“When we want, I guess.”
“We feel a sense of welcome, when we feel a sense of one-ness. Is that not so? Well—now we’re at the kernel. Beauty is nothing but a sense of welcome within, that we transfer onto an object, because the impulse of life is to transfer. A sense of harmony, in other words.”
“A sense of harmony with filthy hovels and cruel skyscrapers!”
“Absolutely. Something in them is in you,—is truth. You feel that vaguely, through the filth and the stolen decoration. And you call all of it beautiful.”
“Why,” laughed Quincy, “you make me think I was paying a visit to myself, in extension.”
“Well, what else gripped you? Was it the architecture?”
They laughed together. And then, in the silence, the boy pondered.
“You’re right,” he said at last. “I felt it also,—that I had been looking into myself. Now, I can do more than feel it—thanks to you; I can express it.” He paused.
“The devil! Then all these brutalities and contrasts and flauntings are truth? And they’re in me, also—at least, what makes them be!”
“Don’t you also belong to the world?”
Quincy looked sharply at his friend. This question moved him. He thought of his life, so far. He thought of the havoc which even this little glimpse of the world had played with him. He grew sombre and his eyes lost their liquid glow of relaxation.
“Something’s wrong,” he said solemnly. “If I belong to the world, there’s that within me objects to it. It cries out, objecting. It felt the beauty, that day. And, as you say, that meant that it recognized a fellowship, a harmony. But it hurt, Garsted,—it hurt like being crushed!”
Garsted laughed—alone. He could go only a certain way with Quincy. This seemed jejune sensitiveness.
From the moment of that laughter, the boy discovered that there were things and states about which it was unwise to talk, even in the rare circumstance of being able to.
Oneday, on the street, Quincy saw Professor Deering. Quincy was hurt at the Professor. He was in a mood for a cold bow that would leave its mark. But the big man stopped him and talked the mood away in cordiality.
“Mr. Burt—I am ashamed of myself,” he smiled wanly. “There have been worries and they have made me rude. Walk me home, now, will you?”
Quincy followed tacitly at his side.
“I was very grateful for that paper,” went on the Professor. “I gave Snowdon of theMonthlya piece of my mind for rejecting it. But tell me, how are you?”
“I am getting on, thank you, Professor Deering.”
“That is as it should be. I am glad to hear it. I wasn’t so sure of you, you see.”
Quincy’s heart sank. It was as if he had been found out, as if a guilt had been fixed on him. Yet, he knew that the Professor’s words tokened merely respect and an unusual interest.
The Professor went on: “You evidently have qualities of rebellion, Mr. Burt. If you have the strength to support what these qualities will always bring you, I have no fear for you. But it is more common to revolt than to support what revolt sets up.”
“I’m all right, Mr. Deering,” Quincy replied; “I am not in the least worried. I am having a bully time.”
“Will you come in just a few minutes? It is tea hour.”
Quincy hesitated clumsily; grew aware of his awkwardness, and agreed, in order to conceal it.
They were before the Deering House. It looked very like a big, paste-board box, dropped directly upon the street by some careless errand-boy. There was no lawn before it. Two low steps led to a tiny porch, scarcely wider than the door, yet big enough for two banks of flower-pots. These were now barren and frozen. The house was of white frame and square. The two windows of the façade seemed to have been punched upon it as an afterthought.
Mr. Deering unlocked the door and Quincy was led across a narrow hall into the library. The room was spacious and bare. The center table had no cover; the three windows had no curtains; the walls were entirely occupied with plain book-racks, the height of the ceiling. A wood fire burned in the hearth, before which lay a tiger skin. This touch of Oriental glamor in the room’s prim contour stood out. With the exception of one upholstered arm-chair, the furniture was plain. Domestic rugs pieced out the soft-wood floor. There was a small gas stove in the corner of two book shelves. On it were a pewter kettle, several cups and a decanter of spirits.
“Sit down, and let me brew you some tea,” said Mr. Deering.
Quincy complied. “This is where you work?”
“Yes. When I close the doors, I am in an inviolable castle.”
The boy remarked that on the center table lay a low pile of unused papers, a single pen and, in the corner, a small rack containing half a dozen books.Even the table seemed impoverished and empty. No artistic wealth of abandon was about it. Meantime, Professor Deering was boiling water.
“You must come here often, Mr. Burt,” he spoke as he leaned over the little table.
Quincy liked the massive stretch of his back, the wide, high head poised gracefully upon a short, thick neck and closely covered, like a cap, with hair.
During the process of tea-soaking there was no further talk. The host seemed absorbed. The guest had naught to say. But now, after the perfunctory questions relative to sugar and brandy and lemon, Mr. Deering came forward with two cups. He made Quincy move to the hearth and sat down beside him.
“Mr. Burt,” he said, stirring his tea, into which Quincy observed that he had poured a plentiful quantity of cognac, “I am anxious to get to know you. I want to hear if you have any plans.”
He questioned the boy about his courses; he asked for candid views of text-books and instructors. He got them. It never occurred to Quincy that the chance of their meeting might seem in contradiction to Professor Deering’s interest. There was about the man an impressionistic note that made harmonious this chance renewal of their acquaintance. Everything about the room, from the kettle to the curtainless windows, suggested a free, airy impressionism. The tidy desk with its bare batch of papers, also. Professor Deering appeared to need about him a liberal space, unhampered and untrammeled by pre-conceptions or too much furniture whatsoever, be it in the physical or the ideal world. Thus only, his creative mind was able to career. So it was natural that a very real result should come of a quite impromptu meeting. Wherefore, Quincy did not restrain himself.
Of a sudden there was a knock. Mr. Deering clattered his tea-cup nervously and arose. A woman had made open the door without waiting for a signal.
“Oh, excuse me, Lawrence,” she said. But at the same time, she stepped inside. And Quincy heard her excuse as if it had been ironical.
Mr. Deering stood strangely embarrassed, his weight thrown back so as to give him an air of difficult balance.
“Julia—this is Mr. Burt. My wife—” he added.
“May I speak to you, one moment, Lawrence? I am sure Mr. Burt will excuse you.”
The big man hesitated again, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Then, he went forward without turning to Quincy and the door shut behind the pair. Quincy had remarked that the embarrassment was all with Mr. Deering. His wife had scarce deigned to nod to him. But now that he was alone for a few moments, he had the chance to bring to consciousness the impression he had had of her.
He recalled her as a slender, supple figure, framed in the doorway. Her eyes were very bright and dark, her chin was long and seemed to point protrusively. She wore a waist of dull blue silk that draped loose from her shoulders. These were narrow and high. Above the dull blue gleamed in his vision that black mass of her hair. Two great coils of it stood out, disordered, above her ears. A curve was low over the flat, cool forehead. He remembered that she was pale and that just below her eyes the blood shone strangely in two flecks through her delicate, hard skin. Also, her hands were large. And tight sleeves drew out thethinness of her arms. She seemed to have the bosom of a boy.
