thrill of real adventure shot through him as he stepped forth, under these new auspices, upon the crashing street. The power of suggestion had availed. It seemed indeed as if he had never before known the great city.
He plunged at once into the subway and alighted at Brooklyn Bridge. There had been no plan in this. But it had seemed the natural tendency. Quincy had merely flowed along. Here was one channel of the city’s life that had happened to catch him in. Since he was there to invite and to enhance this receptivity, it would have been wrong to choose.
So Quincy reached the street from the subway. At once, he was washed along like a splinter of wood on a rising wave, into a screaming welter of humanity and trolley-cars. He was in the terminal whence soars the incline pathway rising to the Manhattan Tower of Brooklyn Bridge.
It was not yet four o’clock. And the sparse stream of early hurriers about him was as nothing against his feeling of solitude. He recalled almost vaguely now the packed recesses whence he had emerged—the delirium of cars churning the crowds, the hammer of the outlying city.
Before him swept the bridge. He felt that every cable of the web-like maze was vibrant with stress and strain. With these things he was alone. Yet he felt no insecurity, such as the crowds inspired. Beyond, through the net-work of steel, huddled Brooklyn. And below his very feet, tumbled together as if some giant had tipped the city eastward and sent all the housespell-mell toward the down-tilted corner, lay the wharves and slums of Manhattan. It seemed to Quincy that he was being caught upon a monstrous swing and swept with its pulsed lilt above the grovelling life of the metropolis. Suddenly, the fancy flashed upon him that from his perch of shivering steel the power should indeed come to poise and judge the swarm above which he rocked. The bridge that reeled beyond him seemed an arbiter. It bound the city. It must know the city’s soul since it was so close to the city’s breath. In its throbbing cables there must be a message. In its lacings and filigrees of steel, there must be subtle words!...
He was already above the river. The sun was cold. The waters of the harbor cut out like sapphire fretted with gleam. Beyond, Brooklyn was in shadow—shadow that sprang rather from its nature than the sun’s lack. Quincy turned north where the great East Side crowded out under two bridges, stifling the river to an inlet. The city rose in a blue haze. Quincy recalled the words of the man in the Park: “Blue’s her color.” It was all like the piled ascent of some brobdingnagian ant-hill. He scrutinized it carefully,—from the stall-like wharves to the tower, turreted and carved in ice at the hill’s crest. It seemed ugly. And yet, as his eyes went back over the mazy whole, down from the notched skyline to the turmoiled streets that fell brown and grey into the water, it seemed beautiful as well. Quincy was puzzled. He did not know that in this flaunting grandeur, building from myriad misery and ugliness, lay the nature of New York.
Quincy too was cold. Instinctively, he turned south. The sun was very ineffectual against the lower citywith its escarpments of wrought stone. There was a cruelty about these that laughed at the falling sun. The tall buildings were ugly—fearfully so. They lacked grace and color. One of them was a titanic telescope done in cake and sugar. A huge structure farther north—ridiculous with a flounce as a flank and its tiny turrets—reminded him of building-blocks. And this brought to Quincy the idea of giant babies, sportively responsible for it all. But there was tragedy as well as farce. The vaster buildings rose all white and impervious and cool from the wallow of unlit mediocrity below. Monsters indeed, they seemed to have sucked the strength for rising from the nondescript ruck that they submerged. Ferocious, sapping prodigies they seemed, now, to Quincy—the sort to which men are sacrificed and that make slaves of their creators.
All of this was like the blow of a mailed fist to the boy. It made him turn toward Brooklyn. The borough of homes appeared shabby and foul, a neglected step-sister unworthy the name of Cinderella. For here was no virtue under the spell of persecution. Brooklyn also was sinister enough. Merely, she had been less successful. Homes, evidently, counted little.
Suddenly, Quincy found that he had left the bridge and was standing upon a street in Brooklyn. He struck down its dingy length. He wondered if the wealth that had raised all the glories he had just observed was in some manner parent to this squalor. For not more than fifteen minutes, he searched the swart, hovelled depths below the Bridge. He saw a ferry-boat at the foot of a street, relieved with plants and romping boys, which had been turned into a consumptives’ home. He was not used to stinking court-ways, houses that leered, rank saloons advertising rum and sidewalks crumbling with neglect. He looked up at the span of bridge. It seemed an unattainable pathway. His nerves told him he would be better looking down at Brooklyn. So he returned.
The whole world had become another world in half an hour. Quincy surveyed the sky, the river, distant Manhattan. It came to him with a thrill that nothing was the same—that everything was radically something else. It was night—boldly, suddenly, entirely. If New York had a tongue of its own, would there be a word in it for evening?
What impressed Quincy at once was that night was not falling, as poetry books would have it, but ascending; and ascending, not in a steady advance like the shadows on a mountain, but in sudden starts, in impulsive sallies, like clouds of guerilla warriors pressing up, free of each other, repulsed here, there held at bay, and here again triumphant.
In the north, Manhattan was already dark. It loomed up, loftier yet more subdued in mist that was forever turning thicker and more sombre. Not a light pierced the haze to Quincy’s eye. He seemed now to be looking down upon an illimitable graveyard. Each house was become a tomb-stone, each towering building, in the light of day a sentinel of progress, appeared now a monument to some great death. Below the liquid green of the two uptown bridges, the East River was opaque amethyst, streaked here and there where some boat had cut a swathe. The moiling tenements glowed forth like coral. Poverty, catching a deflected ray, turned lurid.