Now, the door opened. The silence of the hall whence Mr. Deering stepped back beside him, taking up his tea-cup, brought out a memory of her voice. It had been low and vibrant. Quincy thought, without too great awareness why, of a velvet casing over a silver knife. Then, Mr. Deering continued the conversation.
In a few minutes, Quincy, with a poise that himself was stranger to, arose and left.
He admired Professor Deering for having so beautiful a wife. Then, she was beautiful—this Julia Deering, whose first name he had not lost? It occurred to him that she had been very beautiful indeed, framed there, in the doorway....
Nowcame the Christmas vacation.
A time of ill-suppressed anticipation in a college town. Spirits soar and marks descend. Men laugh more readily; kindness comes to the surface of expression. Charity and self-indulgence, disguised as a fine denial conscious of its temporary being, give life a buoyancy. Energy juts into the future, leaving the swamp of deserted channels for the present. Eyes and mind and above all, the softer sense, wait upon the morrow. There is an abstinence about, as of guests before a feast not quite ready to begin.
And then, the last day, the last hour. The swift march of feet bedecking the frozen station road like flowers. The ring of voices in prospect and good wish, fretting the grey air like tendrils of warm sun. The mad largess to drivers; the luxury of lugging fat valises; the display of bright neckwear and urban suits. There may be slush and ice on the station road-way, but there is spring in the feet that tread it.
Quincy, also, went home for his Christmas vacation. He was one of the few that felt these things about him. Most were in these things, making their sum. He was outside, so he felt and understood. The glitter and ring grew and transformed in him, as he forsook them. Things spiritual too, however fair, have shadows, when they stand within the flood of some subjective sun. So stood these bright things toQuincy’s spirit. Their shadows broadened upon him. And they made him gloomy; for the shadow, even of a painted picture, will be dark.
When he reached New York, with home before him, he smiled ironically to himself. The grey loom from the past brightness was wide across him. He bethought himself that he was going jerkily, obtusely, through a set of motions meaning nothing to him. He was partaking of a ceremony without its spirit. It was a deep and pregnant ritual for these others—home turned host, home in a roseate smile and at attention. So much the hollower did its successive rhythms sound in his own emptiness. For without the promise of felicity, what is baptism but an untimely wetting? Yet, he was caught within this process and with one speed, one exterior, he had been lifted up and hurried homeward. If he lacked knowledge of his own direction, he saw the pomp of promise of the others. And in this combination, his spirits fell and his eyes and lips grew subtly vagrant, as if they had desired to escape from the pain whereof his face was symbol.
A home of prophets would have understood this boy’s distress, launched on them at the set, rigid hour of vacation. But in his home if he came upon it as he was now, journeying uptown, the sullen silence would be received as if the mark were already known, shrugged at with the sole possible comment that one had hoped for college to have bettered him. All this, as well, Quincy understood.
So, as he rang the bell, he feared already his reception. And knowing what its consequence must be, he shut down his mood. He found a smile, inspired by his fear. It was perhaps a meagre smile.But its source was not a common one for cheerfulness. And at this moment, he had no other source.
In this way, he entered.
Many things in the Christmas fortnight served to move Quincy out of himself upon a vantage-point where self might be envisaged.
All of it was a Pattern to him, once it was behind. And in the process of its unfolding, he was the unit that recurred persistently within it. He was the dark part of the design: richly, suavely black. About him fell burstings of color, scatteredly composed and half drawn toward him, as if a slightly stronger force prevailed against the colors’ impulse to fly clear. The whole was restless. The dark center-part—himself—seemed strangely unmoved. It was Quincy’s first intensive lesson in the design of spirit—that mad craftsman who hurls strident clashings into a harmony so fluent that all the world, if one step back and look, falls to a monochrome.
There was no distinguishable episode, at first. His strollings in New York, lit by his own fluttering lights far more than by the city’s screaming incandescence, made no chapter apart. His family was there, all-swerving in its crowd-way: Rhoda with her flagrant and acid beauty; Marsden the oracle; Adelaide the unformidable sphinx; his mother, lacking a motor to her sentiments, beyond the power to clap her hands painfully about his ears; his father with his language of greed; the city with its tongue of brass. But the two weeks were one. And the shadow of college was within them,—indivisible like any shadow, so that our minds alone and not our senses know it for a projection.
The Pattern’s early form was allied with the city....
There was a great tongue of metal that had sharp, cutting edges. It struck against tooth and palate with ironic clangor. The teeth were cold buildings, and the lips about which the metal tongue drew blood were the pervasive helpless passions of the city’s life. In reality, the soft and suffering things were hidden and the metal shone. In his impression, the agony stood out and the element which cut and punished seemed insidiously hid. This inversion his own wish explained. He yearned for optimism. He still had strong within him the essential touch of a gay nature, made for a gay God. Perhaps, since such inversions are a part of wit, the gay God was the merrier for this.
Out of the mouth came speech. Rhoda had Julia Deering as a refrain. There was a rhyming sequence between his father and the Professor. Adelaide was at once a low refrain and an epigram that bit under a soft semblance. Strangely, his mother figured little by herself. But her part was never lacking. She had the ubiquity of intonation.
His impressions crystallized, drew back into actual events. But these events from which logically his impressions had gained life seemed a tracing not to a former, but to a later thing. The Pattern was clear in Quincy’s mind before the events were clear, that caused it.
Above all, there was an afternoon, spent in her room with Adelaide.
“If you have time, Quint,” she had said to him on the first evening after his arrival, “I hope we’ll see something of each other.”
“I have no engagements, Adelaide.”
So, when the time came: “Shall we just talk, this once?” she asked him.
They went up to her room.
It had been “Rhoda’s room” when the two sisters shared it. But Rhoda had been married nearly a year. Yet, the old name and the old association clung to Quincy as they arose from luncheon—Marsden, Adelaide, his mother and himself.
“Well, children, I must run.” Sarah looked at her daughter. “It wouldn’t hurt you, Adelaide, to come along and help your mother.” It was a case of belated Christmas shopping—gifts Sarah had overlooked.
“Mother, Quint and I have planned a cozy afternoon upstairs in my room.”
Sarah gazed tragically at the window. The sleet pounded against it like a snare-drum. She had discovered lately that Adelaide was very prone to make a sanctuary in her room. She had to say something. This inspired her.
“And what would you have done, if Rhoda were still here with you?” she asked.
“But she isn’t, Mother.”
“Perhaps,” judged Marsden, opening a book, “it is only fair Adelaide should have some benefit out of her loss of Rhoda.”
“Oh, very well, I’ll go alone,” Sarah shifted her point, with unconscious agility. And once more she observed the storm, as if she had been called upon to brave it. “Let your Mother go alone in the snow.”
“I’ll help you into the machine, Mama,” said Quincy. This irritated Sarah. The mention of the car lessened the woman’s heroism in braving such astorm to gladden a few more forgotten hearts. And what right had a son to deprive a woman of her heroism, whom wealth had deprived already of her less far-fetched qualities?
But at last, Sarah got off. As Marsden settled in his splendid chair, he smiled quizzically at Adelaide, left alone with him for a minute.
“What are you going to talk about?” he asked.
The girl looked at her brother. He was nearly twenty-seven. His grey eyes lay light and remote in the dark, unhealthy folds of his skin. She looked at them. And they seemed unrelated to her brother. Her brother was the cripple. The curl of his lips, the morbid delicacy of his greying hair, the eternal pain that pinched his brow—these were her brother; and the words that the curled lips had spoken. But those remote, grey eyes! They were fair and bright and beckoned eerily. Adelaide could not understand them. She could understand and answer only her brother, the cripple. And at him, for his words, she was angry.
“What do you think?” she retorted.
“It’s beyond thought,” his mouth said. “To know what you will have to say to Quincy would require inspiration.”
“Speak out,” his eyes asked her.
“Pooh!” She scowled and was silent.
But in the silence, this mystery of one to whom she lived so close came uncomfortably nigh. She preferred the cynic-cripple, though his tongue did sear her. He, at least, might be answered or escaped. She went upstairs wondering why the ties of family were so strangely false, why they solved so little and why, since they gave so little, they should demand somuch. It did not occur to her that the ties of family were ties of least effort, glutton ties, carnal ties. It did not occur to her that the tuft of white soul within her must revolt, by its very nature, against a law that hallowed such! Adelaide was not strong enough to let things like that occur to her. She merely wondered and went upstairs.
Quincy examined the books on the table, though they had not changed in four months; nor in six. He scrutinized the pictures on the walls; he examined a cheap photograph, in an elaborate ivory frame, of Sylvia who had died the winter he was born. He resented, unconsciously, his sister’s perpetuation of this traditional child. His mother could be forgiven for dwelling on Sylvia and Josiah junior. But Adelaide had no excuse. Somewhere within the boy, a recollection must have smouldered of how his father had reckoned up his own unwelcome birth with the death of his two favorites. But this childish embryon of memory had grown, from the boy’s own rationalization, into a distrust of so sheerly sentimental an attachment as must be Adelaide’s for a sister who had died when she was three.
While Quincy moved about to hide his deep discomfiture at this set occasion, and to submerge in casualness his qualms as to meeting expectations, Adelaide sat calmly in an armless chair and waited for her brother to subside. She ventured no word. She did not appear to dislike this silence which was so patently wracking him. The truth was that she was forcing herself to bear it. It hurt. But it was the one way, she thought, of testing Quincy’s willingness to be a friend and to be loved. That she might hazard a first step toward a desired consequence with equalright, simply did not occur to Adelaide. She was the sort of girl to whom social initiative was as repugnant as nakedness—and for the self-same reason. The obscure channelings of sex in girls spread it at times so widely from its normal moorings that the remotest mental regions become colored, with the result that some amenities of social life are as impossible for them as a crude, physical aggression. Most girls of this girl’s age and background would have been just so silent and so passive before a man from whom they awaited a proposal. Adelaide hoped for a mere sisterly relation—the privilege of friendship with a brother. Yet, with this seemingly humble dream, her way was that of a girl aroused and wooed. And the reason, although she might never know it, was that within, her condition also was the same.
Of course, Quincy did not understand. He saw merely that Adelaide was at her ancient trick of silence and of resenting his—as if the right of silence lay all with her, the need of speaking entirely with him. This, with the set formality of their retiring to her room, and the portrait of Sylvia and an indescribable something that was Adelaide herself, conjoined to complete his mood. It was a mood pathetically different from what Adelaide had hoped for. And this also dawned on Quincy:—that it would have been easier for him had she succeeded.
In this mood, silence grew too oppressive and he began to speak. Wonder was small that the girl’s first confession at his words was pain. But from the discord of these two unrhythmed ones—a discord ashamed of itself—came a great pity; and from this at length, a sort of rhythm between them. So talk grew possible, and there was born, slow and unheeded,the boy’s intuition:—that Adelaide was in the ruck and base of life, and that, with her at life’s pinnacle, there had been room there, too, for him.
She showed her wish to know about his friends. Quincy spoke of Garsted.
“Next time you come to town, why not bring him with you?”
“If I knew—” he stopped.
“If you knew what?” she asked. She could easily have completed his remark. It had to do with his insecurity at home. He would not care to bring a friend—granted it was allowed—and have himself humiliated before a guest. Garsted had never seemed to understand his rank at home. Garsted told him, in a year college would respect him. And his family had had seventeen years.
Now, Quincy was silent. Adelaide blushed for him, in his emotion.
“I—I’ll see to it, he has a nice time. You know, we can take him to the theatres. Dad isn’t stingy about the money.”
“No, but Mama is.”
“We’ll get the money from Dad.”
Quincy had found a stiff position in a chair—across the room from Adelaide. Now he arose.
“Adelaide! That isn’t everything,” he rebuked her.
At least, Adelaide felt rebuked;—as if she had not known! as if it had not been delicacy that made her also waive the issue!
“Quincy—don’t get angry with me.”
“I’m not!”
Once more, he picked up a book from the table near which, as if unconsciously for help, he had found hisseat. It was a folio volume with colored pictures. They really interested him. So he turned them over, one by one.
“If you’re not going to talk with me, Quincy—”
He placed away the book at once. And they began afresh.
Another remark opened the problem of the track-team. By now, something was tiring deep down in them. Each of these failures in rapport made the new effort wearier. But on they struggled, with a heroism that was the more poignant for its hopeless inarticulation.
Quincy’s attempt to explain about the track-team suffered from an earlier behavior of the others. This subject had come up, the first evening at dinner. Suddenly, he had seen the expression about the soft mouth of Jonas that had been there in the old days when his one-time idol placed a captured fly in a spider-web. And Jonas had said, knowing already:
“You did not make a fraternity, did you?”
The expression had stung. “I would have, if I’d wanted to stay on the track-team.”
This was beyond Jonas’ comprehension. “If you’dwantedto?” he sneered. And the conversation changed before a saving word from Adelaide. For Adelaide had noticed. And now, in Quincy’s rigid manner, she knew that she was suffering for Jonas. Adelaide knew much. But her mind lacked a motor. And so hampered, it could not reach those increments which are the flower of knowledge.
Quincy recalled her saving him. He deemed her act the result of mercy, of pity—as if she shared Jonas’ incredulity but lacked his wish to make him suffer.
“I just didn’t wish to bind myself. Lots of men in college thought I was right. That’s how I got to know Garsted.” He began gropingly and ended in a hurry.