Now, as he marched on, Quincy observed the south.The arm of Liberty, wisp-like in the mist, pointed to a blood-orange ball of sun. The nearer island lay in a deeper purple; its trees waved through a thicker film. But the waters were in shadow as if night had been an emanation from them, pushing the sun relentlessly back across the rim of the world. Above the harbor, was a deep pall, night’s advance guard in its grey, the sun’s resistance in its orange fretting. The pall fell and the waters grew more brackish. The sun plunged down against the mists, pouring a frenzy of disparted color that shot about the buildings of South Manhattan. And now, a sheet of gold cloud came underneath it. Slowly, yet visibly, the gold turned to yellow, to lemon, to silver—and went grey. Steeped as if in its own blood, the sun sank through the mists, and disappeared.
Quincy shuddered as if he had been witness to a tragedy. Then, huddled in his coat, he pressed on toward Manhattan.
The lower buildings had receded into shadow. The upper turrets were still shooting white against a shrill blue sky. Below, Manhattan was retreating; in the higher line, it still advanced. Quincy thought that the tall buildings slanted forward, that they must topple into the river. And throughout the long expanse, came streaks of smoke, all pointing north, all twining with harmonious measure into the sky.
But now, was the most startling change of all. The phalanx of white smoke seemed to hesitate, broke and scattered. With the sun had gone the wind; and with it, given up to the play of a thousand lesser currents, the smoke eddied forth, curled back and reverted in formless disarray.
Then, with a flash, Quincy was aware of a glitterof lights along the precipice. They were everywhere—huge bars of them in the north, clusters of them in the south. The lights of a city do not come out, one by one. A moment before, he had not noticed any. This, however, Quincy did remark: at first the lights appeared faint, almost fancied within the clear eminence of buildings. But by degrees, the lights, thickening in numbers, grew as well in strength, became more real and more brilliant. In measure, the cold outline of stone against the blue melted and merged; the two values—sky and building—fell back into one wash of grey. And the lights took firmer form in their dimming casements, and gleamed forth like a new city of flame in place of the city of stone. Manhattan of the day, with its sharp, cruel outlines and its clumsy angles, hostile to subtlety and to suggestion, was fading utterly before this faëry Manhattan with its swarms of color and its deep store of fancy.
Quincy fought his way to the street through the frantic turbulence of clattering cars and thronging home-goers. He felt as if he had been dropped down the muddy vortex of a whirlpool. Night was thick above him. Great clouds of people swirled toward the bridge and subway, amid the clangor of traffic and the cacophony of newsboys.
Bruised, frightened, Quincy turned away, eager only to escape. Suddenly, amazement stopped him. Across the dismal mouth of the street was the bridge—a giant causeway. One arc-light underneath broke off a circlet of yellow-white from the surrounding gloom. Above shone a ragged strip of sky. The air was rank. The solitary light tumbled and flashed in the vapors.
Panic clutched the boy. There seemed a half uttered charm about this place. He pressed on. And now, he slipped along the wet walks of Fulton Market where the fish of a thousand pushcarts had dropped blood and ooze during the day. Facing the low, red houses with the hectic, gas-burning shops, Quincy observed Broadway beyond—a long, high gauze of flame. Ponderous trucks rattled past. And a thin stream of drab humanity shuffled toward the ancient ferry that plies to Brooklyn.
Quincy went north on South Street, past the swinging doors of saloons and shops where marling-spikes and flag-trucks made display. Under the Bridge itself he went—looming above him like a curse; and into the rookeries of Cherry Hill.
Quincy had had enough. He was frightened, horrified.
He pushed up Water Street and westward, eager above all to escape the omnipresent Bridge. He passed through fetid piles of tenement, pouring their produce into the street. Crowds jostled him; cars clashed; machines went braying, shuttling. The taste of New York was bitter on his lips. Through its sheer bulk, it threatened to submerge him. He wished to run, in order to be rid of it. But he held himself back. He must be calm, courageous. All of this delirium, this lurid show of filth and vice and an inexplicable beauty—was it not life? Would he avoid life, would he be rid of it? Was he not of it? was he not also life?
And so, aching in his soul, for his experience, yet aware deeply that he had somehow been visiting himself, Quincy reached the station and journeyed back to college.
The depth of the impression of this trip on Quincy was such that he did not begin really to know it until somewhat later. Great shocks often compound a spiritual bath which takes a long time to soak upon the nerves. Quincy’s experience, as he looked back on it, was in the nature of a shock—a physical one. It grew blurred, dimensionless within his mind. And in proportion, grew the mental reflex. It seemed now, to Quincy, that the vagueness of what he had encountered was his own subjective vagueness; as if indeed he had pried into the arcana of existence. Of course, such a venture into truth could not have the petty clarity of fact. He learned that a glance within himself gave just such dim results. Yet here, dimness did not detract from poignancy. And so, with New York. There was a firm analogy between these delvings; and between their consequences, at first elusive, physical, and finally outspreading into an aura of deep importance.
He spoke freely of all this to Garsted.
“Why,” asked Garsted, “do you fail to divorce the sense of beauty from even the vilest thing you saw?”
“That I can’t understand,” said Quincy.
“You don’t seem to know what the sense of beauty means.”
“Let me see if I can figure it out.” Quincy knit his brow, and his blue eyes softened. It was as if he had spiritually relaxed, instinctively aware that in this way one can receive.
“Perhaps,” he groped on, “perhaps, when I feel beauty, I am really feeling a sense of welcome. A welcome of the spirit.”
“Good!” cried Garsted. “And when do we welcome? Now, look out for your answer! No sentimentalism. Hypothetically, we welcome when we are charitable, altruistic, Christian. But actually—”