“Don’t you think, perhaps, it was wrong to antagonize your class?”
“I do not. Damn the class.”
“Well, then you were right, if you think that way about it. But then—but then, you can scarcely blame the fraternities.”
“And who blamed ’em?” cried Quincy.
Of course, it was Adelaide who blamed them. She was about to say so. But evidently, from his outburst, her next step must be to concur in his refusal to.
“Of course,” she smiled, “I don’t blame them. Who cares?”
There was a pause. Adelaide got up, came to his side:
“Well,Ilove you, Quincy dear.”
Audiences laugh when clumsy acrobats fall over tables. So it is fair to assume that the gods laughed at Adelaide.
The conversation died once more. And when it was renewed with a last painful effort, it was far less personal. At once, now, Quincy threw himself in it. He careered freely, happily. And in this abandon, his remarks seemed brutal to his sister. It was her turn to be hurt in this pitiful ricochet.
Garsted had told him he had a mistress. Quincy gloried in this. He knew all of Garsted’s arguments against Puritan morality. Here was another case of sex gratified in purely psychic channels. The boy launched upon a eulogy of his friend’s free life.
“Isn’t he going to marry her?” asked Adelaide.She was gripping herself. She did not mind this open talk with Quincy. Her bringing-up forbade it. And the discrepancy between the tingling pleasure that she felt and the horror that she should have felt, made her insecure. So she gripped herself and gave Quincy rein. Adelaide rode horseback—now that they were rich. A vision flashed across her of her latest mount, galloping in Central Park. She had always felt a similar strange discord between the prim Park and her joy in galloping. But the vision went, without a challenge.
“Oh,” her brother was saying, “when he has money enough, if he still loves her, I guess he’ll marry her.”
“But suppose, Quincy, suppose he stops loving her!”
“Well?”
“Don’t you see, how terrible it would be? What could the poor girl do?”
The boy looked at his sister. She seemed actually suffering. But the wealth of feeling that flowered in her pain had, as usual, gone wrong. He did not care to have his friend’s course criticized. So he attacked his sister, by extolling his friend’s mistress.
“She’s the sort of girl, I suppose,” he answered sharply, “who has other qualifications to recommend her, besides virginity.”
Tears came to Adelaide’s eyes. Quincy was contrite. He jumped up and kissed her. But her tears had made her ugly. Her tender little lids were red. Her hair seemed a trifle colorless. She was three years older than he. Why should he be able to make her weep? He despised her for it. This rôle, he disliked more heartily than being bullied. Could henot find a balance somewhere? or a pleasurable subjection? He thought of Rhoda and of Mrs. Deering. And the tenderness of Adelaide seemed cloying....
Soon, Rhoda came in for tea. And there was Adelaide—perversely at the bottom.
“Well, have you had a nice long chat?” were her first words.
Quincy could not help thinking of her as Mrs. Theodore Cram. Her husband was so important a man. Quincy disliked him so much. And he was so serenely above any feeling, even of dislike, for Quincy. All this hurt. Rhoda was fresh and cool and full as compared to Adelaide, who now looked moist and warm and straggly.
The sisters embraced heartily. Quincy got Rhoda’s hand.
“You’re getting too old to kiss,” she smiled at him. Previously, perhaps, he had not been old enough?
“I am not,” cried Quincy. It was one of those quick flashes of effrontery that mark the strain of deprivation in timid boys.
He came forward and held Rhoda’s head, vise-like in his hands. Quincy was of full height. His tall, nervous figure bent over the voluptuous lined woman in striking contrast. While she was everywhere firmly composed, his form was uncertain and angular and loose.
“Behave yourself, Quincy!” Rhoda struggled.
The boy laughed feverishly. His hands held her head. But her body was writhing away. He meant to kiss her cheek. But Rhoda flashed back her head and his mouth skimmed her lips. His heart melted with the flame of that instant. And then, she broke away altogether. Quincy stood where the event hadhappened, arms still out, hands still before him, feeling the floor gratefully beneath his feet.
“Why, you impudent boy!” Rhoda sneered at him; “how dared you?”
“You talk as if a brother hasn’t a right to kiss his sister,” said Adelaide.
Rhoda turned upon her in a white fury: “You—shut up!”
And Quincy felt Adelaide melt into a corner. He was still looking at Rhoda.
“I am sorry if I hurt you,” he said.
“You did hurt me, you little fool,” the woman’s instinct for giving pain was unerring; “why else do you think I’m angry? You hurt me—here.” She placed a hand above her waist. “If that’s the sort of nonsense you learn at college, my dear Quincy—”
Then she had not even been angry at the kiss? This submerged the boy’s spirits altogether.
And now, with a quick change of mood and a sweet word, she drew Adelaide out of her repentant corner. The two sisters seated themselves for a quiet chat. The servant brought tea on a mahogany platter, based with glass. With a few healing smiles, there was Adelaide, once more glad to bask in Rhoda’s sunshine. Quincy drew up a chair in order to have a place in the sun. But he fared ill. Rhoda’s resentment took the direction of ignoring him. And Adelaide was feeble at bringing him within the conversation. Rhoda feinted her attempts with phrases that recalled the hand-twist of a clever fencer. The boy was being ruthlessly punished. He had had hopes of Rhoda, now he was a college man. And here he was in disgrace with her! What a clumsy, inopportune brute he had been!
Soon, he gave up his desperate attempts—they made him bleed, although she ignored them—to play an integral rôle, at least for the moment, in her consciousness. He retired spiritually. He would have gone away altogether, but he was afraid that his going would not be noticed; this would hurt too much. So he sat there, gloomily, brooding. And again, without restraint or question, his mind fell upon that unknown quality in his experience, Julia Deering. Were all women like either Adelaide or Rhoda? He feared, then, Mrs. Deering must be like the latter. She was splendid, also. And splendid women despised men. How came it, they ever married? What curious streak of humility and mercy made them do this? He knew women were incomprehensible by general consent. This must be the crux of their enigma: that, despite their splendor, suddenly they gave themselves to man! And then, some of them grew to be like his own mother. He was sure she had been like Rhoda, also. Adelaide resembled Jonas and his father. Marsden and Rhoda and he had the grey colorings of his mother.
Yet, where spiritually did he fit in? He was alone. He used to think he was only an adopted child, in the early days of familial agony. Then, he had allowed of his mother, excluding still his father. For some secret reason, it was decided that his father call Quincy “son.” But he knew his lack of authorship. That was why he despised Quincy. Also, he was jealous. For Quincy’s real father had not been so fat, so gruff, so stupid, with breath so foul smelling and hands crusted with little stains. But now, he failed to feel the link even with his mother. For if there was a link with her, surely it must extendto Marsden and to Rhoda. And this was palpably untrue. Oh! it was all a grim play of nature. Doubtless, this fat, crushing, vulgar man was really the only father he had ever had; doubtless this woman with a submerged soul like violets under stagnant waters—was it not patent in her eyes?—had justice in calling him her son. Doubtless, the young woman who had wounded him and the girl who spoke an irritating language he could not respond to, were really sisters. It was a grim jest of nature. He might as well crunch cookies that were good and look forward to the less sneering world of which college was the gate. And yet, at college also—
The door opened and his mother was there.
“Quincy, don’t spoil your appetite for dinner.”
She had first busily kissed Rhoda, maternally kissed Adelaide, and inquiringly kissed him. He had held a half-eaten cookie during all this cycle.
It was now night. The snow had subsided. Most of it had melted as it fell. An odor of moist discomfort came from the streets with Sarah—the odor of the city shopping for Christmas gifts. It was warm and cozy in Adelaide’s room. But as Quincy stood against the window and looked out, this petty ease lay in the back of his brain like a sucking plaster. The street was grey and brown. The lamp-light stumbled through the mists and vapors. A motor car went swaying, snorting; its reeking tires seemed to cut swaths in the thick gutter, like hot irons.
His mother was reciting her adventures in half-a-dozen stores. Also, she was repeating for Rhoda a series of petty household troubles which already he and Adelaide had heard four times. But Adelaide never seemed to grow impatient. And the majesticRhoda was at attention. Quincy found in this no virtue.
Little huddled figures were sprayed through the street. They moved slowly, but laboriously. They were wet and irritated by the weather. Soon they would enter homes, like his, and recite to those they found there, eager to listen, the same round of petty trouble and smug adventure and fallacious sentiment. Would they find one among their various audiences who, like himself, objected? like himself was there through a grim jest of Nature? like himself, longed to be elsewhere? And if so, why could not he, Quincy, discover him? Why could not they be given one to another? A delivery wagon came splashing to their house and stopped. The horse shook his drenched hide. A boy leaped out, laden with packages. He saw the quick crunch of his feet, the stamp of the horse’s hoofs. And then, the bell rang loud and long. Everything outside, this sound reminded him, was muffled. It and he were inexorably separate. Yet, the house and the interminably repeated talk in the back of his brain—was it a solace for this isolation? The wagon churned its way from sight. Vaguely, he heard the rattle of the wheels. After it was gone, an elevated train mounted uptown with a slow rhythm. A car’s clear clang came to him, draped in fog. Two men trudged on the farther sidewalk. One of them laughed and slapped his comrade’s shoulder. The other pulled his hat low and turned up the collar of his coat. They disappeared—for ever. The lamps glared in the darkness that kept away from them. And his mother’s voice crushed on the melody of all these vagrant notes, bathed in the minor harmony of the night.
“Quincy—father’s just come. Suppose you go down and greet him and tell him we’re all up here.”
Then, there was the day—a Sunday—when his mother was ill and Quincy stayed with her, in her bedroom.
Adelaide had gone on an excursion. Jonas and Marsden never bothered. In the afternoon, for a while, his father came as if to perform a duty. On the mandate of his mother that he needed air, Quincy strolled out alone. This too, fell into the Pattern, as he traced back for it.
After the departure of the others, Quincy’s visit had begun with the reading aloud of two columns in the paper and of five pages in a magazine. This effort tired the good Sarah who, in the Harriet days, with an equal illness would not have deemed it worthy of mention to her husband. When Sarah was tired, she grew nervous. And like so many nervous women, she balanced herself with talk. The effect that women force by dint of words is a stimulant for them as insidious as liquor. The volume of words is a mere subsidiary, like the number of glasses. The effect, in either instance, is the heart of the habit. In the drinker the effect is immediate; in the talker, it rebounds from the attention of the victims talked to. In this way, it will be seen that of the two vices, talking is the worse. Drinking may confine its ravages to the drinker. At most, it will aggrieve only his close relations. The talker, however, is a curse-carrier with no conscience and no limit. Unfortunately, Quincy’s mother had lapsed into this weakness. She had been repressed, silent, really noble for so long a term! She had the right to wreak vengeance on society. Moreover, she loved her son. This called for an intense reparation.
She lectured him, that morning. For three hours, she trod on his soul, harassed his spirit and crucified his secret self for being secret—here lay the real reason of her irritation. And then, she said:
“Dearie, would you like to have your dinner brought up, so you can eat with your mother and keep her company?”
Of course, Quincy was delighted. So Quincy’s food was brought to him on the same mahogany platter with glass base. And meanwhile, the maternal service flowed. The misunderstanding boy writhed in the quandary of two necessities—loving this woman and being hurt by her. The hand of the gay God was still too strong on him; he did not know that these two elements—love and pain—must be rejoicingly accepted. Often, his mother spoke of how her children had made her suffer.
“You can never know, my boy, what a mother goes through, for a child.”
Such remarks also, were designed to instil love and veneration. But again, the gay God intervened. The idea of pain still horrified the boy. Its perversion into a boast still filled him with disgust. He would fain have had it that motherhood be joyous; that the best things be the happy things of life. His mother’s lugubrity in speaking of her works of love struck him as sacrilege. And to a gay God, it was.
Quincy was simply not grown-up. But it seemed to Sarah that in matters of sympathy and feeling, he was strangely backward.
“I should like to be able to talk to you like a man, my dear. You are no longer a child.”
And through divers thrusts, Quincy learned what she meant by this. To be like a man was to be moved by ugly things—like business and money and machinery. To be like a man was to be edified by things not only ugly but wrong,—like pain, and that murder of self called sacrifice. To be like a man was to agree, in everything, with a battered, complaining woman whose drowned violet eyes had always been a mother’s. He looked at her. He tried to understand and to consent. But it was revolting work.
“Think of the privilege your father has given you,” she said, “in letting you grow up in New York.”
“Mama—New York is ugly!”
“It is the center of the greatest country of the world,” Sarah replied. “Isn’t that of importance?”
Quincy was moved by her eloquence. Perhaps, that was of importance. Yet something in him mutely stirred negation. He was impressed. But he could not agree. And this conflict fevered him.
“An ugly metropolis is less important than a wild-flower!” he cried, stung to inspiration by his failure to express himself calmly.
Sarah smiled. She had lived among wild-flowers; she knew. She had drudged among them; sweated among them; wanted among them. She was angered by such dangerous illusions in a son of hers.
“My dear—you are talking nonsense. You’d do far better to grasp your opportunities, than to go wool-gathering—like a poet.”
“I am not a poet,” Quincy defended himself.
“That’s precisely it, my dear.” Sarah rose on her pillows and leaned toward him, taking his hand. Her skin was very grey and rough beside the whiteness of her night-gown and the smoothness of her bed-clothes. Brown streaks robbed the grey in her hair of dignity. It was drawn close over her scalp and a single, poorly braid was caught up and fastened at the back. Her arms were bone and her throat was a rugose mass of folds that lacked even the pomp of fat. Sarah was an old wreck for her fifty years. And Quincy looked at her. He was no physiognomist. But it pierced him that his mother was an ill argument for her own ways of living.
“That’s just it, my dear,” Sarah repeated. “You’re not a poet. You’re an ordinary person like the rest of us. We’ve got to get our beauty—not in wild flowers, but in all this—” she waved her tortured hand about the room and let it fall on the rich linen.
“If your skin were more white and smooth, little mother,” Quincy thought silently, “I wouldn’t care if the bed-clothes were of coarse cotton.”
His mother was still speaking. “You must work hard, dear. You must prepare yourself to get along in the world. You know—you mustn’t expect too much from your father. He will give you an education. But remember, there are five of you. And, of course, Marsden and the girls will deserve most of what little there is. Only by working now, my dear, can you earn the comfort and time to do your day dreaming later.”
“And when my skin is yellow, I also will have white linen,” the boy thought to himself.
Oh! he demanded so little. And all the plenty that was forced on him contained not that little. Everywhere, about him, above him, that little was. Yet, he could not reach it. He did not know how; he did not dare, even if he had known! For it seemed tohim that all the world of men was a conspiracy against his having this mite he needed, this mite that had once been strewn through all the world and that now, only the despised were left to revel in. And he did not dare. For, vague as his knowledge was, he saw that the arch-conspirators against his having it were those he loved. To gain his little would be to wound these loved ones. With the thought, his heart broke in two.
So Quincy merely sat there. And finally, he allowed his mussed head with its flood of delicate black hair to fall on his mother’s faultless linen, where her old hand could stroke it. And in this posture of strain and of devotion, the woman that gripped his soul as once her womb had gripped his body, gave forth the poison-nourishment that he drank in. When was he to be born of her, again?
“Quincy, my boy,” she said, “there are so many ways for you to change, that it gives your mother a big pain to think of them. You must be thankful for these pains, my dear. A mother’s suffering should be a treasure and a reminder of duty, that you should never forget.”
And the old, weary canons of a herd-race, hedging in its deformities and greed against the flaming grandeur of a nature it has denied, were vented to make this child conform, in whom a tinge of the old gaieties and loves still dared to linger. A mother’s advice! How stubborn is the strength of man, that through these generations man’s tender sprouts should have outlived a mother’s advice! By the old laws, she bears her child—the old laws of nature and of joy, of fertility and courage and abandon. And by the new laws, she rears him—the laws of compromiseand pain, of soul-oppression and cowardice and cover. And by the fair love of the first law, she presses her advantage for the law of the herd that claims her creature as a slave. A queen, conceiving in her regal bed, enslaved and giving birth to a slave-child. Here is the cycle of most women.
Quincy held his head low as his mother admonished and advised him. It was all still dim and uncertain in his mind, why these things seemed wrong to him; why they revolted him; why the common wisdom and love of his mother should be despised. Quincy did not understand, as she went on, how apt it was that his head should be held low.
A glimmer there was, in the Pattern—he saw that, later—of the truth: that he had been so moved that day, only because the woman who spoke was his mother. Quincy knew that she was stupid; that she parroted her moralities and arguments; that mentally, she was a slave of the herd-leaders who cared no whit for either of them. He saw, then, the fallacy in this: that by reason of a mother’s love, he should have hearkened to a plea voiced for a vast, impersonal machine to which he mattered nothing save as a conforming cog. Of course, that part of his mother was also such a cog. It had no right to exploit the bonds of the real mother who knew and cared for no machine.
All this bred resentment. And there began for Quincy the period in which he despised his mother, judged her ruthlessly and had little thought for her when she was not about.
His father came in at four. So Quincy left for a walk.
That walk was in the Pattern. But when he traced back his feelings for his father, he could not fix, as in the other cases, upon some event of this fortnight that lodged within him as a form. Thought and emotion about his father rushed back with an indefeasible momentum to the days of Harriet, to his running away or to the nights when he was sent up, a-tremble, through the hollow house, to bed or on an errand. As he traced back, now, for signs of his father that were alive, all he caught up was that his entering on that afternoon had spread a surface of great toleration upon his mother’s words. He had gone forth in peace with her. Perhaps, he recalled enough of the old days to feel that she might need his sympathy, being alone with her husband. There had been such times.
Quincy had cold crisp hours for his walk. He went northward in the Park. At first he had had a qualm. He had told his mother New York was ugly. He had escaped to sophistry and metaphysics in order to prove with Garsted that it was beautiful. It did not occur to the boy that since in both cases he had been sincere, he had no cause for worry. He racked his brain in order to find out in which instance he had said the truth. And to his mother, he felt the debt of an apology. But it occurred to him how ludicrous it would be to beg his mother’s pardon on such a subject. She would think him wilder and more scatter-brained than ever. Doubtless, she had long since forgotten his remark. At least, she attached no importance to it. This aggrieved Quincy. And in his new-born resentment, he forgot about inconsistencies and pardons. Soon, he was engrossed in the City.
This was at the point where the Park ends andEighth Avenue begins afresh, with a new acquisition in the clatter and grime and darkness of the elevated structure. During his swift walk in the Park, it had been simple to cogitate upon himself. The Park did not hold Quincy. It was a rough, varied and knotted expanse of dirty snow and gaunt, dwarfed trees. It had none of the mystery, none of the tonic, of a winter woodland. It was a large back-yard of the City. Through it, cut wide, cleared swathes for City vehicles and narrow ones, less cleared, more tortuous, for those inhabitants that went on foot. There were few people, though the day had been bright. It was too cold. New Yorkers suffer such inclemency of life that the least inclemency of weather rids them of spirit. So Quincy had advanced through the Park without a thrill of nature. Though he was a messenger of her spirit—he who ran bare-headed through the woods—this cut-in mass of rocks and trees had no voice for him. The girders of steel and stone that on all sides bound the Park have smothered the soul which that fragment of forest must once have had. Central Park is a half-dead thing, at best. Its winter snows are grey; its summer trees are grey; its autumn fever is a wasting chill without the flame. Some day, inevitably, this must be true also of the great Park in the Bronx.
But now, on the noisy Avenue, matters were different.
Quincy recalled his feeling that the City’s life spoke to him. Night was there. Most of the shops were closed. But beneath the blinds of the saloons, lights shone and a welcome winked. In the tall dun buildings, all enterprise seemed choked like the space, into a rigid ever-recurrent form. The movement on theAvenue was dogged, outcast, heavy. But its dullness did not penetrate behind the brick and plaster. The trains crashed past angrily as if they had preferred to linger, and also watch. Beneath the structure, the lights seemed badly nourished. Those in the houses were of a yellow that suggested malady and poison. It was the life throbbing in these that spoke to Quincy. What did it say?
Something he had heard before: something he had already suffered. Again, there was the strident tongue of metal and the lips that bled. Again, the lips lay quiveringly forward, piteous and eloquent, while the tongue lurked back and darted forth in the swings of pain. And behind the mouth were words; below the rhythm was a music, as fire is beneath the smoke.
It was his own experience; it was his family; it was his life. All of the City spoke it—sang it—the obscure, muffled rooms, and the frangent traffic; the glimmer of breath in the dark hallways and the flash of commerce on the elevated structure, as a train met ice with its current. The entire symphony of twisted, agonizing life, bent upon false errands, hungering with false lusts, deforming the red heart of nature, spoke out to Quincy. And that which he heard was that which he already knew, that whence he had come bleeding and whither he must return to bleed some more.
And so, with subtle intertwinings, this vast impersonal life and his own narrow living became one, as the Pattern whirled.
There were many other salient parts of it; many other clarified events, as he traced back. And the veins and curvings were to dispart and spread andmultiply. But even the tight seed was a weighty form, lodged in his mind....
Greatly increased with the new year, Quincy had returned to college.
Atthis point, Fortune resumed a hand. She had been singularly absent in Quincy’s life since her intrusive visit of his first two years when the fate of the two eldest children, the accident to Marsden and the Burt finances had so obliquely glanced against his own. From then, his life had been pure enough of hazard to be in that regard exceptional. For hazard is the term we apply to striking moments; and each life by its own testimony, is replete with such. But now, upon his return to college, after that purging and clarifying fortnight, an apt facilitation came to his affairs. The Deerings gave a party. There were about a score of guests. And Quincy was among them.
He was the one member of his class to be invited. Garsted was his sole haven from the social waves. And Garsted, having other friendships there, had other responsibilities. In consequence, the boy was somewhat lost. The gathering had the proclivity of breaking up into small groups, discussing in hushed and exclusive tones. Over these fragmentary units, the clear loud laughter of Professor Deering rolled at times, himself the heart of the largest fragment. Quincy was afraid to make himself one of this, since his relation with Professor Deering might be so easily abused. He did not know how to join with any of the others. So not long after the onset of the evening, there he was dangling, miserable at first, then conscious of his misery and at length fearful lest thisconsciousness in him project to those about him and so crystallize his discord with them. In this state his hostess rescued him.
He had scarce noticed her before. She was a much used pigment in the bright picture’s pallet. But she had scarcely been a figure. Her general affability with her reserve kept her from distinctness. But now he saw her coming, directly toward him. Her air was not that of a rescuer. She seemed to be saying: “I know you are having a splendid time without me. But I’m greedy. I’m not having a splendid time without you.” This was half the battle. She began casually and soon they were seated together. Fitfully, others joined her. But he alone remained. She left him to persuade an eminent pianist to perform. But she returned to listen to the music. The artist played several complex pieces—modern—that stirred Quincy potently.
“I can’t understand that music,” said Mrs. Deering.
“I’m not trying to,” he said, “I get all relaxed and then it comes in and—understands me.”
This answer seemed to impress her hugely.
“That was an infinite answer, Mr. Burt,” she said. And, then, the pianist joined them. He was introduced to Mr. Carvalho. And his remark about the music was repeated, as a gem, word for word. In her mouth, it rang profound. Mr. Carvalho, also, was impressed.
“Probably, you compose?” he asked.
The bringing in of the pianist meant the loss of Mrs. Deering, who left now, and did not return. There had been fully half-an-hour of her company. And the energy which she had aroused propelled him happily through the remainder of the evening. As soon as hewas free of Mr. Carvalho, to whom he had absolutely naught to say, and who forsook him as soon as he politely could in order to trail after Mrs. Deering, Quincy crossed into the study where the Professor held an intent group.
At the rear of his room which Quincy, of course, knew, the door had been thrown open into a smaller chamber in which stood the piano. This was Mrs. Deering’s. It was rather closely furnished and fully ornamented. It contrasted strikingly with the naked, larger room. Here they had sat—close to the music. Quincy did not catch many details on this occasion. He recalled a languid couch, littered with barbaric cushions—the modern German school—and bowered by a canopy of orange silk that turned the blue base below it into a liquid marine color. He recalled several cozy arm-chairs wherein guests were ensconced deeply, a tea-table of Japanese wood upon which was a case ofcloisonné. Out of it, the guests took cigarettes. This was essentially a setting for the hostess. Her figure, thin and tense and simply draped in a dull violet dress, stood out nobly in this rather lavish mass. Even so, the generous and ample form of the Professor was well marked against the scant rigor of his study.
Quincy found him sprawling in a Windsor fan-backed chair—an old spindle of oak. One heavy leg was thrown over the side, the other curled up on the seat. His evening clothes, which were a bit too tight, had the semblance of broadcloth in the soft haze of the candles. The Professor puffed on a rich, red briar pipe.
“Bring a chair up—right here. There’s room,” he hailed him from a distance.
As he came, Quincy felt a strained pressure about him. These half-dozen men had banded themselves into a unit, designed for the momentary purpose of enjoying the big man that sat among them. Tacitly, unconsciously they had grown together; they felt together; they gave out a voice together. Their vibrance murmured adversely at this intrusion. They were a crowd, conservative, greedy like all crowds. A primitive mist came from them. Behind, in the other room, such groups were also—fashioned for their own delectation, to enjoy their hostess or some other person who had something to give out. Everywhere, Quincy felt these subtle bands, these correlated breathings, these intense concentrations of many energies upon some little temporary point. He was unused to gatherings. He could still understand them. But he could not understand himself. There was no hint in him of why, alone after his half hour with the Professor’s wife, he had gone straight toward the Professor.
In Quincy’s mind remained the print of these two rooms, undulant in their candle-glow, where many persons sat, restrained, vital, softened only by the tremor of the lights, subdued by skin-deep custom; yet eager, all, for acquisition and enjoyment to a degree that rubbed menacingly close to the frailties that hemmed them in. In his mind was the great, sanguine figure of the Professor, dominating, laughing at this little crowded drama; was the sharp, nervous body of Julia Deering, a-field in it, like some splendid animal that furrows. That was all.
But Garsted told him that he had acquitted himself with honor. And that Fairfax and Littleton had asked about him....
During the rest of freshman year, the boy was at the Deering home perhaps six times. Outside, he saw the Professor seldom. But no more was needed to establish him as idol in that youthful sanctuary. Garsted, of course, was the high priest. And though the ultimate presence was but briefly, and then scantily, approached, Garsted was always there. The junior had constant recourse to Mr. Deering in his work. Also, he was a friend of Julia Deering. This was an added bond for Quincy.
“I knew her when she was Julia Cairn,” he told him. “She is of old New England stock, but her parents had so little sense of fitness as to permit her to be born in Omaha, where they had settled. She’s been married only three years, you know. From private school in New York, she went to Paris. No—she did not study there. She has never studied, that I know of. After Paris, she returned to Omaha! Actually! And stood it two years. By then, she had been made president of so many women’s clubs and circles, forcibly—you know her opinion of such truck—that she escaped to an aunt in Bangor, Maine. From cellar to refrigerator. Next, she came to New York and began to work.”
“I thought you said she had never studied.”
“She never did. But she worked. She got a job as teacher of English in the private school which she had graduated from, five years before. Without a degree, without anything very much, except her power to get anything she desires. Her knowledge in English literature is rather rudimentary. But she had read tremendously in French and Spanish and Italian.”
“Why, then, didn’t she get a job in one of these languages?” asked Quincy.
“I don’t know. Except that Julia Cairn never did what was expected, any more than does Julia Deering now. It was down there I heard of her and met her—at a silly tea, which she veined with gold. A friend of mine, Betty Robinson, used to tell me about their amazing lectures in English literature, delivered by a Miss Cairn. It seems her course was devoted to a systematic proof of the inferiority of English letters to the French. Think of it! In a respectable private school. And her adoring principal never minded. While the girls in their French course were reading Erckmann-Chatrian, Halèvy, Ohnet and other fourth-rate writers, she, in the English department, made them acquainted with Flaubert and Balzac, Zola and Stendhal, so that they might see for themselves how unutterably second-rate were Eliot and Thackeray. She made them read the Englishmen. But she made them love the real European literatures. In that way, she justified teaching what she had often told me she deemed a language that has been ‘decadent since the time of Swift.’ Lead up to these things, yourself. She’ll tell you.”
“And what happened then?” Quincy was not interested in a decadent literature.
“She taught in that one school until the principal, Doctor Tomley, went and died. She was twenty-six, then, at least. Although I’m not sure of her age.”
“Did she lose her job or leave it?”
“She says she was told to go, by the new man who had been assistant master and who probably, in that menial position, had learned to hate her. I am convinced she could never have found another school to tolerate her original ideas of the duties of an English teacher. But she did not try. She insists she couldhave won over another principal, had she been forced to. It is highly probable. Certainly, Dr. Tomley had agreed with none of her views. And yet, he kept her there. At all events, the boast never went to the proof.”
“Well?” Quincy was impatient.
“Well, one fine day, she married Deering—bless his great soul. That’s all. And came up here.”
Here, somehow, with the entrance of the Professor upon the scene, Quincy’s real interest began. But his friend’s news ended.
“I know nothing about that, Quint,” he smiled. “One never really asks Julia Deering anything. One inclines toward a subject. And if she inclines back, one gets something. On the subject of her personal life, she has alwaysdeclined, with a firm sweetness. I have no idea, even of where they met or how. No one else has, either. I suppose,” the upperclassman threw a cigarette out of the window and reached for a pipe, “I suppose they were married and will live happily ever after. Julia Deering is so damned exceptional that it will be just like her to do that most commonplace of things.”
“Is living happily ever after really commonplace?”
“Well,” Garsted laughed, “if it is rare, she is all the more sure to do it. So I’ve got you, either way.”
On the campus, however, there was a legend about this pair. College men have myths for their distinguished teachers. But like all myths, this one expressed exclusively the myth-makers; and it was Garsted’s conviction that there was no truth in it save as a commentary on the undergraduate state of mind.
It was this: that the big, gentle man who was overforty when the marriage happened, had been proposed to by correspondence. The letter was so brilliantly couched, its choice of phrases was so concise, so just, so Greek, that the scholar wired to the writer to appear at once. Julia Cairn came on the following train and they were married that afternoon by the college president, who was a minister of the gospel. The legend went on to relate that the writer of the happy letter was not Mrs. Deering at all, but one of her girl pupils. This beautiful but anonymous victim had been caught by her teacher writing in class. Her letter was detected and confiscated; later on employed with slight corrections, to fit the purpose of Miss Cairn. Since the Professor’s discovery of his wife’s plagiarism, the myth concluded, the pair’s lot had been a miserable one. But Mrs. Deering was too dominant to be got rid of.
Of course, Quincy laughed at this legend. But its conclusion—that the marriage was unhappy, that the great man had been betrayed, that he needed sympathy and rescue—stuck attractively in his mind. For this very reason, perhaps, he failed to see how the myth reflected the student body’s general emotional condition. As Garsted told him, since his state also was reflected by the myth, there was no mystery in his failure to psychologize it.
It was plain, all of that freshman year, however, that strange conflicts raged in the boy about the Deering household.
“She always comes in and bothers him,” he remarked. “And the minute she comes in, he tells her just what we’ve been talking about.”
“He knows you don’t mind,” said Garsted.
“But I do!”
“Will you stop confiding in him? Doesn’t that prove you don’t object?”
At length came an hour alone with her.
“Come in to seeme, some afternoon,” she called to him from the stairs, as the Professor and he sat in the study. Later, as he was leaving, he found her watering the flowers. She was dressed in a frock of faint rose. A bonnet hid all of her black hair. Her hands were covered with sod.
“Come next Monday, Mr. Burt,” she said, scarce looking up from her work, and not in the least anxious as to an answer. Quincy found it awkward to accept to the back of her head. So he went on, without a word, perfectly aware that he would be expected.
His anticipation of the visit was perturbed. He was fearful of what it would entail. He was unwilling to leave it to hazard. He improvised their dialogue; he edited his inventions and kept constantly transforming them. All of his fancies were delightful. In them, he impressed Mrs. Deering greatly. And in the later ones, when he gained courage, she told him that she liked him more than any other of the students. She confided in him what she had kept hidden from Garsted—the secrets of her life. Quincy did not go into details with this. He thought he might best leave that to her. But at the end, he went completely disgusted with himself. He knew that the reality and his imaginings would not agree. In his own fancies, he had exhausted the pleasant possibilities. Infallibly, therefore, that which was going to take place could not be pleasant. As he rang the bell, he felt that he had injured the prospect of a happy time by imagining that happy time. And then, as she opened the doorfor him, he forgot his speculations. He began living in the present.
Before the summer, there were two more tea hours with her. Each of them stood alone. No word uttered at one could ever have been confused with any word uttered at the others. Yet, despite their clearness, they were indissoluble. They lay together in Quincy’s mind as the boundary to a great and vague impression. The vague impression was first; behind, remoter, were these clear visits. As the boy envisaged them, it was as if, before them, Julia Deering had not existed. Instinctively, he accepted this: that before them, she had not existed, although his reason told him otherwise. And of course, his reason did not count. In like fashion, does a primitive people accept a day and an event when the world began. Its reason also, had it been consulted, would have judged otherwise.